I was watching Seinfeld the other day and was struck by a few things.

The first thing I need to point out is that, nah, I wasn’t really every that much of a Seinfeld person growing up. In fact, I was actively anti-Seinfeld. To me, it was that show that got in the way of my preferred viewing. It was a signal that The Simpsons Hour was over and that I’d made a grave error in the scheduling of my evening.

I mean, I wasn’t that much of a Friends person either, but I was more inclined to watch Friends than Seinfeld – possibly because my friends used to watch it, possible because Friends had three girls on it instead of one. I mean, TBH, that probably had a lot to do with it because, having only seen a few episodes of Seinfeld, it comes off as a show that was written with a male audience in mind. However, I’ll give it props for boldly declaring the women do, indeed, enjoy a good wank. This was before Sex and the City told us we could have a high-powered career, orgasms  AND cupcakes, mind you.

Anyway, there was one episode of Seinfeld I saw not long ago which made me think.

Jerry was talking to George (who is probably a very nice guy but I’ll never be able to not see him as the scummy lawyer hanger-onner who tried to rape Vivian in Pretty Woman) about George’s relationship, trying to determine whether the woman he was spending a lot of time with was his girlfriend or just a woman sleeping with – a marvellous 90s term for casual hookups that we might need to bring back.

Like, we don’t say “she SLEPT with him” anymore. We just say that people banged. And we don’t really say anyone’s been “sleeping around”, which a good thing in a lot of ways because good for effing you if you’re going out there fulfilling your sexual appetite in a healthy way. I mean, if that’s what you want to do and you’re not deceiving anyone into thinking you want anything more and you’re being responsible with your sexual health, bloody good onya Sonya. However, I just like the phrasing of “sleeping around”. It has a vague glamour to it, reminiscent of the Nora Ephron vision of Meg Ryan which, as a bookish middle class white girl, is the epitome of all things feminine. It just sounds like a really grown up, I-drink-wine-and-wear-beige-without-being-boring way of referring to sex. It’s rooting around, but more sophisticated, you know?

Anyway, that wasn’t even my point.

My point was that Jerry asked the other guy how often him and this woman were talking on the phone. Like, not just calling to arrange plans, but the old playing-with-the-phone-cord-in-your-fingers, lying-on-your-belly-on-the-bed, long-winded conversations.

And that’s a whole element of relationships that, in a lot of cases, just isn’t a thing anymore.

Like, we’re not having hours-long conversations with each other on the telephone anymore. We’re either hanging out together face-to-face or sending each other memes via social media apps. And you have to wonder how that changes the structure of relationships. If nothing else, it means there’s no more of this “no you hang up” which is met with the inevitable “no YOU hang up”.

I mean, this isn’t anything new; the evolution of technology has been gradually shaping our style and frequency of communication for years, but just watching it on a 30-year-old sitcom from the comfort of a slightly-broken couch in 2020 made me realise how different things are now.

Like, how rich of a form of communication is meme sharing as opposed to talking on the phone? It’s pretty obvious that communication where there’s immediate feedback is better, so you’d assume talking on the phone is better than meme sharing. Especially because you can hear someone’s tone of voice and genuine laughter during a phone call. But you can also be pretty immediate in your response via social media and you can keep that conversation going longer than you ever would on the phone. Like, you can’t have phone calls with your significant other at work, but you’re able to continue the banter via social media when you run down to grab a coffee or, let’s be honest, when you’re sitting on the toilet.

And, if you’ve got your fix of rich, immediate feedback conversation from a phone call, will the pull to see someone face to face be as immediate? Like, do we see each other more now that we don’t chat over the phone? And what about skin hunger? (“Skin hunger”, by the way, is a term I read an actual psychologist use to describe the need we have for human touch. I like the way the way they chose that term instead of going with something less unhinged and serial-killer-y.)

I don’t mean to get all Carrie Bradshaw on you, but I can’t help but wonder if memes are not modern-day love notes. Like, there’s no poetry, but the intent of “I found this and I wanted to share it with you because think you’ll find this amusing” suggests an element of thoughtfulness. Sure, the medium might be the message, but when it comes to courting, this message can be more than the meme. And because the medium allows for more of these confirmations that someone’s thinking of you to be sent at any time of the day, is an influx of memes a better indicator of affection than a single scented letter?

Originally published by The Clifton Courier on June 17, 2020

Sometimes my housemate will do things that makes me wonder just what the heck goes on in his head. Like when he willingly opts to use a “dairy blend” instead of butter – you know, the kind of thing that makes you question his judgement, which in turn makes you question a whole lot of other things about who he is as a person.

But then he’ll come out with something that is so right on it stops you in your tracks. Or, in this case, trackies (this joke will make sense shortly, please bear with me).

He and my other housemate/his fiancé were heading out to get some dinner the other night after a day of working from the home office/the reconfigured dinning nook with a whiteboard on the wall. That meant working in comfy clothing. Sloppy joes. Slippers. Tracksuit pants (geddit?!).

But to brave the outside world, they had to change.

“How come the colour and material of clothing changes what you’re wearing so you’re appropriate for the public?” he said.

And holy geez, he was bang on.

During the day, he was wearing a pair of black trackies and a grey and black jumper. Together, they had a certain look. He looked comfy, but sloppy.

He walked out of his room after trading his trackies for a dark khaki colour pair of pants that had a stiffer weave, but wore the exact same jumper and suddenly he appeared somewhat polished.

In essence, he was wearing he same thing: pants and a jumper. But the pants were just a different fabric and colour.

In this instance, it was the fabric that changed his look from couch to the street: it would have been a similar vibe if the pants were the same colour – black – as he trackies.

But the pants, made of starchier material, were obviously more restrictive and less relaxed for some reason that made them way more appropriate for public wear than the sloppy trackies. It’s almost as if we – “we” being society – deem clothing more acceptable if they have an element discomfort.

It’s like how a loose, flowy crushed-linen button-up shirt doesn’t have the same professional polish as a fitted, crisply-ironed cotton polyester blend button-up shirt. In essence, they’re the same: a long-sleeved button-up shirt with a collar. But there’s one that’s more appropriate for a bougie barefoot picnic and another that would be better suited to a day in court.

However, it’s not just the fabric – colour comes into it as well.

Like how you go to a chain store and you see the same dresses in different colours. They could be the same fabric, but the colour of that fabric determines what occasions you can wear them to.

The one with three or four bright colours in some kind of technicolour pattern? That’s either for casual wear OR something to throw on before trotting off to da clubz to go dancing. Nothing is stopping you from wearing that multi-coloured speckled dress to a dressy brunch or the races, but you’d probably wear the white one instead. And you wouldn’t be fined for wearing that technicolour dream dress to work, or even a wedding, but you’re probably more likely to opt for the black dress, with its exact same fabric but more sophisticated air, instead.

Or, if we bring it back to pants, an office worker could rock could wear black jeans to the office any day of the week, but they’d probably only wear blue jeans on Casual Fridays. Why is that, when they’re the same fabric?

My housemate had made an incredibly astute observation, one that takes a lot to unpack.

I mean, you can wear trackies in public, but some pervasive voice tells us that it’s unacceptable. What is that? Where does it come from?

I mean, when it comes to fabric, I’m putting down to the level of effort you put in to dress yourself corresponding with how publically acceptable your attire is. As if sacrificing your comfort for the approval of strangers is a noble thing.

But the colour one baffles me.

I don’t have the answers just yet, but I am looking forward to bringing this up at me next social outings as a conversation starter – much like the classic “how is a burger different to a sandwich?” debacle.

Stand by for more musings on this.

What is the best way to communicate genuine laughter?

I mean, obviously I’m talking in a text-based scenario. Because, clearly, the act of laughing would be the best way to express your amusement in a face-to-face conversation.

But when you’re in a back-and-fourth text exchange, you can let out a belly laugh but the other person won’t hear it. If you want someone to know that you genuinely found their last remark amusing, you have to literally spell it out. But spelling it out is tricky.

The first option is the standard “haha”. It’s what most people would interpret as laughter, even though it doesn’t really reflect any living human person’s actual laughing style. It is, I would say, the generic depiction of laughter across all English-speaking countries. And that’s all well and good, but because it’s so widely-used, it doesn’t come off as all that authentic. It’s kind of like when you were one MSN back in the day and typing “LOL” even though you were silently staring at the computer screen with a straight face – because, even if you did have to try to be quiet so as to not wake up your parents with your rollicking laughter, most of the time the other person’s banter did generate an actual laugh out loud response.

So what about a “hahaha”? I mean, that’s one extra “ha” and it’s different to the standard “haha”, so it seems to have more weight to it. But, then, I feel like adding extra “ha”s on to a “haha” then creates some kind of hierarchy of laughter. Like, it’s as if you have a scale for your level of amusement and, having assessed the humour of the previous remark against it, came to the conclusion that it deserved one extra “ha”. Whereas other jokes might get a “hahahaha” – that’s two extra “ha”s – because your analysis of the joke generated a higher laughter score. And, look, that might be good at communicating the humour of the joke but, again, it doesn’t have the authenticity of a good laugh.

Because it’s kind of saying “after careful consideration I’ve scored that joke and determined that it warrants X number of ‘ha’s, well done”. So it’s like you’re almost grading the person instead of simply responding with amusement. You’ve had to stop, think and then type out your laughter accordingly and it’s highly likely you’ve looked at the number of “ha”s you’ve written and edited it according to your initial humour assessment. This makes it pretty contrived, when genuine laughter is typically an involuntary response.

And, at the same time, you have to wonder how many “ha”s are too many. Like, where do you draw the line between laughter and straight up mocking? Because if you see a hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, it goes beyond laughter and ventures into something more menacing. I mean, who spends that much time typing that out? Who in their right mind would do that? Excessive use of the “ha” conveys something else entirely.

So should you then just chuck down a splutter of letters, messily assembled to convey your amusement? Something like “ahshahha”? Surely that looks more genuine, right? I mean, I kind of think so but then, I just wrote that while lying silently in my cold bedroom, nursing a headache with what I can only assume is a dumb, blank look on my face. I wasn’t laughing at all, but it kind of looks like I was. And this might be worse than the “ha” scoring system I talked about above, because the random smattering of “ha”-like letters is entirely false. You could argue the doubling up of an “h” and the addition of the “s”, which is close to the “a” on the keyboard, was an unintentional consequence of my feverish typing which I was unable to control due to my uncontrollable laughter, but it wasn’t.  I added the typos in to make the laughter look more genuine. And this deception actually makes it feel more fraudulent to me. That’s not laughter, that’s a betrayal of trust.

So what do you do you when you genuinely find something amusing and you want the other person to know that?

Sometimes I’ll chuck out a “hah”, which by its very nature is quite contrived. I mean, think of the last time someone let out a “hah” in conversation, without any follow up laughter – I’m wiling to bet it was a deliberately engineered response, used to convey something mixed in with the laughter, like disapproval or a hint of disdain. Other times I’ll say “that was a good one” but there’s the risk of it being misinterpreted as sarcasm because the phrase “good one” is so frequently used in movies and shows to show that a character does not actually think the “one” in question was good at all. I’ve also seen some people go with a “that was funny”, but there’s still a lot of misinterpretation that could go on there. You could also like the comment – like, on Instagram, it puts a little heart on the speech bubble – but then, what does that say about the other messages you haven’t liked?

I hoped I’d get to the end of this with a resolution, but I actually don’t know the answers to this one. The best I can come up with is that it’s a case-by-case kind of thing – which means you have to adjust your expressions of amusement according to the context and tailor your response for each individual person like you’re actually engaged in the conversation with them or something. Or should you describe what your bodily response to the joke was? Like, “I actually just literally laughed out loud”? Or maybe a “I just snorted”? Or a “I actually just peed my knickers and now I’ve been sent home from work”? If you have the answers, please respond with your preferred authentic but contrived combination of letters that you use to express your level of amusement.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 20, 2020

Sometimes you need to be reminded to look after yourself.

I mean, it’s harder these days because when you watch more television shows on platforms without ads, so you miss out on the ads that suggest you can’t just go letting yourself wallow in a hole. I remember a while back, in the VCR days, there was an ad for vaguely healthy microwaveable meals where there was a worried mum on the phone to her daughter asking if she was looking after herself*. Or the one for an I-don’t-need-to-name-the-brand-because-its-marketing-team-did-so-well hair care company telling me I’m worth it**.

* I can’t find the ad I’m thinking of on YouTube, which means it either never existed OR some noble soul hasn’t uploaded it to YouTube. I’m hoping it did exist and it’s still out there, waiting for someone with spare time, access to old microwaveable meal commercials and a good heart will upload it to a searchable internet platform. Until then, here’s a New Zealand alternative. 

** I did some research into that campaign and found this little explainer about it. I mean,  feminism and capitalism together, selling haircare products? Excellent. 

I mean, if I was that run down that I’d need to rely on a microwavable dinner for some low-effort sustenance, I’d probably chuck on a piece of toast for dinner instead. And my hair colour is too intertwined with my identity for me to go dying it. So an ad would have to be pretty powerful to make me change that behaviour, but I do like the face-level sentiment of the ads to take care of myself (but, hey, it’s not a failure of the advertising teams, because that brand recognition is still strong like 15 years on).

I mean, sure, I know that I need to eat healthy-enough food, do some exercise and shower regularly, but sometimes the specifics of “looking after yourself” get lost in the day-to-day.

Take a toothbrush, for example.

Do you remember when you last changed yours? Maybe you do. Maybe you have a regimented routine for replacing your personal hygiene products and you keep track of the passing of time in a conscious way. In which case, I am impressed.

But I will generally keep using things out of habit until they are worn to the point of them no longer being effective. And, this was the case before I did shift work and worked weekends so days of the week became irrelevant, I tend to operate slightly oblivious to the calendar. It’s odd, because I am religious with my diary, but I glaze over the dates. Like, I’ll forget birthdays not because I’ve forgotten the date someone was born, but because I don’t realise that particular date is creeping up.

For example, I have a pair of comfy floral boxer shorts I was given in the goody bag of a hens party a few years back (hens parties so much better than stags dos – you still get as wild, but there’s also like scented-candle-and-pyjama element to the traditional womenfolk pre-wedding ritual). I have worn them to the point that the elastic has completely lost its power and whenever I wear them, I have to continually hoik them up so the world doesn’t see my knickers – which, let’s be honest, sometimes are quite overworn themselves. I know I should replace the elastic, but I’ll probably keep wearing the shorts like this for the net six months.

Or like when you use a razor so much that goes beyond being blunt and starts to actively damage your skin with its ineffective blade. It gets to the point where I have to shave over the same spots a few times and my skin gets irritated. I think that I should replace the razer head. But it usually takes a few weeks to get from the point of this thought entering my head and the replacement ceremony.

It’s the same with a toothbrush. I will keep using it and using it until the bristles start curling over themselves. I mean, part of this is because there was a period in my childhood where I didn’t brush my teeth according to dentist recommendations and like 40 per cent of my teeth were fillings. I suspect there’s a psychological hangover where I like to prove that I am, indeed, brushing my teeth by having a worn brush, but there’s also the habit, the obliviousness to how long I’ve been using it, the general meh-ness of routine.

But when a within-the-legal-number-of-visitors-to-my-home visitor used the bathroom and pointed out the sorry state of my toothbrush recently, it prompted action.

I bought a value pack of toothbrushes and tossed the used brush out of my life. And, I have to say, I noticed the difference. Not just in the sense that having fresh bristles actually leaves your teeth feeling alarmingly clean (alarming because I don’t know how long I was using that old brush for or how effective my dental hygiene routine was), but in other aspects too.

I’m planning on getting more elastic for my shorts*. I’ve changed my razor head. I’ve thrown away some leftovers that were suss. I’ve washed bath towels BEFORE they started smelling. Heck, I might even get rid of the saggy knickers lingering in the bottom of my underwear drawer.

Because I’m worth it.

* I haven’t actually fixed my soggy shorts yet, but I’m still planning on doing it. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 13, 2020

I have an addiction.

I grew up in quite an anti-waste kind of household. I mean, we never made our own toilet paper or anything, but we tried to be sustainable before being sustainable was cool. My parents are just pretty practical people who just don’t see the point of chucking something into the rubbish when it can be re-used as something else.

Our veggie scraps fed the chooks. Our empty cardboard boxes went to either Treasure Island* or the Early Education Centre** for the youngsters to use in crafts. Beer bottles went to the Scout Hut. And all our old jars were kept under the sink to be taken up to the hospital to be filled with fundraising jam.

* The local pirate-themed childcare centre

** That’s what they called the Prep classroom in my old primary school when Prep was still a whizbang new idea. I think the school got some kind go grant to go in early with that whole prep thing, which meant we were able to turn the weird concrete-heavy storage room under the school from a vague music room to practice our Stations of the Cross arena spectaculars into a legit classroom with actual floor covering. It was a pretty big deal at the time. 

It became habit to save reusable things and it’s something that I haven’t let go as I blossom into my Late Twenties Era.

This is a time when you’re still young and hip enough to end up at da clubz on a night out (well, it’s really only just da one club I end up at and that’s da club that plays the chart topping hits that are at least a decade old…) but mature enough to make your own bread and get the weekend newspapers delivered.

I appointed myself House Sustainability Convenor when I moved in and have introduced a more regimented recycling program. My cooperative housemates have embraced this change, but not to the same extent of me. You see, they put their jars in the recycling box/green bag/whatever receptacle we can fit under the sink ready to be emptied into the wheelie bin with the yellow lid.

But I fish out the old jars, clean them in the dishwasher and save them for other uses. I just can’t leave them there.

It’s like they call to me and I can’t silence their glassy siren calls in my head until I’ve collected them from the recycling. It’s a bit like Frozen 2, except less mysterious and with a shocking lack of ice-inspired diva dresses.

It drives my anti-clutter housemate nuts. She’s big into keeping things neat, tidy and hassle free, so having a bunch of empty jars sitting around the house doesn’t sit will with her. And I mean, we live in a cosy little house with very limited storage. She has a point.

So I make sure to use what I have as quick as I can.

I have a collection of nuts, flours and dried fruits – which I use to make decadent fruit bread because I’m in my late twenties – that I keep in the jars. I have spare jars to keep the honey I bulk buy in three kilo buckets so I don’t have to keep dipping a teaspoon into the vat of stickiness. But I mostly like to use the jars for plant cuttings.

A while ago now I bought this big drippy kind of succulent from a lady who runs a plant stall out front of her house on the Gatton side of Ma Ma Creek. I have no idea what type it is, but it has these long strings of fat, juicy leaves that look like ticks who have had one heck of a feed, except green. They just dangle over the pot in an effortless, artful kind of way. When I moved into this place, I cut off a few danglers – that’s what I call them, but I’m fairly certain that’s the scientific term for them too – from the Mother Plant and shoved them into the pots in the vertical garden the previous owners built to block out the relentless sun from the back deck.

And now they are thriving. Like, I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but it looks like something an Instagram influencer would have.

But they’re thriving to the point now where it’s almost too much.

The danglers are danglin’ so low they’re approaching the ground. So I’ve started clipping off little bits here and there. But, again, because I don’t want to go wasting anything, I don’t just chuck the offcuts away.

I shove them into soil in the salvaged jars and let them take root. I have them lined up on the little plant bench I put on the back deck without prior approval from the house council, and somehow managed to avoid an official infringement notice despite how untidy (or, as I like to say, “homey and rustic”) it can look.

But the problem is that, eventually, you get to have too many cuttings on the bench. There’s only so much room.

So I’ve started insisting people take them with them as very trendy, grown up party bags when they come over to the house. It’s wholesome as all heck and just screams Trendy Late Twenties Chic.

So I try to send people home with some greenery whenever they pop by.

Unfortunately, in These Uncertain Times, we haven’t had too many people popping by lately and the people who do pop by have already got some cuttings or are tired of refusing my plant offerings. And in These Uncertain Times I feel like I’m going through jar-related foods much faster than usual. And I’m not talking just jam or stir fry jars, but bottles of various backgrounds and don’t even get me started on the empty scented candle vessels I have floating around.

Even I’m starting to think it’s a bit much now.

Thankfully, those restrictos are lifting soon.

It’s been a while since I’ve done an underwhelming recipe, and I’m feeling particularly lazy this week so it’s time for me to give some self-indulgent, unnecessarily wordy directions about how to do extremely basic things in a kitchen setting.

And, look, I’m well aware there’s a growing movement against recipes that have a bit of a life story tacked on to the front. I’ve seen the memes. I get it. So I’m bolding the explicit instructions so you can skim over the rest of this dribble if you chose to deprive yourself of my expertly crafted prose. You’re gonna have to scroll the fuck down if that’s all you’re after.

But, I mean, if you need a recipe for heating up a banana and plonking it on yoghurt, I’m deeply concerned for you. I highly doubt you were brought here because you thought that you wanted to heat up a banana and typed into Google “tell me how to heat up banana please” and it took you here. I know my demographic. Intimately. I’m related to a bunch of you. And I know a few of you HATE bananas. One of you can’t even stomach the thought of touching a banana’s skin. So I know that you’re not here to for a recipe.

So you bastards can just sit and read what I’ve taken the time to write, consarnit. Now, on with the why-is-this-even-a-recipe-recipe.

It’s getting cold. Eating nice food is nice. It’s only natch to want to shovel something sweet and warming into your oesophagus. But you can’t go eating deep fried lard balls dipped in chocolate for dessert every night, because eventually we will be allowed back at da clubz and I’ve heard rumours that the hipster jeans made famous by early 2000s Paris Hilton are on their way back in fashion again. And if you want to carelessly rub up against strangers at da clubz in hipster jeans, having a tight rig is going to up your chances of attracting the singlet-clad beefcake of your dreams.

So if you want to treat yourself with something sweet to acknowledge the impressive achievement of making it to the end of another day without loosing your cool and tearing the siding off the exterior of your home with your bare hands but don’t want to be munging on junk, heating up a banana and plonking it on some yoghurt is a good option to consider.

I mean, I also do this because I often goo too nuts with bananas at the grocery store and can’t be arsed to turn them into banana bread.

You’ll need:

• A banana
• Some yoghurt
• Like 20 grams of butter
• Shredded coconut
• Oatz

The first to do is heat up the butter a small non-stick frypan you can shove in the dishwasher afterwards so you can free yourself of the shackles of washing up. Don’t go too too hard heat-wise for heaven’s sake, keep it on a low to medium heat.

Slice up your banana lengthways. Not too thin or it’ll be too flaccid to handle and not too thick or it will take too long to got all goey. You should get three decent sized slices.

Slap the nana into the bubbling butter and enjoy the scent as it invades your nostrils.

Slop a few scoops of yoghurt into a bowl. I use full-fat Greek yoghurt because being a white girl who uses full fat dairy products is apparently radical and staunchly feminist because fuck the patriarchy and its low-fat women’s yoghurt agenda. I mean, dairy is a gift from our bovine sisters and we should be honouring that, not diluting it with desires to slim down to fit within the constraints of the idealistic female form to appease the menfolk. Rise up, dairy queens.

Sprinkle on a few pinches of the shredded coconut and oats.

Once the banana is bubbly and caramelised, flip said fruit with a spatula. It’s pretty delicate at this point, so be carefee.

Once the other side is sufficiently browned, slap the slices on top of the yogurt.

There, done.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 6, 2020

These days, you have to get a little creative to have a good time.

We have a house whiteboard at the moment, which we’re using as a way to keep track of what unnecessarily-decadent meals we’re making, to sprout our homemade “inspirational” quotes and come up with things to look forward to in the week ahead.

I don’t know about you, but after the initial flurry of COVID confusion and late-Sunday-night press conferences, the weeks have had something of a stagnant feel to them. After the adrenaline and action, there’s a sense of calm that somehow feels more draining than the non-stop slog.

A good way to combat a restless rut is to plan things for the future. To give yourself something to look forward to. Lights and tunnels, and all that jazz.

Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to do that when you’re supposed to be staying within your own neighbourhood – and many places within that neighbourhood are shut.

I mean, we’ve all got plans for When All This Is Over – for me, there’s an increasingly long-term goal of a trip to the UK and Ireland, a visit to Uluru and an insufferably bougie group trip to WA’s wine regions. I mean, I personally think it would be fantastic to embark on a great Australian road trip from Brisbane to Margret River, but I think most of the group is waiting until domestic flights are open for non-essential travellers again, which is still a bit of a way off by the looks of it.

While these vague plans are carrots dangling overhead in the unknowable distance, we’ve needed to have things in our more immediate future.

So, for the tail end of the week, we had the words “Backyard Wine Tour” to help drag our sorry selves towards the weekend.

Now, what’s a backyard wine tour you ask?

Well, each housemate had to select two bottles of wine that neither of us have tried before and introduce it to the other housemates as if they were an expert at a fictional winery. We had to come up with names for our “wineries” and offer some swanky nibblies to go with the plonk. We also had to dress up in the kind of kit you would wear on a winery tour – think linens, florals and floppy hats.

Essentially, we were playing wineries. Sort of how you used to play in the Home Corner at preschool, except with alcohol.

It was an exercise in planning, cooking and improvisation/talking out of your arse.

(In case you’re interested, my winery was called Ice CUBErnet, because its long-held philosophy was to promote the benefits of chilled red wine and how chewing the cubes as you go helps to hydrate the drinker and prevent hangovers. My winery also had an iconic wombat and a strict, foot squashing only policy for mushing the grapes).

As you can imagine, there was all kinds of frivolity on the day. Six bottles between three people with nowhere to go, nothing to do and not much to look forward to got a little out of hand.

There was a broken glass, a few stains on my white shirt and a large candle that melted wax all over the decking on the veranda. And, at some point, my housemates had arranged for greasy, greasy fried chicken to be present in the house as an attempt to soak up some of the day’s events.

After the dawn broke the following day, my housemate had to make an early dash to the servo for milk for the morning cuppas. My shirt was soaking in the bathroom sink. The wax was very much attached to the wooden decking. And the grease from the fried chicken was giving me visions of those fatbergs that clog London drains, which build up in the sewers in ginormous rancid clumps (of course, in this scenario, my intestines were the underground drains and there are no brave, noble souls to go in and clear all the gunge out with shovels and buckets).

I had something else to add to the whiteboard that morning: “rebuild our lives”.

At least it’s something to do.

Right so I’ve been a wee bit slack this week on account of some disgustingly early starts.

I’ve been neglecting my buns-sculpting routines, living off leftovers and experiencing a lot of unplanned naps.

So I haven’t whipped up anything special for today’s schedule posts, even though I had the whole day to do so yesterday. Thankfully, I have a whole bunch of Word Documents on my desktop containing half-written columns that I’ve abandoned but can’t bring myself to place in the digital trashcan. They’re mostly rants that I’ve gone on after being inspired by the muse of unwarranted rage at trivial things. Halfway through writing it down, I either run out of steam or, faced with my reasoning in black and white, I realise that perhaps I’m overreacting and back the heck off. I decide that no one needs to read it and it’s best to just let it go.

I was going to revive one of these I-will-die-on-this-hill kind of rants, but as I started to write the introduction to something that ticks me off about mileage, I referenced one very timely example of something that makes me cranky: Mother’s Day.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the day itself – I certainly hope to one day be congratulated for squeezing life out of my vagina with a luxe pair of silky pyjamas (the plan is to have children when I can afford to keep them alive while still living like a diva, soooo I may never reproduce). It’s nice to say thanks to the woman who brewed you up from a tiny zygote into a person.

But it’s the gramma of Mother’s Day that shits me.

I’m not often a grammar Nazi because that would be extremely hypocritical of me, as someone who often commits cardinal sins against the English language. In fact, I’ve probably already committed many in this blog post. I think it’s about writing the way you talk and, even though the way you talk doesn’t always align with the rules of grammar, you’re still able to communicate your message to someone. I’m liberal in that sense – language is fluid and evolves with society and what was incorrect 60 years ago might not suit the uses we have for language today. And, while I’m at it, who even gets to decide what the “rules” are for gramma anyhow?! But I digress. This is a conversation to be had over a bottle of wine.

BUT I’ve been irked by the apostrophe placement in Mother’s Day – and Father’s Day – since I became aware of news organisations style guides. A style guide is a like a grammar bible for a news organisation to follow to ensure that all copy is consistent. It sounds very boring, but it’s actually quite interesting if you unpack it all. Again, a cracking topic to discuss over a bottle of wine.

Anyway, the style has always been Mother’s Day. And I thought it should be Mothers’ Day, because it’s a celebration of all the mothers out there. It’s not just a single mother’s day, but a day for a whole bunch of mothers. I’ve always been irate over it, but never actually looked into the issue. So I decided to do some scholarly research.

And, after reading three articles that appeared on the first page of Google results, I have a few things to impart.

Firstly, as I learned from a blog by a bloke called Rob Ashton, Mother’s Day was celebrated in the UK in the 17^thCentury, when it was known as Mothering Sunday. It was on the fourth Sunday in Lent and a day when apprentices and servants could take a break from their assumedly unpleasant lives to go home to visit their mums.

But this kind of died out there until World War II, when US troops brought over the Mother’s Day tradition and made it cool again (I would like to think they said Mother’s Day was so “fetch”, but I haven’t seen any research that would confirm this).

And on May 9, 1914 the US president Woodrow Wilson – who you’ll remember was Bart’s inspiration for the name of the man who was writing love notes to his teacher Mrs Krabappel – signed a document declaring the second Sunday in May was a day for set aside “as a public expression of love and reverence for the mothers of our country”.

And on that proclamation was Mother’s Day. Apostrophe between the R and the S.

But before you go blaming the Yanks for all this, there’s a point that goes deeper. The folk behind The Grammaphobia Blog go into the history before this declaration. There was a woman called Anna Jarvis who organised services to honour her mum after she died in May, 1905.

And this blog points to a dissertation by the historian Katharine Antolini about this this Jarvis lady, who apparently Jarvis wanted the singular possessive to emphasise that it was the day to honour your own, personal mother, not mothers in general.

So, I guess that’s that.

I have no way to end this, so I’m just going to leave you with a link to the best song about mothers there is. I implore you to click on this link.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Look, I’m not going to lie, this isn’t going to be the most brilliant blog post you’ll ever read.

But it might just change your life.

I’m feeling a wee bit under the weather for reasons that may be related to the consumption of red wine, white wine, beer and mojito, but could also be a stomach bug things that’s going around. It’s impossible to tell. Anyway, in light of my current condition, I’m not really in a position to be composing the kind of “yeah geez, that really made me think” intellectual gut punches that you’re used to copping from this site. But I still want to contribute my ideas to the world. I still want to be part of your weekend. I still want to connect with you through this medium, even though the chances are you’re in a secret Snapchat group with me.

So I’ve whipped up this little morsel for you to mung on to tied you over until I bash out something print-worthy (which is to say, a piece that went to print, how worthy that may of the ink and paper be is open to interpretation) on Wednesday.

My sister and I planned a cheeky we’re-allowed-to-picnic-now picnic yesterday, which obviously called for egg salad sandwiches.  I mean, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but a good egg sal sang is can be better than repeatedly penetration in a rapid succession.

And I’m not just saying that because of that whole double yolker episode from a few weeks back, which will absolutely prove to be the peak of my career. Egg salad sandwiches are just really, really good. That’s an undeniable fact.

Anyway, my sister, being the organised legal beagle she’s trainer herself to become, looked up a recipe for egg salad to ensure we had the best eggy mush to slop on to our bread. I mean, I personally just crush the eggs with some mayo and pepper and a bit of something extra (you might say the extra ingredient is salt). But she wanted to get it right. And good heavens, did we get it right.

Because this recipe called for a few bits of snipped up shallots to the gunge.

And, sure, the extra pops of green added a certain level of aesthetic to the egg, but it was the oniony fly kick to the tastebuds that raised the sangs from “essential” to “YESsential”. (yep, that’s where I’m out mentally right now, this whole thing just worked up to an underwhelming pun).

I’m not the best person to be giving out life advice, but I think I’m well within my rights to strongly suggest you try snipping a few deep green rings of pep into your next egg salad.

I love making a good list.

As doing a makeover is for Cher in Clueless, writing a to do list gives me a sense of control in a world full of chaos.

It’s neat, it’s orderly and it’s a suitably restrained form of optimism: with its lofty hopes for a future and structure projections of all the things you might achieve in the time beyond now.

At some point in the week, or even possibly last week (it’s very hard to keep track of the days at the moment; it’s almost like time has become a mushed clump of wet calendar pages instead of the crisp, easy-to-distinguish units of time we once lived our lives within) I had a little brain spurt and wrote down a bunch of all the things I was hoping to achieve with my spare time. Something I could refer back to when staring down empty chunks of times to fill that void with fun, productive activity and, dare I say it, a sprinkle of relaxation. This list was, in the back of my head, a lifeline to prevent me from frittering away this free time.

All through the week I was scraping by from day to day thanks to a stretch of 3.30am alarms and a very scattered, restless sleep pattern, I found myself just kind of… existing. I wasn’t really in a state to be ticking off to do lists and was far too disorientated from the after work naps I apparently couldn’t avoid to do all that much. But I figured I’d really start living on the weekend, which I was lucky enough to have this week. I’d go through the list and I would feel productive and happy and relaxed and everything would be just dandy.

Today I was faced with a several empty hours to fill. I was a little bit dusty but otherwise still largely capable of engaging in most recreational ventures, so I thought I would refer back to this list full of endless cool shit to do.

I opened the Word doc that contained said list. I’d obviously written it as the scaffolding for a column and left it unfinished for a more inspired and energised version of myself to complete. As it turns out, this moment of inspiration and energy never came, because I was thoroughly underwhelmed with what I had written down, which was:

Try soaking my feet in port:There was an sales rep I used to work with back at the Armidale paper who reckons that you could get absolutely blind by soaking your feet in port. There’s something to do with the perfect level of alcohol in that it’s not too high that your body needs to expel it from your system but not too weak that if doesn’t make you go all loopy. I’m curious and interested in broadening my horizons, so I’m wanting to give this a try.  

Watch The Ten Commandments:It was on TV the other night and only got from the part where he was horny, preppy Moses to juuusut before he started fucking shit up. I mean, the movie is three hours and 40 minutes long and when you throw ad breaks into the mix, it’s a marathon. But my goal is to watch it from start to finish, especially because I got a tantalising snippet of Nefretiri, who is extremely glamorous and extra and vengeful and just all around fabulous. 

Re-watch all the Olsen twins movies:

That was it. That was the list.

I was three things.

I had written a list of three things. I mean, lists of three things don’t need to be lists because they can fit into a sentence without being a clunky mess. There’s no need for the formatting of a list because one comma and an “and” would have been enough.

Basically, my big goals for myself were to get drunk without consuming calories and spending hours watching TV.

And, unfortch, I don’t have a bucket of port on hand and the Olsen twin movies aren’t on Netflix. I also don’t feel emotionally ready to watch three hours and forty minutes of a single movie.

So I made another loaf of bread. Today’s is apricot, pecan and self distain. I reckon it’ll go great with a cup of tea.