The other day I found myself saying, “I don’t know who you are, but I want to be you,” out loud after coming across a photo on Instagram. Please keep in mind that I currently am the only living being in the house; I don’t even have a pot plant to pass judgment on me. But I feel like the many swan figurines in my house (again, I can get away with this as I live alone) cringed a little inside at that one.

Want to know what it was a photo of?

A woman’s hand holding what looked like a Reuben sandwich, which had been buttered generously on out the outside and grilled to perfection.

If my wish came true and I was that person, I would be holding said buttery, meaty delight and therefore would be within close enough proximity to it to shove it down my throat with the gusto of a girl who claims she “only getsss along with guyyyyz”.

The beautiful thing this whole incident, aside from the sandwich of course, was that I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone.

When the closest thing to another living, judging organism in your home is the mould growing on your couch, you can go about your business without having to justify your behaviour to anyone. As freeing as this is, it can be a breeding ground for a whole other kind of bacteria, which infests the mind rather than the lungs (please never sleep on my couch; I can’t be responsible for how sick a piece of furniture I got free from a friend of a former work colleague makes you). It’s the kind of growth that makes think that your home is a judgement free zone.

And that’s bad, because it’s not.

Like it or loathe it, eventually someone other than you will enter your house and they WILL comment on things. Whether it’s the bunch of flowers that are still in a vase despite all the petals having dropped off or a collection of onion tableware, people are going to notice it. And they will tell you they’ve noticed it. And they will ask you why it’s there. And you won’t be able to verbalise why you paid ten whole dollars on a set of salt and pepper shakers and a vinegar bottle shaped like onions. Telling your houseguest/the intruder that you “thought they were cool” or you “really like onions” won’t cut it.

They won’t say much more on the topic, but they will make a face that tells you they don’t approve or they think you’re a bit weird and you will want to show them the door. When you live alone, your house becomes incredibly personal. Once you finally realise that you call the shots, you start being yourself without restraint. And this leaves its mark on your humble abode; sometimes by way of DNA but mostly by way of décor styling, both conscious and unconscious. So when someone picks on your knick-knackery, it feels like they’re picking on you.

Perhaps this is why have very few friends, and live in another state to many of them.

So I went with a bottle a vodka.

A few days ago I posted about not knowing what to buy as a gift for a friend’s baby shower. This was a challenge for two reasons

• this woman had once compared a foetus to a cluster of cancer cells
• I like to win the gift-giving prize, which is only existeant in my head. I like to walk around, smug in knowing my gift was by far superior to any garbage any other schmuck presented to the giftee, wrapped poorly, might I add.

So when I still had nothing two hours before the shower (weird thing to call an event, if you ask me. I’m certain Aurora’s parents didn’t call that party they had at the start of Sleeping Beauty a baby shower, so why should we?) I was uneasy.

I don’t like loosing in the gift stakes, but I knew I had to make a decision. I knew I was never going to buy a gift that would be really thoughtful and helpful, because the whole mothering thing isn’t something I have a lot of experiences with:

So I thought it’d go with the fallback option: the joke gift. It is undoubtedly a risky move when you have a woman housing a growing infant and about 17 million different hormones, but it was the only option I had. I quickly did a lap of the shopping centre, grabbed a colour-neutral gift bag (because when baby genders are concerned, you just can’t take any risks with blues or pinks) and high tailed it to the event. I thought my gift would be useful, but also get a few laughs. Plus, I told myself, my friend is someone who you would assume would get a lot of joke presents. There will probably lots of gifts like this pouring in.

Wrong.

It turns out that baby showers are for thoughtful, loving and practical gifts. I’m talking nappies. I’m talking hand-made toys. I’m talking nipple pads, for fuck’s sake. I would have never thought of nipple pads in my whole life.

And the thing about showers is that the gift opening is done publically. So your gift choices are not only seen by everyone, but you see how everyone sees your gift. You see not only your friends reation to the present, but every other bastard’s in the whole room. And boy was I up against some tough competition.

The mother in law had knitted two blankets and two toys, as well as giving two store-bought toys which looked like they came from Kate Middleton’s nursery for crying out loud. They were so beautiful.

Then there was the thoughtful mother who had a bag full of hand-me-downs and incontinence pads ready and waiting for all that marvellous after birth action which goes on down there.

As the present pile diminished, I realised I was the only one who went with the joke option. As she reached for my brown bag, I braced myself for an awkward silence.

But thankfully, the vodka was the last thing to have been pulled from the bag. The first was the card, which I had creatively made by folding a piece of brown cardboard in half and writing “gestation celebrations!” on the front. Then came the book Go The Fuck to Sleep. This was a good order, because it was child-orientated, unlike the rest of the bag. My friend then pulled out a thimble (as an aside, how surprised are you that they still make these little bastards, what a win it was for me being able to find one on such sort notice!) and the mini-bar sized bottle of rum.

Me, proclaiming knowingly: “It’s so you can put the baby to sleep!”

I’m sure I once heard something about using a thimble full of rum to knock out an infant so you could get on with your life for a few hours. I just can’t recall where I heard it, or if the source I gleamed this information from was a reliable one. The legitimacy of this “old trick” started to melt away and I was beginning to realise that I had told an expectant mother to feed her small baby rum.

Me, confidence in mothering tip now wavering: “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

*undisclosed chatter and uneasy laughter in the room.

Me: “Don’t worry guys, I’m not going to be having the babies any time soon!”

Thankfully this acted as a diversion while the vodka was pulled out.

I don’t regret my gifting in the slightest, but I do finally understand the fear of judgement from other mothers I hear so much about. I wasn’t scolded or anything, but as my brown paper bag was brought into the spotlight, I suddenly felt weirdly vulnerable. The women weren’t individuals any more, they were The Mother Folk, a powerful fictional force of judgement. And just for a fraction of a second, I found myself understanding what mothers go through.

But then I realised that, if this gift competition only existed in my head, I could be in charge of crowing the winner. And while I missed out on the Best Overall Gift prize, I was number on in the Novelty Gift section.

What does one buy as baby shower gift for a woman who once called babies “little tumours”?

A very dear friend of mine has undergone some huge transformations lately, namely in the uterine region. Where there was once a regular declaration freedom dripping out of there, now snuggles a beating heart and, more importantly, the opportunity to craft a truly fantastic person. In an even bigger transformation, this woman is now having a baby shower. Yep. One of those gatherings where women get together and talk about infants and bundles of joy and “the journey of motherhood”. What makes it more fun? These kinds of occasions are generally dry, which isn’t my friend’s style. I mean, she had to be almost waterboarded to agree to it, but the fact that she’s having one is huge.

It’s less than a week away and I still haven’t bought a gift yet. Because, to be frank, I don’t know what to give her.

It’s always bloody confronting every time someone who is more than a casual acquaintance to me procreates, but this gestational period came as a particular shock. We used to spend out morning tea breaks almost saving the world with our conversation topics – climate change, the public health system, bushfire permits, breastfeeding etc. These sessions usually saw us “respectfully” disagree with one another, but always in good fun. What we did agree on, more often than not, was our stance on the production of people. Bratty kids, vaccinations, the merits of threatening little arseholes with a wooden spoon. We both had wild ideas about parenting being about forging good people, not having children just because it was the thing to do. Now, these conversations were some time ago, so I’m paraphrasing here, but there was one that featured this gem:

Dear Friend with Wild Ideas: They’re like cancers growing in there, really. They’re little tumours.

She wasn’t talking about the effect of selfie culture on modern society, she was talking about children.

Sure, she might have said it with hint of a joke, but the sentiment was there. So you’d be forgiven for thinking a person like this should be the last person to grow a little bambino. Hence my surprise of her baby news.

So I have had to think about what may have changed her mind on the practices of procreation. And I have to say that I can see the appeal. There’s the whole unconditional love thing. There’s also the fact that, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to grow your own retirement care plan. Right now I’m watching my mother and her siblings band together as a support for my aging grandmother, and I have to say it would be nice to know I had a net of guilt and love to fall into when I whither away. Plus, and this is a big plus, you’re practically able to create your own best friend. It will take some time and a fucktonne of commitment but you’ll be able to fashion the ideal person to be your best mate. It’s like one of those grow your own dinosaur kits, where your womb is the cup of water and the water is thousands and thousands of dollars in school fees, grocery bills and horse riding lessons. And because, statistically speaking, these grow-your-own-besties will outlive you, you hopefully should have a BFF for life. That’s a sweet deal.

The other thing is knowing that you’re leaving your mark on this hateful rock we’re all floating around in space on. You do your best to turn out a good person to make it a better place here. And, despite her views about dolphins (she thinks they’re all plotting an uprising – like that episode of The Simpsons except she hasn’t seen it…) I reckon she’ll craft a non-shit human being.

So now that I’m looking back at it, it shouldn’t be that much of a shock.

This woman with her wild ideas and more than adequate knowledge of birth control is probably the ideal candidate for shaping and moulding a bunch of cells into a fully-fledged human being. That’s not me saying that every other bastard would be a shithouse mother; there are marvellous women out there of all ages and backgrounds with all kinds of views on whether farmers should have to apply for a fire permit bringing up wonderful children. I’m in awe of people who willingly sign themselves up to have their vaginas torn open and to be responsible for keeping something other than a plant alive.

What I’m saying is I don’t think you have to be the “mothering type” – whatever that is – to be a great parent. You don’t have to be a type at all. You just have to be a good enough person to try your best.

But where does this leave me on the gift front? Should I get her a tea towel saying “you’re not going to fuck this up”? A bottle of cancer-blocking sunscreen? A barrel of moonshine to drink away the pain of having a living being yanked out her birth canal? A book with 17 ways to turn placenta into a meaty summer cocktail?

At this stage the only idea I have is ribbon saying “I survived my baby shower”.

Suggestions are greatly appreciated at this point.

My best friend’s 50-year-old mother has better weekends than me.

I’m not saying the lady shouldn’t be having fun. She’s fabulous. She’s glamorous. She’s just got back from a solo retreat in Bali. I give her two very enthusiastic thumbs up. But when you compare the snapchats she sent out this weekend and the snapchats I sent out this weekend, it paints a pretty bleak picture.

She went to the Gold Cost this weekend, Australia’s severely underwhelming answer to Las Vegas. She sent out snapchats of her and a sweet honey poolside. I however, sent out snapchats like this:

Admittedly, her “sweet honey” was her husband of a few decades and she wasn’t taking a beer bong from a former Big Brother housemate or anything. But the contrast between our posts is still alarming.

As a young person, I’m supposed to be a heaving, drunken mess. I should spend my Sunday mornings telling a bunch of cackling girls wearing sunnies with lenses the size of dinner plates about the schlep I up woke up next to earlier that day. I should be swinging on the rails of party buses. I should have to take dresses to dry cleaners’ and avoid questions about what the stains on the fabric are. I’m at the age when I’m at the cusp of taking a long hard look at myself and tell that self to grow up.

And while I may be wearing a pyjama set with glitter and a Disney character on the jumper, I find myself needing to grow…down?

I have been conditioned to think that in order to grow, you first need to have your dirty hoodrat stage. I can’t get to my happy ending without realising that I have to change everything about who I am – especially if I want a man to be included in that ending. And I don’t think I have had enough of a wild time make me face some hard truths to catapult me into successful, blissful adulthood.

I mean, no one wants to have to chew on an emergency contraceptive pill for breakfast or be too hungover to enjoy their overpriced avocado on toast, but the precursors to these things usually involve a laugh or two. It gives you something to do other than find yourself accidentally hooked on The Mask of Zoro on TV, spending your Saturday night watching it right until the end despite the frustrating ad breaks. I’m supposed to be wracking up debts and sexually transmitted diseases with wild holiday flings. This all comes back to my idea that my life could be a television series. Who the hell would watch a show about someone who’s big weekend plans involve allowing herself to have her eggs with toast AND butter. I mean, prepubescent Kirsten Dunst was right, butter is divinity, but it won’t get you laid.

People around my age make rules for themselves that they inevitably break: I’ll never mix tequila and whiskey again; I’ll never sleep with Trevor again; That’s the last time I do blow off a Larry Emdur look-alike’s abs. But these rules are always broken, and they are usually broken on the weekend. In a way, I’m like these sequin-clad people. I make a rule and find myself breaking it on a weekend, when I’m weak and not thinking straight. But my version of this is much more boring; my rule is “I’ll never overzealously prod my ears with an cotton tipped bud until it hurts or I cough”. And when I break the rule, it’s far less fun. It means I can’t hear properly for a little while and sometimes get shooting pains in my eardrum. As I raise that little white prodding stick to my earhole, I don’t have a table of girls screaming their “woos” at me, it’s just me and the sound of my bathroom’s exhaust fan drowning out the silence of my decaying soul. I need to fuck my life up fast, so I can then un-fuck my life. It’s complicated, but suffice to say I need to create the kind of memories that will make for an interesting tell-all book on my youth and right now I have nothing to tell. I have to do something about it now because if I wait much longer I’ll be too old to be considered a hot mess and will instead be labelled “sad” or “needs help”. I only have a brief window in which I can be a wreck but still have a future. The time for recklessness is now!

But I think I’ll start tomorrow: I’ve already showered and the first episode of the new season of Grand Designs to starts in like 20 minutes.

Last night I went to The Theatre alone.

I was asked to review a play I’d written about, and the director/playwright/lead actor set aside a seat for me. It was all very fabulous, except I felt a wee nervous about it. I’d never reviewed an actual play before (mostly because I don’t count Cats as a play and also because only three people read my bitter rant, so it hardly qualifies as a review), and this play was all about Shakespeare, no less.

My first experience to Shakespeare was a vague awareness of the great Leo Dicaprio in the 90s. I would watch Ten Things I Hate About You as oblivious to its Shakespearean roots as I was to its dick jokes. And it wasn’t some time after I watched Cher Horwitz cream that self-righteous, shitty-cap-wearing pimple of Josh’s college girlfriend about Hamlet with her extensive Mel Gibson knowledge, that I understood what they were talking about.

Yep. My only experience with Shakespeare was rather through the pop culture filter that happens to colour all facets of my ungodly life.

So knowing I was probably going to write my review to include the line “well I remember Mel Gibson accurately” didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence that I would pen something anyone would respect. But it turns out that wasn’t the only aspect of this development that would throw me into turmoil, and I didn’t realise it until I was standing uncomfortably in the theatre foyer by my lonesome.

Everyone likes to think they are capable of being alone, what with all these affirmations about being independent women and not needing a man and wild ideas about birth control and such. But the truth is, sometimes it can be uncomfortable to be alone. All the single ladies is a formidable force, but being a singular single lady doesn’t leave you with much to do when you show up half an hour early for a play and don’t know any bastard.

I don’t often have a problem with being on my own, but that’s usually when I have something to do, like read a newspaper or eat. The only thing I could do in this situation was wait; I’d already been to the ladies room and picked out my seat. So I did what any self-respecting/self-loathing millennial would do – I started playing on my phone. I didn’t have anything to do or anyone to talk to, but I didn’t want these strangers thinking I was big old loser. If there’s anything I’ve learnt in my life as a womanfolk, it’s that the opinions of people who don’t know you and will most likely never interact with you in any way matter. And yes, everyone in the room IS looking at you and wondering what the fuck you are doing. Obviously. They have nothing else going on in their shallow, meaningless lives so clearly they’ll be wanting to direct all their attention your way.

So, with this in mind, it’s important to know that you can’t just “play on your phone” when you’re alone in a public place; you have to make it look like you’re doing something either salaciously social or completing important tasks.

Because if you’re just mindlessly scrolling on Facebook, you’re a loser. And you can’t just sit there pouring through meme after meme because you won’t look overly cool sniggering to yourself. I should know, every time I find myself loitering outside the courthouse waiting for a family or child court matter to finish I inevitably wind up looking at funny dog pictures in Instagram chuckling to myself like a brightly-dressed Disney villain who has finally hatched a fool proof plan for evil. You don’t realise you’re doing it until an impressive police prosecutor or well-dressed solicitor looks at you with a mix of confusion, amusement and contempt and you can feel the judgement searing through the back of your skull, frying your brain and basting it in the juices of shame. Your head becomes a mid-sized pot roast of indignity. It’s difficult for me to give off a professional vibe at the best of times (my liberal use of the word “dingbat” perhaps doesn’t help) but after I’ve been caught snickering to myself I may as well be wearing denim shorts and sporting a tattoo that says “family”.

You’ve got to be texting someone. I don’t care who, as long as they’ll text back within about 30 seconds to two minutes. Fire off a message to that douchbanana somehow got your number and tells you about how much they hate Tinder and want a girlfriend but can’t get one because girls are too stuck up these days (when the real reason they don’t lave a life partner is because they are about as exciting as a bottle of whiteout and except a girlfriend to solve all their problems) if you have to. I don’t fucking care. You need to look like you’re having a witty exchange with someone, not like you’re texting someone anxiously trying to work out where the shit there are. You don’t want people to think you’re being stood up by your dreamboat. Because no one wants strangers who they’ll never talk to and probably won’t see ever again to think they’ve been stood up. The trick here is to keep a nuetral, slightly smiley expression on your face, and put your phone face down every now and then so people can’t see if you’ve actually got a text to respond to or not. And, for the love of all things holy, don’t fake an overreaction laugh to a text – people can smell a bogus LOL a mile away.

The other alternative is to look like you’re actioning important business emails which you’ve only just been able to get to because you’ve been so busy with business and they’re from international business people doing business in different time zones and you simply can’t ignore them because you need to consult them on business matters. For all intensive purposes, you’re a business woman, and by god do you need your own personal assistant. To differentiate your “emailing” from “texting”, all you need to do is furrow your brow and channel your inner Angelica Pickles’ mum from The Rugrats – no one actually knew what the lady did, but no one questioned how much of an important businesswoman she was.

Last night I decided to combine the witty exchange and business woman technique. As I was technically there for work purposes, I felt like I could swing the business angle by texting myself notes about the play to include in my review (texting yourself is excellent practice for remembering stuff and saving all your hilarious jokes you thought up when you were alone to use when there are people around you want to impress). These texts to me included:

Me to me: Tswiz bad Blood remix (a note about the music)

Me to me: There are rappers

Me to me: Does the original song actually have rappers? Endeavour to find out (here’s the call to action – which what businesswomen thrive on)

But I also went with the witty exchange option, because I was seated be that time and decided there could be nosy people behind me reading my texts. Obviously they would be, because I know I would try to read what the grown woman in front of me wearing buns in her hair like she was godamned Scary Spice was texting if she was indeed sending a message of some kind. So I messaged the one person I knew would be doing nothing on a Saturday night: my married sister. The exchange went something like this:

Me to Married Sister: So I am seeing a play tonight to review for the paper and I didn’t have time to smash a few chicken goujons beforehand.

Me to Married Sister: I’m fanging for a nugg

Me to Married Sister: I really hope this doesn’t skew my thoughts on the production.

Me to Married Sister: This is a variable the director could not control.

Thankfully, about two minutes later the lights went down and I no longer needed pretend I wasn’t uncomfortable on my own because the play started. As an added bonus, looking back at those final few texts has given me an idea of how to frame my review: whether it was worth skipping dinner for. Shall I compare thee to a chicken nugget?

Let’s see if it gets past the editor.