Nah yeah: Proudly proclaiming to the world that I a confident in my dining choices after ordering two main meals, and entrée and a rice dish for dinner. I could have easily passed off my order as dinner for two and therefore projected myself as someone who is responsible about portion sizes with some degree of social life, but I decided against it it. I could have skulked into the Thai joint disguising my identity and making myself as unnoticeable as possible, but I had a pint to make.

I swanned into the restaurant, made eye contact AND conversation with the cashier (I told her I liked her hair, because reinforcing gender stereotypes is how girls bond, ok?) and boldly grabbed a pair of chopsticks. Not two. Not a handful. But a single pair of chopsticks with the gusto of Sasha fucking Fierce wearing a golden jumpsuit flanked with tigers on platinum leashes.

I was not going to hide that the slightly irrational volume of food I had ordered was purely intended for the mouth and intestinal tract of Number One (me). 

I would not be shamed by my overzealous order of my state of solitude. 

I was a woman warrior, feeding my hunger for glory with coconut rice, panang and a fuckload of satay sticks without regard for social stigmas. 

I AM CONFIDENT IN SUNSHINE, I AM CONFIDENT IN RAIN.

I am confident in ME.

Yeah nah: Being so full of Thai food I could no longer sit upright. 

Taking down the Christmas tree is like a violent bout of food poisoning: it’s painful, it leaves you feeling empty and it reminds you of the great suffering that is the human condition.

That analogy may seem a tad depressing and melodramatic, but the longer I sit in my empty duplex facing a glorious arrangement of shimmering, flammable materials which will take considerable time and effort to neatly pack away, the more I am reminded of the gloominess of my existence.

I didn’t always feel this way about my Christmas tree; only two weeks ago I gazed at its twinkling lights with the same longing and hopefulness a C grade celebrity who once was a beloved sitcom cast member but now could only get work on hotdog commercials would look at a contract with Dancing with the Stars. It represented the possibility of lifting myself out of the meaningless ooze I lived in, with Christmas presenting an opportunity to bask in the attention and glory once showered upon me in my younger days. It meant presents and Michael Buble’s smooth, smooth voice and gravy and food in ball form and being around people who were conditioned to love me.

It’s amazing how something in any other context would be considered too tacky to be worth risking the fire hazard can make you feel like a person again. Colourful orbs probably created by the hands of malnourished children in sweaty, dank conditions somehow fill us all with the feeling of goodwill to all mankind. Around Christmas time we stop thinking of our elderly relatives as racist divas demanding we endure their presence because their loins bared the fruit that created out existence, and see them through a warm, glittery filter as eccentrically charming treasures to be cherished. We go out of our way to make shop assistants, bar tenders and waiters smile. We hand out plates of baked good to people who seem lonely (or, in my case, force taxi drivers to eat the leftovers of a double batch of gingerbread bickies after drinking more than my share of champagne). Once the wreaths are out and mass-produced cards are hung on strings over our walls, we turn into sentimental balls of love-radiating sunshine, taking time to marvel at the great joys of life.

So when we amputate the limbs of our plastic Christmas trees and pack the imitation greenery away in boxes, it’s more than a little disheartening. After putting the last box/bag/sack or cheap decorations away we return to our living rooms and are immediately filled with emptiness (yes, that was an oxymoron but that’s what made it poetic – I’m actually very deep you see). We’re faced with the vacant plasterboards of our meaningless, repetitive lives. As you vacuum up the last of the stray tinsel threads, the overwhelming joy you felt just days before is being sucked into a dark and dusty hole. Now your life goes back to the spirit crushing conveyor belt of normalcy –there’s no shimmering plastic reminding you that love is actually all around or dodgily-wired lighting illuminating your heart. There are just blank walls and your eternal solitude.

The silver lining in all this is that, after New Year’s Eve ticks over to New Year’s Day, you’re supposed to be all motived to get your life back on track. Unfortunately for me, my life is based in a comically cold climate and so I’m not so much “on track” as I am “in track(pants)”. And nothing derails the Little Train of Hashtag New Year New Me quite like wearing trackpants. I mean, I’ve already eaten two hot chip sandwiches today.

So where does that leave me? Facing off with two meters of green plastic and wiring, that’s where. It leaves me getting all existential about glitter. And no one should ever question glitter, or what it stands for. As I look around the cold-tiled floors and whitewashed walls of my inconsequential life I tell myself I should comply with the norms of society and take the damn tree down. But, before I am able to shackle the chains of reality around my ankles, I glance at my coffee table and see a mousepad I had received the night before after coming home to unopened mail. It may have been just a mousepad to the manufacturers, but to me it is the photo gift of the century. As I fixated on the most practical and tasteful way to commemorate a graduation, I was inflated by the sight of the glowing face of My Fantastic Friend From College triumphantly printed above three simple, life-affirming words: Stay Fabulous Dannielle!

Fuck it. The tree stays up for another night.

Nah yeah: Getting to take an early mark from work because apparently everyone is taking it easy ahead of the festive break. I felt like Micky Mouse playing Bob Cratchit when he is kindly allowed to leave Ebenezer Scourge McDuck’s counting house, except for the fact that I’m not a male cartoon rodent – but fuck me I was just as jolly and was rocking the same strut.

Yeah nah: Needing said early mark to soak my eyeballs in Dettol and  scrape the flaky memories off my brain with a trowel after spotting a 65-year-old at the bus stop with his faded blue singlet strategically pulled across his chest to allow his nipple to flop out of one of his armholes. Now, you might mistake this for a happy accident, but the fact that this man held my gaze as I passed and had a silver piercing with both ends glittering gracefully in the morning sun as they boldly emerged from his flabby areola told me that this was a statement. I don’t know what that statement was exactly, it was powerful nonetheless. Because nothing makes you re-evaluate your value system quite like maintaining eye contact with a senior citizen freeing their pierced nipple smack bang in the public sphere. Sure, it was creepy, but in a way it was also a big middle finger to shackles of society and the restraints of our conservative existence. Sometimes we all need to break free.

Maybe we’re all that possibly senile and somewhat inappropriate man, just letting our nips see feel the warmth of the sunshine, finally letting the world see what makes us shine – and it’s not just the senseless puncturing of body parts that can cause us to glisten, but our fearless spirits. Sometimes you need to say “to hell with everyone” and let it all flop out like a skinless chicken fillet popping out of a plastic bag.

Nothing is more gloriously uncomfortable as unsolicited biopics.

That’s the lesson I learned this evening, after sitting down to watch Celine, a more about the life of Celine Dion made in 2007 and filed under the True Stories section at my local video store.

I sat down to watch this movie after a weekend involving a bowls day and drawing the last king twice in a row. My Golden-Haired Sidekick and I were both picking at a barbecue chicken like hyenas cleaning up the scraps of a giraffe carcass. We needed something to bring us back to life, and we turned to Celine and the good folk in Canadian filmmaking.

We were not disappointed.

Firstly, I would like to point out that at the end of the movie (which obviously coincides with the lip synching of My Heart Will Go On because ending it with All By Myself would be too damn sad), a message appears on the screen advising viewers that the person attached to the vocal chords from heaven didn’t participate in the film, but merely inspired the 90 minutes of magic.

That means that Celine didn’t have any say over the casting, the story line or the terrible use of wigs. She didn’t get to tell these people that the majority of scenes had a wildly uncomfortable incest vibe usually reserved for episodes of Law and Order SVU and retrospective airings of The Cosby Show. So I think it is only fair that I put in a cheeky disclaimer of my own: I respect the majesty that is Celine Dion. I would never insult her character, her voice or her ability to convert the power of the fire burning inside the heart of every woman on earth into an all-penetrating sound. Celine is like the Holy effing Spirit, alright. But the movie of the same name is a fantastic flaming pile of piss (yes, I’m aware that those last four words are an oxymoron, but just because liquid cannot be in a pile nor can it burn, does not mean that last phrase was not factual).

So the movie starts off with tense mood-building music in a busy backstage area brimming with paparazzi and official people. A woman in a short, cheap blond wig wearing body glitter and a golden nightie emerges. She hugs an old man, the old woman and has a lingering we-have-definitely-been-wrist-deep-in-one-another kiss with the guy who played Veronica Mars’ dad, only he’s wearing a fake beard and has white grey hair. The woman puts a penny in her shoe, no doubt a meaningful habit derived from some heartbreaking story in her youth.

The camera cuts to a stage with “Celine” written above it. Somewhere a flute starts playing the unmistakeable few bars of My Heart Will Go On and the female incarnation of god appears in the spotlight and begins to lip-synch.

Apparently the grown-ass woman wearing body glitter is the voice of the nineties: she is Celine.

Now we cut back to her childhood. It’s a bit of clusterfuck of storylines here because Childhood Celine is so damn whiney, brattily awkward and downright unlikeable that the writers threw in every narrative device they could to win the audience’s affection for the diva. I’m talking the works: bad teeth, schoolyard bullies, a car accident, hand me down shoes, a fire, being poor, a confusing punching bag scene, a cracked record, a terribly choreographed fall, being labelled as a mistake (who needs condoms when you can breed more workers for your family business?!) and having to share a bedroom with two of her adult sisters who for some reason still decide to live there instead of getting jobs and real lives.

Long story short, little Celine is obviously a powerhouse singer and an over-populated family decide to pin all hope on the shoulders of a whinging 12-year-old. They need a manger. A top-notch manager. So they go to Mr Veronica Mars’ dad with a dead raccoon on his head (some would call it a wig, others would call it a lack of investor interest) to make a record. With the knowledge that Mr Mars goes on to impregnate and marry Celine, every scene in which he interacts with a pre-teen Celine has a healthy undercurrent of incest.

This is the kind of movie that will leave your sides sore, because your obliques will get a work out from the constant cringing it invokes. For example, there’s a scene where young Celine overhears Mr Mars say she isn’t the prettiest girl in the world before he dumps on her for holding her microphone too close to her mouth. Celine is crying on her bed and Mr Mars goes in to smooth things over.

“You’re not the prettiest,” he tells her.

“You want someone who will tell you the truth.”

What we’re seeing there is the building blocks for a confidence –shattering co-dependant relationship on a foundation of him destroying her self-esteem before luring her to him with lingering eye contact. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t watching a crime show when he leaned over the bed to comfort her, because if it wasn’t for the PG rating I would have expected a hand up a skirt. It was just so uncomfortable that if someone told me the scene was initially shot to include him unzipping his pants but was hastily scrapped in the editing room, I would totally believe it. There’s another part of the movie where Mr Mars tells Celine to “be a good girl” and you really have to wonder how many times he said that to her and in what context.

And that’s how the movie continues – unconvincing lip-synching sandwiched between inappropriate workplace relations and poorly-explained plot points. Somewhere amongst that Celine encases herself in a puberty-soaked chrysalis and emerges a blossoming woman. She has womanly curves and even womanlier desires. But not everyone is convinced that she can handle this level of woman. Her mother catches Celine dancing with Mr Mars and makes him promise not to “touch her”. This becomes difficult when Celine makes it clear to Mr Mars that she does not only want to be touched, but that she is in love. She has the feelings.

“The public don’t know if you’re a girl or a woman,” Mr Mars tells Pre-Woman Celine.

“Look at me, do I look like a girl to you?” Celine says.

But Mr Mars can’t get hard for a woman who wears dresses appropriately for work with bad teeth and no nose job, so he decides to find spiritual solace in Los Vegas of all places. Celine, now acutely aware that she isn’t good enough, spends the next year getting plastic surgery and researching how to wear tight-fitting clothes. She has fancy hair brushes and deluxe bedding, but all the riches in the world don’t matter until Mr Mars walks back into her life.

Celine is now bangable and therefore able to revive her career, starting with Eurovision. They mention Eurovision. The then debate the popularity of Eurovision. Then Celine is singing on stage in front of words that say Eurovision, just to make sure that everyone knows she went on Eurovision. And now that she is a success, has a great nose and looks like she puts out, Mr Mars finally deems her fuckable and the pair fall in love. Just in case he wasn’t already aware that this decision wasn’t questionable, Celine calls her mum the morning after, presumably still laying in the wet patch. Two years later Mr Mars is wearing a much whiter carpet sample on his head but their love is as strong as ever.

I wont tell you how the rest of the movie ends, but I will say there is a montage to Because You Loved Me which includes Mr Mars walking dramatically on a treadmill. Let that be the carrot dangling in front of your face to keep pulling that cart and stick out the whole “motion picture”. In summing up, I’d just like to reiterate how strange it is that people are able to make movies about other people without their approval. This wasn’t a documentary or a news story, but a fictionalised version of a living person’s existence that didn’t involve the main subject other than bastardising her story and (hopefully) paying to feature he songs in the film. I really wonder what Celine would have to say about this (I feel like that should become a life motto bumper sticker or something. I think the world would be an infinitely more fabulous place if people thought “what would Celine do?” just a little more often).

I mean, I don’t think this movie was intentionally trying to shit all over Celine’s union and make her husband look like a child groomer – in fact, I think the filmmakers were trying to o the opposite – but that’s the impression I walked away with. There was something that was just undeniably creepy and just a little bit shit about this movie – and I loved every minute of it. Like dad jokes or a bag of goon, it was so bad it was good. And that’s really hard to achieve. I mean, you can make something terrible, but it takes a whole new level of crap to transcend that level of shit to something greater. And, in terms of being so awful you can’t look way, Celine really excels. My major criticism was its distinct lack of It’s All Coming Back to Me. It was well worth the $1 late fee I’m going to have to pay when I next front the video store.

An added plus? The trailers included another (presumably also unsolicited) biopic, this time following the rise of Shania Twain. And it just so happens that Shania was on the same shelf as Celine. The only question now is whether the two films being on the same shelf becomes figurative as well as literal.

Stay tuned!

I just ate eleven-day-old raw pastry dough.

I don’t really know if I should be proud of my iron stomach for being able to keep the slightly-greying solid goop down for the past seven minutes. In any instance, it’s a mildly impressive feat. It’s like being able to insert a USB right the first go or having multiple novelty ice cube trays – the level of impressiveness on par with weak country-school-bulk-sized-water-bottle cordial. In the time it took me to think of the liquid equivalent of “whelmed”, I still haven’t violently ejected the buttery mass from my body. I kind of feel like I could do anything but I also feel like I’m one cereal dinner away from becoming a novelty-nightie-wearing ball of “how the fuck did I become this?!”.

I’ve been living alone for less than three solid days and I’ve already reached this point. I can’t wait to see what I’m like by Day Fifteen.

But I can already tell where this is headed, and it’s absolutely going to be well and truly within the first ten minutes of Bridget Jones’ Diary territory. And not just because it’s near Christmas time and I have an obsession for stationery that is matched only by my unfaltering reverence for my own thoughts, but because I have a DVD in my collection that both scares and delights me.

It’s called Celine.

I found it in the “true stories” section at Civic Video (yeah, I live in a magical place that still supports a thriving DVD rental shop) while browsing on Sunday night. I was feeling a little down, you see, and whenever I’m in my darkest days I turn to movies starring Nicole Kidman that critics would rather eat the physical copies of the remaining DVDs than watch again. My go-to movies Stepford Wives and Bewitched are both remakes staring the Australian goddess, and both are motion pictures I find rather fabulous (I don’t know who these critics are, but if they don’t approve of Bette Midler being snarky about pinecones or an engrossing scene about self-wiring VCRs, then I don’t know if I can back their opinions). But because I started the Is She Kidmanning Me?! movie marathon nice and early, I had to dash out to get another title. First on my list was Grace of Monaco, because of all the headlines cleverly referencing the Oscar winner’s fall from Grace. I couldn’t find it in the new release section, so my next bet was the “true stories” shelf (which was silly, in retrospect – having watched the movie I can say with confidence that it definitely didn’t belong in that section as there was absolutely no evidence the “story” element required to be sorted in such a category).

As I walked up to the shelf, my eyes were instantly drawn to a blue DVD cover with a poorly-etched photo of a woman with a microphone haphazardly laid over blurry picture of a stage. There were backlights drawn on with the same graphic detail as Mario Kart for a Nintendo 64. There was a PG rating sticker telling me to expect mild themes. The fancy cursive writing told me the title, but it was two decks of capital letters at the top of the cover that told me I was in for a magical experience: THE FULL LENGTH FEATURE FILM ON THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF CELINE DION.

Obviously I couldn’t walk past something like that.

But I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it yet. Partly because of time restraints (I’m a career woman, after all) and partly because I’m not sure if I’ll be mocking it or enjoying it. There’s a very fine line between the two, and I really don’t want to fall on the wrong side of said line. The last thing I want to do is find inspiration in the French-Canadian songstress’ story. As someone who regularly imagines themselves being interviewed by the likes of Oprah, I would hate to have to sit on that yellow couch and tell the Queen of Television the reason I climbed that mountain/opened my own porridge and scone café/started an online jewellery business making friendship bracelets out of my own hair was because Celine made me believe. If Oprah asked me where my success came from, I’d have to reference the movie. I’m a terrible liar at the best of times, and you just don’t tell a furphy to the woman who called out Lindsay Lohan on her shit. “After sobbing on the couch for 4.56 days, I was so touched by Celine’s dramatized story that I realised I could be my own strength when I was weak, Oprah. I mean, after I waded out of a sea of tissues and empty wine bottles and blinked into the natural light, I realised I could be my voice when I couldn’t speak – I had my love, I had it all. So I became a wellness blogger.”

Five weeks ago I would have never dreamed of saving a hardened ball of butter, flour and sugar for a well-earned treat, and here I am telling myself this current satisfaction is worth salmonella poisoning. So I think it’s a legitimate fear that I may become emotionally attached to the life story of the powerhouse behind My Heart Will Go On. Even my deep-seeded cynicism and relationship-killing sarcasm is no match for the Sin curve of feelings that is It’s All Coming Back To Me. That song is like the audio equivalent of Julie Bishop’s icy glare – it’s powerful and frightening and tunnels right through your composed exterior to your weak, unworthy core. You can’t help but be shaken by it. And so I worry that now, as a woman living alone, Celine’s story will seep into my soul and colour my every move for the rest of my life.

Maybe I am living in fear. Maybe I don’t want to be the girl living alone, thinking of all the friends she’s known, watching Celine Dion blossom into stardom. Unfortunately there’s no turning back. I’ll face another $1 late fee if I don’t return this by Sunday, and I’ll be damned if I pay good money for a weekly rental without watching it.

Anyway, this 1000 word rant is really just an obscenely long teaser to tell you (yes, I mean YOU, my two treasured readers) to expect a review of Celine: A true story form rags to riches in the coming days. Have your emotions ready.

Christmas can bring a family together, but a drunken toilet mishap is often the real catalyst for unbreakable connections.

I have been tasked to recall a Christmas memory for work and work it into a succinct story to warm hearts. Unfortunately, I’m known for being short but never brief so the tale I came up with is far too long. Plus, it inevitably explores gender roles and references reproductive organs multiple times, rendering it largely unsuitable for the masses.

So like a slogan singlet from Supre that’s too embarrassing for public use I’d feel bad about throwing in the bin, I’ve recycled the story and treated this website like a Vinnies donation bin. Enjoy rummaging through my musty-smelling memories at a bargain-basement price.

IT WAS Christmas morning in the Maguire house, which always starts much earlier than any other days. Me and my siblings seemed to be internally programmed to wake with the rising sun when Christmas rolled around, and this day was no exception.

This was the Christmas we were given the go kart: a motorised speed demon on four wheels which would later crash through barbed-wire fences and severely bruise more than one foot thanks to its irresponsible drivers. It must have weighed a tonne in Santa’s sack, so it was left outside on the pergola, right in the line of sight from any bedroom in the house.

But when the four Maguire children woke up that morning, we didn’t notice its careful placement. The coolest of Christmas presents just metres away form us, separated only by a screen door and, and we ran straight past it. It didn’t help that there was a Barbie Picnic Van under the tree, which was the most exciting thing ever for childhood Dannielle (it was a bright brink station wagon with a barbecue as a tailgate, which meant our Barbie dolls could finally combine her love of the outdoors with grilled plastic meats).

This perplexed my father, who couldn’t understand why a lump of pink plastic with multiple choking hazards was trumping an actual moving vehicle. He motioned towards the go kart with all the enthusiasm he could muster at that time of the morning telling us “look at this!” and was only answered with my uninterested munblings as I attempted to free a pink tray of sausages from its plastic casing. This is probably a good signifier of the end of my days as a doting Daddy’s girl and the beginning of my journey to adulthood – that pink station wagon was about to take me over some bumpy terrain.

My father always wanted a son.

I’m from a family with four girls, and while it was a big win for my Little Women-loving mother, I have a niggling feeling that he would have preferred least one of us had our reproductive organs growing outside our bodies.

A real man’s man, my father (who forgoes his Christian name for the ever-blokey Macca) loves his NRL and boxing, is rarely seen without an Akubra on his head and often wears a pocket knife on his belt like he is a hybrid of Batman and Peter Pan. His heroes are the Bush Tucker Man and Slim Dusty. He would have loved a flesh and blood son to impart all his manly ways on, but instead he ended up with four darling daughters. And while this saved him having to deliberate over removing our foreskins or having to hide the moisturiser during our teenage years, he would have loved for one of us to need to stand up to pee, with sheer masculinity dangling between our legs instead of the eternal void of disappointment.

This isn’t just a view I formed after hearing countless people exclaim “your poor father!” when they were told of Macca’s four blessings, it was once explicitly conveyed to me straight from the horse’s mouth.

Rosy-cheeked and brown-ringleted seven-year-old Dannielle (I can’t remember exactly how old I was, needless to say it was a pivotal, personality influencing age) skipped through the kitchen to find Macca holding a fancy-looking bottle by the fridge. The shelf above the fridge was where all the fancy-looking bottles were kept, and because they were so fancy they were rarely touched. So it was unusual for Macca to be holding one of them, and it was even more unusual for my father to look so forlorn. The details are a little fuzzy now some fifteen years later, but from memory the look my father was giving the bottle was how someone would gaze at a portrait of a loved one killed in The Great War, or a piece of cake while they were on a strict diet. My father’s sad, longing look got the better of me, and I chirped a, “what are you looking at, Dad?”, in what could only have been a sickeningly sweet manner.

Without looking at me, or even tearing his gaze away from the fancy bottle, he said something that most child psychologists would sternly advise against telling a young girl as a precursor to puberty; it was mildly soul crushing and absolutely impacted my future development.

“I was saving this for when I had a son,” he said.

Cue the next few years of my trying to be pull off the tomboy act while being absolutely appalling at anything sport-related. This was of course fraught with failure as obviously sport is a boy’s thing, but as an-ever growing chubby lump of a girl, sitting down and looking pretty was also out of the question. This set the tone for a few angry, heavy-eyelinered years with increasingly strained relations with Macca. There were many feelings, and even more Simple Plan songs played on repeat. As my vocabulary grew, my levels of sass increased and horns were locked. Macca was a FIFO worker for much of my childhood, which meant he didn’t “get me” as well as my mother. A constantly closed bedroom door kept things that way. So my father based his assumptions about me on stereotypical “girly” stuff to plug his knowledge gaps and it rarely ended well. My views of his tyranny and his Women are from Venus ideals kept us both from recognising our glaring similarities, and ignoring this fanned the flames of our furiosity at each other when fights flared up. I’ve been told I’m quite loud and imposing, and since I’m a near exact replica of my father, things became quite thunderous when tempers did ignite. Family occasions were not exempt from the occasional verbal scuffle, even Christmas. Because the event called for extended face-to-face interactions, it wasn’t long into the season before he would get on my nerves and other family members had to step in and suffocate the metaphorical fires with distractions and balls of things rolled in coconut.

Thankfully, after nearly three decades of living solely in the company of women, we’ve finally become used to each other. But it wasn’t until the Christmas I was legally allowed to drink in public that we realised just how close the apple fell from the tree.

With a population of roughly 1500, our little town often tried to pool everyone together for celebrations to build “community”. While the annual show was an obvious ringer, the Christmas Street Carnival was a very close second. Council workers put up road closure signs on either end of the main street and a prime mover pulled a stage into position on the road (and by “stage” I mean “trailer with one canvas side removed”). Lights were strung up, the Lions Club fired up a barbecue and the fire captain would impersonate Santa Claus on elaborate “sleighs”. And the pubs filled pretty bloody quickly, spilling out on to the street. The first year I was able to get as sauced at the mums and dads of my childhood friends. I hit the Vodka Cruisers hard. Macca smashed the XXXX Golds and we exchanged banter as the gang of parents from my old primary school marvelled at how old I was. We were partners in crime and it was glorious.

But our newfound friendship was truly forged the next morning, after neither of us could remember getting home. A toilet roll holder had been ripped from the wall, and no one could say with any authority whether they had or had not destroyed the important piece of bathroom infrastructure. An unspoken agreement ensued that it was both of us, and none of us. Bound by the shared guilt of an act we otherwise would have roused on each other for. It’s odd that a drunken toilet mishap could be the catalyst for a shared understanding between us, but that’s apparently how most of my friendships start.

I’ve started treating my friend’s baby pictures like Pokemon battle cards and it’s beginning to get weird.

Recently, one of my high school kindred spirits (we once had to tackle a 5 kilometre walk home from a party during which we stopped being friends, ate microwavable hotdogs from a 7/11, became best friends again and thought mixing blue Cruisers and strawberry milk was a fantastic idea – so yeah, kindred spirits) squeezed life out of one of her more malleable orifices. Five days overdue, the little sucker came out looking like an actual baby, not a half-formed pink chicken-armadillo hybrid. Not only was he healthy, had all four limbs, twenty phalanges and apparently an incredibly large scrotum – but he was also actually cute.

Obviously it was marvellous for his parents, but also a huge relief for me: I didn’t have to pretend the offspring was cute when it looked like something the cartoonist who made Ren and Stimpy would have drawn.

I’m not known for my sugar coating. I’ll either call a spade a spade and then be forced to furiously back peddle or, if I’ve given actual thought to my words, I’ll avoid the digging implement all together. While I’m not as bad as my older sister who walked into the bathroom of our other sister’s new house and tactlessly articulated her opinion of the room with a great big “yuck”, I’m not much better. I’ve been known to rant about the crapness of Transition Lenses to a person only to see their of spectacles darken as they exited the building that afternoon, complain about smokers crippling our health system to table of a pack-a-dayers and tell someone that flat-brim cap and white sunglasses wearers are scum of the earth only for a subsequent Facebook stalk to reveal they had heartily dabbled in both (although that last discovery has only fuelled my mocking of said trash accessories in their presence). Most of the time, people can laugh off my stony comments or simply join me in pretending it never happened. There are the occasional painful silences that follow, but usually it’s something I can bounce back from.

But I feel like making fun of the human being someone brewed up inside them and squished their bladder to make room for is something of a kick to the guts (or a slap on the freshly-stitched area between their vaginal opening and their anus – whatever hurts the most). It’s something you wouldn’t plan on doing, and it would be very hard to explain to anyone that it “just happened accidentally”. An assault that painful wouldn’t be forgiven easily.

So I was absolutely thrilled when the image my friend sent through to me (which, by the way wasn’t on Instagram – hashtag exclusive!) was bloody adorable. I didn’t have to dance around the ugliness of her offspring with “oh, he’s so tiny” or “look how … alert he is”. I could genuinely comment on his pleasing physical appearance. The only faux par was when I was foolishly allowed to nurse the infant and didn’t really know how to support his head (pretty lazy on his part if you ask me – I mean, I don’t do much either, but at least I don’t expect people to keep my airway clear).

Since the initial meet and great (I brought cob loaf, obviously) I’ve been given a few more pieces of photographic evidence that my friend was able to keep the new human she now owned alive, but also fully clothed and even clean. Sometimes, I found myself furiously scrolling through our text conversation just for a hit of baby-induced oxytocin. And I haven’t stopped there. I’ve become one of those people I used to roll my eyes at, showing people images of a baby they’re completely unrelated to and totally uninterested in (I know that sigh, because I used to be that person).

But my annoying baby photo assault has kicked up another gear, as I am apparently reaching the competitive stage. No longer content with boring people with offspring imagery and anecdotes about my friend’s power cervix, I’ve started trying top other people with similar infant connections as if they are Digimon game consoles. Like a 12-year-old with a regular income stream of pocket money and access to a Big W, I am ready for virtual battle and always looking for my next opponent. It happened the other night, after The Office went out for drinks.

The New Uncle’s sister had just had a baby girl and eventually the conversation turned baby photos. Smelling blood, I pounced, quickly whipping my phone out like it was Pokeball (“picture of baby sucking fingers, I choose you!”). It was quite late in the evening by this stage, but the conversation went something along the lines of:

Me: I know you’re like related to her and everything, but look at my friend’s baby.

*implies that obviously, my Pokemon/official newborn representative is much better looking than The New Uncle’s weak attempt at cuteness.

Me: You know how babies look like bloody aliens when they first come out?

*again, implies that obviously, my Pokemon/official newborn representative is much better looking than The New Uncle’s weak attempt at cuteness.

Me: Well this one is like two days old and it actually looks like a human.

*finally, implies that obviously, my Pokemon/official newborn representative is much better looking than The New Uncle’s weak attempt at cuteness, winning the battle.

I don’t know where the conversation went from there, but it definitely involved me showing the poor people I work with multiple snaps of my victorious infant before someone no doubt deliberately steered the topic away from human reproduction.

The lesson in this is obviously that your appearance is the only thing that counts. That’s right, we’ll start judging you on your looks even if you’ve only just had the innards of your mother hosed off your skin and you don’t know what fingers are. You’d better learn now that your worth is based entirely on your facial features and physique even though you had no say in how they appear: welcome to the material world, Baby J.