Published in The Clifton Courier November 22, 2017

It’s amazing how the mind wanders.

I love how you can begin with one topic and end somewhere completely different. Like, you might start talking to someone about the weather and find yourself telling them about that time you ate chalk (it tastes exactly the way you’d expect chalk to taste, in case you’re wondering).

I have a tendency to take a lot of detours when I’m telling a simple story, going off on unnecessary tangents and taking what I like to call “the scenic route” of conversation. I believe it’s a hereditary trait, but I’m not pointing fingers at which parent I’ve inherited it from* (I don’t think I need to).**

* Mum bloody LOVED this. 

** This is the kind of joke you can include in your local paper in a township with a population of 1500. The Tinder pool may be very limited, but at least people understand your family jokes. 

Some people find it annoying, but I think there’s some merit to rambling on.  I think it can be a welcome distraction, if you let it. And sometimes a distraction can be as good as a holiday.

So consider me your travel agent. Because I can start with any topic – let’s go with vacuuming – and take it to places that makes you wonder how I got there. Observe:

As far as household chores go, vacuuming is one of the ones I dislike the least.

I tell myself that it is an efficient form of exercise. I like to think that gliding the machine back and forth builds core strength. And the fact that I’m cleaning while sculpting a physique fit enough to be deemed attractive, but not too muscly that I appear threatening (we don’t want anyone thinking women are too strong now) is satisfying.

I love the concept of killing two birds with one stone.

Heck, I’d like to pull off the literal meaning of that phrase too. Being able to chuck a rock in the air and end up with two dead ducks sounds bad-arse. And it would be a handy skill to have in the event of the collapse of civilisation and, subsequently, supermarket food supplies. I’m not sure why I always end up relating everything back to the inevitable crumbling of society, but I like to think it’s because I’m one of the few destined to survive it.

But anyway, back to vacuuming.

So many benefits.

I do like being in a clean room, with the many particles of dirt being safely and hygienically rounded up in a plastic prison/vacuum bag instead of being sucked up into my lungs. Those anti-smoking ads with the lung dissection really imprinted on me as child. And that’s great, I suppose, because I don’t smoke as an adult – despite how cool Kate Winslet looked taking a drag in Titanic. But sometimes I think of polluted air and imagine it coating my lungs like the amount of tar a pack-a-day smoker breathes in every year. I wonder if that’s healthy.

Again, back to vacuuming.

I like it when there’s spilled rice or sand on the floor to clean. I love the sound that comes from the vacuum cleaner as the stuff is sucked up. It’s so damn soothing that I sometimes purposefully spill things just to enjoy the satisfaction of sucking them up. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty odd way to spend one’s time. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either me savouring the simple joys of life or an exemplification of the mundane, miserable existence I lead. I can always get back to this place too – whether I’m choosing to be happy or pointlessly sprinting nowhere on the delusional hamster wheel of life.

Again, I digress – the vacuuming.

I was vacuuming near the bin in the kitchen the other day and saw a bunch of ants. I sucked them up instinctively, but now I’m conflicted about it. Are those ants now dead? Or are they alive and terrified after being sucked into a dusty tunnel of darkness? Will they ever find their way to freedom? Am I some kind of monster for sentencing them to this fate purely because of their audacity to exist within the parameters of my kitchen?

And that’s where the simple topic is vacuuming led me. Questioning whether I was a monster.

I’d apologise for wasting your time with a column about nothing, but at least it had absolutely nothing to do with the state election*, right?

* Yeah. What you just read was a 600-word build up to a joke about how annoying election campaigns are. 

Distractions; just like a holiday.

Sometimes encouragement isn’t all that encouraging.

The other day the exercise app on my phone that tracks my jogs informed me that my afternoon was my 49^th fastest run recorded for that particular distance.

The notification was written in a cheery shade of green and punctuated with an exclamation mark.

I’m not sure if that exclamation mark was mocking me or if it was being genuine in its excitement for my achievement, but either way it’s troubling.

Because being 49^th isn’t often something worth celebrating.

They don’t make ribbons for 49^th place. They make a first, a second, a third and then a generic “good try” ribbon. These “good on you for participating in the activities the Queensland curriculum forces you to take part in” ribbons used to be orange back in my ballgames carnival days. Then one year, they became multi-coloured metallic caterpillars. I’m not sure if this was because the Clifton cluster was suddenly allocated a bigger ribbon budget or if someone complained about orange being the colour of generic mediocrity, but we started getting these whizbang rainbow ribbons and they were honestly better than a boring blue first ones (read into that what you will and perhaps slip it into conversation at your next dinner party when you’re down to the meaty red wines and feel as though your conversation could solve all the world’s problems).

Sure they were pretty, but they meant nothing. And part of me feels as if this green exclamation of my personal running ranking was that patronising caterpillar deluding me into thinking I wasn’t a total failure.

Maybe it was just trying to acknowledge that I’d tried to be active instead of napping in a puddle of my own drool on the wrong end of my bed, like I’d rather have been doing at the time.

And that’s nice, isn’t it? It’s like a virtual cheerleader congratulating me for making good choices.

But, as always, I’m choosing to read more into this throwaway line than is probably necessary. Because if you’ve learned one thing after all this time you’ve wasted reading my overly-wordy dribble, it’s that I have the overthinking power to subvert something totally harmless into something sinister.

So I’ll start with something positive and slowly morph it into an affront.

If you were running in a race against hundreds of other people, coming 49th would be an achievement. Heck, even if you were racing against 49 other people, at least you creamed that one lazy sucker. As long as some other poor bastard went even slightly worse than you did, you’re doing alright. A victory is a victory, however small. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you.

But this race wasn’t against anyone else.

It was a race against myself.

I was unwittingly racing previous, fitter versions of myself and didn’t even realise it.

So when you take this into account, this little green line of text was essentially a reminder that I had done a better job 48 other times. This notice might at first appear to be enthusiastically saying “well done” with its lime green hue, but the subtext was a much more of a deadpan, deeply sarcastic “well done”. If anything, it was more of an “oi you’re sloppy runner, a complete disappointment to yourself and you’ve really let yourself go” than anything else. It was a slap in the face, not a high five.

And I get it; if I’m coming in 49^th against myself, I probably do need a good slap somewhere.

Some people would suggest a positive outlook equals positive results. But in this case, my negative approach boded well. Because after my most recent run, I received a notification informing me that it was my 32^nd best. That’s progress.

Pessimism wins again.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, November 8, 2017

I hate the way my brain decides to deal with my problems.

I had to get up at an ungodly hour one morning last week and this was a source of stress for me. As fate (slash my poor planning skills) would have it, I ended up going to bed much later than I’d planned on the night before this early start.

Of course, I went to bed concerned about the tiny amount of sleep I’d be getting that night.

Generally, being sleep deprived when I have nothing to achieve that day is bearable. In fact, if my sleep deprivation is the result of a night painting the town a metaphorical shade of red, being tired actually puts me in high spirits. Everything is funnier. The presence of any kind of food is cause for jubilation. A simple cup of tea is even elevated to a higher state of glorification than usual (and, as anyone who has every chinked mugs with me before would attest, the level of exaltation I attribute to a cuppa is already bordering on chants of “hosanna”).

But this strange high that comes from a lack of shut-eye is generally limited to Sundays.

Having to be a functional, productive human who wears shoes* and forms complete sentences while sleep deprived is not my jam.

* Look, shoes are great. I have nothing against them. I like that they form a barrier between me, the hot bitumen, the chewed gum and the used condoms one occasionally skips over on a footpath. That’s very noble of them to expose themselves to that grime for my benefit. But sometimes you just don’t want them on your feet. Sometimes you just want socks. 

I either find myself being infuriatingly excitable and talkative to the point that my co-workers want to stab me in the eye with a ballpoint pen (or so I imagine) or being catatonically dopey.

Either way, I don’t get a lot done. It’s not a good workday. Nobody wins.

So given my brain is what controls me, and that “me” is essentially the collective firing of neurons in my skull, what I want my brain to do and what my brain actually does should be aligned.

You’d think that being faced with a limited amount of sleep, my brain would act accordingly. And considering my brain belongs to me, you would think it would act with my best interests at heart.

But it turns out doesn’t have a heart (figuratively speaking, because you could argue for and against a brain having a heart considering it is powered by a beating heart but doesn’t have an independent, internal heart within itself as a singular organ).

In fact, my brain could probably be likened to another part of the human anatomy – specifically, the orifice at the end of the digestive tract.8

* Yep, that was an arsehole joke. One for the adults. And the smart kids. I’m all about the smart kids. I want so much to impress them. 

Because my mind decided to deal with the sleep dilemma by giving me even less sleep.

It woke me up with phantom alarms and jolted me awake hours before I needed to be. It decided to screech, “you’re going to be so tired tomorrow” over my neurological PA system when it could have just run a loop of ocean sounds. It could easily just shut down, but decided that it was the time to practise the emergency flight or flight drill.

It’s almost as if my brain was doing it on purpose to torture me – like it was resentful that I didn’t feed it with the works of Tolstoy or because of how many times I took advantage of $3 basics specials* during its final stages of development.

* But this might be my brain’s fault anyway, I mean, it wasn’t my left knee that reasoned $3 for a shot of tequila was a good deal, was it?! My left knee doesn’t have that kind of authority. 

And when I did actually have to wake up, it decided to “help” the situation by playing Time Warp – one of the top 10 most annoying songs ever written – on repeat. What kind of strategy is that?! It was like my brain was taunting me, rubbing in the fact that I was going to be a wreck that day by making it even worse with the poor song choice.

Essentially, my brain was turning its figurative back on me while also laughing in my face (well, technically from behind my face, if you think about it).

I thought I called the shots up there, but it turns out I was wrong. I don’t control my brain. My brain controls me.

And it seems my brain has a sick mind.

Original published in The Clifton Courier, November 4, 2017

Something incredible happened over the weekend*.

* And by this I mean, the weekend before. Last weekend the only incredible thing that happened to me was that I was stung for TEN BUCKS for a bloody bottle of water for the table when I met some friends at cafe. I was livid. It might even become an entire column, I’m so angry. Please stand by. 

For one thing, I went into a port-a-loo barefoot and managed to avoid contracting any major diseases. This probably deserves an entry in a medical journal, as I’ve heard that feet are quite absorbent (which, I guess, is why the old Vicks vapour rub on the soles of the feet sealed in with socks is such an effective cold remedy).

But something bigger than my fortuitous swerving of a fungal foot infection happened.

It was if the stars aligned, like some higher being was up there pulling the cosmic strings from the heavens to orchestrate a miraculous event in history. It was strange, as if I’d known deep down on a cellular level for some time that this collision of fates was not only coming, but had to happen for some greater purpose. However, I didn’t realise the gravity of this apparent prophecy until it actually eventuated.

And then I knew that I was born for this moment.

So just what in the heck am I talking about? Is all this hyperbole and lukewarm poetry going to be worth the payout?

You’ve already read more than 150 words, but was this worth the investment of your time when you could have made a start on the crossword on Page 4?*

* I must admit, I’ve started doing those crosswords and hoooooy boy are they satisfying to complete. I can understand why someone would bypass my smutty dribble fora cheeky brainteaser. 

That depends on how you view things.

If you think that rounding up three people with the same, slightly obscure first name is a waste of time then perhaps the crossword is for you. But if you believe in magic, then you’ll know that this is something to be celebrated.

Because over the weekend I achieved a long-held goal of mine: I finally managed to get all three of Clifton’s Colleens together for a photo.

After years of trying to make it happen, it happened. And it was glorious.

The power of C* combined and I could feel the aftershocks reverberating inside me, almost rattling my ribcage.

* Yes, I made them make a “C” shape with their hands. 

The result saw me chalk up more than 60 likes on Instagram, but it’s hard to quantify something like that.

Especially because I think this photo represents something more than the assured legacy of an Irish name.

It represents a new phase in this marvellous continuum of adulthood for me.

With all the complaints us young folk make about growing up like the never-ending onslaught of financial responsibilities and having to call to make our own appointments, there’s a lot of negatives surrounding adulthood.

But one thing we should all raise a teacup to is the fabulous perk that is realising you can be mates with the grown-ups from your childhood. Somewhere along the line our brains matured, we could legally hang out in licensed premises and our bus drivers and the tuckshop ladies became people. And not just the people who could get us from A to B or handed out hotdogs in brown paper bags, but people like us.

When this happens, your friendship base expends beyond the people you went to school or swimming club or uni with and you have all these extra people in your life to spin a yarn with.

The even nicer thing about this is that being in a place like Clifton where you still talk to the lady who taught you how to type is that these people aren’t just limited to the parents of your schoolmates. They’re the everyday people who happened to be around as you were growing up. I like being able to rock up to the pub or the rec grounds alone, knowing there’ll be a good handful of top-notch people there to have a good chat with. Some people go their whole lives without knowing that kind of connection, so even though our water supply could be a little better*, we’re pretty lucky to be here.

* A lot better. I mean, there was a lot of calcium build up in Mum and Dad’s toilet before they finally replaced it. It always made things awkward when guests weren’t briefed on the Number Two situation for the main toilet in the house. 

On a related note, if there are any other Colleens in the area who weren’t part of the Cosmic Colleen Convention*, please make yourselves known**. I’ll see you at the show.

** I’ve since been informed that there were at least two Colleens I missed in the photo. I’m genuinely hoping to round them up for the Clifton Show in February. Hopefully this means I’ll be able to write my plane tickets home off on tax. 

* I’ve started brainstorming ideas for what this meeting could be, asking mates for what they think the collective noun for a group of Colleens should be. So far I’ve got “COLt”, “COLLection”, “COLony”, “COLLege” and “COLtivation”. I’m always open to suggestions. 

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, October 25, 2017

Over the weekend* I moved and it taught me a lot about myself.

* As in, last weekend because of the lag. 

And no, I didn’t move back to Queensland – although that’s the dream – but to a beachside neighbourhood. My idea is that being being closer to the ocean will not only improve my outlook, but magically transform me into one of those fit, toned people you see jogging along the beach who can crack walnuts with their perky, perky glutes. I’m also reasoning that the sea air will mean I’m inhaling less toxic airborne Sydney soot and will hopefully result in a thinner layer of filth coating my lungs.*

* The concerning air quality is in my top five things to complain about Sydney… out of a list of about 547. 

And while I’m yet to confirm the place is definitely not haunted*, I’m feeling like this was a good move.

* Although I’m very wary of keeping mirrors facing away from me when I switch the lights off. I wear and eye mask too, which helps. It’s not so much that I’m worried about the threat of what the paranormal might do to someone who sings as many Christmas carols as I do moving into their space, it’s more that I don’t want to see them. I’d prefer to be oblivious, even consciously so, if I have to.

My room is larger. I’ve got somewhere to line up my totally-not-creepy Harry Potter figurines. If you hold your head juuuuuust right, you can see the ocean from the lounge room.

But the journey to reach this point wasn’t so cruisey.

And by “here” I mean on my newly-built Ikea flat pack bed.

Yep, I finally lashed out. After going through my entire life not paying for a bed or a mattress I have finally invested in a raised sleeping platform of my very own.

And I have to say, I learned a lot about myself in the process.

For one thing, I had no idea how stubborn I was until the weekend.

The instructions included with the bed told me I’d need a hammer, a Phillips screwdriver and a second person to turn the pile of metal into a functional piece of furniture.

And instead of accepting the wisdom of the Swedish furniture gods, I dismissed it. Even though I had access to a hammer, multiple screwdrivers and two helpful new housemates.

I wanted to prove something. And that something was that I could put a flat pack together without help from anyone else using just my own two hands and the sheer power of my pig-headedness. What good comes from proving something like this?

Perhaps it was my way of proving to myself that Sydney hadn’t softened me, the straight-talking, would-kill-a-sheep-if-it-came-down-to-it country girl I pretend to be after two beers. I’m someone who can change her tyre herself thank you very much. I’m someone who will fix a broken blind with a hair tie and duct tape her bumper bar back on to her car. I can do things. I guess I like to think of myself as an industrial, sightly bogan kind of Beyoncé.

So a simple flat pack should be a piece of cake (in case you’re wondering, carrot cake with cream cheese icing is my current fave).

And somehow, without a single swear word I managed to pull it off. The hammer would have been overkill. The screwdriver wasn’t really necessary. And who needs living, breathing humans when you have two boxes the perfect size for holding things up?! A dingbat, that’s who.

I was amazed at how much this boosted my self-esteem (which was kind of low considering I’d stuck my hand in a toilet that morning and smelled awful from moving all day).

The second thing I learned is that I’m an intolerant, irritable person. As I crawled under the covers and nestled into a sleeping position, I was ready for a blissful night’s slumber. But when I moved and heard a faint squeak. I shifted around and there was another squeak.

With each movement a small but audible sound came from somewhere in the framework of my totes-impeccably-constructed bed and my anger grew. Each sound ground my soul just that little bit more, like a knee with the thinnest layer of cartilage.

It was unbearable.

But the third thing I learned about myself is that I can also be lazy. Because it’s been more than 24 hours and I have done nothing to fix the problem.

* Yeah, this baby’s still squeaking and it’s been a fortnight. Maybe this weekend I’ll do something about it. But then again, maybe I won’t. 

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, October 18, 2017

The other day the fire alarm went off in my building.

It was actually very convenient because I was just about to do a workout that promised to “build strength” and “build endurance” in 46 minutes. I’d been putting it off all afternoon and just when I finally psyched myself up to do it, the alarm went off. Some people think that fate is a load of hogwash but really, if that wasn’t a sign that I shouldn’t exercise than what else could it have been? It’s just too much of a coincidence.

Anyway, after the alarm sounded for a few cycles it became clear that it wasn’t stopping. And while I didn’t smell any smoke or see any signs of a fire, I thought it was probably a good idea to follow the instructions of the automated voice blaring through the speakers in the hallway.

But because I’m only one floor away from the exit, I felt like I had a bit of time to prepare myself to leave.

I know from my experience with school fire drills that you’re supposed to leave everything behind and bail in an orderly fashion, but no one ever did that. You’re not just going to leave your Nokia 3315 sitting in your pencil case for crying out loud.

I was fairly confident this was a false alarm, but the voice in my head that shouts “what if” and clangs saucepan lids together is capable of creating a lot of volume so I generally pay attention to it (I know this goes against all the parenting techniques I learned form watching Supernanny, but it’s hard to ignore a tantrum).

So in case I wouldn’t be able to enter my apartment again, I decided to grab a bag.

But then I had to work out which items from my personal inventory of crap were worth saving.

As a child I used to get very paranoid about natural disasters and planned my response to a severe flood or bushfire scenario (I also used to think Nazis were coming for me via rail thanks to my exposure to a couple of World War II movies at a pivotal time in my development… but that’s probably a story for a psychologist). As such, I would store a little plastic bag of my prized possessions so I would be ready to go. From memory, this included my teddy bear and whatever jewellery I possessed at the time that would have been valued as merely “sentimental” by an Antiques Roadshow expert. I was ever ready.

But now that I was actually in this situation I was totally unprepared.

So what did I grab? My laptop that is almost heavy enough to use as a something to break the door open. Like in Titanic when Leo teams up with the stereotypical Frenchman and the stereotypical Irish lad (whose deaths no one seems to care about) to smash a gate. You know, they rip the bench off the side of the wall with their sheer male anger and bust open the gates to save the lower class?

They could have done that with my laptop.

I also grabbed my wallet, my phone charger, a ring I was given by my sisters and an old Linotype block with clown faces on it. Then I legged it in an orderly fashion downstairs.

I still had plenty of room in my bag. It seemed everything else I was happy to let burn.

Maybe this means I’m non-materialistic. Perhaps I just don’t care about physical things. Like, maybe I’m just super enlightened and know that if I have air in my lungs and a heart that beats, I have everything I need. I could just be really spiritual, man.

Or maybe this just means that I have no valuables worth saving and my meagre possessions are worthless.

Read into it what you will.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier October 4, 2017

The other day I had a confronting thought.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. I have confronting thoughts all the time. Sometimes they’re deep unanswerable questions that only lead you down a rabbit hole of despair and confusion like “what would my life have been like if my parents decided to move to Allora instead of Clifton?” or “what if gravy powder didn’t exist?”*. Other times they’re rather uncomfortable involuntary visualisations of political leaders, people on television and whoever happens to be near me in various states of… the human condition. And then you get those startling revelations that hit you like a medicine ball* to the guts.

* And I’m not talking about those medicine balls you get at the gym. I’m talking about the ones from primary school that were full of dust and smelt like mice after being locked up in the sports shed for the past 37 years. They were not pleasant. 

And my most recent confronting thought was one of those starting revelations.

I realised the most exciting part of my day was taking probiotics.

Like the thing that got me bounding out of bed was the idea of 26 billion live bacteria having a gatho in my guts. I mean it. I open the fridge in the morning, see that little brown bottle of capsules and it gives me this weird flutter of excitement.

I don’t have any significant health issues this is going to magically solve. I wasn’t urged by a doctor to host a probiotic par-tay inside my digestive tract like that slightly dodgy best mate in Year 10 trying to con you into turning your carport into a rave cave while your parents are away.

Nothing particularly dramatic is going to happen. Maybe my immune system might be stronger. Maybe my digestion will run slightly smoother. Maybe this slight increase in my overall health will help me sleep better.

But I feel this gradual change won’t be something I can post a before and after selfie of.

And yet, I still get so excited about taking those capsules that look like they’re filled with dried yoghurt flakes/superfine dandruff.

You could take this gut-health-buzz as confirmation that I’m some kind of holistic health nut. And there is evidence to support this hypothesis. I buy bags of carrots for snacks. I jog often enough to own a pair running shorts with inbuilt bike pants. When the after-work hunger binge kicks in of an afternoon, I opt for walnuts over the slab of Swiss chocolate my housemate kindly brought back from Europe, it seems, to taunt me*.

* Lately, this has not been the case. I don’t even like the orange-chocolate combination but I still find myself sneaking a piece every now and then. My self-control is as strong as the elastic on a pair of well-worn undies that came out of a five pack at Coles. 

But then, there is also evidence to counteract this wellness claim. Most of my exercise is based purely on a desire to have a tight-looking rig. I once found an old Easter egg under the bed of my current apartment and, not knowing how long the religious-themed confection had been under the bed, ate it. And one of my key “health rules” is “don’t drink unless you’re drinking to get drunk”. So… I could be a healthier health nut.

I think perhaps it means that I am simply at the point in my life when I can derive excitement and joy from the simple things.

I mean, I recently cleaned the dank, grimy sink strainers using bi carb soda and was so impressed with the result, I told practically everyone about it. I sent multiple “after” photos to friends and acquaintances on Snapchat. It boosted my mood by at least 97 per cent.

And when I think about it, those times when I actually use toilet bowl cleaner are great. I find myself lingering in the bathroom just to get a glimpse of that white, shiny porcelain. I used to think the women’s reactions on toilet cleaning commercials (because apparently the advertising world thinks that only women can clean stuff, as if a set of ovaries is a prerequisite for not wanting to contract an e. coli infection from a filthy toilet bowl) were over exaggerated. They were not. I realised this after the results of a bathroom deep clean left me strutting around with the kind of glow you get from listening to an empowering Beyoncé song.

So yeah, I’m finding happiness in the simple things. While that sounds mind-numbingly mild, maybe it’s not so confronting after all. Because the simple things really make my day. And as the great Sheryl Crowe once sang, “if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad”.

I feel like if my day isn’t “that bad”, then surely that must be good – right?

** Also the title is a direct quote from Kris Jenner, who was making fun of Kim for being boring. She says it in a fabulous deep voice which is fun to mimic and oddly relevant to man conversations with my sisters. 

Originally published in the Clifton Courier, September 27, 2017 

I’ve become someone who holidays on the Darling Downs.

I’m not sure how this happened. Growing up, spending time in and around The Womb was a drag. I yearned to be elsewhere.

But now, as I tick over the quarter century mark, I am not only travelling all the way from Sydney to Toowoomba but I’m also enjoying it. I was excited to get here. I was sad to leave. And I absolutely disappointed the heck out of my 17-year-old self.

I’ve tried for the past few hours to try to summarize my time on the Downs, but being very much in need of a good night’s sleep to recover from it, I can’t really string anything too coherent together. So I’m just going to play a lengthy game of peaks and troughs – where you go through and recount the highs and lows of your time. Or, as I like to call it: yeah nahs and nah yeahs (“yeah nah” is bad, “nah yeah” is good).

Yeah nah: My flight was delayed.

Nah yeah: I got to eat free chippies while I waited for my plane to depart.

Yeah nah: The mercury reached three degrees as we approached Clifton.

Nah yeah: Mum had made up my bed with flannelette sheets. It’s hard to top flannelette sheets on a cold night. That’s like crawling into a bed made out of pyjamas.

Nah yeah: I eat a steak while wearing a party hat.

Nah yeah: Was given a free commemorative Carnival of Flowers tea towel.

Nah yeah: I found a wine I actually enjoyed that was moderately priced, tasted like ginger and had the word “crush” on the label. It packed a cheeky 8.7 standard drinks per bottle, if that’s important to you (don’t pretend you’re above checking the percentage before you fork out for it). It went beautifully with my dinner (a doughnut the size of my head) and paired just as nicely with a mosh sesh to Taxiride’s Creepin’ up Slowly.

I bought one bottle and enjoyed it responsibly and in moderation (obviously) for the first chunk of the night.

Then, upon being informed the service of alcoholic beverages was due to conclude, I decided to stock up on my new beloved drop. I saw there was a three-for-two-and-a-half deal and capitalised on it. I had bagged a bargain and had plenty to share with whichever friends whose house I invited myself over to afterwards.

I was on top of the world… or at least 691 metres above sea level (I looked it up).

Yeah nah: Shortly after I made this important investment, I spotted a group of mates standing near a table. I went over, had a yarn and carefully placed two of my bottles on the table.

Unfortunately, someone who had been enjoying their wine a little less responsibly than I was sitting nearby and felt the need to grab the umbrella from the table, knocking it and my two bottles to the ground.

The glass splintered into hundreds of tiny pieces, as did my heart.

Nah yeah: I found a fluffy, leopard print hat on the ground, which improved my mood considerably.

Yeah nah: I woke up after just four hours’ sleep and couldn’t drift off again. I also had to keep a toilet roll next to my head because my nose was running and I couldn’t find any tissues. Apparently the “flowers” component of the festival got to me a little.

Nah yeah: Immediately after I rose from bed I was whisked off to my favourite chicken shop, endemic to Toowoomba. My chicken burger had a hefty schnitty overhang with double special sauce. I’d won the chicken burger lottery.

Yeah nah: I had to board the last plane out to Sydney, which, despite sounding very similar to the Khe San lyrics, is never that enjoyable.

Nah yeah: Seeing Mum, Dad and my sister still waving from the terminal as the plane took off even though they definitely couldn’t see me (I was able to recognise them easily thanks to the size of Dad’s hat, like a beacon of fatherhood flashing across the tarmac).

Yeah nah: Arriving back in Sydney severely underdressed in my thongs and shorts.

Nah yeah: Booking flights to head back to do it all again (except, hopefully, for the wine spilling) for Country Week. The countdown is on.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, September 13

I have long thought that I would make a great parent.

I can say this with confidence, as my parenting skills have never been tested on an actual child of my own. I’m still allowed to be totally deluded when it comes to my notion of parenthood. I’ll have four daughters and we’ll all be best friends and everything will be as sunny as a Cornflakes commercial*.

* Except when we have emotionally-charged moments. Then it will be like Little Women, only with nicer furnishings and less restrictive clothing.  

But I do concede that I have concerns. Many of them. Like, what if my children enjoy screamo music? What if they point out plot holes in Harry Potter? What if they’re sleepwalkers and I accidentally stab them because I think they’re demon children? These are all legitimate concerns.

And the list keeps growing. The last addition: what if my child expressed an interest in dance?

I was talking with my sister the other night, and somehow my end of year childhood dance concert came up in conversation. The whole show was lolly-themed, and involved some BS storyline about candies coming to life and dancing around for some spoilt brat princess’ birthday.

My class was dressed up in red hessian sacks and feathers as we were cast as redskins, the shockingly culturally insensitive lolly (these were different times) so sticky that it nearly ripped out your filings.

As a six or seven year old, I wasn’t overly coordinated. In fact, I was barely functional. I couldn’t handle complicated moves, and apparently neither could the other classmates my age. So while the older students took centre stage and did intricate step-ball-changes, we skipped around in a circle and clapped along with Will Smith’s Wild, Wild West (Again, I’d like to point out that these were different times).

Thinking back to that experience, I would have been bloody fuming if I were my parents. That measly, pathetic excuse for a dance was such a poor return for what would have been a sizeable investment.

Like, out of all the lessons kids can get, I feel like jazz ballet wouldn’t have been the cheapest*.

* I don’t really remember liking it all that much. Like, I did it, but it certainly wasn’t my passion. At least not then, anyway. I’ve never really been able to learn steps, you know?

If dancing is poetry written by the human body, I am more of a slam poet. I make bold, loud statements with my body. I am powerful. But I am not rehearsed. There’s no way you can pre-plan for that kind of explosive emotion; there’s no way to anticipate what will come next. Nope, I can’t learn steps of coordinate my moves. I have to dance from the heart, not my head.

There was also the whole thing about driving into town. Every. Saturday. Morning.

Our class was in the centre of Toowoomba, which meant at least an hour of driving for whichever unlucky parent drew the short straw to cart us in and out each week.

And when the concert drew nearer, we had extra practises, which meant more trips into town. Trips into town at night. And trips into town at night often meant a Happy Meal or some Super Rooster chippies which, while delicious, would have only added to the cost of the whole exercise (not to mention undoing whatever good that small amount of aerobic activity did in trimming my puppy fat).

Also, our “dance” went for about four minutes in a concert that, from memory, spanned over a good two hours. I think we were even after the intermission, so my parents couldn’t even peel off after our act to avoid sitting through the second half of the show.

So to go through all that for a whole year and sit through two hours of watching other people’s kids prance around only to watch your child skip, clap and mess up a grapevine step* would have been pretty hard to swallow.

* The depressing thing is that this would have been a vast improvement for me. I have a very strong memory from a few years earlier when I was in preschool of my teacher doing her best to force me to dance. But I wouldn’t have it. I stood stock still, holding the position as if I was mid-pencil dive while my classmates flailed about the room like their limbs were made of spaghetti. I thought they were imbeciles. My arms were pinned to my sides, my knees were locked, and my ankles were snapped together. Miss Julie, heaven bless her, tried her best to get my to engage with the song (and the other kids) by trying to move my arms. But I refused. I still remember the song. Wiggly Woo, by the Wiggles. It echoes in the dark space at the back of my head.

I don’t know if this incident made it to my report card, but looking back, it was certainly very telling for the kind person I would one day become. So yeah, me participating, skipping around in a circle, and let’s just say it, being enthusiastic about something would have been a good sign.

What a bloody joke.

Sure, I’ve complained about my parents. I’ve sassed them. I’ve slammed doors in their faces. And yet, not matter how heated our exchanges got, they’ve never hit me with the sucker punch of guilt I wholeheartedly deserve for putting them through that. Never once have that said “you owe me, remember that crappy concert you put me through?!” in the middle of an argument. You have to respect that.

Sorry Mum and Dad, you deserved better.

* UPDATE: On a recent trip home I had a visit with the relative who was also my dance teacher. We both agreed that her guidance helped me to shake my proverbial groove thing with very minimal drink spillage, if any. She was impressed. 

So maybe it wasn’t such a poor investment after all? I mean, think of the many litres of hot beer I was able to drink because of that skill. 

Originally Published in The Clifton Courier, September 6, 2017

Catching public transport before dawn is like belonging to a club you were forced to join.

I generally catch the 6.30am train into the city, hurtling toward productivity while most people are still waking up. But for a brief stint in the past fortnight, I’ve been hitching a ride on 5.30am train as an early bird trying catch the proverbial worm. And while it’s only an hour earlier than my normal ride, the difference is staggeringly different.

For one, the entire train reeks of morning breath. It basically smells like stale skin, onion and old couch with a hint of ciggies. It’s so powerful you can almost see it, like that smoky haze that hangs around when someone nearby is burning off. In my mind, it’s the yellowy beige colour your tongue goes when you have a sinus infection.

At 6.30pm the train it doesn’t exactly smell like a scented candle stand, but it’s less offensive. It’s not that it smells better; it’s just a lower potency of these smells.

It’s also very difficult to tell what jobs people are headed to, because most people are in trackies, sloppy joes and, like me, the kind of shawls the stereotypical cranky great aunt wears on bad daytime movies. At 6.30am, it’s much easier to distinguish what people do for a living. You have the tradies in high-vis, the site foremen in slightly-smicko high-vis, receptionists in pencil skirts and the banker wankers in suits that cost more than my car. But at 5.30am, it’s just a mash of non-descript comfy clothing.

It’s like people don’t really care at that time of the morning. The societal norms are relaxed. You don’t have to be as clean or well dressed or even lucid before dawn, because it’s a miracle you’re up at all. And everyone seems to be rather forgiving of each other, because we’re all in the same boat/train.

We’re all up hating life, avoiding eye contact as we shuffle groggily to whatever location we’d pledged ourselves to be at that time of the morning.

And if on the very off chance we did make eye contact it was the non-judgemental kind. We would each give the other a look that says: “yeah mate, this is a grievous injustice that we’re awake, bumping into one another when we could be in bed like all other people who have are not currently being smited by the universe. But we’re in this together. I get you. I feel your pain. And while I have no evidence to base this on, I believe you can do this”.

It’s amazing how much one cranky but non-threatening glance can communicate. We’re all like that bird Ronan Keating was banging on about when he sang When You Say Nothing At All – except we collectively smell like damp bed sheets that need a wash.

At first I thought this 5.30am club were a crude kind of people, but after just a few days, I became one of them. I mean, I would still brush my teeth but I certainly began caring even less about my outward appearance. I relied much more heavily on dry shampoo. I wore socks with my sandal-ish flats. I wore a shirt twice in one week without a wash in between (although I did strategically space the second wear from the first by a few days to make it seem plausible that it could have been washed).

Because, let’s face it, no one important was going to see me at 5.30am. And by the time I headed home again at 2.30pm, everyone important would be in meetings or getting a coffee to ward off the 3pm slump. I would come and go without really being seen.

By virtue of the time of day, it was like I was invisible. And I have to say, I liked the power that came with.

I may not be able to integrate back into society.*

* UPDATE: I’m still wearing my shawl to work and I DID get about with three-day-old hair despite going for two jogs. I mean, sweat plus head grease plus dry shampoo equals volume. I did, however, wear make up today to counteract my grungy hair because it’s all about balance.