Abridged version published in On Our Selection News, November 10, 2016

I’ve never been happier not to have a car.

Don’t get me wrong, cars are great. They are capsules which allow you to bust out an emotionally-charged rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart in public without attracting a public nuisance charge. They offer air conditioned comfort on a hot day. They’re another place for you to store all that stuff you probably don’t need but don’t want to throw away (for me, it’s my beach cricket set, a two-man tent and several pairs of knock-off Ray Bans from Thailand) acting like a massive bottom drawer on wheels.

But the prospect of driving a car in Sydney makes me more uncomfortable than not wearing thongs in a campsite shower block. Because, from what I’ve observed during my short stint here, is that driving is way more stressful than it’s worth.

I’m not the first person to complain about Sydney driving and I’m not going to be the last, because it really is that awful. Because it’s not so much the traffic that’s the problem, it’s the people in the traffic.

For one thing, people here seem to love using their horns on their cars for things other than the standard “catch ya next time” beep combination usually reserved for leaving a family friend’s house.

The drivers here just like to beep at things. They use their horn not as a warning of impending danger, but as a way to express their feelings – and those feelings aren’t good ones.

This is something I learnt while sitting watching the traffic when I was waiting for a friend the other day.

The number of beeps of horns I heard in the space of 20 minutes gave me a pessimistic view of the direction humanity is heading in.

Because these weren’t friendly horns, they were aggressive toots of fury released in the form of a shill sound to show power over their opponents. It was like something out of a David Attenborough special.

I mean sure, sometimes the blasting of a horn was valid – like when someone had cut them off, which I did see a lot of. Drivers here are much like people in a hurry to get off a bus from the back seat, except they all really need to go to the toilet and are being led to behave completely irrationally out of fear of soiling themselves in public.

Think about the last time you were holding in a power spew and dashing to the nearest sink/bucket/Tupperware container – that’s the kind urgency people seem to apply to their driving.

But while there was the occasional legitimate need for tooting, most of the time there wasn’t.

Most of the time, the tooting happened will after the incident. I say “incident” lightly here because the seem to be incredibly grumpy over the mildest of inconveniences. Hey, I’m a fan of complaining. When I have a bit of spare time to myself, I love blowing minor issues out of proportion. I’m constantly dragging that horse around, preferring to let it rot out in the open to get into people’s noses instead of burying it in the ground. But there are mountains, there are molehills and there are tiny piles of a few dead skin cells and these drivers make Mount Kosciuszko out of a heap of foot shavings. Waiting an extra second to take off as the lights go green is unacceptable. Someone needing to merge in front of you? They may as well be asking for your spare kidney.

The tooting generally happens well after the initial infuriation like an intrusive proclamation of “I am displeased with your manner of driving”. There can be several seconds longer of beeping than was required (although beeping is hardly ever actually required) just so these people with horns can let the whole world know of their disgust at the small injustice inflicted upon them.

For whatever reason, they seem to think their three seconds of bother entitles them to annoy the rest of the population within a kilometre. It this same “if I’m not happy, no one can be happy” kind of caper that makes celibate religious leaders denounce unmarried sex as a sin. It’s like going into the office when you have an infectious cold. It’s like putting the whole household on a diet because you’re fat. It’s the classic, “if we burn, you burn with us,” sentiment from The Hunger Games. 

Many times I couldn’t figure out what prompted these people to take a hand off the wheel and risk losing control of their vehicle just to express their dislike at something. Maybe they have something to say with their hooting, but all I hear is “I have a heightened sense of self importance that is completely baseless”. And that’s coming from me, a person who assumes she’s going to get a state funeral that is televised on major networks.

Thank goodness for public transport (which I will critique soon enough).

Published in On Our Selection News on October 13, 2016

Downsizing is hard.

I’m trying to condense all my stuff down to roughly enough to fit into my car boot.

But for someone who comes from a line of hoarders and manages to find sentimental meaning in nearly object she comes across, this is very difficult.

As a teenager my diaries were poorly kept and only really written as bonus material for my estate to sell to hungry fans after the globe mourns my tragic yet flamboyant death and the end of my brilliant career. So I don’t have as much of a written record of the ways I wasted my youth as I’d like. When you’ve got a serious sidefringe to maintain, you don’t have time to write about your day. Hence why I have several bottom drawers full of what things like packaging, old badges and cheap, broken jewellery.

I’m a little forgetful, so sometimes stumbling across these significant mementos/worthless junk every now and then reminds me of days gone by. They remind me of the time I made my friend a helmet out of cheese for her birthday. They remind me of that time I had a party at my aunty’s house while she was overseas and someone caught a possum with their bare hands. I needed that crap.

My hoarding was fine when it was confined to the walls of one bedroom. But as a roving disappointment moving from place to place, my stuff has now spilled to more than one room, and even to more than one address.

And with a big move just on the horizon, it isn’t wise to have my earthly possessions strewn across the countryside like the contents of a wheelie bin hit by a passing car.

I have a bag of clothes I need to get rid of but “haven’t got around to yet”. Having a dig through this clothing in limbo, I’ve pulled out a dress that had chains for straps, one of which droke at da clubz one night and was fixed by tying a straw between the two metal links. I have a frilly sock with a hole so big I can almost fit my fist through it. There’s a pair of second-hand jeans I turned into high-waisted shorts I wore so much the inner thighs are nearly translucent.

I can’t see myself wearing this stuff again, but I can’t bring myself to part with them.

I can’t sell this gear, partly because I don’t want to but mostly because my junk is worthless. It’s literally falling apart or covered in dust or faded beyond recognition. What I would pay for that object, with memories staining the fabric in off-putting brown splodges, would not be in line with the Average Joe’s price expectations. No one in their right mind would buy this garbage.

So I’m stuck with this gear that is too ratty to donate to charity, too much of an insult to sell and something I would feel bad about putting into landfill.

I’m stuck.

But hey, if you want to make an offer on my old Schoolies singlet with “Fannie” written on the back – let me know.

Published in On Our Selection News September 28, 2016

You don’t need to be legendary to be a legend.

The other night I went along to a seminar about personal branding. The learned and hallowed Wikipedia has a good definition of branding, which I have tweaked to make said definition less about a company and more about me. Personal branding, therefore, is: “a set of marketing and communication methods that help to distinguish a mad-dawg from every other dingbat and create a lasting impression in the minds of every man and his dog.”

Basically it was about figuring out what my brand was and how to best get that message across to my legion of imaginary followers. In the space of about 45 minutes, I had to work out what my unique shtick was. I had to work out just what exactly was the essence of me (as an aside, “the essence of me” would make a great name for the first in a line of many fragrances I release at the height of my fame. It will smell of tea, chicken schnitzel and my leave-in conditioner). This is no easy task on just one glass of champagne.

And I had a feeling that my ability to make fart noises with my neck skin was perhaps not what the charismatic guest speaker meant when he told me and the other audience members with fabulous haircuts to think about what made us distinctive.

In a room full of newsreaders and lawyers and a bloody host of a show trying to encourage children to care about science, I didn’t feel my aim of “sharing the LOLs” stacked up.

We were then asked to come up with a personal mission statement – to summarize who we were and what we were trying to do in a short, snappy statement.

This might be easy if you’re a serious newshound, committed to sniffing out corruption and disembowelling the carcasses of injustice, displaying the rotting innards of perversion for the world to see. Sure, your statement might not be as dramatic, but the general vibe and honour in what it is you do would be reasonably easy to get across. And people would be able to get behind your mission with nods of approval and fists raised in agreeance, because your cause is noble, and, more importantly, useful to society.

Coming up with a powerful mission statement is demonstrably more difficult when you write stories about your vomit and post pictures of your father buying bread on Instagram.

When you boil it down to the big questions, it’s confronting just how frivolous our lives may seem. I mean, my objective is to make enough to support my expensive scented candle habit. My passion, at the moment anyway, is for developing ways to turn the old bananas in the fruit bowl into semi-healthy desserts. And maybe that’s ok.

Maybe we don’t need to have grandiose goals or plans to conquer the world; maybe “I’m just trying to share a smile and not be a jerk” is enough of a mission statement.

But that being said, I still wouldn’t mind having a multi-million dollar perfume empire to my name.

Abridged version originally published in On Our Section News, September 22, 2016

Settling an unsettled mind is a tricky task.

The other day I had my first yoga session in more than two years. I’ve never been much of a yoga person, preferring to jog and pick up heavy things in order to sculpt my fleshy outer casing.

But I’ve had a bit of spare time on my hands lately and it’s magpie season, which means nowhere is safe.

So I went along to a class, dragging my stiff but somehow (I know exactly how: bread) soggy body to the studio and plonking myself down on a mat my sister leant me. I first was struck by how bad I am at listening to and following instructions. It’s like when you ask someone for directions and then tune out at the poor stranger you ambushed attempts to guide you do your destination. I never listen to directions, and it’s a problem. Especially because most of the time when I’m listening to directions, in my head I’m telling myself that I need to listen to directions more because I don’t listen to directions… it’s a cycle that won’t ever end.

Also, I haven’t become any better at telling my left from my right. I failed my learners’ licence test SEVERAL times because I keep mucking up my directions. And it seems I have learnt nothing since I was 17-and-a-half (it’s true, and I still have the Schoolies ’09 singlet to prove it). There’s a lot in yoga about left hands going one place and right legs going somewhere else. It’s like a slow version of the hokey pokey. I’m considering putting an L on my left hand and an R on my right next time.

Yes, there will be a next time. Because it didn’t mind that place.

But also because I want to tame the lions of my mind. Apparently yoga can make your head stop banging on about nothing and this makes you all not highly strung and present minded and all that shit you see in adult colouring books.

I wanted to achieve this during my first session. But it wasn’t that easy.

I sat there ready to empty my mind. Sure, that’s no easy feat. There’s a lot going on up there (think: a room with fax machine receiving endless faxes, a continuous loop of The Simpsons reruns projected on a dirty sheet, an air horn playing the tune of jingles from 90s television ads, several small fires, a mime and a confetti gun). But if anything was going to still my internal waters, surely it would be yoga.

Yoga has soothing music and encourages you to breathe and allows you to wear thongs to class (one of my sisters wears slippers, that’s how bloody relaxed it is). The gym has a confusing video clip playlist that means Pink’s Get This Party Started or Taxiride’s Creepin’ Up Slowly are on every time I’m there. The gym encourages you to “just do it” (whatever “it” is hasn’t been specified, but I can assure you “it” will make the folds under your buttcheeks sweaty and doesn’t involve vanilla slice). The gym requires closed in shoes at all times.

If my mind were to be quietened, this might be the best spot.

So after all the stretching and breathing and twisting my body, I prepared for stillness.

The instructor finished the class with some form of relaxation session, telling us to close our eyes and focus on our breathing. Then she told us to visualise a swan.

And that’s were it all went off the rails.

Because for the last four or so years, I’ve been hankering to sink my teeth into the flesh of one of those long-necked geese.

It started after someone told me the monarchy owned all the swans in The Commonwealth. Naturally, I was outraged. I don’t know the exact twists and turns the following rant took as I unleashed against the unfairness of it all, but it ended with me vowing to taste the flesh of the queen’s winged children. Even if I had scrape it off the road or pick at the rotting corpse of a swan after fishing it from polluted waters. 

So when the instructor told us to picture a swan, I didn’t see a graceful bird gently gliding through a pristine pond, I saw a roast chook with a bloody long neck. And because I had nothing to do but sit there in silence with my eyes closed, my fowl mediation burned with intensity. I saw feathers flying. I heard the honks of despair. I could feel the crunch of the meat thermometer piercing the glazed skin and passing through cartilage.

Then the other night I went again. And again I wanted to quieten my mind. But instead all I thought about was an animated series about a duck and a seal being best friends (you can’t take that idea, either). It was to be reminiscent of the Rocko’s Modern Life era and break down barriers. The animation would be the most basic of drawings – none of this three dimensional bullhonkey that children are force-fed. I even had the first few bars of the song for the opening credits.

Clearly, it takes more than a few stretches to break in the wild brumby with flowing mane and sparkling eyes that is my mind. Maybe my thoughts were never meant to be reigned in. Maybe my mind is supposed to run free on the horizon of lunacy.

But during both times, while the ridiculous and criminal thoughts pulsated through my brain, I remained still. On the outside, I was calm. My chilled out exterior shielded the madness within to a point where one couldn’t suspect my thinking.

And here’s where yoga could potentially have its biggest benefit for me.

I recently found my soulmate in a hat.

I don’t really know what happened. The other day I was dehydrated and felt pretty nauseated, so I got in the car, cranked up the air con, blasted Sheryl Crow as loud as my car’s speakers would go without crackling (but Sheryl’s got some bass yo) and found myself at my Akubra dealer.

I spent a fair hunk of time with the salesman trying to work out what suited my needs. Because, while my head was pretty easy to fit, my needs were complicated. I didn’t really need the hat per say, but I was feeling fragile and I wanted it. My needs were strictly frivolous and spiritual.

I don’t really know how to explain that to a sales assistant. How do you ask another person to suggest a hat that is an extension of your soul? How do you phrase “I want a hat that would look poignant on my rustic headstone” without sounding insane? Because these hats are generally for agricultural people, but I had a higher purpose for mine.

I didn’t want to tell him that I grew up “in town” and the height of my agricultural experience was dumping fodder in a bathtub-cum-trough and sprinting to the gate because I was convinced the calf that lived in our spare paddock had a vendetta against me (I got mine in the end though, literally eating the flesh of my enemy).

You see, I’m from the country, but I’m not from a farm. My parents came out here for the cheap land and stayed for what I can only imagine was the heavily discounted peanut shell mulch and the hot chooks a surly legend called Barry would sell. I don’t have sheep to muster or crops to harvest.

I guess I just liked the idea of having a signature hat. Sure, sun safety is important and my skin is so pale that my neck is going to look like the skin that forms on custard when I’m 40. But it wasn’t about that. What I wanted was to be identified by a hat. Like if my plane disappeared over the ocean and my hat washed up ashore. I would want someone to see it and crumble into a fit of tears.

I don’t know how I got here. It was a strange journey. People stopped wearing hats as soon as they left school. For some reason, wearing a hat wasn’t cool – but for some reason ear stretchers were, go figure. The No Hat, No Play rule was the bane of our existence. Teachers didn’t seem to care that you could potentially asphyxiate on that whole donut you shoved in your mouth during an eating race or the innocent but disturbing display of sexual harassment in the school yard during kiss’n’catch, but if your hat fell off your head even for a second, a teacher would be on to you quick smart. Somewhere along the line, the idea of practical yet stylish sun protection crept into my head, built a nice three bedroom brick house and settled in. Maybe it was love of playing up to the country stereotype to my Sydney friends, maybe it was my desire to stop the part in my hair being forever pink, or maybe it was my yearning to have a wide-brimmed stamp of authority. But I found myself ending up on the Akubra website, trawling through the company’s Instagram feed, drooling over each picture in the dead of night too many times to ignore the call. And with my tax return burring a hole in my pocket and my credit card debt FINALLY paid off, I was in the mood to be reckless with my money but sensible with my purchasing.

Eventually the world’s most patient salesman and I can come to a consensus: a dusty dark brown cattleman.

Looking back, it was so simple, poetic even. Dusty was how I felt at the time. Dark, well that’s the general shade of my soul. Brown is essentially my trademark. As the only brunette amongst three blonde sisters, it was my identity: My oldest sister was The Smart One, my second sister was The Pretty One, my younger sister was The Cute One and I was The Brown One. Sure, it was comically soul crushing but at least it made me memorable to senile, vision impaired relatives. Then there was the Cattleman aspect – while not a legit cattleman, I did technically feed one once so it still counts.

It all fit. It was fate. It was me. And I’m not saying that Australiana headgear makes miracles, but when I walked out of that shop I didn’t need to vom anymore.

Why do people ask how you’re doing when you clearly look awful?

The other day I went into my local chicken shop after a big night out. I looked seedier than a parrot’s poo. It was roughly 3pm. I was wearing pyjama bottoms, a dirty jumper and thongs (I was also wearing my watch, to make my outfit look more purposeful and accessorised with a dinosaur mood ring to indicate to bystanders that I had lost control my life, but was still fabulous). I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before and, according to the residue on my sandals, I didn’t end up completing the digestion process. So I was hungry, weak and a little shaky. My facial expression could be best described as was a mix of “just about to sneeze” and “the dog just died in the action movie”. I had a mess bun with so many flyaway hairs that it looked like I had slept on a balloon.

I was in fine form.

I walked up to the counter, and the girl at the cash register greeted me and asked how I was. Sure, she was just being friendly and enquiring about a person’s wellbeing is standard practice in customer service.

But you’re not supposed to actually answer them. You’re supposed to tell them you’re “good, thanks” and then cut to the chase (in this instance “the chase” means “requesting an ungodly amount of food without a side order of judgement from the team of teenagers handling your greasy pleasures”). You’re not supposed to be honest.

Because working in this particular chicken shop can’t be easy. These fast food soldiers would be exposed to all kinds of pain, and would perhaps clock off traumatised if everyone answered the “how are ya” question honestly. Being about 97.8 per cent of Toowoomba’s morning after food of choice, these brave young people would see the Garden City at its absolute worst. It’s practically a triage centre for the hungover. I’m talking smudged mascara, mismatched shoes, the dankest of trackpants. 

But seeing humanity at its lowest would correspond with some serious highs. They would witness the healing power of chicken salt. The soothing properties of secret sauce. The invigorating attributes of barbecued chicken.

I can’t think of a more noble profession. I have nothing but respect for these people, but on this afternoon, I forgot about their vital service.

“How was I going?!” What a bloody question. I thought about telling her the truth. “Well, I’m about to buy a family-sized box of chips entirely for myself at three in the afternoon. How the heck do you think I’m going Sharon?!”

But something stopped me. Sure, I just wanted my salty rectangular prisms of potato and didn’t want to prolong the ordering process. I didn’t want to come off a jerk. I didn’t have the actual energy to say that many words with my mouth while standing up. 

But mostly, I reminded myself how thankful I was for her service. I answered with a “tip top” and asked for my chippies.

I realise this is a date late. But last night I was unable to post because I was making a quadruple layer caramel cake for my sister. It had three different kinds of icing guys.

I’m paying for it now though because I taste-tested/drank so much icing that my sweat glands are oozing salted caramel. It’s really taking a toll on my white shirt collection.

Published in On Our Selection News September 1, 2016

Gardening has never been something that has come easily to my family.

We have several fruit trees which we assume to be some form of citrus, but each season they only bear yellowy balls of despair, which are hard as rocks, taste like lemon-flavoured stomach bile and really make a mess of the lawn.

The lone gum tree we planted when we moved in now stands as a lifeless stump in our backyard, a beacon of the hopelessness. It copped a few heavy branch losses in a few storms and then just gave up on life. Dad since sawed it to have a flat top, making it just about the right size to hold a single stubbie, presumably so you don’t have to hold your drink while sombrely taking in the grim plant graveyard that is our backyard.

The air in our backyard that used to be scented with the perfume of jasmine is now putrid with stench of nothingness – the jasmine bush decayed years ago, along with any hope our family would grow anything other than impossibly fine hair (it’s actually a big problem. I’ve never been able to pull off a mess bun because of it, which really spoils my off-duty ballerina look – that and my sloppy rig, of course). We had accepted our fate. We would never have a garden from Backyard Blitz. For us, Better Homes and Gardens was more like Better Homes and Don’t Even Try to Improve Your Garden You Plant-Killing Swine, which really doesn’t have the same ring to it.

But then last year something magical happened. We had this horse living in our backyard – we didn’t own her or anything, she was just crashing there for a stint while she figured her life out. Anyway, this couch surfer ended up eating everything in her path (I’ll just going to take this moment to pause and point out how much I am identifying with this old horse right now. It’s probably not an encouraging sign when you’re identifying with an elderly horse. But I think I’m just an empathetic person. Maybe I have a big heart or maybe I’m mentally unwell, but I feel bad for products in the bargain bin. The other day I bought the crumpled box of gravy because I could feel the pangs of rejection it must have endured. Seeing a “buy me quick” sticker with a severely reduced price tag makes me want to tell that wilting bouquet that it’s worth more than 60 cents. Going to the supermarket can be a pretty emotional experience for me).

Not wanting to be unHORSEspitable (couldn’t help myself), Dad went to great lengths to keep the old girl fed. He tried throwing out the veggie scraps to the pony, in a move that would have made relations between the horse and the chooks very sour indeed. In amongst the scraps were pumpkin seeds, which must have mixed with this hoofed houseguest’s… leavings.

Because within a few weeks a bloody pumpkin patch had popped up. It was like something out of a Paul Jennings book. Suddenly, Dad was a lord commander of a garden which actually produced something edible. It was like the angels of heaven conspired to create this miracle, which saw the world’s cheapest vegetables grow freely from the soil in our custody.

Since it sprung up, my family has probably saved all of $12 in grocery bills, and countless minutes not spent at the supermarket buying pumpkins. Sure, this might all add up to equal the cost of two Famous magazines and the time it takes to read them, but it’s a blessing nonetheless.

There’s two lessons to be learned from this modern-day parable (yes, I suppose this makes me Jesus, or at least some kind of spiritual guide). You can chose to take one or the other or both on board. You can also ignore my spiritual guidance but you’d be missing out on some ripper wisdom.

Moral One: if you want something bad enough, you should stop trying. Just do nothing and eventually what you’re hoping for will just magically appear. Because you deserve to be rewarded for all the work you didn’t do. Good things DO happen to white people!

Moral Two: never give up on your dreams, because you never know what can come out of a shitty situation.

Originally published in On Our Selection News, August 4, 2016

Nothing grounds you more than wearing undies soaked in your own vomit.

Let me explain. On the weekend I went to a BYO sushi joint. Whether it was the full bottle of rosé I drank or large volumes of the half-cooked salmon I ingested at said restaurant it can’t be said, but the next day I felt a little worse for wear.

I had done all the right things – I kept up my fluids and showered under the most soothing temperatures. I thought this had put me in good stead to go out and enjoy the early afternoon sunshine. I had every intention going for a jog. But alas, it was not to be.

I was driving along in two lanes of traffic when salvia began pooling in my mouth. My stomach churned. I gripped the steering wheel tightly. I knew what was coming, and began to look for an opportunity to pull over. With a lane of traffic on one side and concrete divider on the other, I knew I would have to summon all the determination I possessed to keep the vomit at bay before I could safely pull up.

I thought I was self aware, I thought I knew who I was, I thought I had some level of self control. And for the first few minutes, I was right. My mouth had filled with vomit, but my strength of spirit and a forceful hand over my lips defeated it. I mustered up all the strength I had and forced it to retreat. But my victory was short lived.

They say you can do anything if you put your mind to it, but I doubt “they” were trying to swallow a mouthful of vomit for the second time while operating a motor vehicle. Because the second time the load of hostile liquid trekked up my oesophagus, there was little I could do to stop it.

It all happened so fast. About a litre of phlegmy, clear liquid sprayed all over the steering wheel, up the driver’s side window and into my lap. My dress was soaked, my underwear sodden with warm, gunky juice. It was like my water had broken. But this was not the miracle of life. This was more like the birth of a demon, an exorcism of bad decisions. I was drenched in failure.

I eventually pulled up, used water bottles to rinse out my hair, my clothes and flush off the glop on my steering wheel and driver’s seat and had a friend pick me up.

Some hours later after a visit to the chemist, I walked back to my car.

Unable to keep Eno down, I had resorted to licking the salt off hot chips and slowly I came back to life. As I walked the short distance to my car I hunched over, held my stomach and sucked the salty goodness out of each chip before putting it back. It was fantastic progress for me but I apparently looked so pathetic, a friend who drove past called me multiple times. “You just looked heaps sad,” he later told me. I don’t know how I didn’t hit oncoming traffic when the vom-canic eruption occurred, but it seemed I had hit rock bottom.

However, after all this, I at least felt better than one other person that day: the guy I walked past who was standing creepily in the bushes looking like a stalker, trying to catch Pokemon. Sure, I was wringing wet with my own vomit, but I’d never stoop that low!

Published in On Our Selection News, July 28, 2016

It’s impossible to not care about what other people think.

There’s plenty of people on the Facebook who will attest to the fact that they don’t have a duck to give about others’ opinion of them. Why they would give people a type of web-footed poultry I’m not sure, but people on social media love to tell the world they don’t consider others’ opinions about them important.

Everywhere you look, people are proclaiming that they don’t care if people are judging them. They live by their own rules, apparently. And that’s great, but I don’t know if it’s completely true 100 per cent of the time.

Sure, we all have times when we say “dash the neighbours” and let our freak flags fly, but usually this has to involve a pint or two of something. Because we all know the world is a judgemental place. I know this, because I am a gleeful participant.

Kid yourself all you want about not being judgemental or prejudicial in any way, but it’s in our nature. Humans born with eyes, noses and ears not just so we can see, smell and hear when food is near, but so we can sense dangers. In the early days, back before the wheel or even the Nokia 3315, humans needed to sense danger in order to survive. Now that we have supermarkets and mozzie repellent, the major dangers we have to avoid in our cushy Western lives are social dangers. The threat of being uncool. The threat of being a dingbat.

Because, from an evolutionary standpoint, dingbats are bad news. To put it succinctly, either you are one and or are associated with a group of the uncool and no one wants to breed with you or share their half-eaten antelope carcass with you. You die from starvation and produce no young to guilt into feeding you. It’s science: we use our senses to avoid becoming an undesirable.

Kid yourself all you want but we all know the opinion that really matters is the one you imagine people have of you.

Let me take you back to just over a week ago. There I was, standing in line at KFC wearing socks with thongs like a maniac. To make matters worse, my socks were turned inside out. I hadn’t showered at all that day. I smelt like a second-hand gorilla’s armpit. I was having lunch, but it was about 6.30pm. I wasn’t in a good way. The venue, the outfit, the unconscious hunching over like a 120-year-old woman in a shawl: it was all very sad.

In fact, it was more than just sad, it was confusing. How did it get to this point? I mean, I’ve eaten kale multiple times! I had a tertiary education and a loving family and (as far as I know) no horrific memories I had been repressing. And yet, here I was, taking dump in the toilet of the world’s greasiest fast food restaurants on a Saturday night, reeking of sweat and Windex, wearing socks and thongs. How did it all come to this:

( As a bit of background: the music in the toilet sounded like it was chosen by a weedy 16-year-old who wears a shell necklace and hopes to get a DJ gig at Schoolies events and was louder and more obnoxious than a Bulldogs fan sitting in a clump of Broncos supporters at Suncorp Stadium) 

I mean, KFC is delicious. But after that news story came out of China about a 25-year-old girl not leaving KFC for a week after being dumped, I’ve always associated the chicken joint with the deluded and the downright pathetic. So it was fitting perhaps that I was drawn to that particular fast food outlet on this, my last night in NSW.

I walked in with my head hanging in shame.

But a thought crept into my head, “perhaps these people are the dingbats and you are the cool one”. I realised that, while I cared about what people thought of me, I didn’t care about what THESE people thought of me. Because they were in NSW and I was blowing that popsicle stand.

Published in On Our Selection News, July 24, 2014

Always let your conscience, and fear of criminal charges, be your guide.

I’m one of those people that cringe myself out of watching certain situations unfold in fictional scenarios which are presented to me through the medium of television. I blame my overpowering empathy. I’m a feeler. I’m deep. That’s why I can no longer watch Jam’ie: Private School Girl – not because Chris Lilley should be creating new mockumentaries instead of riding off the success of Summer Heights High (P.S. Sam. I want my DVDs back. Don’t pretend you don’t have them because I know you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about) but because I feel far too embarrassed for her that I physically can’t stand it. I have to pretend movies finish differently.

If the end is too distressing, I feel it in my stomach. I haven’t even seen Human Centipede and I have to pretend the ending was just someone making it up because I can’t handle it. But it’s when people try to cover up their crimes in movies/television/radio soaps I can’t handle the most. I don’t handle guilt very well, and apparently I am a terrible liar, so I’m really not set up to handle those situations. Plus, I must have seen Disney’s Pinocchio at a pivotal point in my development, because that cricket is in my ear telling me to let my conscience be my guide. I suppose I’m lucky that it was only Jiminy Cricket from that movie who informed my childhood psyche, as the distress of the uncomfortably suggestive “Pleasure Island” scene with boys turning into donkeys and grabby men could have really messed me up.

Anyway, watching these characters try to deal with their guilt and avoid trouble really eats me up. Which is why I have a confession to make: I’ve hit something with my car. And I caused some damage. Yep. While pulling into the driveway of my sister’s house, I touched the garage door with the front of my car. Technically, you could say, I hit it. Rammed it. Smacked into it. Who cares if I was going one kilometre an hour and didn’t even startle the easily spooked dog with the noise? I was a criminal. I inflicted damage to the structure of my sister’s hard-earned bricks and morter. Her castle. Her home. Forever altered by a gentle nudge of my bumper bar.

Upon inspecting the door with her boyfriend, it was suggested that maybe she didn’t need to know. There was minimal visible damage, and the door still opened and closed as per usual. Sure, it probably made sense to “forget about it”, but I’ve seen I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I really don’t think I could handle the smell associated with a boot load of live bait in my car. Or, you know, the plunging of a fishing hook into my chest.

I wasn’t about to involve her boyfriend and his friend who happened to be visiting at the time in some kind of guilt-laden secret circle of impending death (although, as the female lead who wanted to tell the truth, I was most likely to survive)! So, guided by my conscience, and fear of being Jennifer Love Hewitt, I overcame my fear of being roused on and confessed via text. After all this tense build up, her response, “Oh dear… oh well,” was a little anti- climactic. A hook in the chest would have been a more thrilling end to this column. Maybe I should have hit the door harder.