Published in On Our Selection News, November 21, 2013

Complaining is therapeutic.

I had to have a blood test this morning, which meant I had to go without breakfast before work. It turns out you’re encouraged to drink lots of water during the pre-test fast. But because I’ve never had a blood test, I didn’t know this. So of course my veins were flat, and the nurse couldn’t get any blood from me. Now not only was I hungry, but I had to go through the whole thing again.

When I finally arrived at work, I was in foul mood. I’m becoming renowned for my complaining “rants” in the office, and today me and my crappy veins let loose. I’ll admit that I’m somewhat cynical, but I refuse to see it as a bad thing. And today I had some convenient validation of this.

While waiting for my fruitless jab (fruitless in more ways than one, as was without my usual morning banana), I read an article about happiness. With a picture of a smiling helium balloon, I was expecting to be told to think positive and to “treasure myself” (pipe down Miranda Kerr!), however I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the author was my spirit child. They were cynical, negative and sarcastic. Hooray!

Basically, this person said that you can’t be positive all the time, and that allowing yourself to be negative was the secret to happiness. Because there is nothing more enjoyable than complaining. In fact, it’s what brings people together.

You don’t call a friend over to talk about how happy you both are over a bottle or six of wine – you whine about life, you make snarky jokes and it’s great fun. Those deep and meaningful conversations in the dying hours of a party are always about complaining, and spark the strongest of friendships.

So I feel that I have reason to complain. For one, my phone had no signal so I couldn’t let the boss know that I had a legitimate excuse for being late (although trying to catch Karl Stefanovic interviewing the Grumpy Cat IS legitimate) and I hadn’t had a cup of tea yet! To make matters worse, we don’t have any bowls at work so instead if buying cereal when I could finally eat, I had to settle for a fistful of ham.

Complaints and criticisms are also fun to read, and more often than not, very fun to write. Being negative is fun, but I suppose there comes a point when you have to pack it in, because, to quote from the infinite lyrical wisdom of the Spice Girls, “too much of something is bad enough…”

There’s nothing more self-indulgent than complaining about your life to a friend and a communal vat of ice cream while watching Sleepless in Seattle or flopping on your bed in a fit of tears while pumping Simple Plan’s first album. But an excess of a good thing is not good. In the same way that too much fruit can give you anal leakage, too much whinging and cynicism can be a bad thing. People start to refer to you as a negative Nancy.

Complaining is good, but you do have to chase it with a silver lining. So I do occasionally try to be positive. For example, today’s non-breakfast fiasco did leave me hungry and grumpy, but it also provided fuel for a column I may or may not have prepared for… See? Being negative has its positives!

Published in On Our Selection News November 7, 2013 

Discovering you have money issues at a checkout is always ten times worse when that checkout is at a service station.

When you’ve forgotten your wallet at a grocery store, you can abandon your trolley and walk away. But when you’ve got a car filled with unpaid-for liquid, you can’t exactly put it back on the shelves.

Over the weekend, I stopped at a fairly busy petrol station to fill up my noble silver, and slightly hail damaged, steed. I was only going to put in a certain amount as I had a crisp $20 note in my wallet, but I decided to go the whole hog and save myself the hassle of having to return to a fuel station in the near future.

I was feeling pretty good about the situation – I engaged in a bit of banter with the dreadlocked guy behind the counter, inserted my card in the machine without a glitch and the machine made very satisfying sounds as the buttons were pushed (using en EFTPOS machine without the button sounds is always an off-putting and deflating experience for me).

Everything was coming up Milhouse. However, things took a turn for the worst when my card declined. I’m trying out this foreign concept called “saving” and so I’ve been attempting to trick myself into curbing the spending by transferring much of my money into a different account. The budget was going great until I discovered the local op-shop was stocked with fantastic-former-dance-costume leotards, which put my meticulously crafted (and somewhat unreasonable) budget out.

I just had to make a quick transfer. No worries, right? Except that during the time that I grabbed my phone from my car and lined up again, I had lost my bankcard. It wasn’t in the usual segments of my wallet. I even checked the massive pile of unnecessary receipts I keep for some reason.

The servo was quite small, so when the pumps were in use, cars had to line up, and being a busy road, it never took long for the line up to spill out onto the road. Not only was I that annoying person who had to transfer money, but I was creating some serious congestion. Whoever uses the saying “stopping traffic” in a positive way has clearly never held up several pre-morning-coffee soccer mums before.

After making two trips from inside the station to my car, I began to loose hope. Even though I’d tried to make it obvious that I had lost something by looking under my car and keeping my eyes fixed on the ground (which conveniently meant that I didn’t have to make eye contact with the grumpy motorists), I still had a kind lady approach me asking if I needed money, which made the situation even sadder.

Just when I was about to crumble right there on the servo floor next to the over-priced chocolate bars, I looked in my wallet one last time. And in the zipped compartment (which I didn’t check because that is a strict coins only zone), there was that cheeky little card. My relief was on par with my embarrassment as I sheepishly lined up for the third time. Yet while I could feel the hate searing into my skin from the many waiting cars, I was glad because at least I was able to leave.

Published in On Our Selection News October 31, 2013

Celebration is the spice of life.

I hit a massive milestone on Friday night, handing in what I hope was my last piece of assessment ever (don’t worry, I knocked on wood). After four years of being mildly stressed, all my spare time spent contributing to my uni degrees had come to an end.

All that was left to do was to hit “submit”.

With one click of a button, the last of my uni-related worries would be gone forever. This sounds good, but the truth is I was concerned that there was a gross lack of ceremony involved.

A few weeks back, I carried on like a proud mum when I followed my roommate and a friend from college as they handed in their theses. I took dozens of photos, and got a little teary when they handed over those wildly significant bound pages.

As convenient as online assignment submission is, it certainly lacks that excitement that sticking things in a slot can hold. Why, you could be sitting at the computer in a dirty old t-shirt and your undies, with greasy hair and Celine Dion’s greatest heartbreaking hits blasting in the background while you submit the culmination of four years of missing current TV shows (I JUST finished the first season of Game of Thrones, and am still a little sad. The third season will kill me) and having no money. Where’s the fun in that?

By about 6pm on Friday evening, I was panicking. I had no celebratory plans, yet the submission date loomed. I asked friends for their advice, and while one suggestion to “bake and eat an entire cake,” sounded delicious, it just made me think that I was going to be sobbing into the icing before dying and being discovered weeks later half eaten by my dog.

I’ve always held the belief that all things should be celebrated. I treat myself to magazine time when I’ve finished a weekend workout, I go to ridiculous lengths to mark the birthdays of friends and family and I celebrate the completion of each paper by drawing a massive smiley face on the “pages to do” list (after a particularly trying week, I’ve been known indulge in a shrill “wooo” that rings in the ears of my colleagues).

This also works in reverse. “You didn’t get that job? Well let’s celebrate that by watching trashy TV marathons and eating until we feel uncomfortable. Quick! Go put on your loose pants!” Even the bad things must be acknowledged, and “celebrated” in some way. So of course a milestone as big as no longer having to think during my spare time, no more referencing and no more group assignments had to be celebrated, and it had to go off with a bang.

So I did the best with the resources I had. I forced my Mum, Dad and little sister to pull the five party poppers I found in the cupboard as I hit send. I popped some champagne that I won from work and put on a big sombrero that had been in the back of my car since a friend left it there two years ago. And while it took Mum two goes to get the hang of party poppers and I ended up finishing the bottle, crying though a Rosie O’Donnell movie on my own, it sure was better than nothing.