The other night someone asked me what my “thing” is.

It sounds very vague, but in retrospect it’s actually quite a probing question.

It’s like asking someone what their deal is. Or “who do you think you are?”

It’s one of those questions that is difficult to answer without overthinking too much.

I know it was meant to mean, “What is your hobby?” But that’s not really a question you ask. I mean, people don’t really have hobbies anymore. No one paints model airplanes or collects stamps. Think about it, what are your hobbies? Like, what do you do when you’re not working, sleeping or trying to avoid eye contact on the bus?

After typing “define hobby” into Google, I learnt the widely-accepted definition of a hobby is an activity one does with their leisure time for the purposes of pleasure.

So technically you could call re-watching the Shark-ira video a hobby. You could also call compulsively smoothing my hair while loosing all sense of reality in the silky sensation a hobby. Even slowly walking past a construction site to sniff the scent of freshly-cut lumber could fall under the definition of a hobby.

Sure, they’re done in my leisure time and they bring my pleasure, but you can’t really list those things off when someone asks what your hobby is.

You see, a hobby is something that usually is done in pursuit of an interest. Now, there’s a difference between a hobby and in interest. A hobby is something you actively do, while an interest isn’t so tangible. It’s more of a feeling – like something you’re intrigued and excited by. It’s almost like a theme, in a way. Importantly, you can be interested in something without actually doing it. So even though you could say my hobby is eating chicken schnitzels and drinking beer, I can still be interested in having a ripped rig.

So what are my interests then? That’s a tough one. My interests would have to include myself and dessert items that won’t give me another chin. And my related hobby for pursing this interest currently is eating frozen mango cubes and scrolling back through my Instagram posts to remind myself just how bitchin I am.

I guess you could call this blog a hobby, but sometimes it derives me of pleasure as I can’t organise my time properly and find myself staying up into the early hours crafting it – poorly, might I add – when I desperately need to sleep.

The “what’s your thing” question continues to play on my mind, because there’s so many ways to read into it. And maybe I’ll unpack that later down the track when I’ve run out of ideas but for now I am focusing on the hobby angle.

When I answered, I told the asker that I drew trees. Which is true. When I get bored, I will doodle a tree on a scrap of paper. My old court reporting notebooks were full of trees. It doesn’t make me edgy or anything – it’s just the only thing I learned to draw in art at school.

I like doing it, but I rarely do. Even though I get home at like 3.45pm most days and have apartment to myself for at least two hours, I never break out the pencils and paper. I’m somehow always too busy.

And this has got me thinking about the way I spend my time. Like, I can say what my hobbies are: writing, drawing, reading etc. but how many of them do I actually do?

And if I’m not filling my leisure time with those activities, what am I filling it with? And then it all comes back to that over-arching question: what the fuck am I doing with my time?

It’s at this point where I’m considering keeping an activity log, in which I’ll record what I did and why I did it. And because my idea of a wild Friday night was going to bed early after reading Little Women, I feel like I will at least attempt this task. I’ll probably log logging my time under the “hobby” category, because lately my idea of pleasure has become a little beige. I mean, my idea of the mile high club is purchasing an egg and lettuce sandwich off the flight attendant snack cart.

I expect the results of this experiment to be confronting but boring and very, very depressing.

Today I had my column appear in my local newspaper.

I’ve been an official columnist for a few years now, but my creative prose/pure smut had been appearing in a free magazine delivered to houses a few towns over.

There was a happy buffer zone that meant a bit of distance, but it was close enough to ensure some vague sense of relevance and allowed my fans (mum, dad and my little sister we call Kevin) to access it easily enough. It was comfortable because I still had this air of anonymity.

But now my words will be appearing in print in a paper every bastard reads every damn word of (I know this, because we used get multiple people telling us about a typo in the most obscure of classified ads).

Being the sloppy person (of rig and of character) I didn’t plan ahead of time, and found myself sitting to write this piece on next to no sleep after a delayed flight well after my bed time.

And I have to say that I panicked.

I tried to watch some of The Mindy Project to take the edge off, but all it really did was make me feel inferior in everyway and realise that I’m more like Danny Castellano than I care to admit.

Because I don’t really have a persona. I don’t have a general topic. I don’t have a direction.

When people ask me about what my column, I’m not sure what to tell them. In resumes, I would try to impress recruitment officers by telling them it was an “extra creative outlet, with topics varying from social commentary to political observations to over sharing about my humorous experiences”.

Social commentary was a broad yet professional term I used to cover pieces I’ve done where I complained about the snotty bottleo’s in my neighbourhood being too fancy to stock the cheap nasty wine I like or the rise of inspirational quotes on athletic clothing.

Political observations included my name-dropping Barnaby Joyce.

Over sharing about my humorous experiences was a pretty spot on description, which meant I didn’t have to explicitly explain how many times I’d written about my own vomit.

I don’t really know if that’s a cohesive theme. The generally vibe of my thing is basically assuming everyone’s as obsessed with me as I am. I’m just writing things under the impression the entire world wants to know what I think about chicken nuggets.

But going into a new publication I felt like I had the chance to reinvent myself. To do some real branding and have an actual purpose instead of sprouting dribble. I thought that living in the big city could have been an angle.

If I spun it a certain way, I could have quite the glamorous life in the minds of my readers. I work in the city, I’m a writer, Richard Wilkins was at my office Christmas party and I use a lift to get to my apartment – an apartment! The epitome of urban glam! I am an Australian Carrie Bradshaw having crazy adventures in the big apple!

But the truth is I’m the bogan Carrie Bradshaw. I’m kind of similar, but also not at all.

I mean, I’m currently living in Inner East Sydney, so you could say I live on the Inner East Side (I also like to call it the Middlish East, although I only thought that up this afternoon).

Carrie bloody loves her shoes, while my obsession with footwear is limited to seeing if can get an extra week out of the sandals with no grip and decaying leather.

Carrie writes about steamy escapades and sharp observations about relationships, while I write about viral cat videos.

Carrie spends her evenings out at swanky clubs, while I like to go to the dirty bar which didn’t kick my friend and I out when we dipped our fingers in a puddle of spilled tequila for a cheap buzz.

It’s practically the same thing, right?

And I got to thinking that this could be a great vibe for my new column.

Maybe instead of glamorising an over-populated swampland, I could reveal the steaming mound of rubbish it actually is. Instead of appearing sophisticated and charmingly neurotic, I could portray myself as bogan and mentally unsound. Instead of being relevant to women everywhere, I could be relevant to just myself.

Which, come to think it, is exactly the tone of my column already. I guess I don’t have to reinvent myself after all. I’m already substandard but fabulous! Just like Dorothy with her slippers, I had my mediocre powers all along, I just needed to know how to wield it. And just like that, I had my opener: I’m the girl who makes people feel better about their lives by sharing the shame and disappointment that is my existence through weekly columns.

You can find my columns in The Clifton Courier from now until someone sensible steps in and puts a stop to all this nonsense.

I’ll be uploading my published columns a fortnight after going to print, but I recommend picking up a subscription so you can scrunch it up into a little ball or light it on fire after reading for ultimate satisfaction.

My father wants me to smuggle dead animal on to a plane in my carry-on luggage.

Macca, as some of you faithful few may know him, gave me a ring this afternoon and, after telling me about how bloody stinkin’ hot it’s been, the conversation quickly turned to meat. Obviously.

Meat is a big deal in my family. My father gets confused if someone suggests chicken for dinner twice in a row and my mother is practically a flesh eating velociraptor. She looks like a sweetie with her kind face and the care packages of baked goods she prepares for the nursing staff at the hospital she frequents, but make no mistake, she’s a cave woman. It’s not uncommon for her to literally gnaw on a leg of lamb. Sometimes she’ll salvage the comically large lamb bone instead of eating desert – which was always the standard but eternally sophisticated post-roast treat of Sara Lee apple pie. The local butcher gets concerned if Macca hasn’t gone in to pick up a few steaks in more than two days. My brother in law gifted my parents a carving set for Christmas and it was like they were 16-year-olds being given a Suzuki Swift with perosnalised plates in at their glitter-themed birthday parties.

And apparently that has rubbed off on me, because this it turns out I made a meat-themed birthday post I put on Facebook just today. This wasn’t to add clout to this importance of consuming dead animal to my family. This was purely by coincidence, and it’s actually pretty confronting that I would consider it appropriate for an acquaintance is haven’t seen in about four years: 

“Happy birthday NAME,” I said. 

“I hope you have sucked all of the marrow out of the bone of today.”

So yeah, meat is important.

Anyway, a few months ago Macca picked up a few lambs to keep the grass down in our spare paddock. It was his Fathers’ Day treat to himself. There would be one each to my sisters and their partners, and one for the main family unit (which included the single losers, as a fitting reminder than I’m not getting any meat). We were under strict orders to clear out the freezers in preparation for the greatest gift of all. Yep, Macca’s Christmas present to my two sisters this year was a whole lamb. An unholy amount of red meat. Kilo after kilo of Australia’s favourite thing to barbecue.

Well the day has come since Macca had one of the lambs slaughtered and carved up, and he’s in a sharing mood.

“I’ll give you some to take back,” he told me. “You can put it in your handbag.”

As someone whose carry on bag looks like it could fit several dismembered toddlers, I’m already pretty nervy about what I take on aeroplanes. I can’t say I’ve ever weighed my carry on, but it would rarely fall under the maximum weight limit thanks to my “better to be safe than sorry” approach to packing things I might need.

So when I walk up to the flight attendant to board the plane, I’m already a bit touchy. And with that cat-printed bag I generally look mentally unsound and would probably be picked as the most likely to flip out in the air and try to turn a weapon on someone. As such, clutching one of those Coles insulated esky bags full of dead lamb with a shifty look in my eye would not be a good option for me.

Particularly because of my family’s insistence on using old milk bottles for ice blocks, which would no doubt take me over the weight limit but could be classed as a weapon. I’m not saying I would select a two litre bottle of solid, milky water as my first choice in a line up of deadly implements, but it would do a heck of a lot more damage than a pair of nail scissors if I needed to defend myself. How do you explain away a bunch of dead sheep and a blunt ice club to airport security? I would end up on Border Patrol.

That being said, my retirement plan is currently hinged on the hope I will one day have my own reality TV series so perhaps this isn’t such a bad idea. This could be a creative way to bring it about. I mean, I know at least seven people who would watch at least the first series of a series about the the guy “just waiting for a mate”. Surely the meat smuggler girl could go just as viral? I’d be willing to discard my dignity if it could lead to me being paid $2000 to flog vitamin water on Instagram. I could even be a feature in the next Australia Day lamb adverts. I could even the new marketing tool for Australia, telling tourists I’ll, “throw another shank on the barbie,” for them. This could just set me up for life.

However, I think Macca would somehow wind up being the star of the show.

Today I am officially a quarter of a century old.

Somehow I have managed to avoid being the collateral damage of an alien invasion or a giant meteor hurling itself into the earth. Although, I am quite certain I would be one of those few remaining people who managed to outlive the majority of humanity’s weaklings in such an event. I have long enough hair to substitute as a rope I need be, I’m assuming the few episodes of Bush Tucker Man I saw as a child would come back to me at the necessary moments of outback hunger and I have the right amount of sass to make me a valid character for the imagined audience to relate to but also enjoy.

Yes, I am 25. I can now rent a car and pay less to my insurance company if I have a prang. If I were in the royal family I could announce my intent to marry whomever I chose. If you were to round my age to the nearest 10, I’d be 30. I am mature, I am strong, I am wearing just an oversized t-shirt with galloping horses on it and undies I bought in a two-pack from Coles.

This is an important age, according to the internet and according to me – because when I turn a milestone number I get to live by the rules of Birthday Month instead of my usual Birthday Week extravaganza.

You see, on The Internet, 25 is a pivotal age. Most listicles about being in your twenties – believe me, there are shitloads of them – reference 25 as a landmark mostly for things you’ve supposed to have done/learnt/experienced by. They usually are prefaced by telling you in some “I give zero fucks” way that you should be yourself and stop comparing yourself to others and then proceed to tell you what they’ve learnt through their deeper-than-magma experiences as a middle classed white person like they’re passing down some deep wisdom. They usually tell you to be ok with drinking wine alone and all that shit, because there’s nothing healthier than smashing alcohol in solitude and not talking to people. You just do you! Hahaha hashtag wine!

So for the sake of hypocritically patronizing you with what I’ve learnt in my four lots of five years on earth, here’s my response to what The Internet reckons I should have done by now.

Go to a music festival: Been there, done that, I’m probably cooler than you. The last Splendour I went to I got gastro and ended up in the medic tent after vomiting up my toothpaste.

Buy dinner for your parents: I once drove half an hour each way to a Chinese food store to feed my creators and chief financial backers. That should be enough.

Travel to another continent: I went to Thailand and partied so hard I lost my clothes, my thongs and woke up in my mate’s bed after vomiting in my own. On the plane ride back I smuggled two triple cheeseburgers into my carry on from the airport Hungry Jacks. When the cabin was dark and most people were asleep, I tried as quietly as possible to take my tepid burger out of the wrapper in silence and stealthily consumed that glorious combination of meat, cheese and sin. I felt like the smartest woman alive. 

Try an adrenaline sport: I once had to abandon slipping down a family water slide at Wet’n’Wild while lining up on the stairs as I waited my turn. It was too damn high for me, so I dragged my hungover self to the relaxing safety of Calypso Bay – which is where a gentle currently calmly guides you along an imitation river in an inflatable tube. That was close enough. And I’ve repeadly tried to convince people to go on the Aqua Duck with me to no avail. I don’t think I need to try adrenaline. I think safety is the biggest thrill of all. Who needs a racing pulse when you can be assured of having a continued pulse by remaining alive for as long as possible by minimal risky behaviour? Dickheads, that’s who.

Spend the whole weekend partying: Mate, last night I stayed up until midnight to bake  a cake and today I bought a teapot. I think I’m right.

Have a good convo with someone of a different faith: I’ve had many a stimulating conversation with people who would choose Cold Rock over Baskin and Robbins. They’re not so different from us after all!

Vote: I’ve done worse things for a sausage (like sneakily stealing one from a barbecue tray when I’d already had more than my share).

Dye your hair a completely different colour: I went red for a period in Year 7. It didn’t land me a role as the only Weasley sister. Now I am just the run-of-the-mill-non-friends-with-Daniel-Radcliffe-nobody brown.

Let go of a friendship: In primary school we were assigned pen pals with some random home-schooled kids we used to have to invite to our sports days because our school was too small to make up the numbers. I stopped writing back after I realised her name was Rosemary, which I thought was a shit name at the time. Now she probably goes by Rosie and owns a bitchin’ zine. I’m an idiot.

Like yourself: There have some been some very close calls where I’ve nearly liked my own Insty photos, but I managed to avoid it.

Practice being charitable: Sometimes my sister stinks, I don’t bring it up so I don’t hurt her feelings (but also because it would do nothing to change her habit of brushing her teeth only once a day).

Let the Grudge go: I’ve actually never owned or seen that movie, so I guess I don’t need to do this one? On a side note, I have a copy of The Bling Ring I don’t need anymore, if you’re keen.

Go on a blind date: I met my Uber driver from New Year’s Eve for coffee last week. It was technically blind for me because I was too drunk to properly remember what he looked like. I got free cake out of it and an awkward hug, but that’s about the extent of it.

Exercise: Oh, I eat far too much bread not to. I actually run like the wind (and by “wind” I mean “heavily breathing sweaty red monster who mouths the words to Amy Whinehouse’s Valerie with enough to emotion to make passers-by think she’s going through an emotional breakdown“).

Eat an exotic food: I don’t know if you know this, but I have hummus quite a lot. I’m pretty cultured like that.

Learn to cook: I have one word for you: nuggchos.

Save for your retirement: hahahah. My most expensive asset is an unregsitered car held together with thumbtacks. Retirement is never going to be an option for me.

There’s more to go, but I have to go put pants on and drink beers now. If I’m stumped for ideas for my Wednesday post, I will continue this later!

Ah, another year is gone.

The time has come to grab a rum ball and reflect on how your existence is contributing to the world. You find yourself confronted with a bit of travel time and you have nothing to do but take stock on how you frittered away a perfectly good year. It’s like when you judge the outfit choices of celebs on the red carpet, but you judge yourself. This is why the consumption of alcohol skyrockets in the holiday season.

So how am I doing? Well, let’s take a look at the facts.

Now, before I press on, I must remind you that I did this on Monday, when I was feeling rather tired and was sitting in a dark room facing a wardrobe with mirrored doors. Mirrored doors are fabulous until you find yourself faced with the reality of your existence and can’t escape your bland reflection, which is decidedly less Disney-like than you’d prefer.

So here are the results of my stocktaking:

Yesterday I went on a pub crawl wearing a Santa suit that looked like it was made from a blend of carpet underlay, stray dog hair and the whiskers of three backpackers who had to shave their adventure beards off to return to work after trekking through Nepal for four months. Imagine how that would smell, then add stale beer, sweat and sea water to that equation and you’ll have the musk of me on this particular outing.

I cracked the glass cover of my phone, wore a beard around my thigh and went swimming in the ocean wearing socks and sneakers.

The following day I had to listen to Disney songs in order to perk me up at work.

The last video on my phone is a recording of the beach with me screaming the lyrics to Total Eclipse of the Heart. I am alone in the video.

The last song I listened to on my phone featured Justin Bieber, but then I also found myself jogging to Slim Dusty’s classic beat Duncan the other day so I don’t know what I can deduce from my music choices. Maybe I’m eclectic, or maybe I just have terrible taste it depends on who you ask.

My dinner last night was a free sausage sizzle and a custard-filled doughnut, but today I had zucchini noodles with shaved turkey so I guess that’s what they call balance. The worst thing I ingested today way a Scotch finger. This could be interpreted in two ways. The first is that the worst thing I ate was a plain biscuit, I must be treating my body like a temple. On the other hand, you could argue that if the world’s plainest biscuit besides the milk arrowroot was my big treat I must lead a very dull, depressing existence.

And we all know from my earlier admissions that I don’t treat my body like a temple, but more a house you rent out with a group of mates for a hen’s party – you have a good time in it but make a rushed, panicked effort to clean it up enough to get your bond back.

Good lord, it sounds dismal.

Add to this that through the week, two of my friends announced they were writing books – one had just finished, the other had secured a publisher.

Two others had just graduated as doctors.

Another fabulous friend was admitted as a fully legit lawyer and, better still, got a fresh batch of bitchin’ business cards.

Meanwhile, this year I had what some people might call a mid-twenties crisis. After leaving an unhappy workplace, I found myself without a job, without a permanent address and with a shitload of boxes. But I didn’t do any of the classic life crisis things. I didn’t trek across the wildness to find myself. I didn’t start my own business. I didn’t even write the mini series I would tell people was a comment on country journalism and an examination of small town Australia in the context of a changing media landscape when it was really based on me and hugely egocentric.

I spent all of today baking gingerbread that was underwhelming at best.

I haven’t yet showered – or brushed my teeth – and it’s 3.02pm.

My breakfast and lunch was said disappointing Christmas biscuits.

So what all does this say about the life I’ve chosen to lead? Did I spend my year wisely? Am I proud of who I am?

Hmmm. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m going to need some much stronger rumballs to answer those questions.

Patheticness is in the eye of the performer.

We make our own decisions about what makes us tragic, ultimately being the only ones who can make us feel one way or the other. The difference between being lonely and being a lone is a mindset. Although that doesn’t stop people from making their own assumptions.

My friends go to the dog park just to look at the dogs. They don’t have one. They just go to look. It’s good for de-stressing, my friend says. And she’s right – dogs do wonderful things for the human psyche. And there’s nothing wrong with checking out a few happy pups. It’s a public place after all. But it does sound sad and borderline creepy that she goes there purely to look at the dogs like some kind of canine-loving pervert. I don’t think she takes treats to lure the pups away, but she does know each of the dogs by colour and personality like there were contestants on the Bachelorette.

So what’s worse? My friend and her boyfriend going to the dog park with out a dog just to watch? Or me?

Because right now I am at the dog park. Alone. And it’s the setting for my new local Carols by Candlelight. And not only am I without a dog, but I am without a family, a friend or even a bottle of wine (and by wine, I mean cheap nasty carbonated grape juice so bubbly I can’t taste the actual wine).

I am also being paid monthly so I am living off my credit right now, so I can’t even buy some delicious fruity ice cream thing from the truck that is getting no attention from kids and parents when there is real ice cream and Nutella crepes available elsewhere.

I’m not here for dinner. I’m not meeting friends. I am not even wearing my jogging gear so I can’t even pretend I am stretching after a long, impressive run (although I have considered throwing on my runners precisely for this purpose).

It’s very odd to be alone at these kinds of things.

I used to be able to go to all kinds of shit at home by myself. Because if I didn’t run into my friends, I’d run into their parents or the lady I talked to at the bank or the family I buy my bacon from. Apart from my sister, I knew of two other Colleens I could cut a rug with on the d-floor (otherwise known as the patch of bitumen in front of the truck trailer acting as a stage).

I’d be able to confidently strut down the street to whatever festivities going on and know there would be at least five people aged 16 to about 78 I could sink a few tinnies with.

But I find myself here sitting up the back with the two other friendless wonders.

One is sucking a lollipop and pretending to read the program.

Another is texting, presumably to make it look like whoever he isn’t meeting here is merely lost and the pair are working out logistics. They aren’t coming, mate. You know it. I know it. The couple next to you would know it if they weren’t too busy being happy to notice this tragic trio.

I am sitting here texting too, but I am texting myself, writing this column via multiple blue speech bubbles, so it’s a totally different thing.

We all have our coping mechanisms for when we find ourselves alone in public. Because being alone in public isn’t always as blissful as being alone in private. Being alone in public means sitting with your knees close enough together to avoid an indecent exposure charge. Being alone in private means wearing only your saggiest undies and a stained jumper.

Ah, the lollipop eater has a child. She’s not a lone watcher, she’s here on official mothering duties.

The texter has “gone to meet his mates”… or cry to his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

And I remain, texting myself this column and getting bitten on the upper thigh by mozzies. Why am I staying? Perhaps it’s because the blood sucking disease spreaders are the only living beings going anywhere near my crotch tonight.

Maybe it’s because neither Netflix nor Stan have Love Actually and my roommate doesn’t has a DVD player set up with the television.

Maybe I’m just fishing for blog material. I can pretend I’m doing this purely for literary reasons. This isn’t pathetic; this is research. My defence for any sad situation I find myself in is that it’s memoir material. As such, I’m able to justify any humiliation by reasoning it will make me appear more relatable to all the plebs who will read my life’s story to make them less depressed about them never being in my league. I’m not embarrassing myself; I’m merely gathering material for my memoirs.

But the truth is my lingering/loitering/borderline perversion is probably due to a combination of all three.

Oh! The texter came back, he’s now walking among the crowd taking video for snapchats. At least he’s not sobbing on a couch somewhere.

They started playing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and it sounded like Noah Jones should have been signing it. I was reminded of the deeply depressing original lyrics like, “faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more” and “but at least we all will be together if the Lord allows – from now on, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” And I have to admit, as the spikey grass dug into my thigh skin I began to feel a little sad. I began to feel that lonely Christmas depression I see on movies before some grand dramatic gesture. If I were in a romantic comedy, some bastard I knew would have started singing All I Want for Christmas Is You and a spotlight would have shined on me in an unrealistically flatting glare. Instead, I nearly had my foot run over by a disobedient child with a mini scooter. I hate it when my life isn’t a Christmas rom-com.

Update: my friend who watches the dogs is doing the EXACT thing I am right now. By herself. We’re alone in different states together. And that means we’re not only not alone, but also not lonely. We’re not pathetic, just quirky!