I’m getting tired of people my age banging on about wine.

For some reason, every bastard is bloody obsessed with wine, and not the fun champagne rip-off kind. It’s the kind of wine that’s room temperature with no hint of carbonation. My generation’s fixation on it is inescabable. Every second meme you see about female-type people in their 20s has a wine component. “Everyone’s getting married and I’m just here with my wine” or “Tonight I’m going to Netflix and chill … with my wine” or the slightly more honest “look how different I am from other girls because I don’t care about uncool stuff like love or having children or being responsible with my money and like to drink wine, and aren’t I so self aware and hilarious and, let’s just say it, quirky for pointing it out? Hahahah… YOU SHOULD TOTALLY LOVE ME I’M SUCH A FUCKING CATCH! PLEASE VALIDATE MY MISERY BY LIKING MY PICTURE”.

Well here’s a truth bomb for your turnt fam squad goals. Wine actually tastes awful. I don’t care how juvenile it makes me look; I don’t care about being a traitor to my cynical generation of hermits. I’m just going to say it: most wines are yucky. Maybe I’m wrong. But maybe most wines taste like a mix of that water you find in olive jars blended with equal parts of distain and haughtiness, with overtones of liquid whiteout. Maybe I like the look of holding a wine glass, but don’t exactly enjoy the feeling of having my tastebuds scraped off with a blunt potato peeler.

I just want wines to taste the way I thought they would when I was watching the two kinds on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty get absolutely blotto to celebrate forcing their children into an unwanted marriage. It was a red variety, and looked hearty but sweet. My innocent mind imagined the two crown-wearing arseholes were drinking a nectary, plumy fruit drink. Of course, I was a pup of a child and didn’t understand that there would be other reasons to drink something other than the sweet taste.

You might say I lived a sheltered life growing up in my quaint country town where almost everyone knew your name and you could play multiple rounds of Spotlight up your street without fear of being stuffed into an unmarked van. Say what you like, but I did have a vague idea of what “getting high” meant. In fact, I knew it first hand. Sometimes my friends and I would get together in little clumps and spin around and around really fast to laugh at how incapacitated we were immediately after the stopped twirling. It turned out that was a gateway activity that led to more dangerous highs, like rolling down hills. Needless to say, I understood the notion of doing something silly for the good feels afterwards.

But the idea of putting something into your mouth that wasn’t nice tasting just because it made you feel good was completely out of my capacity of thought. The only not nice tasting thing you would put into you mouth to feel good (eventually, anyway) I knew of was medicine and it didn’t look like either of the two men on my family’s slightly green television set were suffering from any cold or flu symptoms. This was a time when my favourite food was hot chip and chicken sandwiches (let’s be honest, it’s still one of my top five meals) and I would consume the small amount of vegetables on my plate by swallowing them whole and washing them down with big gulps of milk, like an Echinacea tablet. When it came to matters of the mouth, it was all about taste, so it never crossed my mind that these irresponsible parents would be drinking anything other than zingy grape juice.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of wine. I love the glasses with the stall stems, I love the fact that it’s premixed, negating the need for a Lido mix-in and I love the look of sophisticated judgement that radiates from drinkers. I love it all. But if wine were a man and all those traits about them were reasons to love him, the taste would have to equate to his membership of the Shooters and Fishers Party or him supporting the Canterbury Bulldogs in the NRL. It’s something you try to put up with for a while and try to focus on all the other good things about him, but ultimately you decide you just can’t accept it inside you. Sometimes you might be in a pinch and need to get a quick buzz so you brace yourself and drink it quickly, but you can’t do it to yourself every weekend. It’s something you want to get over and done with which leaves a bad taste in your mouth and is best down while holding your nose.

That is not what I wanted wine to be. I wanted to be like a young, taut Courtney Cox in Cougartown pounding the grape like a tank. I wanted to be like the bitchy aunties you see at most weddings, tearing apart the bride’s whoreish dress over several bottle of sav blanc. Hell, I’d settle for the fat emperor man who drinks wine with a loose cannon donkey in Disney’s Fantasia. But it tastes awful. That’s not to say I wouldn’t drink it for the … health benefits. A friend and I would go to every single one of our brother college’s formal dinners in uni just because of the unlimited access to wine guests were privy to. I liked being drunk, and at that time I didn’t mind the looks of disgust I got as I mixed lemonade into my glass of red (like a shandy, only more shameful!) and happily bastardised a “good wine” with sugar while Kerry O’Brien addressed the room.

But I can’t do that now. Now I have to give off some kind of air of sophistication, and for some reason that means drinking room temperature horse piss and pretending to like it. Year 9 Dannielle would be horrified, but I do conform to the norm at times. I like to join the crowd, because then there’s plenty of people around to see when I do something cool. And I reckon there may be a few closet scrubbers like me who want to look classy, but can’t stomach a merlot. So here’s a tip. And you can trust my absolute sincerity on this one because heavens knows I haven’t got the reach to attract offers to write sponsored posts. The answer is Banrock Station’s Crimson Cabernet.

If you think it doesn’t sound like an actual type of wine, you’re probably right, but that’s the beauty of it.; it’s not a “proper wine”. A little while ago, my sister and I walked into a bottle shop and asked the assistant to recommend “a wine that looks like wine for people who don’t like wine”. This unnamed changed our lives. He presented us with a wine-shaped bottle of red liquid, which promised to be sweet, fruity and lightly spritzed. Sure, it’s a nectary drop, it’s probably about as thick as a piece of steak and most people to see my drinking it scrunch up their nose in disgust, but it’s everything seven-year-old me thought wine would be.

My sister made it the “house red” at her wedding and everyone hated her for it. Cheers!

I’m trying to offload my furniture, and I’m getting really sick of people not falling over themselves to buy my used items.

I’ve placed adverts which I thought were informative yet enticing descriptions of my old wares to tempt buyers to scramble for the privilege to own my unwanted gear. Most recently, I’ve put an ad on a website we’ll call “slumspree” for an old desk and an office chair. The desk came into my possession after I moved into an old college friend’s room. He didn’t seem to want to deal with the hassle of selling it and I couldn’t be arsed to get rid of it, so it stayed. The office chair was a gift I received from my old workplace after my boss’ wife’s work upgraded their chairs and gifted their old seats to us – like a game musical chairs except way less tense. The furnished multiple rooms nicely and have done their jobs of holding both myself and my stationery off the floor. But I’m downsizing and they have to go. Unfortunately, the word bait I used for buyers hasn’t attracted a single nibble.

Sure, “used” doesn’t sound overly enticing. But the items I try to sell are quality goods. It’s not a pair of stretched out, crusty knickers I’ve put up for sale. These things may be well loved, but they’re not total garbage.

Add this with the fact that I was given full marks on an assignment all about advertorial just this week (I don’t want to brag, but I’m going to because I need the validation. I don’t like my chances of getting any other gold stars in the near future so I’m going to cling to this high mark like Mark Latham clings to relevance), I’m not talking 87 per cent or 92 per cent. I’m talking about the triple-digit mark. I’ve never met my tutor face-to-face, but I imagine this learned sir is the kind of guy who has at least one tweed suit jacket and is a well-read savvy man with, as far as my baseless assumptions can tell, a cavadoodle (which means he has a good and true heart, I suspect). He wouldn’t just give me good marks if I didn’t deserve them, so I must be at least not total rubbish at floogin wares.

So I’m surpsied as to why I haven’t got a better track record with palming off my shit to other people.

Appalled, actually.

I’ve gone back through my computer files and pulled out two other ads that went on the same website, we’ll call it “dumfree” for now, and am scratching my head. The old saying “you can’t polish a turd” is an eternal truth, and while I’m not saying my items were dreadful, they weren’t brand new. So I thought that there was no point in pretending otherwise. And if I’m not going to set the bar too high, I might as well set it unremarkably low. Apparently advertising is all about building relationships with customers, and I didn’t want to be the advertising equivalent of a fuckboy. I wanted to be honest with my customers about what they were getting themselves into, but I also wanted them to like me. And I think my copy reflected that:

ADVERT FOR AN OLD ARMCHAIR

“If you’ve ever wanted to nestle yourself in the folds of a heavy smoker’s uterus, this is perhaps the closest you’re going to get without ending up having struggling actors doing terrible re-enactments of your behaviour on a late-night Channel 7 crime series. Sink into the plastic plushness of this armchair, and wonder no more what a close up of Donatella Versace’s neck looks like. Like leather but nowhere near as luxurious, this armchair covering makes you question your morals. Not because you’re picturing a calf having its skin peeled, but because you know you nestling in the sweat stains of strangers shouldn’t feel so good.

Features include: browness; authentic pleather wrinkles; sweat stains from the various relatives of mine who you don’t know but may just begin to smell like.

Bonus: Anything you find in the cushions if yours to keep. I haven’t checked what lingers in the folds of that imitation leather, so it is essentially a Lucky Dip wrapped in big, brown packaging. Who knows what treasures you could unearth!?”

ADVERT FOR AN OLD SHELF DAD SAVED FROM LANDFULL

“This excellent use of dead tree is far from a furniture abomination, but rather a technology buff’s dream. Equipped with state-of-the-art shelving technology, this piece will hold various items off the floor, nodding to the world-wide trend of using physical objects to create a barrier between household goods and the ground. A cutting edge hole has been added to this piece to maximise user versatility. Use the carefully-constructed void to thread through electrical cords, spy on your friends, or become the prankster of the year by shooting your grandmother with a Nerf Gun out of nowhere– the possibilities are endless! The shutters were engineered for multiple displaying options, as well as creating that highly sought after what-was-the-carpenter-actually-doing look. Yes, this piece is so on-trend that it needs its own hashtag.

Pounce now to become the envy of all the acquaintances you keep on social media purely to boost your self-esteem.”

I ended up dropping both pieces off at the local tip to be recycled.

Looking back, I think I can see my problem. I had neglected on very critical rule when it comes to online spruiking: include sizing. Thankfully I have learned from the mistakes of my past and tacked on some measurements to my ad before posting it.

I’ve got a bit of time left until my advert expires and I haven’t had anyone enquire about the items, but I’ve got a good feeling.

Some days you love your life, other days you hope that shooting pain in your pelvis is your appendix exploding and not just a super poo blocking your bowls so you can spend the whole day in bed.

Some days getting up out of bed and putting on clothes which haven’t been sourced from Peter Alexander seems impossible, and an emergency surgery seems like a far better option. Some days the idea of having to spend eight hours pretending you are a functioning person is exhausting. There are times when you feel like you can’t face people. When appearing cheerful seems painful. When using your brain seems daunting. Sometimes the weight is so heavy you can’t even move to peel your bed socks off. There are days you just need one more day to yourself. These days are usually Mondays.    These are the days you start thinking of what miracles might happen to give you that extra time. You find yourself in some pretty odd places that might concern hospital staff, and you start doing some weird bargaining in your head. You can live without your appendix, so getting a few days off to have it hacked out of your body seems a reasonable trade-off. So on the days when you’re laying in bed and you feel a quick shooting pain to the right of your abdomen, you think today could be your lucky day.

Your sister lost a heap of weight when she had her appendix out and they do keyhole surgeries now so the scarring would not even be that severe. Plus, you’re guaranteed at least one bunch of flowers, free magazines and the occasional comforting hand on those forehead bumps you usually keep out of sight with a curtain of hair. An added bonus: all the action is going on downstairs, meaning upstairs is an all-you-can-eat zone after they yank the little sucker out of you. This could be a real win. A second dull pain hits your side again and your spirits are buoyed.

You get up out of bed and waddle slowly to the bathroom, considering whether you should text your boss now or wait until you get into the office and dramatically collapse in the middle of everyone writhing on the floor in pain. The sympathy. The spectacle. The attention. You can feel it coming your way.

Unfortunately/fortunately (depending on what sort of mood you’re in) the only thing coming is the shit of the century; brown water spraying your porcelain bowl with a range you thought only possible for industrial-grade irrigation pumps.

It turns out imaginary appendicitis and raging diarrhoea feel the same before they reach the point of explosion. You wipe away a tear as you flush away your week of leave, and angrily slam the toilet lid down (while we’re on the topic, shut your bloody toilet lids people. I don’t care if you pee standing up, sitting down or in a reverse cowgirl style. Open, exposed toilet water is filthy and your displaying of it is yucky. We’ve got opposable thumbs for fuck’s sake and you still think it’s ok to have open passages to the sewer system in your home?! Are you a wild animal?!) You’ve had enough of this bullshit. What does your an appendix really do for you anyway? You’ve kept it alive for more than two decades now. The least it could do in return is to become inflamed and volatile when you needed a break. You just know the little prick will hold out until you’re in a remote jungle to explode and will probably kill you. Typical.

Fortunately for you, your body is still intact, reasonably healthy (unless you’ve swallowed a pipe bomb without realising, as far as you know you’re in pretty good shape) and you make it to work. And it’s not all bad.

Sure, you have to deal with ten zillion emails, make actual meaningful contributions to meetings and do three times the work you were expecting on that day. But then you might be sent out to an alpaca farm or a CWA event with unlimited scones. There’s generally something that happens that makes things that little bit less awful. Some rogue co-worker may act on a whim and bring out some toasted bagels complete with smear. You may have to take a photo of a puppy or interview a man about the ins and outs of honey and be told that neglecting bees is illegal. Heck, you might get retweeted by someone!

Sure, you’re much busier than you would be if you were home on the couch. You’re also wearing shoes. And doing work takes a lot more work than laying down. But it’s not all bad. Because going to work is much like remembering you forgot to brush your teeth after you’ve got all comfortable in bed – except you don’t get paid for brushing your teeth, and you can brush your teeth in just your knickers. It seems like a big deal. You feel like your body is a wax strip, and separating yourself from the mattress will be a painful affair. And so the whole ordeal is incredibly daunting. But the truth is, getting up out of the cocoon of your body heat and self-loathing is the biggest battle. Once you’re up and brushing, you realise it’s not that bad. Before you know it, you’re done.

At the end of the day, you’ve made it to the end of the day and before you know it you’re back in your seven-year-old Best and Less pyjama pants watching the home renovation channel. And you and your appendix are friends again.

Until next Monday.

May 19 marks 25 years since Daryl Braithwaite’s classic The Horses cracked the number 1 in the charts, and hour hearts.

It seems a fitting time to close the chapter on my three-part mega series epic The Daryl.

It was October when I first spoke the man. It was November when I saw him perform this audio gift to the world. And my last chapter in this gripping saga was published (and by published, I mean “made public via a free web platform” and not printed on actual paper or under any legitimate banner) in April. I realise this has been a drawn out progression, but it has taken me quite a lot to process what I experienced.

My Christian ancestors were right to think The Lord would rise again. But maybe they were wrong in thinking The Son of God would return to the earth as a physical human being. Maybe, just maybe, He came back to earth not as blood and bone, but through song. Perhaps this time the Big Boppa up Toppa came back to earth not through the vaginal canal of maiden who wears a lot of blue, but through the vocal chords of a humble man who also wears blue (in the film clip anyway). Maybe, like Mary’s uterus was the Sacred Vessel to carry The Son of God, Daryl’s diaphragm is a holy chalice for the Second Coming.

Think about it for a second. The Horses has the power to bring grown men to tears. It turns dance floors into one giant hug. It unites people. I guarantee you that blasting The Horses through speakers during a riot would by more effective in ending the madness than any amount of tear gas or water guns. The Horses is a spiritual force that cannot be denied.

The day I saw The Horses performed live changed my very genetic makeup. It was like a near death experience; a saw the light, and I saw a higher power. I believed.

Those opening bars were like nothing I had ever experienced before. I don’t know how to articulate how rapturous it was, but suffice to say that all the penises in the world could never achieve the euphoric heights I reached in those opening seconds. I was one with the universe. I was light. I was a sunset casting a thousand sparking reflections in the ocean. I transcended space and time and saw the colours of eternal love.

Behind me were rows and rows of indifferent middle-aged people sitting in their plastic chairs, keeping to their assigned seating. But I could not be contained. I cared not for their judgemental eyes and danced like a woman possessed. At one point I slipped past security guards and ran right up to the barrier to stare adoringly up at the figure emitting the sounds of ecstasy. His hair was greyed, his armskin was withered and his body sagged; but he was beautiful. As the stage lights formed a glowing aura outlining his aging shape, I knew I had seen true glory.

The rest of the song is a blur, with my memories mirroring that last scene in Grease when Danny and Sandy are in the clouds. Somehow I had reached the heavens. My feet were on the ground, but that man’s glorious voice took me there, way up in the sky.

I don’t know how to end this recount, nay, gospel. There are no words to convey the emotions that tsunamied over me, no definitions that can accurately describe how I felt. And so I leave you with this, a photo my snap happy co-worker captured in the aftermath of the great rhapsody. Amen.

The other day I found myself saying, “I don’t know who you are, but I want to be you,” out loud after coming across a photo on Instagram. Please keep in mind that I currently am the only living being in the house; I don’t even have a pot plant to pass judgment on me. But I feel like the many swan figurines in my house (again, I can get away with this as I live alone) cringed a little inside at that one.

Want to know what it was a photo of?

A woman’s hand holding what looked like a Reuben sandwich, which had been buttered generously on out the outside and grilled to perfection.

If my wish came true and I was that person, I would be holding said buttery, meaty delight and therefore would be within close enough proximity to it to shove it down my throat with the gusto of a girl who claims she “only getsss along with guyyyyz”.

The beautiful thing this whole incident, aside from the sandwich of course, was that I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone.

When the closest thing to another living, judging organism in your home is the mould growing on your couch, you can go about your business without having to justify your behaviour to anyone. As freeing as this is, it can be a breeding ground for a whole other kind of bacteria, which infests the mind rather than the lungs (please never sleep on my couch; I can’t be responsible for how sick a piece of furniture I got free from a friend of a former work colleague makes you). It’s the kind of growth that makes think that your home is a judgement free zone.

And that’s bad, because it’s not.

Like it or loathe it, eventually someone other than you will enter your house and they WILL comment on things. Whether it’s the bunch of flowers that are still in a vase despite all the petals having dropped off or a collection of onion tableware, people are going to notice it. And they will tell you they’ve noticed it. And they will ask you why it’s there. And you won’t be able to verbalise why you paid ten whole dollars on a set of salt and pepper shakers and a vinegar bottle shaped like onions. Telling your houseguest/the intruder that you “thought they were cool” or you “really like onions” won’t cut it.

They won’t say much more on the topic, but they will make a face that tells you they don’t approve or they think you’re a bit weird and you will want to show them the door. When you live alone, your house becomes incredibly personal. Once you finally realise that you call the shots, you start being yourself without restraint. And this leaves its mark on your humble abode; sometimes by way of DNA but mostly by way of décor styling, both conscious and unconscious. So when someone picks on your knick-knackery, it feels like they’re picking on you.

Perhaps this is why have very few friends, and live in another state to many of them.

So I went with a bottle a vodka.

A few days ago I posted about not knowing what to buy as a gift for a friend’s baby shower. This was a challenge for two reasons

• this woman had once compared a foetus to a cluster of cancer cells
• I like to win the gift-giving prize, which is only existeant in my head. I like to walk around, smug in knowing my gift was by far superior to any garbage any other schmuck presented to the giftee, wrapped poorly, might I add.

So when I still had nothing two hours before the shower (weird thing to call an event, if you ask me. I’m certain Aurora’s parents didn’t call that party they had at the start of Sleeping Beauty a baby shower, so why should we?) I was uneasy.

I don’t like loosing in the gift stakes, but I knew I had to make a decision. I knew I was never going to buy a gift that would be really thoughtful and helpful, because the whole mothering thing isn’t something I have a lot of experiences with:

So I thought it’d go with the fallback option: the joke gift. It is undoubtedly a risky move when you have a woman housing a growing infant and about 17 million different hormones, but it was the only option I had. I quickly did a lap of the shopping centre, grabbed a colour-neutral gift bag (because when baby genders are concerned, you just can’t take any risks with blues or pinks) and high tailed it to the event. I thought my gift would be useful, but also get a few laughs. Plus, I told myself, my friend is someone who you would assume would get a lot of joke presents. There will probably lots of gifts like this pouring in.

Wrong.

It turns out that baby showers are for thoughtful, loving and practical gifts. I’m talking nappies. I’m talking hand-made toys. I’m talking nipple pads, for fuck’s sake. I would have never thought of nipple pads in my whole life.

And the thing about showers is that the gift opening is done publically. So your gift choices are not only seen by everyone, but you see how everyone sees your gift. You see not only your friends reation to the present, but every other bastard’s in the whole room. And boy was I up against some tough competition.

The mother in law had knitted two blankets and two toys, as well as giving two store-bought toys which looked like they came from Kate Middleton’s nursery for crying out loud. They were so beautiful.

Then there was the thoughtful mother who had a bag full of hand-me-downs and incontinence pads ready and waiting for all that marvellous after birth action which goes on down there.

As the present pile diminished, I realised I was the only one who went with the joke option. As she reached for my brown bag, I braced myself for an awkward silence.

But thankfully, the vodka was the last thing to have been pulled from the bag. The first was the card, which I had creatively made by folding a piece of brown cardboard in half and writing “gestation celebrations!” on the front. Then came the book Go The Fuck to Sleep. This was a good order, because it was child-orientated, unlike the rest of the bag. My friend then pulled out a thimble (as an aside, how surprised are you that they still make these little bastards, what a win it was for me being able to find one on such sort notice!) and the mini-bar sized bottle of rum.

Me, proclaiming knowingly: “It’s so you can put the baby to sleep!”

I’m sure I once heard something about using a thimble full of rum to knock out an infant so you could get on with your life for a few hours. I just can’t recall where I heard it, or if the source I gleamed this information from was a reliable one. The legitimacy of this “old trick” started to melt away and I was beginning to realise that I had told an expectant mother to feed her small baby rum.

Me, confidence in mothering tip now wavering: “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

*undisclosed chatter and uneasy laughter in the room.

Me: “Don’t worry guys, I’m not going to be having the babies any time soon!”

Thankfully this acted as a diversion while the vodka was pulled out.

I don’t regret my gifting in the slightest, but I do finally understand the fear of judgement from other mothers I hear so much about. I wasn’t scolded or anything, but as my brown paper bag was brought into the spotlight, I suddenly felt weirdly vulnerable. The women weren’t individuals any more, they were The Mother Folk, a powerful fictional force of judgement. And just for a fraction of a second, I found myself understanding what mothers go through.

But then I realised that, if this gift competition only existed in my head, I could be in charge of crowing the winner. And while I missed out on the Best Overall Gift prize, I was number on in the Novelty Gift section.

What does one buy as baby shower gift for a woman who once called babies “little tumours”?

A very dear friend of mine has undergone some huge transformations lately, namely in the uterine region. Where there was once a regular declaration freedom dripping out of there, now snuggles a beating heart and, more importantly, the opportunity to craft a truly fantastic person. In an even bigger transformation, this woman is now having a baby shower. Yep. One of those gatherings where women get together and talk about infants and bundles of joy and “the journey of motherhood”. What makes it more fun? These kinds of occasions are generally dry, which isn’t my friend’s style. I mean, she had to be almost waterboarded to agree to it, but the fact that she’s having one is huge.

It’s less than a week away and I still haven’t bought a gift yet. Because, to be frank, I don’t know what to give her.

It’s always bloody confronting every time someone who is more than a casual acquaintance to me procreates, but this gestational period came as a particular shock. We used to spend out morning tea breaks almost saving the world with our conversation topics – climate change, the public health system, bushfire permits, breastfeeding etc. These sessions usually saw us “respectfully” disagree with one another, but always in good fun. What we did agree on, more often than not, was our stance on the production of people. Bratty kids, vaccinations, the merits of threatening little arseholes with a wooden spoon. We both had wild ideas about parenting being about forging good people, not having children just because it was the thing to do. Now, these conversations were some time ago, so I’m paraphrasing here, but there was one that featured this gem:

Dear Friend with Wild Ideas: They’re like cancers growing in there, really. They’re little tumours.

She wasn’t talking about the effect of selfie culture on modern society, she was talking about children.

Sure, she might have said it with hint of a joke, but the sentiment was there. So you’d be forgiven for thinking a person like this should be the last person to grow a little bambino. Hence my surprise of her baby news.

So I have had to think about what may have changed her mind on the practices of procreation. And I have to say that I can see the appeal. There’s the whole unconditional love thing. There’s also the fact that, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to grow your own retirement care plan. Right now I’m watching my mother and her siblings band together as a support for my aging grandmother, and I have to say it would be nice to know I had a net of guilt and love to fall into when I whither away. Plus, and this is a big plus, you’re practically able to create your own best friend. It will take some time and a fucktonne of commitment but you’ll be able to fashion the ideal person to be your best mate. It’s like one of those grow your own dinosaur kits, where your womb is the cup of water and the water is thousands and thousands of dollars in school fees, grocery bills and horse riding lessons. And because, statistically speaking, these grow-your-own-besties will outlive you, you hopefully should have a BFF for life. That’s a sweet deal.

The other thing is knowing that you’re leaving your mark on this hateful rock we’re all floating around in space on. You do your best to turn out a good person to make it a better place here. And, despite her views about dolphins (she thinks they’re all plotting an uprising – like that episode of The Simpsons except she hasn’t seen it…) I reckon she’ll craft a non-shit human being.

So now that I’m looking back at it, it shouldn’t be that much of a shock.

This woman with her wild ideas and more than adequate knowledge of birth control is probably the ideal candidate for shaping and moulding a bunch of cells into a fully-fledged human being. That’s not me saying that every other bastard would be a shithouse mother; there are marvellous women out there of all ages and backgrounds with all kinds of views on whether farmers should have to apply for a fire permit bringing up wonderful children. I’m in awe of people who willingly sign themselves up to have their vaginas torn open and to be responsible for keeping something other than a plant alive.

What I’m saying is I don’t think you have to be the “mothering type” – whatever that is – to be a great parent. You don’t have to be a type at all. You just have to be a good enough person to try your best.

But where does this leave me on the gift front? Should I get her a tea towel saying “you’re not going to fuck this up”? A bottle of cancer-blocking sunscreen? A barrel of moonshine to drink away the pain of having a living being yanked out her birth canal? A book with 17 ways to turn placenta into a meaty summer cocktail?

At this stage the only idea I have is ribbon saying “I survived my baby shower”.

Suggestions are greatly appreciated at this point.

My best friend’s 50-year-old mother has better weekends than me.

I’m not saying the lady shouldn’t be having fun. She’s fabulous. She’s glamorous. She’s just got back from a solo retreat in Bali. I give her two very enthusiastic thumbs up. But when you compare the snapchats she sent out this weekend and the snapchats I sent out this weekend, it paints a pretty bleak picture.

She went to the Gold Cost this weekend, Australia’s severely underwhelming answer to Las Vegas. She sent out snapchats of her and a sweet honey poolside. I however, sent out snapchats like this:

Admittedly, her “sweet honey” was her husband of a few decades and she wasn’t taking a beer bong from a former Big Brother housemate or anything. But the contrast between our posts is still alarming.

As a young person, I’m supposed to be a heaving, drunken mess. I should spend my Sunday mornings telling a bunch of cackling girls wearing sunnies with lenses the size of dinner plates about the schlep I up woke up next to earlier that day. I should be swinging on the rails of party buses. I should have to take dresses to dry cleaners’ and avoid questions about what the stains on the fabric are. I’m at the age when I’m at the cusp of taking a long hard look at myself and tell that self to grow up.

And while I may be wearing a pyjama set with glitter and a Disney character on the jumper, I find myself needing to grow…down?

I have been conditioned to think that in order to grow, you first need to have your dirty hoodrat stage. I can’t get to my happy ending without realising that I have to change everything about who I am – especially if I want a man to be included in that ending. And I don’t think I have had enough of a wild time make me face some hard truths to catapult me into successful, blissful adulthood.

I mean, no one wants to have to chew on an emergency contraceptive pill for breakfast or be too hungover to enjoy their overpriced avocado on toast, but the precursors to these things usually involve a laugh or two. It gives you something to do other than find yourself accidentally hooked on The Mask of Zoro on TV, spending your Saturday night watching it right until the end despite the frustrating ad breaks. I’m supposed to be wracking up debts and sexually transmitted diseases with wild holiday flings. This all comes back to my idea that my life could be a television series. Who the hell would watch a show about someone who’s big weekend plans involve allowing herself to have her eggs with toast AND butter. I mean, prepubescent Kirsten Dunst was right, butter is divinity, but it won’t get you laid.

People around my age make rules for themselves that they inevitably break: I’ll never mix tequila and whiskey again; I’ll never sleep with Trevor again; That’s the last time I do blow off a Larry Emdur look-alike’s abs. But these rules are always broken, and they are usually broken on the weekend. In a way, I’m like these sequin-clad people. I make a rule and find myself breaking it on a weekend, when I’m weak and not thinking straight. But my version of this is much more boring; my rule is “I’ll never overzealously prod my ears with an cotton tipped bud until it hurts or I cough”. And when I break the rule, it’s far less fun. It means I can’t hear properly for a little while and sometimes get shooting pains in my eardrum. As I raise that little white prodding stick to my earhole, I don’t have a table of girls screaming their “woos” at me, it’s just me and the sound of my bathroom’s exhaust fan drowning out the silence of my decaying soul. I need to fuck my life up fast, so I can then un-fuck my life. It’s complicated, but suffice to say I need to create the kind of memories that will make for an interesting tell-all book on my youth and right now I have nothing to tell. I have to do something about it now because if I wait much longer I’ll be too old to be considered a hot mess and will instead be labelled “sad” or “needs help”. I only have a brief window in which I can be a wreck but still have a future. The time for recklessness is now!

But I think I’ll start tomorrow: I’ve already showered and the first episode of the new season of Grand Designs to starts in like 20 minutes.