I’m at a stage in my life where I have high thread count sheets, but also have a bottle of Trevi chilling in the fridge.

It’s a transitional period. I’m finding myself, yet I am building my career. This means I get to be a hot mess*, but also have expensive towels. It’s an interesting time in a female person’s life, which is probably why it’s often fodder for television series. There are so many hijinks to be had – will she date someone obsessed with public fornication? Will she have a career crisis that can only repaired by an honest but humorous monologue about convenient experience she had that week? Will she finally fall in love with the hopelessly attractive but vaguely detestable man introduced to the show in the first episode?

Again, this all comes down to my hallucination that my life is a television series. Unfortunately, it’s not – well not yet, but hopefully somebody from Hulu will stumble across my little blog and realise the deluded musings of an everyday Australian girl are exactly what modern television is missing. I lead an everyday life with no apparent narrative arc other than my continued existence – and considering my Saturday night involves just me, my laptop and a comfy oversized jumper, I would say that narrative arc bears a closer resemblance to a flatlining heart monitor.

Because my life is an actual life and not an idealised representation of what a roomful of writers thinks the existence of middle class woman should be, there is no underlying theme of my experiences. What happens to me everyday has nothing to do with, for example, modern relationships or the empowerment of women or even power struggles within elite law firms.

Now that that’s cleared up, back to the amusing juxtapositions of my life.

I’m at a stage where there are a lot of age appropriate douple-ups. Where I’m at now is essentially the vaginal-opening-shaped portion of a Venn diagram where the circle of Young Adult and Responsible Adult overlap. Call me Malcolm, because I’m in the middle.

Clearly I should have put “legitimate-looking handwriting” in the Responsible Adult circle. 

But unlike childhood when being in the middle meant you were the overlooked Jan, being in the middle as an “adult” means you have a bit of power. It means you get to be chosey, and pick at aspects of your age like the Sizzler salad bar. Sometimes, what you pick up with the standardised tongs is delicious, other times it can be laced with poison because of a disgruntled worker. That’s life.

So I get to choose a few dishes from the Responsible Adult bar – having a business card, regular pap smears, sometimes wearing work-appropriate heels to the office. But because of my mid-twenties status, I’m also able to load my plate up with Young Adult treats such as double fisting free champagne and wearing a long shirt as a dress even though bending shows off my undies.

Unfortunately this mid-status equates to only paying for the salad bar option at the counter, which means there are some things you miss out on. Sure, you’re able to access all the potato skins you want but when the waiter drops off the steak someone ordered at your table, you can’t help but wish you had committed to a main meal of your own.

Now, let me stop you right there. I remind you that my life isn’t yet a popular television series about a successful, adorably eccentric lass looking for a life partner. And I’m in no way equating a life partner to a well-cooked hunk of steak. I’m not yearning for piece of steak of my own, daydreaming about a slab of meat I can pour gravy over – although now I am wondering if anyone has ever done that as a way to spice things up. What I am saying is that, should you be expected to join someone else’s table, it would be nice to be able to refer to that steak and tell them “I can’t, I’m already full”.

That’s right. I’m taking about excuses no one questions which only applies to couples. Say what you will about committed relationships, they always offer an out for just about anything. Got a dull social obligation that wouldn’t be worth the smears of foundation required to look presentable for? Your life partner has a sporting thing they need your support for. Asked to sign up for an optional work training day over a weekend? Romantic interest is getting their wisdom teeth out and need you wipe away their drool. Facing a sweaty, unpleasant extended family Christmas dinner you would rather catch headlice than attend? Significant other has already told their family you’re spending the holiday with them. Relationships give you the obligation-cancelling power of claiming a case of diarrhoea of biblical proportions, while pining the disgust on someone else. You’re able to lie about deaths, but because you’re getting out of something due to the fictional heart attack of your partner’s stepdad’s mother you don’t have to worry about jinxing your own family members. It’s an ultimate free pass of excuses, and I don’t like not having that for myself. What I need is someone who I can blame for not being able to do stuff I don’t want to do without being obliged to do stuff I don’t want to do.   Because unfortunately, sometimes having a piece of steak is the only thing that can excuse you from doing something you just don’t feel like. You may already have a lot on your plate, but the potato skins you gorged yourself on from the Young Adult bar isn’t accepted as filling. People assume that not only can you fit more in, but you’re actually hungry for something more. Two soup bowls of pasta, several helpings of cheesy bread and a token effort at the salads will never be seen as as substantial as a steak dinner. You could have three carefully curated pre-dinner desserts (one which isapple crumble centred, one chocolate overload and the other purely ice cream based) and people would still think you’re compensating for a steak no matter how creative each bowl was. Unfortunately, that’s the world we still live in: a world in which potato skins aren’t good enough.

And, just so we’re clear, I’m talking about metaphorical potato skins. Literal potato skins will fill every bastard up.

*So I didn’t realise that hot mess was an all-bad thing. I used to think it was some kind of super sexy former child star who has a shitty car, is sexually irresponsible and can hold her piss like a team of reserve-grade rugby league players – they care less about their on-field performance and have an inferiority complex on account of not being good enough for A grade so these guys know how to party – all while having an unexplainably banging rig and somehow kills it at their job. When someone says “hot mess” I think of Amy Schumer’s character in Trainwreck before the conventions of romantic comedies forced her to turn her life around and submit to the whims of a man and the ideals of society. So I used to like to refer to myself as one of these people until I found out that “hot mess” is essentially the human equivalent of a wheelie bin in the hot summer sun on the first bin day of the year – yeah, Christmas AND New Years, which means prawn heads, beer-soaked paper towels and those devilled eggs the neighbours insist on giving you which were leftover from the party you took them to as your contribution to the nibblies. That stinks guys. Apparently “hot mess” is someone with a shitty car, sexually irresponsible, drinks a lot and looks like death whose boss is searching for excuses to fire them without being open to a Fair Work prosecution.

Earlier this weekend I considered signing up for a mentoring program. My old college put out a call for alumnae to sign up to help third year students make that giant leap from smelling of day-old goon and wearing ruggers to lectures to being an actual professional looking employee. The brief said it didn’t matter what level in our careers we were at – any help was good help.

Maybe it’s the narcissistic show pony in me, but something pushed me to sign up for it. Sure, it might be a littler extra work but it also would mean a steady supply of admiration coming my way. The Idealist In Me said “you have so much to offer a supple, young student” and I went to click the link to sign up with grand visions of me, wearing a blazer and stylish but practical shoes leading some empowered-looking young ladies into some kind of celestial board room. Together we would take out our sledgehammers and smash the glass ceiling before turning and posing at a non-existent camera like the opening credits of a local news broadcast.

But then The Realist Inside Me started screaming, kicked in a plaster wall in and began dragging The Idealist In Me away from the “click the link” button face down by her hair so her teeth ground down to bloody stumps on coarse cement while swearing like a sailor. Think Inside Out meets Happy Tree Friends and you have an accurate representation of what was happening inside my head. This was a contentious idea.

The Realist Inside Me demanded I list a few concrete examples of what exactly I could offer a supple, young student. But before I could come up with that, the little bastard began listing examples of how I could significantly screw up a fresh mind. And I had to agree that some of these didn’t bode well for mentoring magic.

I’ve dealt with a few work experience kids in my time, and some of those outcomes were not ideal. I once got into a tense standoff with a high schooler over the difference between similes and metaphors (I know my poetic devices, don’t fuck with me). I also coerced the kid to watch Billy Maddison after Adam Sandler talk got all too real. I freaked him out by baking him a going away cake from scratch, complete with a terrifyingly bad icing drawing of an alligator (because writing out “see you later alligator” was impractical).

I’m also reasonably terrible at introductions. In fact, I would use the word appalling. Here’s an example of how I introduced myself to a uni student we took on as a short-term intern:

Me: I’m Dannielle aaaand I am …. wearing a yellow skirt.

Editor: This is Dannielle. She’s our senior journalist.

Me: Hey.

If you think that’s bad, here’s an actual transcript of my introduction to one of the country’s most prominent politicians. I anticipated it was going to be touch and go, so I baked one of my mother’s fruitcakes to take along as a buffer to conversational stumblings. Upon reflection, I’m glad for my fruity foresight:

Me: If there’s an awkward silence get into the fruitcake.

Disclaimer, I’m not great at small talk – I once started a conversation asking a guy if he had ever got a chicken wing stuck in his beard.

One of The Country’s Most Prominent Politicians: …

(awkward silence)

Me: Let’s get into the questions.

That’s not something a lamb of a journalist needs to be exposed to. That’s not something anyone wanting to not appear as an unmistakable imbecile should be exposed to.

Now The Realist Inside Me is getting louder. She’s yelling about my childlike insistence that the office tissue box feature Frozen characters. She’s bringing up that time I worked yanking a newborn calf out of its mother into an intro about spring. She’s raving about my most ironic typo (to date, anyway) when I wrote “education” without the “a”. With a track record like that, what could I possibly teach an emerging professional without rendering them unemployable?

In a final blow, The Realist Inside Me goes through my phone records for evidence of my lack of qualification to give life advice to a vulnerable young’un. Perhaps my inaptitude to provide sounds guidance on the path to success can be summed up in one text, sent from the Laundromat, which I go to because I don’t own a working washing machine:

I just got really excited because when I put my washing on, I changed be machine setting to a cook wash and it knocked a dollar off the price!

Things are finally looking up!

It’s about as impressive as a screen door. The pathetic optimism attached to the meagre saving does not exactly denote an example worth following. I’m about to give in.

But then, after spitting out a mouthful of blood and tooth shards, The Idealist In Me speaks up. It’s a bit muffled, but she chimes in with something only the glass half full kind of person would say: “if you’ve pulled that kind of shit and you still manage to be employed, you must be doing something right”.

And while her swollen face is distracting, her message is clear: sometimes you have to measure success not in wealth, rank or accomplishment, but with how much you’ve been able to get away with. And despite all your major cock ups and irrefutable character flaws, you have to remind yourself that, so far, you have avoided being thrown into a hessian sack and tossed into the sea like a litter of unwanted kittens. Maybe, you aren’t an intolerable bucket of disappointment. And maybe someone can learn from that.

Before The Realist Inside Me can make a rebuttal, The Idealist In Me makes a dive for the “click the link” button and I’m signing up for the program. I might not be the best example in the world, but I’m also hoping I have something to give as well. I may wear a pony belt to work most days, but at least I go there. Most of the time, I’m also wearing shoes. And if nothing else answers the question of whether I would be a competent mentor, I’ll leave them with this last question on the online form:

Is there anything extra you would like to add/offer when putting you in touch with the student you will be mentoring?

I have a business card, you know.

For those of you playing along at home/keeping up with my blog as a way of reminding yourself that your life could be worse, my car wasn’t in great shape last week.

Long story short, it was sitting unused, taped together in my garage for the weekend and it needed attention from someone with more qualifications than being competent at using a hot glue gun to make it legal to drive again. After explaining to my co-workers my predicament, I had roped in the only male-type person in our department to make calls on my behalf so to avoid the mysterious uterus surcharge that sometimes makes its way on to an invoice statement. The Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague kindly obliged and gave the wreckers staff my brief which is best described as: “mate, I don’t care how it bloody looks, just as long as it’s road worthy”. After this, Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague has since tried to tell me to get a new car. Which I balked at for a number of reasons:

Reason Number One: The sole purpose of a car is for transportation needs. My chariot is still able to ferry me and my perpetually over-packed overnight bag from A to B so it still fulfils its purpose.

Sure, it doesn’t exactly look brand new. The ceiling of the car is held up with thumbtacks. There’s a weird brownish smattering of gunk on the inside of the door that I can’t explain. The bonnet has so much hail damage it looks like cellulite. It’s missing a hubcap.

But while there may be some exterior imperfections and the occasional quirk in the mechanics, it still manages to get where it’s going. My mechanic George tells me it’s the best advertisement for Toyota that could ever be created. Throwing something away when it still does what its supposed to do wasteful, and it this kind of throwaway, keep up with the Joneses culture that is going to be our country’s undoing one day.

Reason Number Two: There’s a girl with the same car as me (right down to the 300,000 plus mileage and the missing hubcap) and I am determined for mine to outlast its rival. I thirst for the day my vehicle stands over her car’s decomposing body as it is lowered into the ground like a scene from Pretty Little Liars. My sensible family mover is A.

Reason Number Three: I’m quite poor. I’m in no state to be making financial commitments – I put chicken nuggets on my credit card last week.

Reason Number Four: Even if I had a sackful of dollars, I’d be wanting to trade that currency for more chicken nuggets. I’m not wasting hard-earned nugg-dollars on buying a car when I already have a working one in my asset portfolio – it’s called economic sense.

Reason Number Five: I have formed a strong emotional bond with this lifeless object, and after being scarred by what can happen to disused machines in The Brave Little Toaster as a child, I’m not about to let that happen to one of my oldest friends. They say that if a friendship reaches the seven-year mark, you’re friends for life. I’ve had this car for nearly eight years, so it should technically be a candidate for one of my bridesmaids by now. It’s so intertwined in my life, it made it into my Year 12 yearbook:

*

I’ve been through a lot with my slightly dented metallic mate. There was that time we accidentally sped into raging flood waters and were nearly swept away; a lighter, sportier car would have been literally up the creek but my heavyset lady’s big bones weighted us down and by some miracle allowed the tyres enough traction to take us to safety (note: if it’s flooded, forget it). There was that time I needed an impromptu platform to dance on for a friend’s video; a smaller model would have crumpled under my intensive thrust work, but the wide roof provided the perfect podium for my powerful gyrations. It may have the roof held up by thumbtacks, but it has a boot big enough to support my borderline hoarding insistence of having a swag, a tent, a beach cricket set and half a carto of Tooeys on me at all times – just in case of an emergency. This emergency situation crept up on me before, when My Curly Haired Friend and I went on a day trip and found ourselves stranded on top of a mountain with nothing but warm tinnies for dinner. When it got too cold to hang out in the tent, we drank within the warmth of my noble steed and things got … emotional. Some would say the stinking hot piss we were sinking loosened our lips, but I like to think our raw, tear-soaked heart-to-heart crying-so-hard-snot-comes-out session was encouraged and nurtured by the innards of my fraying interior like the flabby arms of a kind grandmother.

My car has been a boat, a bed, an esky, a go-go dancer stage, a campsite bar, a Splendour mule, a portable wardrobe, a literal shelter from the storm, a metallic blue feelings container and a reliable friend for nearly eight years – I can’t just let all that go because it needed a little cosmetic surgery.

I started to explain this to my Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague but by the time I got halfway through explaining my first reason, his head was shaking and he was reaching for his headphones.

Apparently there is a shorter way of explaining my decision making process, and that is simply saying “I don’t want to”. But that kind of caper would make for a very dull blog post.

*The chocolate smear did eventually come off the back seat. Now I can walk into my 10 year reunion with my held held high! 

Nah yeah: Having actual plans on a Tuesday night to get exited about. 

Instead of sitting at home and re-watching When Harry Met Sally or playing with my favourite new website faceinhole.com (that is literally what it is – you make a hole to put people’s faces in. I did it with a pastry plan and the Home Alone movie poster on the weekend and, despite getting very few likes, it was fantastic). 

I had actual plans instead. With another person. Just look at these excited texts that were exchanged: 

Actual Person: Let me know when you’re on your way!!

Me: Woooo! 

I am just having a cup of tea, and then it’s pants and Coles.

I’m so excited.

Good God.

Yeah nah: The excuted texts were about me buying a bag of frozen onion rings. Heating up the frozen onions and eating them. The whole bag. 

When the most valuable thing you own is being held together with tape, you can safely assume it’s a metaphor for your life.

Last week the bumper bar came off my car and by golly did I overanalyse it.

While some people are able to coast through life blindly thinking everything that comes their way is pure chance, I possess the knowledge that there’s some conniving bastard up there scheming away to fuck with my life for a few cheap laughs. I know that nothing in this world is an accident. Nothing is pure arse.

For me it’s less “everything happens for a reason” and more “there is some kind of divine, all-seeing television producer who added this incident into the mix as a catalyst for change, a lesson learned or maybe just a comical narrative arc”. So I have a tendency to think of my weeks in episode format, thinking each time seven days tick over there’s a new adventure to be had and a new lesson to be learned. In my mind, there’s a Truman Show-esque operation going on here that involves man with a headset and clipboard hurling life events at me to see what happens next. However, the voice over is me, so I’m slapping some kind of narrative together each week based on whatever shit is thrown at me. Its like less gruesome bits of Hunger Games, the more mundane aspects of Big Brother and the less glamorous parts of Sex and the City all rolled into one. Every time the ratings drop, the headsetted man chucks a curveball my way.

So when my car was divided into one big piece and one small piece, I knew something was up. I backed out my driveway, heard a crunching noise and nearly kept driving thinking I’d crushed a non-existent pipe or paint can on my way out of the garage. I got out and had a gander, but I wasn’t expecting to see a mechanical prolapse littering my driveway. I let out a lest than enthusiastic “yeah good”, looked around to see if anyone noticed and quietly drove back into the garage where I could assess the damage and collapse into a snotty, irate mess within the private confines of my balmy garage. Exhausted from weeks of shithouse sleep, broke from poor life event hindsight and slightly stressed as a result of this winning combo, I’ll have to admit a few angry tears burned tracks down my cheeks (although I’ll cry at anything these days – from engagement news to pictures of my friend’s offspring to The Goofy Movie – it doesn’t take much to get me going).

But before dousing my home in petrol, lighting a match, faking my death and hitchhiking my way to a new life in Mexico, I decided to have a tinker with my noble steed – I’d pulled up and put back together clicky pens before, how much harder could this be?

After discovering the front indicators were once attached to the bumper, I set about haphazardly reconnecting the wires to the bulbs. One side’s wiring had come off in a neat plug and was easy to reattach, but the other had frayed, metal threads and what looked like the world’s tiniest USB connection. This minuscule wiring project required only the most sophisticated, professional tools, which I obviously didn’t have. But who needs a tool belt when you have an iPhone torchlight, a sewing kit and a pointy toothpick with a tiger’s head on the other end? With a few choice curse words and a lot of squinting, I had managed to fix my blinkers without electrocuting myself and leaving some poor emergency worker to discover what could have been the most pathetic death of their career. And while positioning the bumper kept knocking the Bush Mechanic wiring out of place, I eventually got it back on with both blinkers working. For an added touch of glamour, I selected a translucent duct tape, which was by far more stylish than those other cars you see out there with their red, green or black tape sticking out like a sore toe. I guess I’ve always been luxe like that. Sure, my car was essentially being held together with tape, but at least it was now in one piece.

I’d managed to overcome that week’s hurdle in under two hours, but it wasn’t until this week that I realised it was a life lesson episode. My trusty, slightly dented, steed was more than an overworked family vehicle; it was a graphic representation of my life.

My existence was the equivalent to a 20-year-old car falling apart. I had let my lawn grow so unruly that my kind but fed up neighbours mowed it that afternoon. But I didn’t realise what was going on because I was disorientated from a five-hour nap in the middle of a school day. I turned up on their doorstep the next day in my pyjamas and presented them with an apology pie. But I was only able offer them the family-sized dessert I was planning on eating myself because I had purposefully made excess dough and had eaten so much raw pastry by the time the pie was done the idea of putting the confection in my mouth was akin to licking a used blackhead strip. And the only reason I was able to leave my bricks and motor personal bubble was because my bitter, decaying soul had been nursed back to an adequate level of health by hours of wisecracks and Dad lectures provided by the cast of Full House.

Last week the lesson I learned was that I had some major fixer-upping to do. But it wasn’t just sticking a car together using office supplies. I had some real life repairing to do. But I feel the ripping of one part of my car off another wasn’t an error in my reversing skills (clearly) but a premeditated intervention aimed at teaching me a lesson. The lesson is not that I need to pay more attention to my rear view mirror, but that I have the capability to repair the damage I inflict on myself in life. Sure it might be sloppy and not exactly legal, but I can put things back together even if I don’t have the conventional metaphorical tools to do so. It may take figurative toothpicks and safety pins, but I can get my life back into working order if I just persevere.

Or at least I hope that’s the case, because unfortunately not all things can be fixed with duct tape.

I just played complaint knifey-spoony with my father and lost big time.

I haven’t been sleeping very well lately and when I become super tired for an extended period of time, I get very whingey. Usually I can complain like a demon, but deprive me of some sleep and I can hit new lows of patheticery even Kanye West would think twice about tweeting. So when my hotline blung (I’d like to think that the correct way to refer to hotline bling in past tense for is hotline blung but I haven’t any real authority to make that call) earlier tonight, it could only mean one thing: a good ol fashioned venting. But the problem was the bling was blung by my home number, and my father had done the dial.

I briefly detailed my ailments, and then my father proceeded to tell me about a teenager with cerebral palsy who loves cars but can’t get his licence and is watching all his mates hoon about from the sidelines. “It could always be worse,” he told me.

This is how it always goes when I attempt to trade my woes for sympathy with my father. I present my meagre quandaries and he shows them up. It’s almost like a competition. To better explain this phenomenon, let me put this scenario into pop culture context:

Imagine the scene from Crocodile Dundee when Paul Hogan is threatened with a pocketknife by a New York City Punk. The missus is very concerned and reacts just as the hooligan wanted. But leathery old Mick barely reacts and whips out his shard of steel so large it could have been a surfboard, dwarfing the other knife scaring the thug and his mates away. Now imagine that instead of the little baby pocketknife, the New York City Punk is actually armed with a fist full of complaints – job’s a joke, you’re broke, love life’s DOA, the standard issues facing Ross, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey and Chandler (although apparently affordable housing was never one of them). Sure, they’re not fun but they’re not particularly impressive life obstacles.

Then imagine my father being completely unmoved, chuckling in an eerily cheerful way. At this point I, the flamboyantly misguided youngster wearing old lino for a jacket thinking my weapon was especially remarkable, start looking from left to right, not sure what this crazy Aussie bastard is going to do next. My father then reaches into his native animal leather jacket and pulls out a misfortune so depressing it would not only make Australian Story, but would also be referenced on commercial breakfast television presenters the next day.

My father wears an akubra, a lot of khaki and still carries a pocketknife around on his belt even though having an offensive weapon in a public place is an offence that attracts a custodial sentence. Aside form “Dad”, he is only referred to as “Macca”. He drives an old Defender ute with the back seats ripped out to allow the secure storage of chainsaws, bags of spanners and unexplained lengths of rope. So it’s not too hard to imagine my father in this scenario.

“That’s not a problem, THIS is a problem,” is, in essence, what he tells me every time.

You see, my parents are packing when it comes to problems. My mother had polio as a kid, had three spinal fusions (one of those after her pregnancy with me, which, weirdly, kind of makes me feel like I’m tough because I destroyed my mother’s body – I like to think I was a hulk baby who punched my way upward and tore open her scars from her previous c sections, ripping my way to freedom) and now has a permanent tracheostomy which means she has a tube hanging out her neck to help her breathe. My father, on the other hand, is of reasonably good health but spent time in orphanages, not knowing his father and not being able to afford shoes as a youngster.

So to these people, my problems are not real problems.

To make matters worse, my father is closet Catholic, which means he isn’t visually or verbally outward about his faith but has those guilt-ridden “help thy neighbour” or “think of those brothers and sisters less fortunate than you” sort of ideas pulsating through his veins like the overwhelming desire to dress like a beefy Marilyn Munroe and sing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend in a room full of strangers. As much as he tries to ignore the sequins and feather boas of his true self, sometimes he will catch himself off guard and spend an afternoon moving furniture for a family who lost all their possessions in a fire or making sure his mother-in-law feels loved at Christmas. This is a bad thing when you want to wallow in your misery and be selfish. It’s especially bad when you’re fishing for sympathy. So instead of getting the deluxe triple dad Full House treatment when life gets me down, I get a combination of Mick Dundee, Abe Simpson and Maggie Smith’s character in the first half of Sister Act.

“There are plenty of other poor bastards out there who’ve got it a lot worse,” he tells me nearly word-for-word every time I start feeling sorry for myself.

Perhaps this is why I’ve become so good at complaining. I’ve had to compete with the best. My parents already set the benchmark pretty high in terms of setbacks, but raised the bar even higher by never feeling sorry for themselves. This is very annoying for me, their offspring, because if they don’t feel sorry for themselves for the shitty hand fate dealt them, I’m not entitled to wallow in self pity for anything less than they endured. If you can’t top a spinal tap, you’ve got nothing to whinge about.

You might say this is a good thing that offers a grounded perspective on the trivial woes that face a middle class white person like me, but for me there is nothing more decadent than sinking into a pit of pity. Wallowing is one of my favourite things to do – you get to eat family-sized portions of things with a single fork, you can watch as many Bette Midler movies as you want, you can wear jumpers than are three sizes too big for you and you can stare blankly into the abyss of your life. I love doing all of those things. Sometimes I think about having a fake break up weekend, when I get to enjoy all the perks of having a broken heart without all the lost emotional investment – I’m actually considering turning it into the next hottest retreat concept.

So it’s really unfair that I don’t have anything in my life that warrants marinating myself in misery. It’s not my fault I was properly vaccinated or came from a loving family. I didn’t choose this to happen to me. And for that matter, it’s not my fault I happened to be born in a country where my skin colour means I’m immediately accepted as the norm. It wasn’t my doing to be brought up in a stable home that always had food, electricity and no violence. It wasn’t my choice to be given an education. I didn’t decide to be heterosexual. And I certainly didn’t give the go ahead for my brain to fully develop in a normally-formed human body.

I didn’t get to be looked at differently because of the pigment of my skin, or be excluded because of the slant of my eyes. I didn’t get to be unable to participate in society because my brain works differently or my body spasms, contorts or doesn’t move. I didn’t get to be told my relationships were wrong or that I dressed like a freak. I didn’t get to be unable to keep up with schoolwork because I was hungry or bruised or tired from being up all night scared of what the next shouting match would bring. I didn’t get to not go to school or a doctor or have no bed or have no food to eat. I didn’t get to not be loved.

Yep. It’s pretty unfair alright. But I’m so good at complaining that I can complain about having nothing to complain about.

Last night I condemned someone to eating only the mediocre sandwiches at my funeral.

You don’t need to know the particulars of the conversation, but know that the context for such an exchange was laid by a drunk father figure, an overzealous whirl on the dancefloor and two grown men heavily skidding headfirst across loose gravel. Of course I turned an incident completely separate of me on its head to be all about me and establishing my superiority – my main objective in life – by considering how I would be affected should the chap die as a result of the incident. So, in a bid to circumvent my moral culpability, I told the young fellow, who I knew from my high school bus route, to consider seeking medical attention. My half-hearted suggestion was, in my mind, setting the pretence for my standing over his open grave with a smug look telling his cold, greying corpse “I told you so”. I would carry this all-knowing grin across the cemetery to the wake venue and help myself to the best array of the snacks knowing I did what I could and deserved that vanilla slice. Of course, this thought was communicated under the influence of three quarters of a bottle of Stone’s ginger wine, two beers, and at least four unwisely chosen whiskeys and could have gone over better. I can’t remember the phrasing, but I believe my icy retort banned the ungrateful fellow from any mildly exciting sandwich fillings on offer at my wake and, in no uncertain terms, a complete prohibition from mayonnaise of any kind.

This isn’t the first time I’ve started a petty hypothetical funeral war. Just before the Christmas break a co-worker and I were talking about hitting the highway home with considerable speed, when I steered the conversation from happy festive thoughts to our dramatic, fiery deaths.

Me: Wouldn’t it be great if we both crashed and died?

Less fabulous co-worker: Ummm

Me: Who do you reckon would have a bigger funeral?

*silence

Me: I’d like to think that my funeral would beat yours… People would be pretty distraught I reckon.

I then pointed out that while we were both from small towns and would expect a lot of those bastards to be upset, I had more separate pockets of friends who would be affected. Out of respect I tried to wrap up the conversation by implying that I would have only a fraction more mourners than him, but I think we both knew that if had have died on the same day, my funeral would have a longer guest list and extensive media coverage. Because when it all comes down to it, death is a competition.

I suppose it’s quite morbid, but it’s something to think about. It’s your last impact on the planet, so you not only don’t want to screw it up, but you want it to shit all over everybody else’s. We all have in the back of our minds the songs we want played at our funeral (The Vaccines’ Wetsuit to start off, Modest Mouse’s Float On and Daryl Braithwaite’s The Horses for the montage of flattering photos and Janet Jackson’s Escapade to lighten things up as they wheel my coffin out the door) and we all aim to create a significant, solemn traffic jam as the convey of mourners make their way on the longest route possible from the chapel to the cemetery, interrupting people’s days and only making them angrier because they can’t be angry at a dead person – there’s nothing more satisfying than an enraged person having to be respectful because of enforce societal norms. We all entertain this thought every now and then because we all know that death is coming for us.

I remember being three or fours years old laying on my parents bed feeling like an absolute queen because I had all that cushy space and was able to enjoy my Disney read-along-tape in solitude when it struck me. My mother came in to put some laundry in the cupboard when I asked her if everybody would die. Now my mother, for all her sweetness, can be alarmingly casual in scarring my young mind – like the time she told me that I was, indeed, a bit on the fat side after a funky tartan skirt from Target didn’t fit my rotund 11-year-old body. While I can’t remember the exact wording, my mother’s psychosis-inducing response went something like: “yep, everybody will die – you’ll die, I’ll die – everyone,” she said cheerfully before wheeling her trolley of clean clothes to another room leaving me to ponder my oncoming demise and the impending end of existence. Here I was just lust learning how to form symbols into English words when I was left attempting to rationalise the cosmic truth that we are all floating on a planet of death in a see of nothingness. I remember feeling as if someone had kneed me in the stomach and not much else, as I probably silently slipped into an psychotic episode. I probably soiled myself at the very least.

I have to say that my ability to comprehend death hasn’t really advanced far beyond the immediate panic that washed over my as ringleted child. My guess about what’s waiting for us in the great beyond is as good as anyone’s, but to distract myself from the eternal void, I have added a healthy dose of competiveness to the equation. I want my death to blow all others out of the water. I don’t care too much to the specifics, but I want to send shockwaves thought society when I do take my last breath. Whatever actually lies in my afterlife, I certainly hope it involves some sort of surveillance system to allow me to watch people crumble in my absence.

I want to know who will be so sad that they vomit, who tries to swindle whom out of my earthly possessions (maybe my collection of swan ceramics will become valuable one day) and what the brave person who volunteers to dress my dead body puts me in. But mostly I’m interested in who comes along to the party. I want to know who comes from out of the woodwork to pay their final respects and watch people deliberate on whether they knew me well enough to go to my funeral. I want to hold a hot and not contest from heaven (clearly that’s where I’ll end up because my heart is so big) and judge who dressed tastefully and who was obviously going to hook up with the cavalcade of beautiful mourners I attracted to my last hurrah. I want to hear what nice things people say about my in the several eulogies I will demand in my will, and how my bad qualities will be sugarcoated with the classic “she’s dead, we can’t call her out for the spiteful arse she was anymore” filter. Will the pretty fights I picked be referred to as “a passion for colourful debate”? Will my filthy potty mouth be categorised as “zest for vibrant language”? Will my unrelenting selfishness be painted as “being deeply introspective and unflinchingly dedicated to going after her happiness”?.

Like many, I cling to the desperate hope of an afterlife. I don’t want to float around in a state of unknowing, I fear what will happen to my consciousness and I am terrified by the thought of a everlasting black silence. But as Leanne Rimes and many an inspirational Instagram post will tell you, life goes on. If I’m dead in the ground while other people are living, I want their thoughts to be about me. If people are able to still enjoy the land of the living while I can’t, I want them to spend the rest of their eternity knowing my grand exit from this life was better than theirs. Because if you have to die, you may as well doing so in a way that makes everyone else feel inadequate and less loved. I may be dead, but I am still dominant. Finished, but fantastic. In the ground, but infinitely better than you could ever hope to be. I want to exit not gracefully, not humbly, but with a firework explosion of glitter boldly proclaiming to the world that I may be gone, but by god am I fabulous.

There’s nothing less relaxing than forcing yourself to relax.

I just got out of the bath after some friends sent me bath products in the mail to celebrate my birth. It was thoughtful gift, because apparently baths are tranquil, relaxing habits of women who do shit like run businesses while training for marathons and cultivating orchids. Successful women take time for themselves, and prolonging the washing ritual is one way to do that. After being pestered for evidence I had used the gifts, I finally succumbed to peer pressure and immerse myself in the depths of relaxation, or so I thought.

Now before you point out the obvious, I am aware that soaking in the tub is like sitting in a gently simmering oversized saucepan of dead skin cell soup. That hot water that is supposed to clean your skin merely extracts the grime lodged in your pores and creates floaties of filth that speckle the liquid like a teabag that has had its side split and leaves spill out. Sure, you use soap and everything, but everything you scrub off your body just becomes part of the ooze you’re floating around in. It’s not all that hygienic, when you think about it. So I showered off my stank before I filled up the tub, hoping this would be sufficient in preventing the creation of a salty broth infused with my juices.

Once clean, I filled up the tub and tossed in this grenade of colour and scents and confusing crackling sounds. The bathroom has this annoying feature which means you can’t have the light on without the exhaust fan blaring. I live in a rental so obviously cannot be trusted to use the fan when necessary, which means if I didn’t want to be laying in the dark, I’d be catching a cold from all the air blowing around. It wasn’t ideal but I also overcame that relaxation hurdle, carefully stringing fairy lights up in a way which would prevent them from falling into the water and electrocuting me, thus saving some poor soul from having to scape my wrinkled, water-logged body out of the tub some weeks later. I was almost ready to go when a thought struck me: the problem with baths is that there’s not a whole lot to do once you’re in the tub.

You’re just sitting left sitting in there in water all exposed with your own thoughts and a mess bun. After the candles are lit and the bath bombs fizzle off, you’re supposed to just sit there and relax. But you can’t really relax because the only thing for you to do is think. You can’t fall asleep because you’ll drown/be pulled to a watery death after a bath demon with grey, withered skin appears the second you close your eyes. You have to stay conscious at all times for the purposes of staying alive, which leaves you in the soul company of your own mind. Sure, this can lead to some calming mediation but it can also lead you down the path of picking apart every single decision that led you to dunking your body in green water on a Friday night instead of doing something fun, like drinking shots out of glasses duct taped to a ski with your friends.

And that can be a dangerous thing. So I did what I always do when I want to forget about the blunders of my past: distract myself with carbs and fantasy. I brought into the bath room with me some diversions in the form of the thickest Harry Potter book ever created and the second autobiography of television writer who now has her own show in the hope I could gleam some of her success by laying down and reading things instead of getting off my arse and being proactive about my future. I also plated up some avocado toast (surprisingly, even though my location has some of the highest fuel prices you’ll see on this side of the Equator the great avocado price hike hasn’t stuck my local supermarket so I am lapping it up while it lasts. Although, I’d pay almost anything for an avocado – I mean I wouldn’t sell a sibling, but if I had an iron-clad guarantee the flesh would be just right, I’d seriously consider trading in a cousin or something.) for good measure I even boiled the kettle and brewed a fantastic cup of tea, which was made even better by the cutesy mug that was included in my birthday care package.

So, with ample activities, a steady supply of food and the appropriate lighting, I was ready to unwind. The air was steamy, which multiple women’s magazines would tell you is the optimum atmosphere for melting the stress away. I was prepared to sink in the water and be reborn as a zen, chilled out goddess of calm like baptism-cum-lobotomy.

For the first five minutes everything went according to plan. The water was warm and smelled like a lolly shop. Somehow, the bath bomb made the water feel slipperier and my skin slimy, but in a sensuous way, not like an old fish. Unfortunately, there was one last snag in the line to serenity. In my bid to make this experience the most luxe of all, I used only the hottest water to fill the tub. What started as a warm embrace suddenly turned into a smothering crush. After about 20 minutes sweat began pouring down my neck to the point that it practically raised the water level. I could feel my brain cooking in my skull, like I was some kind of overdone human boiled egg.

I tumbled out of the tub threw on a robe (to hide my shame should I die, with the hope that I would look like a glamorous 40s film star overcome by tragedy instead of a half-cooked bogan who go into a bar fight in a dressing gown) and staggered to my room. It was a tumultuous journey, but I made it to the bedroom and passed out under the fan. My head was throbbing, the room was spinning and I could feel my heart beating out of my armpits. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t soothing. I could feel my flesh cooking and my skin felt like it had a greasy film from not properly towelling off. I was supposed to come out of this experience feeling like a silken goddess, instead I felt like a barbecue chook. And there is nothing relaxing about feeling like a juicy lump of poultry, regardless of how well-seasoned it may be.