1. The one where my mother tries to prove her knowledge of contemporary music to my brother…

Mum: Is that Metallica?
Chris: No.
Mum: Is it Korn?
Chris: No.
Mum: Who is it?
Chris: It’s Jesus Christ and the Shut-the-Fuck-Ups. Do you mind? We’re trying to watch a movie here.

2. The one in the car…

Dad: Can you please stop clicking your pen?
Mum: What, so you couldn’t hear that annoying woman who kept announcing the keno numbers at the restaurant but you can hear my pen clicking? What is this, some gender-based selective hearing where you can’t hear annoying women?
Dad: Well I can hear one now.

3. The one where I think my grandfather’s girlfriend was trying to ask me whether I have a fuck buddy…

Edith: So, have you got a fella?
Me: Nah.
Edith: Do you have a special friend though?
Me: Huh?
Edith: Do you have a…you know…a special guy friend?
Me: Um, I have male friends?
Edith: Good.

4. The one where my grandfather’s girlfriend insults the modeling industry in general…

Edith: Have you tried any modeling yet?
Me: No.
Edith: Why not?
Me: Well for one, I weigh more than a hundred pounds.
Edith: Yes but you’ve got nice hair.
Me: I dont think that’s going to cut it on the runway.
Edith: Yeah well some of those girls really shouldn’t be up there anyway. They look like dogs.

• my friends will want to go to the Tav tonight and I will flatly refuse, as since I have moved to the city, I have grown out of getting shitfaced at dirty bars in the Hills.
• a few hours later, I will be standing on a table in the beer garden at the Tav doing shots of sambuca.
• I will yell at a taxi driver and pass out in the study at my parents’ house.
• Mum will knock on the door at 8am tomorrow morning and ask me if I want to go to church. I will pretend not to hear her.
• My brother and I will wake up 5 minutes before my parents come home from church and pretend we have been up for hours.
• My mother will give me a Bryce Courtenay book, which I will never read, and I will give her a scarf, which she will never wear.
• My brother and I will hand each other cards containing $50. Sometimes, we just pull out our wallets and exchange notes.
• My mother will drink a glass of champagne while she’s preparing a dip plate, then have a hot flush and retire to the lounge while my father finishes all other food preparation for the day.
• Our Christmas lunch guests will be church families and awkward singles, because my mother believes that the days surrounding Christmas are for catching up with relatives and in-laws, but Christmas Day itself should be spent with her spiritual family.
• My brother and I, faced with the prospect of a long lunch with our estranged childhood Sunday School friends, will begin putting away beers as though our lives depend on it.
• Lunch will include a lot of seafood, which I will remind my parents I do not eat. (“Oh how nice of you to provide for everyone. Thank you so much.”)
• I will start a fight with someone about Christianity, get shut down by my mother, sulk for the rest of the meal and then leave the table as soon as is vaguely socially acceptable.
• I will sit for half an hour with my cat and then fall asleep on the couch.
• I will wake up after all our guests have left and my dad will make up a fruit platter just for me. We will sit in front of the fan and watch a documentary about Hitler.

Ryan: Men just love to break stuff, so we get destructive when we’re drunk.
Me: And that is why women will inherit the earth.
Ryan: If that was actually going to happen, I think you bitches would have done it by now.

Ryan: I don’t understand why religious people are so happy all the time. Although, I guess I’d be pretty stoked if I thought that when I die, I’ll get to live in the clouds with Natalie Portman on a neverending coke binge. Being religious is like lining up for a really awesome rollercoaster. Like, you could be in that line for fucking days, but you don’t really care because you’re so excited and you know it’s going to be amazing.

Ryan: The problem with Bear Grylls is he’s too unrealistic. He’s like, “So if you find yourself parachuting in the Maldives and you’re being attacked by a bird, this is the knot you need to tie in a rope to kill it. And don’t forget to eat its eyeballs after it dies, Pelican cornea is packed full of vomit-inducing protein.” That would never happen. But if he was like, “This is how you change a tire if your car breaks down on the Habour Bridge during peak hour,” that would actually be helpful. People would watch that.

For more offensive statements, you can follow Ryan on Twitter.

Literal Man decided to finally talk to the hot girl at the coffee shop, even though she was sitting with a group of friends, whispering conspiratorially.

“Hey baby,” he said in a low voice. “Wanna go out sometime?”

“I’d rather die,” she replied.

Her girlfriends laughed wildly and he joined in, lightly slapping his hand against the table.

“Seriously, fuck off,” she said.

“Oh. Okay.”

He went out to the carpark and rummaged around the boot of his car.

What a strange girl, he thought, smashing a cricket bat into her head as she exited the coffee shop.

By the time the police arrived, her face was bashed in completely on one side.

“You should date somebody from Twitter,” my flattie JC told me one night at the pub. This was a couple of years back, when meeting people from t’internet was still something of a novelty and you didn’t tell your mother when you were doing it.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said and waved my beer dismissively. The truth was I had already considered this and had reasonable-sized crushes on more than a few of my followers. Plus my Twitter network was relatively small, highly interactive and privy to a lot of details regarding my personal life. It’d save a lot of the legwork involved in getting to know somebody on a first date.

“No, seriously,” JC continued, “I bet that if you tweeted on a Saturday night and said you wanted somebody to take you out, you’d have at least 5 offers in the first hour.”

I didn’t know whether he was right or wrong, but the likelihood of me actually doing this was roughly equal to using my beer money to sponsor an African child. I had met enough people online to know that some of them were fun and could become your new BFFs, but others were fun and then later proved to have a very tenuous grip on reality. In the beginning, it’s almost impossible to tell which category the stranger sitting on your couch chopping weed will fall into.

So I put aside the idea of Twitter dating for the meantime, but then after a depressingly dry season, I began to consider it more seriously. I mean, if I was on Twitter and I wasn’t a freak, then surely most of the other people who were on Twitter weren’t freaks either? Maybe I should be more open minded?

Later that week, I was on the bus after 6 or 7 cocktails and recklessly decided to ask out someone from Twitter. I looked through my list of followers and finally settled on a guy who had flirted with me a little in the past.

“Want to grab a beer sometime?” I DMed him.

“Sure!” he replied.

I arranged to meet him for drinks after work the following Wednesday. Then I texted my friend Keira and said, “I just asked out a guy from Twitter.”

Keira wrote back, “Two words: Mister Burns.”

Mister Burns was a philosophy student I had met a couple of years earlier through RSVP.com and, after seeing his reasonably attractive profile picture, agreed to meet in real life for coffee. But when he showed up on the day, he looked a bit like Gollum and was wearing a matching block coloured tracksuit. He smelled vaguely of urine. “I have to go,” I said, not even bothering to formulate an excuse, then climbed straight back into my car and drove away.

I wasn’t so worried about meeting this Twitter guy though. I’d seen a few photos of him and he looked okay. I was confident about the date, but when Wednesday arrived, I found myself feeling nervous. “What if he’s ugly?” I asked the girls at work. “Or what if he’s fat? Oh my god, what have I done?”

Fortunately, he wasn’t fat. In fact, he was pretty cute. We smashed some beers and had great conversations and I thought, yes, this is going so well, snaps for me.

I agreed to meet him for a coffee the following weekend, and I was genuinely looking forward to it. But in the harsh light of day, he was nowhere near as attractive. In fact, he kind of looked a bit like my brother, which was cause for immediate disqualification. It was too late to back out though, so I sat down, ordered a coffee and began mentally scraping together a list of possible excuses to leave early. He seemed nervous in a sober setting and spoke at great length about his cats.

This date was very borderline: bad enough that I knew I wouldn’t see him again, but not quite bad enough to leave after only half an hour. But then he solved my dilemma by shifting the balance.

We were discussing his vegetarianism, and I inquired about his iron levels. “Do you get sick a lot?” I asked. “I went off red meat for a while last year and just seemed to come down with cold after cold.”

“Well it’s different for women,” he said, “As they have a tendency to….you know…”

“What?”

Here he made a violent flowing gesture with both hands and whispered, “Bleed.”

I picked up my bag and left him with the bill.

After I ignored him for a few days, he messaged me.

Him: “Was that initial drink supposed to be a date or a networking thing?”

Me: “A networking thing. Why do you ask?”

Him: “Oh I’m embarrassed… Not that I had assumed one way or the other, but yeah… Shit, I’m an ass.”

Me: “It’s okay, everybody makes mistakes.”

He unfollowed me on Twitter not long after.