I was returning to the office after purchasing my daily coke zero from the Asian grocer, and as I was waiting for the elevator,  I made eye contact with a group of six people entering the lobby from the street. The moment the lift doors opened, I got in and pressed “Level 2″. As I ascended to my floor, I pressed my ear to the doors and listened to the six people as they waited below in the lobby and bitched about me.

“What happened?”

“Didn’t she hold the lift?”

“Oh my god, what a bitch.”

The truth is, normally I would hold the lift. But sometimes, I feel like if I do one more good deed, the karmic balance of the earth will implode due to my profligate saintliness. I give blood. I donate to charities. I give my coffee change to homeless people. I pick up other people’s litter when I see it. I believe in freedom of speech and same sex marriage and doing unto others and random acts of kindness. But every so often, I just need to be a cunt.

Every 6 months, I go to the dentist. My dentist’s name is Fred. He has an enormous belly and wears a white coat, so he resembles a giant pillow. I rest my head against his soft stomach while he peers into my mouth, pokes around, and says “You have a sensationally healthy mouth.” This takes roughly 45 seconds and $75 and then I am free to go. Every 6 months, the exchange is identical. Well, it was until this week.

On Monday, I went to see Fred for my regular check up. As I nestled my head against his tummy, he peered into my mouth for longer than usual. Then he scraped the side of one of my teeth. A mild, yet definite ache spread throughout my jaw. Fred scraped another tooth and it hurt too. He stood up and loomed over me.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he asked.
“Nothing, I swear, it was one time!”I cried uncertainly.
“Your gums are receding, girl.” Fred said.

Anytime somebody calls me “girl”, I know I am either in trouble or they are hitting on me. This was the former.

“That’s impossible,” I replied, “I’m only twenty-three. I have perfect teeth. I take real good care of them too.  Look at them, they’re beautiful.”
“Look again,” Fred answered, and peeled my bottom lip away from my jaw. Sure enough, the gums on either side of my mouth were slowly wearing away, exposing the roots of my teeth, which were beginning to turn a distinct shade of dark yellow.
“What the hell is that?” I asked and Fred replied, “Decay.”

Decay? Decay was what happened to corpses buried inside coffins in the ground. It involved maggots and bad smells and smug relatives. And now it was happening inside my mouth.

“What do I do?” I asked Fred. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, because for some reason I believed that the less I knew, the less serious the entire situation.

“Put this cream on your gums at night,” he said, handing me a small tube labeled $25, “And go see a goddamn specialist.”

After I paid and left the surgery, I sat in my car and cried for twenty minutes. I hadn’t realised how much of my self esteem was tied to my teeth up until then. At that moment, my entire personality seemed to hinge on the quality of my pearly whites. If I lost a single molar, I would lose my sense of humour, or compassion, or balance.

I calmed down eventually, drove home and made banana muffins. I rubbed the cream on my gums every fifteen minutes. I googled “causes of gum recession” and was confused that none of the typical reasons applied to me. As soon as my brother got home from work, I made him look inside my mouth and inspect the decay on my exposed teeth.

“That’s gross,” he observed, “And weird. Your teeth look fine everywhere else.”

“I know!” I agreed, “They’re perfectly nice looking on the outside, but underneath they are rotten and ugly and slowly dying.”

“Kind of like the rest of you,” he replied.

I went to my 5 year highschool reunion last weekend, and I was really excited to see how all my old class-mates had grown and matured into well-adjusted young adults. Apparently nothing really changes though.

classmate, finishing up a boring story: “…but that was when my license was suspended, so I didn’t drive anyway.”

me: “How did you lose your license?”

classmate: “High range DUI.”

me: “How embarrassing.”

classmate: “Nah, it was fucken great. Mum dropped me at the pub every night so I could still get pissed!”

me: “I’m so glad this experience has humbled you and made you wiser. The legal system should be proud.”

me: how long did it take you to get home from the farm?

ex-boyfriend: well I stopped for an hour at the pub, so I got home two hours later than if I’d driven straight through.

me: no, you would have been one hour later than if you’d driven straight through.

ex-boyfriend: nah, two hours. One for the time I stopped, and one for the distance I would have traveled if I hadn’t stopped.

me: that’s completely illogical, you weren’t moving backwards at the pub.

ex-boyfriend: what would you know? Women can’t drive for shit.

My mother corners me in the kitchen and says “You’ll never believe what just happened!”

Certain that she is right as my imagination could never conjure up something as spectacularly mudane as what she’s about to share, I smile politely.

“So I was emailing Kerry, and thinking about calling her, but I thought I’d wait until after lunch. But then the phone rang and, no shit, it was Kerry! We were just chatting, then after a while, she said ‘Why did you call me?’ and I said ‘Kerry, you called me.‘ And she said ‘No, I didn’t,’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did!’ Anyway, we finally figured out that while Kerry was cooking, she got a message on her answering machine that sounded just like me, and that’s why she was asking why I had called her!”

Silence.

“Because she got a voice message on her answering machine!”

Crickets.

“Because it sounded just like me!”

By which point, I’ve usually left the room to slit my wrists.

When I was a kid, my family lived on 5 acres of bushland out north-west of Sydney. We had neighbouring properties on either side, but they were invisible to us and separated by thick scrub. One day, my uncle, who was staying with us, was alone in our house and accidentally set off the burglar alarm. Within minutes, the neighbours from each side came running down the driveway, one with a cricket bat, the other with an axe. It was awkward for my uncle, but my parents marveled at the speedy and protective response from our neighbours.

Now we live in suburbia. Recently my mother was at home during the day, watching television, when our next door neighbour’s alarm started going off because they were, in fact, being robbed. Annoyed at the noise, my mother turned up the TV and continued watching. A few hours later, one of the neighbours came over to say that their house had been burgled, and were we all ok?

“You’re a bad person,” I told Mum that night over dinner, “You’re going straight to hell when you die, and they’ll put you in the Lazy & Selfish cell block.”

“Well I didn’t know they were actually being robbed,” she replied, “Besides, they have a dog.”

“He’s a pet, not a home security system.”

“Whatever,” she said, pouring herself a glass of wine, “If anybody asks, you tell them I was out shopping.”

Believe it or not, I once dated somebody with a questionable friendship circle. They were nice enough boys, but they had a habit of going to the pub on Friday night and waking up on Sunday morning.

One such Sunday morning, I was requested to pick up a few of the boys and transport them to a BBQ. And so I was happily driving along, enjoying the sunshine and attempting to ignore the smell of hangover in my backseat, when a certain gentleman named Daniel grabbed my arm. “PULL OVER” he said, opening the car door.

I sat in my car and waited while Daniel vomited profusely on somebody’s rose bushes and swore in between heaves. “Cunt.. Haaaggguuhh.. Fucking.. ggarrhgh.. Mother.. snergggh.” And then I waited while he turned on the nearby garden hose and held it over his head, washing off the spew that had splashed onto his face and shirt. “What a fucking yak!” he declared, chunks of vomit flying as he violently shook out his hair, not unlike some kind of wildebeest.

It was then that we both noticed the young couple and their children, sitting on their front porch and staring at the rose bushes, untouched bowls of cereal in front of them.

A few moons ago, one of my friends was undertaking a massage course. One night she decided to practise some newly-learned techniques on her boyfriend.

“Now, just relax your diaphragm,” she instructed.

“Diaphragm!” he said, “Only girls have those!”

Somewhere around my ninth year of schooling, I found myself at the library during a free period and sitting in a study room full of boys not studying. As is wont to occur at Christian highschools, the conversation rapidly turned from the canteen’s new lunch menu to masturbation.

“It must be so awesome to be a chick,” a certain young man remarked.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Well don’t you all orgasm every time you put in a tampon?”

“Actually, a vagina is a little more complicated than that.”

“Whatever.”

This is a true story. It happened to a friend of mine.

It began in Athens. It was the last night of our 6 week European adventure. The next morning, we would have to make the long journey home and go back to work, uni, and other mundane bullshit. It was a bittersweet occasion. I wanted to celebrate, but instead I went to bed early, my liver threatening to implode after a month-long binge on tequila and gyros. My travel-buddies still wanted to party, so I joined them for a pre-drink at the hotel bar before they went out and then I retired to my room, where I promptly passed out.

The next morning, there was a soft knock on my door.

“Can I come in?” a small voice asked.

“Sure,” I opened the door and my friend came tumbling in.

“Ohmygod,” she said, “That arsehole!“

“What??” I asked.

“So I took this guy back to my hotel room last night…”

“Yes?”

“And we were just, like, making out and stuff, but he was too drunk to…you know…”

“Fuck?”

“Yeah. So I just went to sleep. Then I woke up a few hours later because he was jerking off beside me.”

“Gross.”

“So I was ignoring this guy and just trying to get some sleep, when he suddenly grabbed me, flipped me over, and came all over my face.”

“Oh my god.” This was bad, even by my standards. “What did you do?”

“I told him to leave. Then I jumped out of bed and ran into the shower.”

“Was he gone when you came out again?”

“Yeah, and so was all the money I had on the bedside table.”

“So not only were you plied with alcohol and forced to go to sleep unsatisfied. You were then rudely awoken, white-zombied and robbed?”

“Why does this stuff always happen to me?”