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?”

I was recently driving some friends to a bar when I became aware of a fairly inane conversation taking place in my backseat.

Friend #1: Which do you think is worse – a pedophile, or a rapist?

Friend #2: I think they’re both pretty bad.

Friend #1: See, I think a pedophile is much worse.

Friend #2: How come?

Friend #1: Well a pedophile is, like, twisted and fucked in the head. Whereas a rapist is just Lebanese.

I recently dropped a friend home after a night out and followed her inside to pick up some books I’d lent her a few weeks earlier. Entering the house through the garage, we discovered her father slumped on the couch in his dressing gown, cradling an empty wine bottle in his hand and staring mournfully at the wall.

“Jesus,” my friend said, “What the hell happened?”

“It’s Costa,” her dad whispered, blowing his nose.

“Who?”

“The ironing man. He’s dead.”

“Oh my god!” my friend lamented, “What the fuck am I going to wear to work on Monday?”

My mother does not cook. She has fed her family for twenty-five years using a process known as “food assembly.” Food assembly involves cutting and chopping, adding water to various items, and putting things in the oven or microwave. Dinner guests are perfectly aware that 80% of their meal has come pre-prepared and will often turn to my mother in between courses and compliment her. “This is excellent, Lyn. Did you make it? AHAHA OMG HAHA.”

As a result of all this culinary ineptitude, I have no idea how to do basic things such as boil rice or fry fish. If I had my own house, and you came to visit, and I pleasantly asked you, “Can I get you something?” it would be a filthy lie, because I could not get you anything except a glass of wine. I can, however, make an acceptable carrot, walnut & banana cake, because my father is a most excellent baker.

As a kid, Dad spent every afternoon after school at either one of his grandmother’s houses, where they taught him to bake, sew, and stay away from black people. He’s pretty crafty in all areas of the kitchen and he can mend a button before you can say, “Why doesn’t your wife do that for you?” Visiting men often frown at my father as he zips around the kitchen in his apron, stirring frantically and humming to Rick Wakeman. “I’ve got to get these muffins on before my aerobics class starts,” he would explain, and I’d be even just a bit more proud of him than I had been fifteen seconds earlier. Oh yes, my father may have done the cooking, the cleaning, the sewing, the ironing, and the fruity gym classes, but he was just as talented at changing the oil in my car or mowing the lawn. The only task I ever saw him defeated at was attempting to rename a word document on his computer.

Unfortunately, because my father wanted to teach me important things in life, like how to use condoms and mix prescription medications safely and play the Pink Panther theme on piano, he never imparted his domestic knowledge to me. And rather than observing him closely to learn what I could, I simply sat back and enjoyed being waited upon, cooked for and cleaned up after.

So now, between my stints of living at home, I walk the streets of Sydney with tatty clothes and a growling stomach. I can still make that cake though.