how to sleep on a bench = valuable life skill

• Pack ear plugs anytime you go anywhere because people are awful.
• You should always take spare headphones in case you sit on somebody else’s on the plane and break them with your strength/arse.
• When ordering food on your holiday, think about the country and the landscape and the stuff on it. If you haven’t seen a cow for a while, skip the beef.
• The kinds of people you want to avoid when you travel are: children, people who have children, and anyone who has written a self-help book.
• Even if you are traveling with your favourite person on earth, they are bound to annoy the shit out of you at some point. The best way to deal with this is to sweep all your belongings off your banana lounge and dump everything onto the ground, say “You want this chair? Take the fucking chair,” and then lock yourself in the hotel room and eat a whole tube of sour cream and chives Pringles.
• Overnight train is the worst form of travel after Holocaust box car.
• If someone’s body language doesn’t quite make sense, it’s probably because they are cutting open your handbag with a stanley knife and trying to steal your wallet.
• Staying at a fancy resort turns you into a jerk fairly quickly and you will soon find yourself asking a waiter where the fuck is my mojito?
• Boys don’t really appreciate spa treatments and are likely to describe an amazing and luxurious experience as “being hit with bags of seeds” or “someone wiping their hands on my face, like a lot, and those satin pyjama pants made my balls really sweaty.”

1. Bugs can crawl in your mouth while you’re asleep and then you swallow them
2. All girls grow up to look like their mothers
3. If you flush the toilet with the lid open, poo particles drift out of the bowl and land on your toothbrush

Who has ruined your life? What did they tell you?

“You look like you’re on holidays!”
- my yoga teacher who never wears makeup

“Wowee, we’re looking very…casual.”
- my chiro, I think he might be gay

“You look nice today.”
- my boyfriend, he is obligated to say this even if I have been awake for 2 days drinking

“Are you ill?”
- my mother

No alarms

• Either my local church is having AA meetings or they hold a special scumbag service on weekdays.
• During the week, you notice a lot of middle-class junkies around Surry Hills/Darlinghurst. These are the junkies who have graduated to an all-tracksuit wardrobe, but they are not yet living on the street or robbing 7-Eleven’s. They usually go to score with their bf or gf and they’re quite thin and always have a dog.
• There is an entire house full of trannies on the street behind mine.
• My gay next-door neighbour also appears to be unemployed but neither of us is willing to admit it.
• West Wing goes foooorrevvaa.
• Despite having 11 extra hours at my disposal every day, I eat a lot more when I’m not working and I go to the gym less.
• I really like candles and slurpees?
• The scummy workmen around the corner fill our recycling bin with empty chinese food containers every week after garbage night.
• If there’s no real need to shower before 5pm, why press the issue.
• The closest I have come to actual insanity was when my neighbour played this song on repeat for an entire day and a night. I cried and started looking at rental properties online.

Last night I went to yogi dancing. This is basically yoga with a deejay, and then a “freestyle” section where you “just dance” for 15-20 minutes and feel like you are in a nightclub rather than a sandstone church in Paddington with a bunch of hippies.

What to expect at a yogi dancing class

1. Upon arrival, place your havaianas in a room full of havaianas. I positioned mine next to a dead cockroach for reference.
2. Enter the church. Inside it is eight hundred degrees and there are four thousand hippie backpackers sitting on the floor. They are all surprisingly attractive. Make awkward small talk with some of them. There is a pile of glow sticks at the front of the room and flowing light projections on the ceiling. There is one toilet. Behind the organ.
3. Meet the yogi, Angel. She is wearing a microphone headset and what I suppose you could call shorts. She has a glow stick in her hair. She is the nicest person you have ever met.
4. The yoga begins. Angel takes you through each routine, then leaves you to do it in your own time. So she’ll show you how to draw circles with your heart, then leave you to continue drawing circles with your heart on your own, while the deejay plays Sigur Ros and sways at the front of the room.
5. The difficulty increases unexpectedly. The poses pretty much go from swinging your arms from side to side to a headstand. You sit down on your mat, defeated. “This is bullshit,” you comment to the Irish girl next to you. She doesn’t respond though as everyone has their eyes closed.
6. Angel asks you to put your mats to the side and come into the centre of the room. She shows you some basic tribal-esque dance moves. The lights go down and the class pretty much turns into a rave, complete with glow sticks and smoke machines, but without any drugs. Then you just dance, frantically, for twenty minutes. (This was an issue for me, as ordinarily I do not dance unless I have a gun to my head or a blood alcohol level greater than 0.1). You are all sweating buckets. The hippies fucking love it.
7. The dancing stops and you are told to do a few “cool down” laps around the room, introducing yourself to everyone you walk past. You meet River, Ariel, and Clover, and shake their sopping hands and then you stop caring.
8. Everyone does some wind-down poses to Sufjan Stevens or whatever. Angel walks around spraying eucalyptus or something over you.
9. You discover a puddle on your mat and glance up towards the ceiling before realising it is your own sweat. You smell pretty bad.
10. You all lie in the corpse position for 5 minutes. Someone farts and nobody reacts except me, because I think it’s funny. Anytime anyone ever farts in the world is very funny.
11. Angel asks everyone to come onto her mat so we can pose for a group photo. She tells us to tag ourselves in the photo when she puts it on Facebook, so that we can all become friends.
12. On the way out, Angel gives everyone a kiss on the cheek. You feel a slight buzz as you leave, but that could just be due to the fact that you are severely dehydrated and inhaled quite a bit of that eucalyptus stuff.
13. This all takes just over 2 hours.

Actual helpful advice:

• BYO mat. You don’t have to, but this is a very sweaty, full-on class and you might get pregnant if you don’t.
• Take a towel too.
• If you’ve never done yoga before, take a few beginner classes at a yoga centre to familiarise yourself with some basic poses (like downward facing dog, warrior pose, salute to the sun, extended angle pose.)
• Make a booking. Classes are pretty popular. It’s $25 a pop. Deets here. That is also where I stole the above image.

• 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.

CORRECT – in honour of the Tav’s famous night club re-opening, my school friends were extremely keen to pay $15 for the pleasure of reliving our youth by chugging breezers, dancing on a podium and getting fingered in the carpark.

• a few hours later, I will be standing on a table in the beer garden at the Tav doing shots of sambuca.

INCORRECT – I went to my parents’ house, watched an episode of Studio 60 and then went to bed. I am so boring.

• I will yell at a taxi driver and pass out in the study at my parents’ house.

INCORRECT – I was able to sleep in my old room, as the lesbian couple who has been staying there was away for Christmas.

• 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.

INCORRECT – the woman is learning.

• My brother and I will wake up 5 minutes before my parents come home from church and pretend we have been up for hours.

INCORRECT – I got up early and went for a run, then made avocado on toast and read a weight loss magazine. Oh the shame of it.

• 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.

CLOSE – I got a novel by Philippa Gregory (an author I liked around 2001) and a Jamie Oliver cookbook, which I will never open because I am in no way gifted when it comes to food preparation.

• My brother and I will hand each other cards containing $50. Sometimes, we just pull out our wallets and exchange notes.

INCORRECT – we have developed a new arrangement where we request very specific gifts and nobody is disappointed. I am hoping to work my mother into this system for 2011.

• 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.

CORRECT

• 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.

CORRECT – this year’s line up included some people who were our neighbours during the 80s and an elderly woman with severe dementia who stared at a blank television screen for most of the afternoon.

• 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.

CORRECT – I don’t remember much after 5pm.

• 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.”)

CORRECT – but my mother also made a ham, which was the cause of many arguments but tasted delicious.

• 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.

INCORRECT – however I did make several racist jokes which were met with awkward silence and a lot of throat-clearing.

• I will sit for half an hour with my cat and then fall asleep on the couch.

INCORRECT – I partied all day and drank cocktails in the pool. Obviously the cat decided to spend Christmas Day hanging out with all her loved ones (ie. herself.)

• 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.

INCORRECT – after a drunken stumble to a BP station to purchase microwave popcorn, my brother’s girlfriend and I watched Ricky Gervais’ Science and then I passed out around 10pm.

Earlier this year I decided to go back to uni to finish my bachelor degree. I’m not sure why. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My first lot of exams was reasonably traumatic. Here is a summary:

Exam #1: Gender, History & Culture

• Wake up late
• Injure eyeball while putting in contact lenses
• Cannot ride bike due to the rain
• Cannot find taxi due to the rain
• Cry
• Phone a friend and make them drive me
• Accidentally slam my writing hand in the bathroom door
• Arrive 10 minutes after the exam has started with throbbing hand
• Mistake a pair of boobs for a bum and write half an essay on dual gendered identities before realising what was actually in the photo and having to rewrite the whole thing.

Exam score: 83
Overall grade: Credit

Exam #2: Australian Studies: Images of Australia

• Arrive on time to realise exam is open book and I did not bring my books
• Decide to go home and get books, sacrificing valuable writing time
• Run up the hill of death in Ultimo, through the pissing rain, trying to find a cab in morning peak hour
• Am too unfit and have to stop to rest while precious minutes tick away
• Stand in the rain for 10 minutes trying to find a taxi
• Find taxi
• Lose it to some lady in a power suit
• Cry
• Find taxi
• Drive all the way home, get books, drive back to the exam venue
• Hand over $40 in taxi fares
• Sit exam, which started 20 minutes earlier
• Hate life.

Exam score: 80
Overall grade: Distinction

I ended up withdrawing from the following study period two days after the census date, forfeiting roughly $1,400 in HECS but not really caring.

When my mum gets back from Turkey, she will read this and be disappointed in me.

I haven't been awake past 10pm since this photo was taken in 2009.

#1 You start thinking about contents insurance.

You don’t own anything apart from a bicycle, a Nintendo 64, and the electric frying pan with the melted handle that your mother gave you when you moved out of home.

But still.

Maybe you should insure that junk, because it’s better than having nothing, right?

It’s not.

#2 Your personal comfort becomes more valuable to you than looking good.

You decide that you were stylish enough when you were younger and now it’s time to be warm and have free movement of your limbs when you go out.

I assume so, anyway.

I was never stylish at any age.

I wore hand me downs.

From my brother.

#3 Your hangovers become brutal.

They used to set in as a gentle headache, then ease off after a strong coffee and 4 hash browns.

Now they break down your door at 7am and smash you in the face with all the force of a date rapist.

#4 It becomes harder to keep the weight off.

You used to eat like a 12 year old boy, but you had an arse like one too.

Now you have an arse like Jack Osbourne.

Before cocaine.

#5 When you buy cereal, you choose the ones that promise to lower your cholesterol.

Whatever that is.

#6 You start getting along better with your parents.

You realise they’re not so bad.

You stop planning ways to spend your inheritance because you don’t want them to die so much anymore.

#7 When someone offers you free drugs, you say no because you have work in the morning.

Just kidding.

I would never do that.

So I did Dry July.

It was horrible and wonderful in equal measures.

I went to an engagement party, 3 farewells, a birthday, Halfway Crooks, and my own work farewell without so much as a cheeky nip.

(I smoked heaps of crystal meth though. Not really. However, I did order a steak with a red wine jus one night.)

Going out sans-booze isn’t that different from going out with booze, except that time slows inexplicably and you will have finished everything you want to do in a night after about an hour.

I became pretty productive.

I lost 4kg.

I got a new job (may or may not be related to Dry July.)

I did heaps of yoga and bought various seeds and juices and vitamins and am thinking about purchasing some incense because I have all this extra money I didn’t spend on ten beers and I don’t know what to do with it.

How to do Dry July:

1. Accept the fact that it’s okay to hang out at a bar without drinking ten beers.
2. Know that most people won’t try to pressure you too much into drinking, unless they are a dickhead.
3. If your boyf or girlf is prepared to do it with you, it’s ten times easier.
4. Don’t drink.

I celebrated the end of Dry July by getting hammered at Splendour in the Grass. It was fun, but after a point each day, I decided to switch to water. Normally I would just drink through that. The mornings afterwards, I wasn’t too hungover, but felt generally shakey and unwell. The best way I can describe it is to say that I felt vaguely poisoned, which is probably not an inaccurate way to talk about alcohol.

Will I do it again?

Probably. Maybe not a month-long stint like Dry July, but I definitely do not intend to resume my mid-week sessions any time soon. I think that drinking a lot/often is like wearing underpants that are too tight. Sometimes you don’t realise how much they’re hurting you until you take them off and surely you can’t have put on that much weight since uni and why are you even wearing the same underwear as then?

SHAMPOO IS BETTER!

Last week, I went for a run. Because I’m fit. As I was jogging through Hyde Park, I noticed a man sprawled on a bench, seemingly unconscious.

“Junkie,” I thought, and continued running. However, as I got closer, I noticed he was reasonably well-dressed and clean-shaven. His head was thrown back and his mouth hung open. Like a corpse. As I jogged past, he did not move at all. When I got to the end of the park, I turned around to look once more. The man still hadn’t moved. I hovered for a few seconds, then a possum ran in front of me and I chased him because I love the possums in Hyde Park. They make me feel like a bush ranger. I ran home, then ate a can of corn and played Diddy Kong Racing. After all,  I am a grown up.

The next day, the man was gone. I wondered whether he’d simply woken up, or been gently pushed into Sydney harbour by the city council. Had I run past a dead body and not noticed/cared? It was entirely possible. I live in Darlinghurst. I pass smacked-out junkies more often than I buy toilet paper. I have frequently seen homeless people brawling, interrupted doorway poops, witnessed various acts of vandalism, and been a spectator to more than a few domestic disputes. On top of this, I get asked for money every time I leave my house. But enough about the Red Cross, because the junkies are pretty annoying too.

Sometimes, I’ll see a couple fighting, and the dude will push or hit his lady around a little. I’ll think, “How could he!” but my default reaction in these situations is to always look the other way. Sure, I’m a post-feminist/alkaline or whatever (I was born under the sign of Taurus), but I’m not prepared to get glassed in the face to save one of my sisters.

Am I a bad person?

Don’t answer that.

I’ve been on the other side of the spectrum too. I was once attacked while waiting for the bus, because I looked at a person. Nobody seemed to mind much. And I once tried to fight someone on York Street, which attracted a few stares, but not so much as a comment from passers-by.

Have we become desensitised? Or are we just tougher?

I don’t know, I’m from the Hills. We used to kill bees when we were bored.