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.

• talk to myself in the mirror
• inhale deeply when I walk behind the French guy’s desk at work, because he smells good
• google all my doctors, yoga teachers, hair dressers, therapists, etc, to try and find personal information about them
• set up fake email accounts under my parents’ names and feed them through my inbox, even though I have never actually used them
• photograph strangers on public transport
• wear the clothing of anyone who has left jackets/shirts/pants at my house
• look up girls’ skirts when they’re above me on the escalator
• smell other people’s hair

Ryan: I’m so high.
Me: Me too.
Ryan: Want to go to the Voodoo lady’s house?
Me: Dude, I am ripped. I wouldn’t even go to an ATM right now.
Ryan: Good call. Let’s get burritos instead.

Me: When I’m old and I think back on my twenties, all I’m going to remember is being stoned and walking down Riley Street.
Ryan: Naw, come on… I’m sure you’ve been stoned on lots of other streets too.

Ryan: I don’t know why that girl got so mad at me.
Me: Well, according to my therapist–
Ryan: Please don’t even finish that fucking sentence.

Ryan: Want to come over for pasta tonight?
Me: Sure. Will Rosh be there?
Ryan: He has a dinner date. But if this chick is anything like the last one he dated, she’ll probably want to eat twice, so I’m sure they’ll make an appearance.

Olivia belongs to my friend Kristen. Now that she is two and a half years old, I can finally have proper conversations with her. She is kind of like Rain Man and mostly gives one-word answers, but every now and then, she brings out the gold.

Me: So I heard your parents are toilet training you.
Olivia: Yeah.
Me: That’s pretty cool.
Olivia: Yeah.
Me: Can you do a poo in the toilet yet, or just wees?
Olivia: Poos and wees.
Me: Pumping.
Olivia: Yeah.

Me: Do you have a boyfriend?
Olivia: Yeah.
Me: Is he cute?
Olivia: Yeah.
Me: What’s his name?
Olivia: Dunno.
Me: So it’s pretty casual then?
Olivia: Yeah.

Olivia: I saw bats in the park and they eat Vegemite and pizza.
Me: Bullshit. Bats eat fruit.
Olivia: And pizza.
Me: I live near the Domain. I think I know what I’m talking about.
Olivia: Nah.
Me: I’m not even going to argue this with you because you’re being illogical. Wanna go inside and watch Mad Men?
Olivia: Yeah.

Housies at Halfway Crooks

• they drink a lot of juice.
• they get mad when you hook up with their friends.
• they are ordinarily incapable of organising anything more complicated than a home-delivered pizza, but can fashion a fish tank from an abandoned computer monitor they discovered on the street or prepare an impressive variety of liquor-filled frozen Easter eggs in just a few moments.
• if you have a party, they will get completely blind and then pass out in their bedrooms while you are left to make sure nobody steals the TV or starts a fire.
• they can yell awful, psychologically-damaging things at each other, sit in stormy silence for 45 seconds, and then start chatting again normally as if nothing ever happened.
• when you get dumped and wake them up with your crying, they are pretty useless and will generally just pat you on the back and tell you analogies about boats to try and put things in perspective for you. I guess that still helps though.
• they eat a lot of cereal.

Literal Man wasn’t expecting his wife home for another 3 hours, so when Regina walked in and discovered him in bed with his receptionist, everyone was shocked.

After a moment of stunned silence, Regina stormed over to their dresser and picked up her jewellery box. “Fuck off!” she told at the receptionist, who was hastily gathering her clothes. Regina then turned to her husband.

“You bastard,” she spat. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll have nothing. I’m going to take you to the cleaners!”

“Oh yeah?” Literal Man screamed. “Well I’m going to sue the shit out of you and take a lot of your money!”

He picked a razor from the bedside table and sliced his wrist open for dramatic effect. As he bled out, he wished he had remembered to charge his mobile phone so he could call an ambulance.

This one time, at Hotel CBD, I was drinking gin with some friends when this forty-something guy began lurking near our table. My friend, whose eloquence was matched only by her drunkenness, turned to him and said, “Fuck off, you’re old.”

His jaw dropped a little and he went and sat at the table immediately next to us, looking crestfallen. I was embarrassed, so I went over and apologised on behalf of my friend. He bought me a drink and we started chatting. He told me he was in Sydney on business and didn’t know anyone, but just wanted to chill out and have a drink in town. We talked for a while about travelling, university, and how unnecessarily rude my friend was for assuming he was trying to hit on a bunch of chicks who were clearly young enough to be his children. I mean, come on, he just wanted someone to talk to! He just wanted to hang out! No funny business or anything. And what is wrong with society these days that you can’t just go up to people and say hello without them jumping to conclusions and assuming you’re trying to fuck them? The world has truly gone down the toilet.

After a while, I noticed my friends were getting ready to leave, so I stood up and held out my hand.

Me: Have a good night.

Old man: So, can I have your number?

Me: What?

Old man: I find you very attractive and I’d like to take you out to dinner.

Me: We just had a ten minute conversation about how old you are and how it would be criminal of you to date anyone my age.

Old man: Mmm I know.

Me: If you really want to, you can add me on Facebook.

Old man: What’s that?

Me: Exactly.

He gave me his business card and I kept it for a while, because he looked so much like Drew Carey.

That pretty much sums up my dating history anyway.

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.