The best part of every episode of Gossip Girl is the show’s clever and unexpected use of irony.

For example, after a lifetime of meticulous avoidance of rumoured carcinogens, Serena develops bowel cancer and shits blood which is gross and all her friends pretend they don’t know her.

I saw some lorikeets once when I was a child, and then I fell off my rollerblades and chipped my four front teeth.

I also have a birth mark on my leg that looks like a pimple.

My favourite rice crackers flavour is salt & vinegar, but not as many brands are making it lately. I am not sure why.

]]> http://annikskelton.com/2010/01/21/lorikeets/feed/ 7 http://annikskelton.com/2009/11/06/buckleys-chance/ http://annikskelton.com/2009/11/06/buckleys-chance/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:29:57 +0000 Annik http://annikskelton.com/?p=2195 Buckley was born in Indiana in 1962 and had eleven children to his highschool sweetheart, Regina.

Regina began to lose her sight in the early nineties and required an expensive operation to repair the damage to her eyes.

Through a commercial radio competition, Buckley won the May Day ‘Grab as Much Cash as You Can in 8 Minutes!’ contest, but he had no arms and Regina went blind.

When I was in primary school, we were visited once a year by the Life Education Australia van. This was a caravan manned by chirpy women who used a giraffe puppet (Healthy Harold) and a nude mannequin (Tammy) to educate third graders on drugs and general health. I didn’t care much for Harold, but I was fascinated by Tammy and her womanly figure, which I would never develop. Her plastic skin had been shaven away on one side, exposing her plastic internal organs. I wanted to reach out and stroke her plastic liver, then tweak her plastic nipple. I was shy though.

Healthy Harold taught us about the food pyramid and advised us to exercise regularly. He then launched into an anti-drug tirade and touched on the dangers of peer pressure as well as the legal and socio-economic factors involved with drug abuse and their long-term effects on society. I spent these lessons staring at the caravan ceiling, which was covered in tiny fake stars, and thinking about my silk worms, but the message was so strong, it seeped completely into my eight year old brain anyway. If anyone had offered me a cigarette, I would have urinated on their entire packet and rang the police immediately. If thirty of my classmates had stood in a circle and chanted “CHUG, CHUG, CHUG,” I would have tipped my bottle of beer down the nearest drain and raised my face to the sky, arms outstretched, before calling out the twelve steps and giving glory to God. I was completely staunch in my resolve: I would never drink or smoke. I would certainly never take drugs. I would be healthy. I would be happy. I would be like Harold.

Four years later, my great-grandmother died. She was ninety-seven years old, and had been in a nursing home for six months. I remembered the day she was put into the nursing home, because my father was very tense and simply told me, “She fell over.” But through eavesdropping on my mother’s phone conversations, I was able to piece together all the details: Nan had gotten out of bed during the night to get a glass of water, then she had fallen over on her way back from the kitchen, breaking her hip and smashing her head against the floor, knocking herself out. Unable to get back up after she regained consciousness, she simply remained on the floor and waited for somebody to find her. By the time my grandfather arrived in the morning to take her to church, she had ripped up half the carpet in her living room in an attempt to keep herself warm throughout the night. She had torn up her hands doing this, and managed to cut her arms on broken glass. She had also shat herself and was crying with embarrassment.

This single agonising, undignified event completely horrified me. “Why couldn’t she get back up again?” I asked my mother, interrupting her phone call.

“She’s just too old,” Mum explained, “The body starts to give up and stop working after a while.”

This distressed me deeply. The idea that I could one day find myself unable to walk or wipe my own arse was the most depressing thing I had ever contemplated. And the thought of my great-grandmother lying amongst broken glass on her kitchen floor, nursing a smashed hip and a bruised face, scratching at the carpet and defecating on her own muumuu was too awful for my pre-pubescent brain to handle. In that moment, I vowed that I would die the day after my 70th birthday. Or even sooner, if possible. I would never be found covered in my own shit and lying broken on the floor, because I simply wouldn’t live that long. I would die while I still had dignity and presence of mind. Hopefully I would still have my figure too.

And so, when my time came, I said “Yes!” to cigarettes. I said yes to alcohol and pot and pills and anything else that crossed my path. I still work out and eat properly and moisturise and sleep 8 hours every night, because I am vain, but I’m not going to make any effort to extend my life beyond the ability to control my own bladder. If being healthy means dying in a puddle of my own excrement with broken hips, then Harold can eat my arse.

Editor’s note: Any teachers or parents who are interested in having Annik speak at their children’s schools can send an expression of interest via email to education [at] annikskelton.com

“Nope.”

“I remember Chris getting laid that night.”

“Oh look, it’s those two fat chicks who sat on my bike! I’m pretty sure Chris went home and had sex that night.”

“And this one was at New Year, right before Chris laid some girl. Fuck, we were drunk.”

“Oh and there’s the time we ordered all the red bull and vodka jugs… Hey Annik, see what Chris is doing to that pool cue?”

“Wait, there’s the chick I used to hook up with who had leukemia… I thought I could make her feel better. Like, fuck the cancer out of her or something.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know, I broke up with her.”

“Hey look, it’s the biker viking party!”

“Oh yeah! Chris had sex that night.”

“Anal sex.”

My brother: Is it your face?

Dad: It’s eczema.

Me: I’m going to my room.

Last year, Nanna got sick with various forms of cancer and shifted permanently into my aunt’s lounge room while she waited for the inevitable. I flew up to Brisbane to visit her and found my namesake sunken in an armchair, even thinner than usual and looking overly pale.

“How are you feeling about everything?” I asked, as I painted her nails a deep red.

“Okay, I guess,” she shrugged, “I’ve said goodbye to all my children, divvied up my stuff and had a good run. All I can do now is wait.”

“It’s a bit horrible though,” I pointed out, “Just waiting to die.”

“Nah, it happens to everyone,” Nanna replied, “Besides, I’m sick of hearing about the bloody American election.”

• approximately $6,000
• a month of sleep
• 4kg
• a pantload of bad karma

When I was twenty-one and full of goodwill and energy, I applied to go overseas and perform 6 months of volunteer work. “Sure,” I lied during my phone interview, “I love kids!” And then, “Oh yeah, small towns are awesome!” Lord only knows why I decided to get myself into this, but (similar to my decision to go to uni) I was bored and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And so, at the crack of 2008, I flew to South Africa, where I attended a 2-day orientation program in Johannesburg. The gist of this seemed to be, “do not take drugs, do not stop at red traffic lights, do not use ATMs, do use condoms but do not have sex with your students, and if you catch malaria you shall lose a spectacular amount of weight.” Armed with this knowledge, I was then sent to the north-east coast, and driven to a leetle village which shall remain nameless.

“Here you will be a boarding house mistress,” Francois, the teacher I was to share a house with, informed me, “And you will teach cricket and swimming at the school.”

“I’m not really into sports,” I explained, lighting a cigarette.

“Just take grade one,” he said, as he climbed into his ute and drove off.

I sat on an upturned bucket on the driveway and glared at my volunteer partner, Zoe. She came from a small town in Victoria, had too many freckles, and required prompting to do absolutely anything. I hated her, but we played cards sometimes and I was interested in the fact that she had recently had breast-reduction surgery. “What did they do with the extra boob-matter?” I would ask, but because she was boring, she would just shrug. On the upside, she followed most of my instructions without question. “Fetch my washing and take it to the boarding house,” I would say, and she would disappear inside to collect the sweaty T-shirts and dirty underpants from my bedroom floor.

Our house was small, hot, and not air-conditioned. I was provided with a fan to keep the mosquitoes away at night, but scheduled power-cuts throughout the district meant that we were without electricity for roughly 2-hours, three times a day. We did not have a working television or cooking facilities, and the internet was a distant memory. We also ran out of water several times. I was dying for a pedicure.

Our “meals” were cooked for us at the boys’ boarding house. And while we were treated to the odd piece of fruit or vegebetalia, our staples were frankfurts, meat pies, fried chicken strips, and oven chips. Not having the palate nor the metabolism of a fifteen year old boy, more often than not, I drank a glass of cordial, ate a piece of bread, then left the table to sit on my bucket and smoke.

Our days were spent at the school, where we began each day helping the first, second and third graders read. These kids were either total show ponies or complete morons. I tried to shame them into learning (“You are in the third grade and you cannot even read, Monte, how will you ever bust out of this miserable village?”) but they had no respect for my volunteer authority.

Once the day’s reading had finished, I was supposed to help out with art or computer classes. I didn’t like art or computers, so I re-organised my timetable so that it appeared I was fully booked. I then walked back to the house, sat on the bucket, and smoked until lunch time.

In the afternoons, I almost always had to take PE. When I was rostered to teach soccer or cricket, I would put the students in a line and instruct them to kick or throw a ball to each other while I worked on my tan. My swimming lessons were unfortunately more involved, as I was required to be in the water at the same time as the children. There they climbed on top of me and dragged me underneath the surface. I then pushed them away and swam to the edge. They chased me around the pool, and I suppose that in some way, they did get a bit of swimming practice. As long as none of them drowned, I felt I was doing my job.

After school finished, I was either required to supervise homework at the girl’s boarding house or amuse myself in some way. I spent my spare hours playing the piano in the school’s empty hall or walking aimlessly around the village. But most of the time, I sat on the bucket and smoked.

There were, of course, some pleasant little pockets in all of this. The students were generally polite and well-behaved, appealing kids. They called me “Ma’am” and wished me good morning when they saw me around the school. When I was alone at the house, the matric boys would come over from the boarding house and we would sit together on the driveway and smoke cigarettes and look at the stars, while they put together very convincing arguments on why I should buy beer for them. I was also getting the best tan of my life.

However, a few weeks of this routine began to take its toll. I was awfully homesick, losing weight and suffering from terrible insomnia. The villagers were gossiping about me, because I was young and female, and half the boy boarders claimed to have slept with me. I was bored as fuck and Zoe was about as entertaining as a fence post. I called my airline on the sly and quietly enquired as to how long it would take to get a flight back to Sydney. “Four to six weeks,” the plane lady told me. I hung up, sat on the bucket, lit a cigarette, and decided to go home. The only problem was working out how to extract myself from my volunteer duties.

I began to weigh up my options. How could I leave and cause offence to the least amount of people? And more importantly, how could I get out ASAP?

In the end, I lied.

I called my father early one morning in February to wish him a happy birthday.

“How are you doing?” he politely inquired.
“Oh you know, I’m just- BAAAAHHHHHHH URRGGHHH!”
“Oh. Well. Um, hang in there, sweetheart.”

And so, using the tears so instantly produced by hearing my father’s voice, I walked into the kitchen and when Zoe asked what had happened, I told her that my mother had developed breast cancer and was scheduled for surgery in a week’s time.

Over the next three days, before I climbed onboard a jam-packed flight that I was able to join after being granted compassionate priority, many of the students and teachers shared their personal stories about cancer with me. The school’s art teacher, in particular, took me under her wing, as her husband had been battling various types of cancer for years and was on his last legs. Most of the students, staff and boarders approached me privately to offer their condolences, love and prayers. Francois sat with me on the bucket and smoked, then took my hand and placed it on his crotch. Zoe cried and asked me not to leave. I smiled sadly and nodded.

A week later, as I sat in my parents’ sunny backyard in Sydney, sifting through the assortment of “Get Well” cards the South African children had made for my mother, I related this story to my friend Mark. He listened quietly, took a long pull on his beer, and squinted at the sky. “You’re going straight to hell,” he told me, and I figure he’s probably right.