I was out to dinner with my lady friends, when the conversation turned to gay guys.

“I always wanted to be a fag hag,” one of my friends lamented, “But they’re too bitchy.”

“Not all of them,” I said, “I think that’s more of a gay cultural thing. Like certain strains of gay culture are more bitchy than others.”

“Well my fag is lovely,” another girl offered, “And he’s always there for me when I get gastro.”

Somewhere around grade 10, my friends and I started hanging around a particular group of guys. They were mostly apprentices who’d dropped out of school and they hung around our local shopping centre when they finished work in the afternoons. We caught the bus there after class and smoked cigarettes on the loading docks in our private school uniforms while these guys tried to source pot and mooch free pizza. They were the type of guys who considered taking a dump on somebody who was passed out at a party as “witty.”

When I stopped going to house parties and got drunk in bars instead, I fell out a little with these guys. I still saw them around, but when I did, I pretended not to know them. But after uni, our circles started overlapping again and I decided to give one of the boy’s house parties another go. Maybe they had grown up, toned down their behaviour and learned not to be so silly?

The party was going well. Nobody had spun a bottle or stuck their hands down my pants, the bathroom didn’t smell like vomit, and the police hadn’t visited. Then around midnight, the boys began passing around glow sticks.

“Are we going to a rave?” I asked.

“Not quite – wait and see,” somebody named Willo winked at me.

Each guy pulled down his jeans, cracked open his glow stick, and rubbed the contents onto his penis. Then they ran in a line down the dark street and shouted out to all the neighbours. Bleary eyed citizens shuffled to their bedroom windows and looked out to see a trail of bobbing wangs lit up and making their way past their rose bushes.

The boys then ran back to our yard and threw themselves one by one into the pool, screaming, “IT BURNS! FUCK, IT BURNS..”

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!”

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.

When I was ten years old, my parents made me change schools mid-term. We’d moved a few suburbs away and the 30+ minutes of driving every morning and afternoon was giving mum the shits.

I’ve never been able to make new friends easily, and I was no better at it back then. In fact, the only friend I managed to recruit that year was a girl named Kim, who wore thick glasses and constantly had the faint aroma of shit about her.

“Kim wears nappies,” the other kids gossiped, “cause she poos her pants all the time.”

I didn’t find the smell too bad, so I hung out with Kim and invited her over to my house a few times. She was nice enough and she always gave me half of her roll-up.

When school finished for the year, Kim went away on holiday with her family. She sent me a postcard from Jenolan Caves that read:

Dear Annik,

I miss you. I’m glad you came to our school. Thank you for being my friend and for not making fun of me like the others do.

Love, Kim.

After the summer break, Kim and I were enrolled in different classes because I was smarter than her. In my new class, a group of four girls, who were reasonably pretty, started letting me sit with them at lunch and invited me to the movies and their birthday parties. I never really spoke to Kim again after that.

My friend Mark is one of the most important men in my life. A nurse by trade, he has the privilege of fielding all my medical questions (“Okay, so I was in the men’s room at Q Bar, and stuff was happening, and then I fell…”) A mechanic by hobby, he also has the joy of fixing anything that goes wrong with my car. In return, I introduce him to hot chicks who he might be able to convince to sleep with him.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing though.

My friends and I first met Mark at the beginning of Year 11. He was new that year and his parents had sent him to our conservative Anglican school after he’d been busted with a knife too many times at his old place of learning.
“Hey laydeeez..” he drawled, sidling up to us behind the science block at lunchtime, “Where do you girls go to smoke around here?”
“There’s an abandoned house across the street,” we offered, “And we’re having a party this weekend if you wanna come.”

That Friday night, as we passed a bong around my friend Kim’s backyard, Mark burst through the side gate and waved a bottle of Passion Pop above his head. “LET’S GET WASTED!” he suggested, and spun the bottle on the ground hopefully.

“Ew, slow down,” and we rolled our eyes as Mark went around the yard, sussing us out one by one.

Later we reconvened to share our experiences.

“He said I had an arse from heaven,” Kim laughed.

“He didn’t say anything at all to me, just went in for the kill,” I shuddered.

“He followed me into the cubby house,” my friend Bryony admitted, “And when I offered him a cigarette, he leaned over and whispered, I wanna suck you dry.“

“Good god, that’s fucked up!” we agreed unanimously.

However, it was at that moment, in the early hours of the morning, that we realised none of us had seen Mark for quite some time. We searched the house. We searched the yard. We walked up and down the street, calling his name. We found no trace of him, except his shoes ,which lay on top of the BBQ next to his car keys.

“Shit!” Kim’s mum wasn’t happy, “I’ve lost the new kid. The Christians will kill me!”

We sat up for a while wondering what to do. Then we passed out.

I woke up at sunrise to find myself on the couch on the back deck. As I mentally assessed my hangover, I heard a groan from beneath me. Slowly, Mark crawled out from the small space underneath the couch and turned to look at me.

“Hey, gorgeous!” he said.

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?”

Earlier this year, a blogger friend asked me to be a bridesmaid in her upcoming wedding. Deciding that this was probably as close as I would ever get to my lifelong dream of being a Flower Girl, as there is not an overly high demand in the current economic climate for twenty-two year old Flower Girls, I accepted.

A frequent visitor of bridal forums, my blogger friend had come to learn many new acronyms. Most of these were fairly self-explanatory (eg MIL = mother-in-law, and so on), but some were already deeply ingrained in my brain as something else entirely.

“You will be fabulous as a BM,” my blogger friend said to me in an email.

And all I could imagine was myself being eaten, and then defecated, by a giant monster.