Boys are stupid (part 2)
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.”
Boys are stupid (part 1)
Copacabana, early 2003
boyfriend-at-the-time: Why are there bins in all the girls’ toilets?
me: So women can throw out their tampons and stuff.
boyfriend-at-the-time: But don’t they dissolve? Like inside you?
Why I have low self-esteem
Somewhere around my fifteenth year, I sat at the kitchen table one evening, doing my homework and eating a frozen piece of banana cake. My mother entered the room and looked from the cake to me.
“What?” I asked her.
“It’s not that you’re fat, darling,” she explained, “You’re just…flabby.”
How I failed uni
I did not officially study for my Higher School Certificate, but I obtained a reasonably high UAI because I had written my maths formulae, history dates, English quotes and legal studies cases on clear plastic and stuck them on the back of the toilet door. I then stared intently at them while I crouched on the bathroom floor on early mornings, nursing the worst of my study-leave hangovers. And so, armed with these surprisingly excellent results and the world at my feet, I enrolled in a Business degree with a major in Accounting. If you had asked me why I wanted to be an accountant, I would have said something along the lines of, “I like Maths and I don’t know what else to do.” Indeed, I did enjoy the odd equation, and the approximate 5% of my course that involved Maths was reasonably enjoyable. However, the remainder of my classes and lectures proved to be rather dry, so I decided to make do with the textbooks and my ability to improvise.
This worked well for my first year and my sparkling academic record continued. However, at the beginning of 2006, my interest in the course began to wane. Depressed and directionless, I chose to spend my days drinking gin and watching Dawson’s Creek rather than studying. Miraculously, I passed my third semester, and then during the fourth, I…….failed. I went to my exams and stared at the paper and I didn’t know any of the answers. I couldn’t even make something up, because I had failed to absorb the basic grains of knowledge that I could have then elaborated on to construct some kind of response. So I handed in my blank paper, went home, poured myself a gin and tonic, and watched Dawson’s Creek.
After that semester, I deferred my course for a year, then never went back. And to be honest, the only thing I really regret is my $11k HECS debt.
Thin legal ice
As an adult, I seem to have a knack for getting in trouble with the law. Not that I do anything particularly bad, but anytime I do disobey the rules, I get busted at an extreme level. The second my car creeps over the speed limit, I become blinded by the flash of a camera or see a police car in my rear view mirror. (This is likely to happen on a long weekend so that I’ll lose half my license.) And whenever I park in the wrong spot, I cop a ticket (always the $180 ones.) We all break the little rules whenever we can and usually it goes unnoticed. But when I do it, I get fined.
I attribute this to a brief, yet intense, stint of shoplifting as a young teenager. My friend Brooke and I would waltz into Kmart in our school uniforms, fill empty McDonald’s cups with make-up and earrings and layer on underpants in the change room, then saunter out casually. But while Brooke relished the adrenaline rush of walking through the store’s security gates with her hidden booty, the whole thing made me ill with anxiety. I imagined the police breaking down my bedroom door and hauling me out from under the doona. (“That’s her, there’s the Lip Gloss Thief of Castle Hill!”) I lay awake at night, dreading the day we would eventually be caught. Fortunately, once we’d accumulated enough Max-Factor to last us until menopause, Brooke and I decided to quit while we were ahead and resumed our life as generally-law-abiding citizens. I’ve totally used up all my ‘get out of gaol free’ cards though.