Typical Darlinghurst landscape

• Listening to my neighbours rotate a limited playlist at extreme volumes that would normally be appropriate for Mardi Gras comedown parties, 14 year old girls, and the autistic.
• Seeing an aboriginal guy take a shit on Crown Street.
• Being woken up regularly on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings around 4am when the girl next door would bring home whoever fingered her at the pub and then act coy by chatting to them for 45 minutes outside my bedroom window.
• The tranny who used to steal my mail.
• Calling the police every Friday and Saturday night to come and clear away the hipsters drinking goonbags in the gutter.
• The cockroaches.
• The maggots.
• The wasps.
• The time a rat ran up the stairs.
• Finding a homeless person in my garage.
• Having your front door pissed on.
• Listening to idiots setting off their own car alarm (at least once a day.)

• Looking at your own poo was important because it told you whether you were healthy or not.
• Female pleasure was considered essential for conception to occur, so if you got knocked up in a rape you could never press charges because obviously you enjoyed it, you swampy whore.
• When you were dying, the priest would announce it at church and then everyone would come to your house to stand around and watch you die.
• If you didn’t die “properly” and went under screaming, crying, or freaking out, you were considered a huge pussy and would have to kill more time in purgatory than people who died more pleasantly.
• Rich people didn’t eat garlic because it was considered peasant food.
• Vaginas didn’t really exist. Girls just had inverted penises and if you jumped up and down enough, it would eventually fall out.
• It was considered “womanly” for an unmarried man to sleep with a lot of women, so in order to maintain his masculinity he would bum dudes instead.
• You could swaddle your baby and hang it from a tree all day while you were off ploughing fields and nobody would think less of you.
• Generally speaking, there was never any need to take a bath.
• Women had no souls, just like black people and slaves.
• People would take a dump in most places. There were no toilets anywhere and no real concept of cleanliness, so you could poop pretty much wherever you wanted and not be embarrassed about it like I was. If you were royalty you might have a “toilet” on one of your castle’s turrets where you could shit off the side of the building and your shit would slowly run down the wall into the shit-filled moat below.
• It was a pretty gross time for everybody.

aka I am doing Open Uni again.

1. She can see photos of you fucked up (that’s a given.)
2. She can’t remember her password and will get drunk at Christmas lunch and bang on about what a stupid website it is and how she’s going to ring them on Monday and tell them to “let her back in”.
3. She takes ambiguous status updates literally and will complain that your cousin’s status simply said “sigh.” (“Just sigh. Nothing else. Why is she sighing? What does it mean?”)
4. She calls you and asks you how to delete things from her feed once she’s read them. (“What, you mean other people’ s posts?” “Yes, how do I get rid of them?”)
5. She is giddy at suddenly being privy to so much of your personal life and comments on every single fucking thing you do.
6. Your creeper flatmate tries to add her as a friend.
7. She emails you asking you to explain what is a creeper?
8. She posts horrific anecdotes that refer to your father and her “doing it”.

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?

• smells bad
• nothing good to eat
• never much phone reception

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.

• 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

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.

This post is for Aleisha McCormack. She asked me to write about my hobbies, because I am a glamourous blogger who works in advertising and lives in the big city. It took a lot of reflection over quite a few weeks, but I’ve finally put together a comprehensive list:

• peeling other people’s sunburnt skin
• drinking
• licking the salt off rice crackers
• putting things in the bin
• reading books about shipwrecks
• loling
• getting up during the night to make sure the stove is turned off

I think that’s all. Sometimes I also write limericks using rude words. I guess I’m just a fun/crazy gal!