These are his stories:

Me: Excuse me?

Cabbie: You just look like you’ve been partying pretty hard.

Me: Right.. Can you take me to the Hills?

Cabbie: Sure. But just so you know, there’s a $60 fine if you vomit in a taxi.

Me: I’m not going to vomit in the taxi.

Cabbie: Okay, but just so you know–

Me: I’m fine.

Cabbie: You just look a little tired, that’s all. My mate rang me only half an hour ago cause some girl hurled in his cab. It’s a massive pain because you have to take the car to get cleaned, then you miss out on fares… So $60 doesn’t even really cover you.

Me: Take the motorway, please.

Cabbie: You know what the worst thing is? When people pay by credit. Man, I hate people who use credit cards. The driver doesn’t get the payment for at least two weeks.

Me: I’m sure it doesn’t take that long.

Cabbie: It does. Sometimes it takes months.

Me: I have cash.

Cabbie: Okay, but keep in mind it’s an extra $60 if you throw up.

Me: I’m not going to throw up.

Cabbie: Alright. Maybe we should stop talking and you can just concentrate on not throwing up.

Me: Sure, great.

Half an hour later.

Cabbie: Okay, so including tolls and the surcharge, that’ll be…$113.50

Me: Oh.. Do you take Mastercard? Put it through quickly, I’m feeling kind of nauseous.

Girl in bathroom: Yeah! I did pick up on that.

DIB: It’s so weird.

GIB: Wait.. what’s Twitter?

DIB: Fucked if I know.

Me: Twitter is a micro-blogging  and social networking service where users can post updates using 140 characters or less.

GIB: Who said that?

Warning: you may be disturbed by what you are about to hear.

transit officer: there’s no need to talk like that

junkie: HOW DID I BRK ER 3 EGG? 3 EGG? EDGAR? IN A FUCKEN BAG? NOT IN DIS BAG. NOTHA BAG

transit officer: watch your language

junkie: TWO HANDGUNS AND A TASER GUN!!!

transit officer: we haven’t got anything

junkie: IN DEE OTHER BAG, YA CLOWN!

Pause

junkie: YOU WANNA BE CAREFUL WITH ME

transit officer: I’ll keep that in mind

junkie: OOOUHH! YOU’LL WANNA!

Pause

junkie: WITH PLEASHHAAA

transit officer: we’ll get off here for a second and we can work something out

All aboard!

Not only was I unfortunate enough to be born with scoliosis and eyes which look in different directions when I am over-relaxed, but I also belong to a set of parents who insist on living in the Hills.

For those unfamiliar with Sydney, the Hills is an entirely stagnant and insular area north-west of the city where people are born, educated, employed and married all on the same block. People who live in the Hills go to school, church, soccer practice, work, the pub, and the movies all with the same group of friends they have had since pre-school, and they will continue to do so until they all rot beside their colostomy bags at the Anglican Retirement Village on Old Northern Road. If you suggest a visit to a city club or a day trip up the coast, Hills residents will smile and shake their head at you as if you are retarded. “Why would we trek all the way over there when we have everything we need right here?!” In this way, the Hills is exactly like America, but thinner.

The only way to get out of the Hills is to go to uni so you can secure a high-paying job and afford to move somewhere less conservative and tainted by Christians. But if you failed uni, like me, then you have to catch Hillsbus everywhere.

Hillsbus is the only way to get from the Hills to the city without paying $40 in tolls or trawling through three different forms of public transport. It is a privately owned company, which means they have a total monopoly on the norwest city-workers’ commute and can bump up their prices at will. The result is 60,000 passengers who fork over $50 each week for the privilege of spending 2 hours every day standing on a crowded, stuffy, perpetually late piece-of-shit vomit yellow bus. It is inevitable, like the tides – anyone who catches Hillsbus is a cunt.

“Umm Neek,” I can hear you say, “You catch Hillsbus. Does that make you a cunt too?”

Well yes, it does, to be honest. I live my life in a cranky state of constant exhaustion because my commute is so fucking long and tedious, I have considered simply sleeping on a yoga mat under my desk at work and giving myself sponge baths using the office water cooler. I also catch approximately six colds every winter because Hillsbus is so crowded that you will perform fellatio, on average, every three weeks simply by sitting in the aisle seat. I hate everyone on Hillsbus and all the filthy diseases they carry and sneeze on me. I never give up my seat for pregnant people or old women because the ride is so long and expensive that on the rare occasions you can get a seat, you hold onto that fucker like it’s going out of fashion. If someone wants to carry another human inside them for 9 months or commute long distances once they’re past the age of sixty then that’s their business, not mine. You should have thought about how you were going to work that into your life without counting on the generosity and kindness of strangers because really, the average person is fairly shit.

The Evidence

Last week, I was waiting at the Hillsbus bus stop after a few post-work beverages, when I became aware of some crazy bitch screaming up the road. Naturally, I turned to look, but my alcohol-riddled brain was too slow to look away before I had accidentally made eye contact with this raging meth head. I turned away anyway, hoping she would let it go, but ten seconds later I was grabbed around the head and dragged 3 metres by my hair. At this point, my brain cut out and I could not feel any pain or really register what was going on. I assume this is the same protective mental mechanism that shields me during sermons, conferences, and twenty minutes into any family dinner. Also, I was too smashed to know quite what was happening. However, I was aware of being slammed up against a wall and thrown to the ground, while being screamed at and called a cunt, a bitch, a whore, whatever else. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I assumed the fetal position and tried to cover my head. My friend Julia was on the scene fast, and yelled obscene threats until the ice junkie retreated, then she helped me to my feet.

“Are you okay?” Julia said.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“No.”

“Do you want some water?”

“No.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“Give me three.”

As we stood back in the bus line, because there seemed little else to do, I became aware that every other person waiting in the queue – all thirty or so of them – had simply watched me get bashed by an ice addict and decided that being a witness was the best civic duty they could provide in this particular situation. One lady (who was not a cunt) phoned the police to let them know what had happened, but everybody else just stood there guarding their place in line and staring at me. I knew they wanted tears. They wanted hysterics. They wanted blood. Instead, I held my cigarette at a jaunty angle and immediately pulled out my iPhone to tweet about the experience. I tossed my hair and LOLed. “Can you believe that just happened?” I asked Julia, who had not blinked or exhaled since the junkie first approached us. As soon as I know somebody wants something from me, I do everything within my power to prevent them from getting it, simply because I can, and I am selfish at heart. So these Hillsbus cunts could have their bus seat, but they wouldn’t get a show out of me.

When I got home, I took three valium and had a bath. Then I stood in front of the television and told my mother I had been attacked by a meth addict at the bus stop.

“That’s awful!” she said, putting down her crossword puzzle book. “Was anyone there?”

“Yeah, but nobody did anything. They didn’t even ask if I was okay. Those arseholes just stood in line watching. Like it was fucking street theatre.”

“Well I probably would have done the same,” Mum said, picking up her book again. “You don’t want to mess with an ice junkie. Besides, you’d never risk losing your place in the Hillsbus line. Those bastards will sidle up like you were never even there.”

The above image was brought to you by the genius man that is @bobearth and my power to persuade people to photoshop genitals into ordinary pictures.

“Hey, do you want to come back to my place?” he asked.

“Oh, no thanks,” I said.

“Well can I come back to your hotel?” he tried.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, “Not really. No.”

“I’m not going to lie,” he continued, “I don’t want to watch tv or talk or anything. I just want to have sex with you.”

“Yes, I realise that,” I said, “I’m leaving now.”

“Okay…” he said, “But you should know that when I get home, I’m going to think about you while I masturbate.”

And sometimes it’s better to let your co-workers think you are a victim of domestic abuse, because that is less embarrassing than the skanky, horrible truth.

So it was basically a waste for me to be spending 3 hours in a day spa at an island resort off Penang. But I went anyway, because I was on holidays and there was little else to do. As a young Malaysian girl rubbed exfoliating scrub into me, I thought, does she hate this? Maybe she had kids or ailing relatives, and instead of staying home taking care of them, she was stuck rubbing oil onto soft white people for $4 an hour. If she was anything like me, this would make her bitter and overly critical. She would sniff at my uneven tan and scoff at my undefined arms. She would snicker at the disposable day spa underpants cutting into my well-fed western flesh. She would shake her head at the scars on my leg (a sure symbol of poor-little-rich-white-girl syndrome.) She would hate me, and every minute she had to touch me would be torture.

I began to wish that the massage girl was older. I wished she was taller, more Asian, and spoke no English. I wished she was a large, elderly African gay man.  I wished she was anything that would make her less like me; less likely to judge everything before her down to each individual hair follicle.

I worried that the exfoliating procedure was chaffing her hands. Perhaps she had a paper cut that needed to be kept clean, and all this day spa gunk was preventing her wound from healing. Maybe she’d pulled a muscle in her back, and climbing onto the table to crawl over me was painful for her.

I was getting hot under my towel, despite being nearly naked beneath it. I could feel the beginning of a headache behind my eyes. I wanted a glass of water. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to go back to my room and sit alone under the air-conditioning and watch the cooking channel, even though I had no intention of ever cooking anything in life. I wanted to check my phone to see whether my friend Kahlee had texted me. I’ve known Kahlee for 4 years, and I am used to emailing her ten times a day to update her, in immense detail, on everything that has occured within the last hour. If I do not document my life in mundane emails to Kahlee, it has not transpired.

By then, the massage had become mentally excruciating. I should have been enjoying this luxurious treatment; basking in the extravagance of it and wishing it would never end. Instead, I was considering pushing the girl away, explaining, “I’m sorry but I’m nuts and I can’t lie here for 3 hours listening to my brain,” and leaving the spa.

But then, just as I was trying to figure out how to communicate my sentiments in Engrish, the girl interrupted my thoughts by saying, “Miss, may I scrub your breasts?”

I had 2 seconds to think about this. I needed 3 more.

“I’m sorry – what?”

“Miss, may I scrub your breasts?”

“Ohh, of course,” I said graciously, as though she had asked to borrow a light.

And then, as the impoverished Malaysian woman exfoliated my nipples, my brain magically switched off. I had landed myself in a situation so awkward, so culturally imbalanced, so close to paying an Asian girl to perform sexual favours, that my mind was simply unable to worry about anything else. I relaxed.

“This is great!” I told Niki as I struck a pose and smiled winningly while a Chinese girl photographed me. “I’ve never been to a country where everyone thinks I’m so hot!”

“They don’t think you’re hot,” Niki explained, “They think you’re a whore. A white western whore who will spread her legs after three margaritas by a cheap motel pool.”

“Oh.” I said.

After that, I scowled whenever anyone asked to take my picture. And if I noticed somebody photographing me without my permission, I twisted my face into a snarl and raised both my middle fingers towards the camera. If I was going to be uploaded to some seedy Indian guy’s Facebook album and tagged as his girlfriend, framed and placed on somebody’s bedside table, or possibly even masturbated over, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it smiling.

So my friend Niki and I were stoked when we boarded our flight to Kuala Lumpur and saw that there weren’t any other passengers seated within five rows of us. The morning had already been stressful enough – we’d gotten up at 4:30am after going to bed at midnight, and had been forced to stop several times on the drive from Brisbane to Coolangatta so that I could be violently sick in filthy service station bathrooms. The attendants all gave me dirty looks as I exited the bathrooms, pale and sweaty and looking every part the junkie.

Therefore it was a relief to get to the airport on time and know that we’d be able to spend our flight stretched out across three seats – a whole row each – and catch up on sleep. But then, 20 minutes before we were due to depart, 300 Malaysians suddenly boarded the plane and filled all the available seats around us. Worse, these people all had kids. Obnoxious, bratty, whiney kids, who took turns losing their shit and hollering like psych patients throughout the entire 9 hour flight. The worst of these children, a little Malaysian Dennis the Menace in denim overalls who looked about 2 years old, sat directly behind me. He immediately proceeded to wail, thrashing under his seatbelt and kicking the back of my seat. I allowed 10 minues of this – ample time for parental administration of corporal punishment – then I stood up and faced his grandmother, who stared back at me impassively. I looked pointedly at her horrid rat-baby and then back at her. Control your spawn, I told her with my eyes, Make it quiet, or kill it. Then I sat back down and took 3 valium.

An hour later, I awoke to the same screeching and seat-kicking. Full of buzz and lacking my usual sober inhibitions, I stood up and went to the child. “Please stop kicking my seat, sweetheart,” I said, “Or I will kick you.” And he stopped after that.

I spent the remainder of the flight drifting in and our of a valium-induced slumber and calling the flight attendants every time I woke up. It was impossible to attract their attention as they walked throughout the cabin, but if I pushed a small orange button above my seat, I was attended to within seconds. Perhaps this magical orange button was intended for medical emergencies or similar. Whatever. I would press it without hesitation whenever I needed some water, another blanket, or a hot Milo. The flight attendant would drop whatever she was doing and come running over. “What is the matter?” she would ask breathlessly, and I would hold out my Air Asia neck pillow. “I can’t blow this up,” I would explain, and she would stare for a moment before realising I was serious and demonstrating how to blow-up the pillow. “Maybe instead of showing me,”  I suggested, “You could just do it for me?”

“Oh. Ha ha. No.” Their English was limited.