And then everyone left, and I got a job

It has been a fucking long time since I last posted on here. I guess I'd better quickly fill in whoever's unfortunate enough to be reading this on what's been happenning.


November: Well, the HSC finally came to a profoundly anti-climactic end when I finished my last ever high school exam. It had been Society and Culture, I believe. We drove off into the bush immediately afterwards for our much cheaper, earthier version of the notorious schoolies.

Our version of schoolies didn't go for very long. It actually just consisted of camping by a river, drinking, smoking, and swimming. At one point we all journeyed across the river, away from our campsite, for a bit of a wildly unnecessary bush bramble. We left one of the girls behind at the campsite because she was asleep and is one of those people that you just don't wake up. The interesting thing was that this particular friend of ours was terrified of lizards, and exceptionally large goannas had been circling our campsite for most of the morning. We figured leaving a girl who was terrified of lizards alone with a bunch of large lizards was a perfectly dandy idea, because, you know, she was asleep. For some reason, none of us took into account the wild notion that people often wake up after they've been sleeping for a while.

We all eventually returned to the campsite, slightly sun burnt and incredibly exhausted, to find that our friend had mysteriously vanished. We gazed up the hill and discovered that she had not, in fact, completely disappeared. Rather, she had merely teleported herself into her car, a place where she would be physically protected from the goannas that, upon waking up, she had discovered were circlcing the tent.

Somehow, we all convinced the goannas that the three of us were remarkably fearsome and, as such, they should vacate the premisis. Getting our friend to leave her car and return to the campsite - now completely but probably only temporarily devoid of goannas - was a much more difficult task. 

After two nights of camping, I returned home. In the same day, I attended a job interview for a job I would later recieve and officially signed out of high school. Straight out of the exam hall and into the work force. For the next week or so I entertained an old and dear friend who was in the process of moving from Dubbo to Cairns, and decided to visit in the mean time. When we weren't drinking, being emotional, catching up or wandering the streets in a thoroughly existential search for meaning/something to do, I was attending training sessions for the job I would soon begin.

Suddenly, I found myself bidding farewell to my friend at the local airport, crying, next to another crying friend. Before I knew it I had started the job, which was to be a strange cross between Barrista, Till Person, Waiter, and Wholesale Delivery Boy. But for the first month, all I did was help move the entire business from one venue to another. That was quite the induction.

December: My workplace officially opened, and I was introduced to two new friends I would be seeing a lot of in the future; "Overtime" and "Wages".

Christmas came and we all sat out the back of my brother's house. I managed to move my entire life from one house to another in five days. There were gifts and deep conversations about things that happenned before I was born with people I never knew. There was beer, and wine, and pavlova. I managed to move my entire life from one house to another in five days.

The new year came in while I was on the toilet. The Dixie Chicks Greatest Hits played in the background as I heard Lola and her boyfriend shriek about the New Year. I rushed out, washed my hands, and changed the music to "Midnight Radio" - a glorious song from off-broadway musical "Hedwig & The Angry Inch" that I'd always wanted to play at midnight. We drank wine and peppermint tea, played scrabble and nibbled on chocolate before spooning in my double bed.

January: My new years resolution was really just to be healthy. But somehow January ended up as a month of alcoholism, parties, take-away and not sleeping enough. I went to work, saw my friends, got drunk and that was about it.

I was (of course) working when my mum and her husband left town in their caravan to travel around the country. I came home and suddenly realised that I now had to do my own washing and cooking.

Two of my closest friends turned eighteen in January. Both are from New Zealand and neither seemed very fussed about their coming of age. I owe one of them a pub crawl.

February: I'm not sure if anything remarkable happenned in February. I worked, a lot, but decided to start looking after myself at home. I re-entered the kitchen I had evacuated when the HSC hit, and learnt when to add red wine and what works in a quiche. The answers were "always" and "everything".

I ventured to Sydney in late February to celebrate a friend's 18th/go out clubbing/get out of the fucking small town I hadn't left since October. I took myself to Arq and then Bondi, where I snuck into the backpackers and intended to stay until sunrise. It became very freezing very quickly, and so at 5 in the morning I gave up, picked myself up off the grass and caught a bus back to where I was staying.

I spent a lot of that weekend on busses. I snuck a bottle of wine into the East Hills Hotel, caught up with a friend I hadn't seen since school ended at Coogee, and had a few drinks, Thai Food, and a go at the Pokies with my mum at Beverly Hills.

I sat at the airport terminal for two hours until my plane finally arrived at 7am on a Monday morning. I read Frankie for an hour, then we were there. I got off, went home, showered, ironed my uniform and headed to work.

And that about sums things up. I'm no longer a student, or a child. Working to pay my own way, rent and bills is thrilling and terrifying. At the moment I'm a bit under the weather, and for the first time, am really missing mummy.

La Vie Boheme

Okay so it's been quite a while since I last posted on here. Nine months. I could have had a baby. I didn't. I don't have a womb. Or a girlfriend. Not that I want either.

Anyway, hello! I'm back. An awful lot has happenned over the past nine months and I don't really know where to start. I suppose the beginning?

At some point in the year I had a boyfriend. That all started and ended pretty quickly, actually. I probably shouldn't talk about it too much. He seemed sweet. But alas, that chapter has closed.

In about May I started getting involved in the local theatre. After ushering for a few shows, I heard auditions were being held for another show, "All Shook Up". At the time I was as shy as anything and didn't want to even go to the audition, let alone be in a musical. I was almost certain I couldn't sing, couldn't dance, wasn't the world's greatest actor and certainly didn't want to sing, dance and act in front of anyone I didn't have to. But I went to the audition. I did it. I'm pretty sure I turned up an hour late, even though the audition was held walking distance from my house. I'm always late to things. The epitomy of this would have to have been the time I held a barbacue down at the local beach's foreshores, and turned up 40 minutes late. I was the host. It was my barbacue. Yet I turned up 40 minutes late.

Right, the audition. So I went there and sat there shaking until the Director asked me to sing something for her. The only song I'd prepared was an excerpt of "We three Kings of Orient Are". Everyone was really shocked at how deep my voice was and didn't seem to mind that I'd sung a Christmas Carol in the middle of may.

I got into the show somehow as a member of the ensemble. I kept telling myself that I would have to let them all know that I had to leave the show as the pressure of the HSC was too strong. But I never got around to it, and along came opening night. I was running so high on adrenaline I didn't even have the chance to feel nervous or scared. Between when I auditioned for the show and the show's afterparty, I came to several epiphanies.

Anyone who knows me would be very, very sick of hearing about my "existential crises" or "sudden epiphanies". But I'm going to assume you, whoever you are, have perchanced to visit this blog for reasons dark and unknown, and as such don't mind me blabbing on.

Rehearsals started in May after the cast had been put together. I was shy and terrified of everyone and everything. My hair was auburn, and I had a boyfriend. By the time the show ended, all of that was gone. On opening night, we were all slapping each other's arses and undressing in front of each other backstage. And my hair, well, I'd dyed it black because I was sick of having to keep up the dying process. And the boyfriend, well, he was gone. It was good, in retrospect, that we parted ways. Even though I didn't really like him, I'd forced myself to believe that I did. And somehow it still hurt when it all ended. I guess being rejected isn't nice, regardless of who did the rejecting.

He might have rejected me, and other friends might have walked out or faded away from my life, but in the theatre I found sanctuary. I became eerily close to my theatre family over those few months. At one point I performed a less than sober striptease to some of the girls in the cast to Cher's "Welcome to Burlesque".

Anyway, the theatre became my home. I spent more time with the cast and crew than I did with my own friends and family, which felt like a bad thing. But then I came to the realisation that the theatre is what I love. I love performance. I love it.

It's been very difficult for me not to drop out of year twelve to become a full time vagabond. When I found out that auditions for "RENT" the musical are taking place somewhere in Sydney in October I sent off a flurry of excited emails. But then reality struck, and I realised I wouldn't be able to afford constant trips to and from Sydney, and shouldn't be traversing acrossing the country between HSC exams. And I decided I should stay here in my hometown for the rest of the year as it is my last year living here, and some people I might not see again.

Fuck, I'm going to miss everyone and everything about this town. Well, that's a lie. We have our fair share of bogans here, and much less than our fair share of excitement. But I have met the most beautiful people living here, and made connections I don't want to lose. People here have touched me on a deep level and I'm actually terrified and distraught at the thought of losing this connection. Although we all vow to stay in touch, I know that in reality only a few of us will, and the rest are doomed to drift off into the "I used to know" category.

I am truly going to miss this place. This beautiful town full of gorgeous people. It was where I grew up. It was where I first found myself. I learnt to walk, talk, sing, dance, drive and thrive here. I learnt how to be a person, how to be a friend, how to be a lover and how to embrace everything life offers with both arms. It was here that I had my first kiss, my first love. It was in this town that I discovered who I am. I discovered that I might be anybody, or somebody, and that I wasn't just nobody. I learnt to persevere, to try my hardest and to never give up. I learnt when to stop, when to let go, and when to walk away. And I know that moving to Sydney next year is something I just have to do. But I will forever hold this town and it's people close to my heart.