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.

Birth of a teenager

Well shit. It' 12:26 in the afternoon and I just woke up.

I was sortof hoping this day wouldn't come. When I was small, I used to look on in disgust at my brother's teenage lifestyle. The drinking, the going out, the incredibly odd food choices and the lingering smell. More than anything I think what repulsed me was the hours he kept. He would go to bed sometime after two - in the morning! - and arise sometime after lunch the next day. For some reason, this was completely unacceptable to my pious ten year old self.

The smell is something I remember vividly. He, and all his things, and all his friends had this vivid smell. It was the smell of apathy. The smell of frequently going unwashed for days at a time. The smell of mess, of disorder, of chaos. The smell of freedom.

When my brother moved out and stopped being a teenager, I never thought I'd come into contact with the smell again.

Today, I woke up around lunch time after going to sleep sometime after two. And I realised...

I now have my own smell.

It's official. I'm a dirty, rotten, teenage dirtbag. Most people enter this phase some time in their early teens, perhaps thirteen or fifteen. But of course of entered it after my eighteenth birthday. I'm somewhat renowned for being late. Late to catch onto trends, late to class, late to get togethers that I organise....

Most of the bands I've recently gotten into were in the height of their fame a few decades ago. Bear in mind that I wasn't even alive a few decades ago.

I'm not sure what it is that makes me so late all the time. Perhaps it's the fact that I generally take too long to do anything. Or maybe the fact that in over eighteen years I still haven't quite grasped the art of time management.

Generally, I catch onto trends after they've gone full circle. They've been discovered, shared, and then disowned by hipsters as "too mainstream", and then disappeared into the abyss of obscurity. After about a decade, they are nostalgically revived, and after another twenty to fifty years they're back in fashion as "vintage" or "retro".

It's usually sometime after the trend has disappeared into the abyss of obscurity that I finally jump on the bandwagon. In fact, more often than not the trend may have been through two or more revivals and again disappeared into obscurity, before I jump onto the bandwagon.

It's safe to say that I'm late when it comes to jumping on bandwagons. I'm late for busses too. Somehow I never miss long distance trains or planes though.