The Mad World

Inspired by my love of all things chiropractic.

“You’re…David. Yeah, you’re going to be my tough client of the day. You’re going to be the client who’s gone and completely thrown out his spine. I can see it from here. It’s bad.

Don’t worry about answering me. I find that I always just natter away. Tune me out if you want. I’ll probably talk on anyway. I hope that’s ok? It’s just…it gets so repetitive if there isn’t a running commentary. You find you’re stuck in this ongoing cycle of kneading flesh and smoothing bumps and pushing and pushing at this thick wheel of knotted muscle that never quite unknots. So you’re pushing away, wrenching at this solid human wall of tension and you’re causing pain even if you think you’re helping them, and to tell you the truth – it gets old. It gets really old, David.

So I find that talking it away makes it much better. I get to talk about my day and ex-boyfriends and how much I hate my job. And then whenever my boss walks in, the head chiropractor here, I immediately clam up, I furrow my fingertips into your muscles with an urgency and finesse you haven’t yet felt in our session, you sort of wish that our whole massage session could have had that same dedication and expertise but of course, I don’t do the really good massages for just anyone. Otherwise I would have burnt my fingertips off by now. I would be massaging you with little blooded stumps. Which you wouldn’t like, would you?

But some customers, well, they get this magic treatment. I’ll dole it out to one, maybe two, a day. The ones who deserve it, like you. You’re the hero, Dave. Can I call you Dave?

You were in the news and everything!

You were that everyday saviour, going for your daily mid-morning stroll around the park, a walk you take every weekday at 11.30am in lieu of a coffee or cigarette break. While your colleagues are sucking down the stimulants, you’re trotting merrily around a lake, you’re breathing in fresh, gorgeous air while they sully their lungs or dirty their throats. You find this mid-morning walk gives you the boost you need to “get on with it” that day, whatever “it” might entail. It’s a short walk, fifteen minutes at most, but enough time to ensure you become a highlight of the coffee-mothers’ day. They gape after you, this confident, strutting suited man, shiny and confident and self-assured. Their hands clutch at their coffee cups in a burst of misused passion. They want to fling their skim lattes away and grip you with the same urgency. They want to lap up your youth and your confidence, your swagger and your self-sufficiency. You are a sort of currency to coffee mothers.

But you don’t notice any of this, of course. For you this walk is a profoundly personal odyssey, a passage from one part of the day into another. It is your way of making sense of this life you lead, the meetings and the arse-kissing and the constant overwhelming TIREDNESS that is just part of the day. Your walk is the one break from it all, the few moments where your personality is allowed to escape from the pen, the moments where you may talk to dogs and smile at babies and snort gustily from spring flowers. So, you don’t notice the mothers. They don’t register. This moment is not about them.

But today, all that changes. Today is the day where some dog decides to go ape-shit in the park, running around, snarling and frothing at the mouth, butting prams and biting ankles and eating peoples’ picnics. This isn’t the sort of dog you would normally attempt a conversation with either, this isn’t a small fluffy white dog with orange food patches around its mouth. It’s not a Labrador puppy with wide swimming eyes, the sort that you’d find in a toilet paper ad. This is a big, snarling, stinking beast and it’s not the sort of dog who you think would be an equal conversationalist.

So, you ignore the dog, as much as possible. While you skip your laps around the not-really-so-very-big lake, the dog makes himself seen. The dog is ingratiating himself into your routine of liberation. He is assuming himself into this moment that was meant to be all about YOU, about YOUR peace and happiness, a peace and happiness only disturbed by dogs with names like Fluffy and Peaches, not ROVER and BARK.

So, this dog is annoying. He is annoying, the way he swaggers about YOUR lake, the way he glares at you expectantly through the quivering reeds and across the still grey water. He is annoying, but no big deal, until the dog starts making a big deal. The dog gets bored of trying to gain your attention, or decides to just amp up the way in which he will, HE WILL, wrench your attention away from the grass and the reeds and the still grey water.

The dog looks at you, and it looks at the coffee mothers and it makes a few major cerebral connections at once, before it decides on a course of action. The dog gears up and gloats, it gives you one last smug dog-grin from beneath its wrinkled brows, and starts STALKING towards a baby. The Mum is oblivious, she’s nattering away on her mobile phone and drinking a stupid skim latte, and this dog is just CHARGING towards the pram which she’s not even holding onto, the dog is frothing and snarling and it just has this long, low, horrible frequency to its bark. This is the sort of dog that means business. This is the sort of dog that would rip a body up in half before it realises what it just did.

And so the whole park is standing there in this frozen, cold horror, mouths agape, picnics forgotten. The swans are craning their necks out of the not-so-still grey water, the eels are holding their breath and poking their slimy heads out of the now-quite-disturbed lake, and there’s just this moment of awful, expectation-fuelled silence. And you can’t believe it. You can’t believe everyone is frozen while you, YOU, are just bubbling and seething with adrenaline, the adrenaline of your 11.30am ritual.

Before you know what you’re thinking, before you have a chance to slip out of the jacket you had made in Hong Kong, made for you by a tailor who you tipped generously, you BOLT towards this dog and this baby. You launch yourself at the dog, you roll and leap and soar in the dog’s direction, and somewhere in this rolling and leaping and soaring, you do it. You distract the dog from the baby. You awaken the mother from her inertia. She even drops her coffee. And you and the dog freeze in a moment of mutual solidarity. Mutual respect. Maybe a bit of mutual fear.

The dog calms down. Its breathing slows. Its foaming spittle trickles down its heaving mouth, its flapping tongue. The dog has been calmed. You get up to dust off your jacket, to chastise the mother, to point at her skim latte and lecture “WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT, YOUR LATTE OR YOUR BABY” and then flounce away from the park and the lake and the gaping swans and breathless eels, out of the edge of the glimmering woods, out of the edge of this moment of tragically ill-populated heroism.

But you can’t get up. You are stuck. You are frozen. All those people around you, moments ago bogged down in stillness, their useless swollen feet lolling in what felt like setting mud, are now buzzing around a frozen you. Your energy has transferred to them and fled from you. Your heroic achievement has been pilfered, sucked out, collected and distilled into little bursts of unprecedented function amongst a sea of previously stationary people. They have sucked you dry of your energy. They have bled you. While they buzz and flap and sniff, you are stuck to the ground that moments ago held them down.

You are stuck to the ground not through some grand psychological impulse, an affinity with this dog soon to be in trouble, but because you have done something terrible to your back, and you are in ball-tearing, teeth-gritting, horrible pain. It feels like someone has coiled up your back muscles into some eternal tangling gyre, widening and disabling everything, worsening moment by moment.

And so you managed to scoop yourself up, you made a graceful exit on all fours, and you heaved your way here today. I’m so glad you came to us, David. To me. I feel like I know you now, from hearing your story. I feel like we have something very tangible and special in common. I might sound a bit crazy in saying that, but…I really do.

Do you feel the same?”

Hey fans and h8ers,

Should have posted this a while ago, but here is the Heckler that I’m going to have grandchildren for, just so I can thrust a laminated copy of this under their noses every time they visit me.

They came up with this heading.

My friend Stace gave me a bunch of words and I wrangled them into a story.

Future Fund

Janice was getting married. Janice was thirty-five, which was universally agreed as a pretty good age to get married. Janice worked five days a week, she sweated regularly at the gym, and she ate salad for most of her lunches. Janice deserved this marriage. She deserved happiness and contentment and most of all she deserved never having to work again because she was marrying someone who was about five thousand times richer than she was.

Janice deserved this rich husband, and this rich, gleaming marriage, because Janice had worked for this marriage. She had done ridiculous things to ensnare the affections of her soon-to-be husband. She had partaken in activities like fox-hunting and antiquing. She even went on a cruise around Somalia, under duress, where she spent a lot of time worrying about pirates, but most of her creative energy was focused on one thing.

Her future riches.

She would be heavy and groaning with wealth. She would jingle wherever she walked, not with coins but with fiscal potential. She would shuffle to and fro, shuffle delicately and femininely, with her money-laden legs, her cash-lined trousers. And it would be a heavy undertaking, it would be difficult and all-consuming and there might be some chafing involved, but these sacrifices were worth taking. For money.

She would work to build on this burgeoning wealth. Not work in the sense of nine-to-five, sweaty employment, of course. Not work in the sense of standing in front of a hive of itchy school children, writing the word ‘principal’ on the blackboard with a piece of crumbling chalk. Oh no, those days were certainly over. But in a non-employment sense, in a non-nine-to-five sense, she would attract more wealth. She would be a wealth-magnet. She would do things like instead of requesting wedding presents, ask for one of those horrible Wishing Wells at her wedding, the kind of present-surrogate that tells your friends “We don’t want your personal taste, we don’t want your awful projection of what our married life requires, we just want your money. Give. Us. Your. Money”. She would give money to literacy programs and receive tax benefits. She would donate to Cystic Fibrosis and buy slinky dresses to wear to Cystic Fibrosis galas. She didn’t even know what Cystic Fibrosis was, but their galas were always the richest.

Janice was ready to dive into this new beginning, this pool of opportunity. Within the crystal water, the future gleamed, like a shiny coin. The future waved, like a flapping note. She leapt in, her slinky dress cascading behind her, her crumbling chalk floating away.

1. When the dog’s water bowl is empty, and she goes to drink from it, and her tongue scrapes against the grainy bottom of the bowl and your insides turn cold in a moment that can only be punished with self-flagellation but WHAT SORT of self-flagellation will be best?

2. When you forget the dog is outside eating a chicken wing, and you leave the dog outside, and ten minutes later you go to the screen door and there she is, huffing and panting because she’s been OUTSIDE for ten minutes, and that chicken bone made her SUPER THIRSTY, and she goes over to her water bowl and this time YOU ENSURE that her water bowl is absolutely brimming with clear, fresh water, you push her head aside and try to beat her to it, and fill it up with your own Mount Franklin bottle just to be sure, because giving away spring water helps to assuage guilt or something like that.

3. When the dog is half blind and fully deaf and can’t tell the difference between roads and grass, and so on her morning walk, she starts bumbling unknowingly towards the road, and she’s about one paw-length away from making herself vulnerable to the whooshing-by of cars, cars whose owners are in a big rush to get to Byron Bay CBD and buy some embroidered handbags, or overpriced sarongs, or 200 bucks worth of marijuana. Or, even if there are no cars around, there’s still the real and ever-present concern of the elderly dog being unable to tell the difference between height levels of pathways and that of road, and the dog toppling ungainly from higher pathway to lower, AND GRITTIER, road, and hitting her soft sweet grey head on the hot tar of the road.

4. When you go out for two hours JUST TO BUY YOUR MUM’S BIRTHDAY PRESENT, WHAT, I’M NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ANYMORE???, and you come home and the dog is heaving with excitement to see you’re back, she’s so excited she starts dog-coughing, wheezing like her larynx is crammed with furry caterpillars, and you wish your presence was less exciting but DAGNABBIT what can you do.

5. When you try to make the dog wee before you go out, and she won’t, so you go “FINE THEN, DON’T” and then you come back 2 hours later from buying your Mum’s birthday present and let the dog out with a chicken wing to eat, and the dog needs to wee SO BAD she doesn’t even look at the chicken wing, she dumps it on the grass and then goes to the other side of the garden, away from her food, because she is CLASSY LIKE THAT, and does the longest wee in the world, and for every second that she stays in that crouching-sitting-meditating longest-wee-in-the-Northern-Rivers position, you feel little acupuncture needles of guilt in your lungs.

OH MAN now I feel better.

So, I’m back into the blogging business and I’ve decided to pursue a new fancy schmance writerly avenue, which consists of TOTALLY BEING YOUR AGONY AUNT. I am a overflowing advice vessel, my sage wisdom is just LAPPING out, my modern know-how pooling down the bottom and dripping from the side of this badly-made boat.

Let’s start with our first customer:

Agony Aunt,

Literally Bruised, Sydney.

Hey LB, can I call you that? Is that cool? Are we on that plateau of familiarity yet or should I totes calm down, hold off on the BFFE impulse and call you by your full (YET BLURRRRED FOR THE SAKE OF ANONYMITY) name?

No. The answer is NO. I will call you LB.

You’ve come to the right person, LB. I’m not just an agony aunt, luxury dog enthusiast and Kanye West fan. I am also someone VERY FAMILIAR with the trials and tribulations of Drama Warmup Games like trust exercises. There was a time when I wasn’t just a husky disembodied voice purring from beyond a screen. I used to perform in shows, in one show I played a woman who had to cry in Scene 5, and I cried in Scene 5, and it was beautiful. I also had to play a character whose life steadily disintegrated through the narrative of a play. I demonstrated this degradation through my choice of outfit and hairdo. I started the play well-coiffed, and I ended the play looking like an Afghan Hound, only with curlier hair and better fashion sense.

Acting was fun, shining on stage was fun, crying in that very important Scene 5 was fun. But you know what was not fun? Trust games. We used to play this stupid game called ‘Knights, Horse and Cavalier”. You’d gallop around the rehearsal space trying to stay in character as a 1930s Holocaust survivor, responding to the bellows of KNIGHT! HORSE! CAVALIER! from an enthusiastic stage manager. “Knight” meant you had to sit on someone’s knee and pretend to be a damsel. “Horse” meant a wrestle of indignity between you and your next partner between who would ‘ride’ the other, as if a jockey. And “Cavalier” was the real doozy. It involved LEAPING into the arms of one of your co-actors and getting them to hold onto you in a grand chivalrous display of massive chiropractic concern.

Everyone hated “Cavalier”. You always glared at the perfect skinny girls in cut-off jeans who jumped into their co-actors’ arms with impunity. The rest of us made a muffled “sorry dude” and a pissy acquiesence to the required action: we would wrap one meaty arm around the guy and hold one leg up in the air, grinning hot-faced through our indignity.

So I completely understand how you feel, LB, and this is why I recommend that you find new friends who are NOT INTO THAT SORT OF SHIT, friends whose idea of a good time is maybe hanging out in the backyard digging up weeds or drinking mojitos or injecting intravenous drugs. These are the sort of friends with whom you can establish VALUABLE ITEMS OF COMMONALITY, like your love for motorcycle sidecars, or Lindsay Lohan pre-cocaine, or the fact that you can fold the Australian $5 note to make it look like a whale is giving someone a blow job. Good luck, friend.

Aunty Jess

So, I just found this little review I wrote of a day out in Maitland, where we had an excursion for a sociology class. It was such a formative experience, which still to this day peppers my regular conversation, that I thought I’d paste it below:

Yesterday was one of the formative experiences of my life. It was the day I went to Maitland Gaol, a place closed down in the late 90s for being too inhumane and archaic. It is now used for traumatic prison tours, ghost sleepovers and weddings. Because, you know, places of misery and incarceration bode well for a future marriage.

We drove there in a big tour bus with our fellow apathetic Gen Ed classmates (“Why are we here?” “Maitland is gay”, “I prefer Korean pop to Japanese”). We watched a very graphic video where a man told us about being raped by a skipping rope. We stopped at Mount White for some frittatas. So far, so good.

Eventually, we got to Maitland and trooped wearily to the Auschwitzesque gate, shaking blood back into our limbs and hoping we didn’t have Deep Vein Thrombosis. A bug-eyed woman told us to divide ourselves into two groups, then mocked us as the future of Australia when we failed to do so quickly. Our group was told to wait in the yard for Dave, an ex-inmate, to come and talk to us.

Our first taste of Dave was of him leading a group of ashen-faced primary schoolers outside and telling us to get out of his way. And then Dave was back and the tour was underway. In the next two hours I learnt a few things about gaol: it turns you into a scary asshole (if you weren’t one already). Some Dave-highlights include:

- finding the token tall girl of our group and constantly referring to how tall she was. At one stage suggesting she was a lesbian and being genuinely surprised when he found out that she wasn’t.

- showing us his fake eye, cut out in a prison fight.

- getting a group of 6 to line up against a wall and rest their weight on their foreheads, exhibiting a typical punishment in gaol. He assured them that he was a good few metres behind them so not to worry and that “oh no, they’d have to pay me more than that…”

- Waxing lyrical over the pretty drawings in one of the cells and then telling us that they were done by a pedophile who, when released, used them to lure children into public toilets and molest them. Followed by a gruff, “any questions?”

- Told us that anyone of Asian appearance automatically got a job in the kitchen, even if they’d never cooked in their life because “well, you all look the same; we assumed you could all cook. Come on, you do all look the same. I mean, I look different to him and him and him. I couldn’t tell any of you apart. And you speak another language”. All of this was directed to an Asian girl in our group, who continued to smile serenely at him. Part of me silently begged her to say, “I was born here, douchebag”. But another part of me was scared. Very scared.

- The highlight of my trip: Dave showed us how to make a razor blade out of a cigarette filter. A girl asked him to show us how it worked, handing him a piece of paper to demonstate on. HE SLICED THE BACK OF HIS HAND OPEN.

The bus was pretty quiet on the way home.

I just discovered the most amazing feature of my blog. I can find out what people have been googling that then led them onto my site. And since these answers may not be readily available, I thought I’d help out and offer my opinion or ideas.

Try never get drunk outside your own house
I still feel strongly about this. You’re spot on, my friend.

Things to do with a camera
Do they mean fuh-reaky things? I guess you could…hug it?

Ode to old people
Poppa, poppa, you so fine,
You’re flame resistant like melamine.

Fun things to do with a camera
Uncomfortable, my friend.

Things that are unforgivable
There are only two of them: queue-jumping and murder.

Difficulty swallowing vitamins
Join the club, brother in (malnourished) arms. I wish I could help.

Powerful odes
Last one wasn’t enough?
Poppa, poppa, like Sydney’s streets you are ‘mean’
You’re hard to crack down on, like polypropylene.

Was rachel bilson a shy child?
Maybe, but hasn’t she blossomed!

Final fair well to the world eat my shit
If it helps, I could give you some spelling classes? Are you still “around”, Reader? This is awkward for everyone.

Myrtle wilson’s blind ambition
Don’t even get me started on this. If she had just CHECKED that violent blind ambition, she wouldn’t be lying dead on the freeway between New York and Long Island, a mass of jellied organs and missing one boob. No, she wouldn’t.

How big is westfield bondi junction
Big enough for all of us to bask in its glory.

bernard fanning so thin
I KNOW, RIGHT?

ugly molls
I am the THIRD RESULT when people google this. Holy shit.

can i get spider eggs on my scalp?
Oh man, I hope not. Good luck.

Barometer 2, March 2009

Hello to my old friends and my new friends, and those of you who aren’t sure where you stand, who await an effort of cajoling, of flirtatious prising from my end, until you finally hop onto the Barometer Boat, until you are a firm, steadfast sailor of HMS Jessica. Hoist the anchor, scrub the decks, puke over the edge, cos you’re here and you’re staying.

This week’s Barometer might be a bit kerazy and out there because I’m sitting in a really hot room listening to the new Guns n Roses album, trying to concentrate on my Important Literary Endeavours, but instead rocking out to Buckethead’s flamin’ riffs. But enough about my Saturday night in. Time to set sail.

HOT
Facebook notes
I have a bit of a routine in the morning. It goes: get up, get the bus, stare at the blind guy who takes my bus while imagining his inner monologue, get to work, drink a cup of coffee, delete my new emails, then go on Facebook. One of my favourite things on Facebook, apart from stalking those fuckers from school who called me Bell-armi Salami, is to check out who has written Notes lately.

There is a new ‘meme’ (nerd-speak for: ‘list of shit’) sweeping the internet at the moment, where people have to write twenty-five facts about themselves like, “I’ve never felt comfortable in crowds” or “I have loved twice and lost twice” or “I still haven’t kicked that paedophilia thing”.

Because I am a massive FB-friend-whore who ‘friends’ people I’ve met only once at parties, I get to read a whole bunch of incredibly personal and awkward confessions from virtual strangers. These are amazing, not only as a source of inspiration for future writing, but as a chance to build up my arsenal of ‘people whose lives are not as good as mine’. Because that’s what makes life rewarding.

Seachange
I’m not normally in the habit of staging 90s nostalgia revivals, but this show is AMAZING. It has Sigrid Thornton’s lopsided smile, David Wenham’s shaggy stubbled charm, cute bratty kids and Kevin Harrington who isn’t JUST my favourite character in Neighbours, but my second favourite character in Underbelly (a close second after the hilariousness that is Roberta Williams). Our house has recently invested in this box-set and let me advise you to do the same if you are a fan of HAPPY WEEPING and UNCONTROLLABLE EMOTIVE THIGH-SLAPS.

NOT
Waiting
Those of you who know me (and let’s face it, you’re probably the only ones reading this because you know I’ll test you on the contents later) will know that I have an attention span best described as ‘fox-terrier on crack’. I can only clean my room if I’m watching a TV show at the same time, something like the aforementioned Underbelly, where there are drugs and guns and angry sex to distract me from the fact that I’m doing something constructive. Similarly, if there were a prize for facebook-time-wasting, I would come second only to my friend who niftily CHANGES NETWORKS WILLY-NILLY in order to stalk as wide a pool of people as possible.

So you may understand the inherent difficulty of someone like me performing a simple task such as waiting for a bus. Therefore I have set myself a challenge for every time I find myself waiting for a bus that is running late, since challenges are known to make life more fun AND rewarding. I make myself write the first line of a crap romance novel, and so far have come up with two openers:

1. Things were frosty back at the ranch. It had come to a stage where the only place Jenny could get any thinking time was in the bath.

and

2. Ethel wondered if every marriage would feel like this, or if, yet again, she had managed to snag a dud.

And don’t get me wrong; they’re good lines. However their majesty didn’t quite make up for the time when the bus I was hailing DROVE RIGHT PAST ME despite my enthusiastic flagging and even pausing Flo Rida’s new single on my iPod. It drove right past me, this empty bus; the driver sort of shrugged at me in contempt while doing so, and I bubbled with rage best described as “primal yet ladylike”.

Only one thing could calm me down and let’s just say the theme song starts with “I don’t wanna live in the city, my friends say I am changing” and ends with “The time is right, now I’m going through a seachange”.

Ahh. Better.

I’m back at Tharunka writing a Hot or Not column. Here it is, bitches. LOVEJESS.

Barometer #1 February 2009
The Barometer is back for another year because I am back for another year, spending more time studying my very lucrative Arts degree, just waiting to nose my way into hundreds of waiting jobs in the even more lucrative Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Irish Literature Industry. Until I’m head-hunted though, here is, for your entertainment and disgust, a regular instalment of the Barometer.

The Barometer is a Hot or Not column that will help you live a socially acceptable, or at least less-nemesis-filled life. In 2008 we dealt with such important topics as: Coca Cola, ice-cream sandwiches, wedding presents, and Channel 10′s ill-fated yet brilliant programme: Taken Out.

I look forward to another year of discussing similar topics of grave interest; things with psychological and political and philosophical resonance, things like Lindsay Lohan’s new eating disorder, nougat, and why I hate public transport.

HOT
Melted cheese
My housemate did something really nice the other day. We were cleaning the house in preparation for our TOTALLY ROCKIN’ OUT AUSTRALIA DAY PARTY(!!!1!) and my other flatmate who is diabetic needed to stop and eat something to prevent passing out, whereas I needed to stop and eat something to prevent turning into Hungry Princess Bitchface. So my kind anonymous housemate, let’s just call her Waroline Callace, made us a plate of ‘quick nachos’, also known as a bowl of guacamole and some corn chips with melted cheese on them, yeah I know, it was delish.

Now I don’t know about you guys, but I would eat grilled cheese on cardboard if I ran out of bread, crackers, amusingly-sized melba toast or rice thingymajigs. I have an embarrassing obsession with the stuff; now that I’m old and musty, cheese has replaced shortbread biscuits as the sort of food my Mum used to need to hide from me as a kid if she didn’t want me to sit there, eating them solidly until I had to lie down and sob for the next four hours. I still feel a repressed pang of longing whenever I see a packet of Glengarry shortbread. Rest assured that the week I spent in Scotland over New Years was a very challenging and delicious experience.

Anyway, these nachos were amazing and then when we finished eating the corn chips, we ate the little globs of melted cheese that had dripped all over the plate, like piggy little dishwashers. And that just set the scene for a fun and patriotic Australia Day of eating, drinking and soaking in our own filth, to be outlined further below.

NOT
Falling asleep in the daytime while drunk
And here I shall continue on my little odyssey, quickly becoming quite a blatant attempt to basically tell you what i did on the weekend. We had our Australia Day party on Australia Day and decided to kick it off at noon so that everyone would be out of there by dinnertime and we could sober up for work the next day.

Things were going to plan. People got drunk by 2pm and were gradually being trundled home by their loved ones. Those of us who lived there, instead of being good hosts, had taken residence in one of two blow-up pools where we mixed two excellent things – glass and bare feet – by drinking lots of alcohol while stewing in increasingly champagne-filled water. Slowly, one by one, we staggered out, to have drunken showers and then “totally just lie down for ten minutes”. And then suddenly, we were asleep in Waroline’s room, totally dead to the world for two hours of potential partytime, and all because we were drunk and stupid and maybe had exerted ourselves too much from the continuous lifting of mugs of cider up to our mouth and drinking from them.

And here is where our cunning plan had failed. Daytime drinking, for all you impressionable first years, is an AMAZING thing to do if you stay awake for the gradual sobering process, allow yourself to be hungover between the sleeping hours of midnight and morning, and then wake up, fresh as a daisy, unaware of the World War III you liver has been subjected to overnight.

We had broken two of the cardinal rules of life:
- Thou shalt not nap after 6pm if thou dost not want to feel like crap when thou wakest
- Thou especially shalt not do this if thou is drunk to start with, thou dumbass.

We woke up hungry, sober and smack bang in the middle of a raging hangover. It was awful; we sat in front of the TV watching the people who didn’t sleep playing Wii (surprisingly un-fun), ate our body weight in pizza and paddlepops and then lay prostrate on the couch, groaning for the next two hours.

It was a hard, cold process and it will stay with me as a guide for even longer than this damn Australian flag ‘temporary’ tattoo that I stuck on my leg and now can’t seem to scrub off. Learn well, first years. Let my ongoing grievous mistakes be your opportunity for a life lesson.