Ask Jess: A New Direction

November 27, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

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,

I’ve been having some trust issues lately, some really major problems with my friends. Like if we were doing a trust exercise, they would drop me – both metaphorically and physically. They bitch behind my back, and they laugh at me when things screw up in my life and it’s really starting to bug me. I’d find more friends, but I like these ones. Or at least, I did.

What should I do?

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