Appropriate Family Holidays

Growing up we travelled a lot, not fun beach holidays in Fiji or Coffs Harbour like lots of families but dusty driving and camping holidays where excitement meant traveling one thousand kilometres in a day. Inevitably we ended up in Coober Pedy a few times. In itself this is a pretty crappy place, no one lives above ground for a start, and a normal touristy day here involves sifting through piles of dirt. So I guess my parents were looking for something different when they took us to Crocodile Harry’s house. They must have seen it advertised somewhere as a thing to do, so we hauled our asses over to this odd ranch outside the main drag.

Littered with debris the place was surrounded with broken down cars and (surely a made up memory) tumbleweeds rolling on past. We paid our two dollars, or however much it was that he had the gall to charge, and headed into his “nest”. Inside his underground house was a wall made of old dusty bottles and, I kid you not, a wall covered in women’s bras. There must have been hundreds of them, some of them signed with ‘x’s and marked with lipsticked kisses. So after what must have been five minutes of standing awkwardly in this man’s house we left. Retrospectively, that man was just a lecherous old drunk and I don’t know what possessed my parents to take my brother and I there, I guess it was the same parenting instinct that allowed them to cover my school books in gigolos. Or perhaps it was just the nineties, when people weren’t so damn precious about their children. Either way, all these years later I think it’s pretty hilarious that he charged children money to look at garbage and some dirty underwear.

So if you’re ever in Coober Pedy, be sure to check it out, I don’t know where the name “Crocodile” came from, but it’s surely a name that delusional old man gave himself. He probably thinks he’s Paul Hogan. Hell, maybe he is, and it was all the cash from his tourist enterprise that he wasn’t declaring to the tax office.

Australian Psycho

The idea of psychopathy interests me immensely. After reading John Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry^*, a narrative-style non-fictional romp into the inner workings of dangerous and corporate psychopaths, I was further intrigued. After finishing the book, and equipped with Hare’s checklist of what constitutes the cold and senseless condition, I actually went around diagnosing many people I know as psychopaths. I thought I was an amateur psychiatrist (I like to appoint myself different vocations from week to week, it shakes things up – more than once I’ve decided I was a private eye, but I’ll get to that in another post). Inevitably though, I turned on myself and began to wonder if I were a psychopath. Although Ronson clearly states that if one ever worries that they are a psychopath then they are not one (this feels like a delightful riddle) I still look back at my life and think that I definitely had a lot of psychopathic promise.

I believe there are three precursors to psychopathy which can be observed in children including:  wetting the bed, having a fascination with fire and being cruel to small children and animals. During my life I had exhibit all these concerning symptoms at one time or another. I am going to immediately dismiss the first and focus just on the second two because, let’s be honest, who didn’t wet the bed as a child? To me, this one seems completely arbitrary (and I would know, as I did one unit of psychiatry in my science degree, so am pretty much the authority on all things to do with it).  

Firstly, let’s discuss my fascination with fire. Apart from having the winter chore of lighting the fire in our slow combustion stove (which is more about my parents’ fascination with being warm than my fascination with fire) I was always interested in burning things, lighting candles and playing with matches. Mostly I remember always wanting to burn the edges of my homework and stain it with tea to make it look old. I still don’t know why I would want my homework to look old, I was 8, how old could it possibly be?  This whole practice seems retrospectively hilarious; how on earth does burning the edges of a page make it seem antique? Have all documents which have reached at least one hundred years in age survived some sort of fire only to be singed around the edges, the fire miraculously stopping just before the text? And what was the cause of all of these olden day fires from which important papers where being saved just in the nick of time? Heaven knows. But there you have it, fascination with fire, check!

Secondly, cruelty to small animals is a big red flag when attempting to identify a future psychopath, and this I had in spades. When I was small (six to ten years of age) I engaged in the following activities:

ü  I once squeezed a slug to death

ü  I pulled wings off flies (but who hasn’t done this, so it doesn’t really count)

ü  I squeezed my cat George so hard and he made such a terrible smell that my dad made me ring the vet and explain what I had done (HAHA, my parents were so creative with their punishments, maybe that was why I was so creative with my torture?)

ü  I left my guinea pig in the sun and he died of heat stroke after an amazing amount of yellow stuff came out of his mouth

ü  I left another guinea pig on a chair and someone sat on him, he also died, see previous point about yellow stuff

ü  I put a lizard in a fry pan (which was on)

ü  I tied my rabbit to the kitchen table and left him there for an hour (he was eventually hit by a car in a separate incident. Obviously.)

All of these I feel horrible about now, although I feel less bad about the guinea pigs because I don’t like guinea pigs that much. What are they? Are they a really long, hairy neck with legs? Or do they have no neck at all? And just when you think they are all warm you realise they have pissed on you. Yep. I don’t like guinea pigs. Anyway, I digress.

So I have covered the fire and the cruelty to small animals, but there is the one reason which trumps all previous nut-bag behaviour and makes me feel pretty sure I was on a psychopathic trajectory as a child. Take a deep breath, constant reader, because this is bad.

When I was about eight or nine we would go to the house of a family friend who had a small child. For some reason this child irked me, I don’t know what it was about it, but it followed me around and it just had an arrogance to it that I DID NOT LIKE. The child was old enough to stand up and walk, but not old enough to speak. And so I used to pinch it. And when I say pinch, I mean hard, as hard as I could in fact – I would grab what I could between my thumb and forefinger and squeeze, if I could incorporate some fingernail action into this I was stoked. The worst part about this is that I used to pinch the kid because I knew it was not old enough to tell anyone what had happened, it would suddenly start to cry and I would look innocently and quizzically to the parents – “what on earth has happened to your darling child to make it shriek so?” my butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth face said. While really I was thinking “what a nifty game!” Unfortunately, I have never felt remorse about this (lack of remorse: another point on the psychopath checklist. TICK.)

I still don’t know if something happened in my life to stop me from evolving into the psychopath I was destined to be, or maybe I did become one – who knows. Go ahead and judge me if you want, but just know that I will come over to your house, pinch your kids and squeeze your cat until it farts.

 

*Ronson, Jon. 2011, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry. Riverhead Books. USA Buy it here - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychopath-Test-Jon-Ronson/dp/0330492276

 

 

 

How To Get Boys To Like You

I have been having periodic insomnia since the Hanson concert I attended last September. Strangely enough it has been accompanied by an unshakable feeling of melancholia. My stomach won’t stop churning and I just feel down. So, after another sleepless night and a bit of a google it occurred to me that I still have an immense crush on Taylor Hanson. Can this be possible? Can it be that someone who adorned my pre-adolescent walls could still be playing on my mind like the chorus of mmmbop fifteen years later? Unfortunately, this seems to be the case. As the first strains of Thinking of You floated across the aged and mostly overweight audience of the Enmore theatre I was transported back to 1997. Ah, 1997, when I was ten and an amazing weekend meant a metal slinky and a staircase, a time when a well put together outfit meant that your scrunchie and your leggings matched and “make up” meant body glitter meticulously applied to your temples; those were the days! I do however, remember this golden era of my life being tinged with sadness, the kind of incurable sorrow caused only by the most intense of crushes.

I think it needs to be said that crushes in the nineties were not the same as crushes now. Take Justin Bieber for example. Any ten year Belieber can simply youtube his name and watch endless hair flicking, hip gyrating videos. Bieber’s songs can be immediately downloaded and listened to at any time and from anywhere in the world. In the nineties a crush on a pop star was a full time job, requiring blank cassette tapes to be in your tape deck at all times so that when the songs you loved came on the radio they could be immediately captured with a synchronised depression of both the triangle and circle buttons. CD singles were purchased in the lead up to the album release (at between 5 and 10 dollars a pop) and then the full studio album was acquired for $30 – most of which you already owned in cd single form. One had to get up at 6am on a Saturday morning to watch rage in the hopes that the video clip for “I Will Come To You” would be played. This often meant sitting through hours of clips from bands you didn’t like such as Whigfield and Mousse T (who, for the record, both sang embarrassing words like ‘horny’ and ‘sexy’ which always caused me to blush deeply if either of my parents were around) in the hopes of catching four minutes and nine seconds of Hanson bliss. Yes. Nineties crushes were more involved, and therefore, better and more important.

Rewind fifteen years and my most prized possessions were my Hanson posters. This was back in the day before the advent of twitpics, google image search or cheap colour printing; meaning that each full sized poster had to be hunted down with multiple copies of TV Hits, Smash Hits, Girlfriend and Dolly being purchased. To place even more strict parameters on this treasure hunt each magazine would only have one full sized poster lurking at its centre, these were double sided (which helped a little with the odds of striking it rich). The scarcity of posters featuring the three long-haired crooners, coupled with the fact that my annual income was approximately $200 meant that each poster was priceless. In the end I had about twelve, so really I was pretty much the nineties version of a tiny millionaire. Weirdly enough I diligently applied Lipsmackers to the Hanson brothers’ lips every night before bed, which meant that the lips of all the boys on all the posters were translucent. One day my mum asked me, with a wry smile, if I had been kissing my posters. Mortified I told her that I had simply been allowing them to sample my large Lipsmacker collection and she left the room. As soon as she was gone I tried to remedy the situation and upon taking down my favourite poster (crimped hair, blue background and bubbles) discovered that a whole nest of huntsman spiders was living behind it. Maybe it was the delicious scented lip gloss, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was the lure of Taylor’s penetrating gaze, those spiders were as close to heaven as they’d ever get.

My love for Taylor was unshakable, but I was no fool. I was entirely aware that I would never have him. So I did the next best thing a girl could do – I found someone who looked similar to him and transferred all of my pre-pubescent, creepy stalker love onto them. I won’t name names but I will say that Taylor2 had flowing golden locks and caught my bus. He was a mighty high school student, while I was a mere fifth grader. I must reiterate that the nineties was an innocent time before technology, so when I say “stalk” I actually, LITERALLY mean stalk.

I would catch Taylor2’s bus every day, and when the bus route changed so that we no longer caught the same bus I would just catch his bus anyway and walk the extra two kilometres to school. I was the only girl on a bus that went to an all-boys school. Mmm, subtle. Years passed and I entered high school (yes, this is a stalker love story that spans years; the type of crazy with which I am infected is deep-seated and patient). And still I caught his bus, patiently waiting to be more than five feet tall and to maybe, vaguely, resemble a woman. Unfortunately for me, I am still waiting for either of these events to occur, so after four years of having a crush on Taylor2 and looking no taller or more womanly, I decided that the whole thing had come to a head and I must reveal my undying love to him. So I looked him up in the phone book and I wrote him a letter. Keep in mind I am probably thirteen years old at this point and anyone who has been thirteen years of age will know that this is the most awkward and embarrassing time in a person’s life. I, for one, was constantly afraid of judgment and rejection. Enter the crazy. I didn’t handwrite (or type, which would actually have made more sense) this letter, I CUT OUT LETTERS FROM THE NEWSPAPER AND GLUED THEM ONTO A PIECE OF PAPER. Yes. I wrote, what could only be described as, a “ransom-style” secret admirer love letter. Oh dear.

But wait, there’s actually more. In the letter I included an email address for an account that I had set up at astroboymail, which was a thing at the time. If I’m not mistaken, the username was “rockstar” (which was actually a step up from my original email address funkygalgroovychic@hotmail.com), and I asked him to email me. I anonymously told him that I loved him and asked him to email me - girl’s got game! I don’t know what I expected, probably something along the lines of:

Hey! Is this that tiny girl from the bus who looks like either a giant baby or a midget adult? The one who has been staring at me for the last four years? I sure hope so, because damn! Nothing’s sexier than a lurker. From Taylor2.  

Anyway, I added him on ICQ and continued to give him cryptic clues as to who I was until he tired of me. Or MSN was invented – I’m not sure which one it was.

So there you have it, my little foray into stalking – before the phrase was a socially acceptable, harmless form of voyeurism. I’d like to say that I never did anything like that again but that would be a lie because into my teen years I committed innumerable ring-up-hang-ups (the stalker’s bread and butter) sent one boy a MIX CD anonymously (incredibly creepy) and cast love spells on people (oh god!). I still wonder if this was just some odd quirk that I had, or if other people got this caught up in crushes, but at least those people knew how I felt – even if they did sleep with a night light from then on.

Note: I blocked Taylor2 from viewing this post. So if you are seeing this via Facebook you are NOT him L.

 

 

Peter Andre Porn and Poorly Covered Books.

Yesterday I drove past a billboard advertising back to school supplies and gave an involuntary shudder. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was that elicited this reaction. Then I remembered, perhaps the most traumatising moment of my childhood, when my mum let my dad help me with the all-important task of covering my schoolbooks…

Do you remember contacting your books in school? It was always such a difficult job; I never knew why they didn’t just make the covers of exercise books sturdier. It was such a time consuming ritual; cutting the contact, fitting it to the size of the book and then trying to coax tiny bubbles out of plastic with a ruler, a job which is surely intended for someone with three or four hands. The worst part was that the mistakes you made would haunt you for the rest of the year, as you would try (in vain) to scrape away any air-bubbly evidence of your crappy contacting abilities. Anyway, my phobia of school book contact came to a head the year that I was eight.

My mum was busy doing something and sent my dad with me to K-mart to purchase the annual contact supplies. If your dad is anything like my dad you’ll know that dads, no matter how deft at using a nail gun or doing differential calculus, sometimes fail at very simple tasks.

So I find myself in Kmart with my father trying to decide on some contact. My dad, obviously bored with this mundane task that means nothing to him, tells me I have taken too long, grabs three rolls of contact and takes them to checkout. It is only once we are home that I realised with absolute dismay that my dad has bought me the worst contact known to man. As I unroll the contact it becomes apparent that this is not the butterflies floating on a purple background that I wanted, but rather shirtless and semi-shirtless men – although to be fair the background was purple. This contact boasted hundreds of men with washboard abs, some wearing open vests, seemingly caught mid-nineties style sexy stripper dance. 

School started the next day so my mum decided this would have to do and covered ALL of my books in sexed up, Peter Andre look-alikes. Need I remind you that I was eight years old and nowhere near an acceptable age to be ogling semi-naked men? I don’t know what my mum was thinking, but I guess money and time factored in there somewhere. So I did what any self-respecting eight year old would do and slowly lost every last one of those god-forsaken, crotch-covered books and made my mum go out and buy the butterfly paper.

But it still haunts me, seventeen years later.

 

First World Resolutions

New Year, new resolutions. But has anyone ever, in the history of time ever kept a resolution? I’m pretty sure the safest bet is to just never tell anyone your resolutions, make as many as you want, but if no one knows about them there is very little chance anyone can hold you to them. I learnt this the hard way back in 2003 and have endeavoured to never make another resolution.

As a fourteen year old I was a liar and I was competitive, I am neither any more, but back then these had to be the two central pillars of my little, adolescent personality. Anyway, I had one of those friends who you always end up in little passive aggressive competitions with – who could finish their maths set the quickest, who could get a razor scooter first, who knew more words to Destiny’s Child songs, you know the one. So 2003 rolled around and the clicking over of the New Year led to that inevitable discussion about what resolutions we would be making. I had decided that I was going to sponsor a child. Of course, because the best resolution for a child who DOES NOT HAVE A JOB is to make a financial commitment to another child (who is also sans job. And house. And clean water.) So that was my resolution and it was (rightly) met with a cynical snort from my friend. She didn’t believe I would sponsor a child, she thought I didn’t have the money; “I’ll show her!” I thought.

Jump forward a month and I had all but forgotten my promise to pull a poor, starving African child from the depths of poverty. I had been happily spending my five-dollar-a-week pocket money on candy ears and dolly magazines when my friend enquired about how my sponsor child was doing. What was his name? Where was he from? How old was he? So I took a deep breath, looked her right in the eye… and lied my ass off. Of course.

 “Umm… he’s from Africa, he’s eight years old and his name is Mumble Mumblington. He’s just gorgeous, you’d just adore him!” Very proud of how sincere I had sounded and completely chuffed that I had put my friend in her place I turned to leave and was confronted with every liar’s worst nightmare – a request for confirmation of your entirely baseless lie.

 “Bring in pictures, I’d love to see them!”

“Sure thing.” I responded faux-enthusiastically, and scuttled away.

Unfortunately, the same little mind that came up with this ridiculous lie in the first place forgot this whole exchange almost as soon as it happened. And so another week passed and again I was quizzed on my fictional adopted child – not only did I still not have a photo, but I had entirely forgotten the first name I had made up. To distract from the second quickly and quietly mumbled, pathetic African sounding child’s name I made up (which I am sure sounded nothing like the name I gave a week before), I told her that tomorrow was the day I would remember to bring photos.

As soon as she had gone on her way, surely not believing a word I had said, I broke into a cold sweat. My exposure was imminent. And to have lied about an act of charity? Surely, that was the worst kind of sin! I just never wanted to be proven wrong, and now my pride had got me in all sorts of hot water. I decided there was only one thing left to do. Not confess that I was a liar (HA! we’d come too far for that) no, I would have to legitimately sponsor a child. I went straight to my mum and bargaining away my future birthday present – which was eleven months away, surely this deal would be forgotten by then, I mean heaven forbid I actually sacrifice anything for this person who was essentially a prop in a lie – and was given the money to sponsor a child.

I immediately rang world vision and began making myriad odd requests. Could I sponsor a boy? About eight years old? In Africa? (He was from Swaziland. I’m still not sure this is actually a place, but it sounded like something fourteen year old Maz would tell someone, so that would do perfectly.) Then came the final hurdle; I had asked the World Vision lady to list the names of viable candidates, and much to my growing concern they were all too normal. Tom Smith, Michael Jones, Mark Peters, nothing like the names I had hastily invented, and then… Vusie Magagula. Rejoice! The gods of perjury had smiled down upon me. And that is how I came to sponsor little Vusie Magagula for six years. He did send me letters and photos, and I took them to school, all self-righteous, and showed them to all of my friends. “Look at me, Marion, the selfless truth-teller-extraordinaire” my eyes screamed.

So I learnt that it is not a lie if at some point in time it will be true and that when all else fails, bluff and make up stupid names. Dazzle people with inventiveness to distract them from the bald-faced lie you’re telling them. And sponsor a child, you selfish bastard.

It's A Nice Day For A Trite Wedding.

While I was engaged I realised one thing about weddings and that is that they are like ice sculptures – you decide what you want by first deciding which parts you don’t want. So I wrote this list, and from it the icy swan that was my wedding emerged.

I got engaged recently and have been feeling guilty about it ever since. Not because I don’t want to marry my wonderful partner, but because I’m not crapping my pants with all the tacky bullshit that seems to go along with being “the bride”. Rewind ten years and I’m pretty sure you would find me sitting in the textiles room of my high school, sketching some god-awful asymmetric wedding dress, one really long sleeve encrusted with diamantes with a train that goes on for miles. Tell fourteen year old Maz to plan her wedding and I’m pretty sure it would be everything that everyone seems to expect of me to plan now, when I am a fully grown adult. In the days of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter it is all too easy to take a little peak inside what is the norm for weddings these days from the proposal, to the planning, to the events leading up to the big day, to the day itself. Being an insanely judgmental voyeur, I gobble up these Facebook statuses, tweets and photos like the most delicious of overpriced wedding cocktail hour canapés.  So please, all narcissistic brides and grooms, don’t stop updating on my account as you have enabled me to create my own list of nuptial no-nos. 

The F-word. Not fuck because I can, and do, say that all day long (fuck fuck fuck) but I abhor the word fiancé. I don’t know what it is about it, but I cannot bring myself to say the word “fiancé” seriously. It may well be that every time it comes out of my mouth I hear that heinous party guest from Seinfeld loudly proclaim “has anyone seen my fiancé? I’ve lost my fiancé!” but I suppose I also feel a little like I’m prompting people to ask me about my wedding, it just seems a little attention-seeky. Your friends and family know who you are marrying so you really just use your betrothed’s name when speaking to them. Logically it then follows that you are only saying the f-word to people who don’t know you well enough to know your personal situation and hence are pretty much, in one word, trying to validate yourself to strangers by telling them that someone wants to marry you. Furthermore, you are asking people to enquire about a very personal part of your life. I am however, a fan of the word “partner”, a little because they are your buddy in everything you do, but mostly because I like it when strangers are unsure about my sexuality. It’s good to keep the people guessing, it creates a mystique. Honestly, the main reason I’m excited to be married is so that this can stop being an issue for me and I can just say the word “husband”.

Your Special Day. If there were ever a vomit-inducing expression it’s this. I read an article by a wedding planner once claiming that each wedding is pretty much the same as the next; never a truer word was spoken (unless you are one of those people who gets married at the bottom of the ocean or via Skype or at Woolworths, but if this is the case that is a whole other kettle of fish). I know that it is special, it really is, but when people say “special day” to me it makes me think of a health teacher telling me about my first period. To be honest most people in their lives will get married (at least once) and it will inevitably involve a dress, a bride, a groom and signing some document. Sure there are variations on this theme but in the end I’m pretty sure they’re all about as different two pelicans, I mean, they are obviously different animals with different personalities and different life goals and such but in the end they are all the same species.

Engagement shoots. A pre-wedding photo shoot, often abbreviated to “E-shoot” (like they are so ensconced in wedding culture and are so often mentioned that people feel the need to abbreviate it and save themselves all the time they are wasting on those two extra syllables, god help us if this is true). I understand a wedding photo shoot, of course you want photos of the day you get married, but I am flabbergasted that someone would want photos that mark an occasion but in no way indicate what that occasion is. Last I checked denim and matching white tees don’t scream “wedding”. Although this may be an urban wedding myth, I have even heard accounts of photos taken from and “e-shoot” being blown up to life size and flanking the entrance to the reception.

Chair covers. When people cover things I automatically assume they have something to hide. Are the chairs you have chosen so dirty or mismatched that you have to cover them? A chair covered in one of those stretchy chair seat covers and then tied with a ribbon looks like some weird chair shaped gift. Do people ever take them home thinking that they are some sort of wedding-party-favour type thing? I just don’t actually understand what the point is.

Strange wedding day theatrics. From Facebook stalking and talking to friends who are no longer able to breathe with laughter I have compiled the following list of ridiculous shit I have seen and heard people do at their weddings. Obviously, the aforementioned life sized cut outs warrant an honourable mention. So, in order of silliness: the bride and groom’s arrival preceded by the pageboy and flower girl in a miniature jeep. Fireworks surrounding the bride and groom during their first dance. Bridesmaids in matching jewel tone dresses with diamante straps. An entirely aesthetic tepee being erected near the wedding site to “look good in photographs”. Bridesmaids in matching fuchsia strapless dresses. Candy buffets for the guests (what are you, five?!). Bridesmaids in matching peach asymmetric shoulder dresses. Having a novelty first dance. Having multiple dresses or weddings (other than for religious purposes.) Bridesmaids.

Wedding photography. A completely understanding component of a wedding however, I could do without photos of: the bride and groom kissing, the bride lying across the laps of the groomsmen or any photo where the groom’s jacket is slung casually over one shoulder. The other photographic component which cannot be ignored is the video montage. I was offered, for my wedding, a compilation of photos and images of my partner and I which would be played to the moving strains of Greenday’s Time of Your Life. “All we need is some footage of you two walking in the park holding hands and kissing” I was told, the disgust on my face was registered and I was hastily reassured not to worry, that “it will be classy – we’ll make it sepia” HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Just give me a second, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

 

Ok. I’m alright now. No, just… no.

 

To conclude, please don’t take offence to this. Not that I particularly care for your feelings, but if you did take offence and have tasteful, elegant weddings then I would have nothing to make fun of and my life would be slightly less delightful.

 

Amendment: I have been informed that the aesthetic teepee mentioned in this post is not purely for visuals but can actually be SLEPT IN! Quickest marriage to consummation ever? I sure hope so!