trust me, i’m a pro January 20, 2012
Posted by Emma in Observations.Tags: lano and woodley, procrastination, terrible puns, work
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Patrick's got the right idea.
So I’m at the office and I’m getting paid a comfortable hourly rate to print paperwork and highlight the parts my clients are supposed to fill out and sign. It’s not difficult work, but the other two residents of my cubicle didn’t show up today, and it’s both tempting and easy to type nonsense into an e-mail template so that it looks and sounds like I’m being super-productive. This, combined with longing thoughts of my upcoming three-day weekend and the book in my bag that I had to stop reading halfway through a particularly exciting chapter, has led me to make an executive decision: today, I will procrastinate.
I’m a master of procrastination. You could even say that I’m a ‘pro’. (See what I did there?) Whether it’s at work (oh yeah I’m totally on hold there’s no way I’m just listening to an empty dial tone and mindlessly doodling pictures of mooses (meese?) on my message pad), at home (I can’t be bothered hanging my washing out so I’ll just put it on a seventh spin cycle), or at uni (watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother is totally related to the essay I’m meant to be writing about post-apartheid literature), I can find ways to avoid doing pretty much anything. The critical point of this arrangement is that when I’m feeling productive, I’m very, very productive. I can work at a speedier pace than my more consistent counterparts. I can get the same amount done in half the time, effectively allowing me 4 hours in every day to loaf aimlessly around the tearoom deliberately taking 800 minutes to make an instant coffee or “go to the bathroom” and spend half an hour leaning against the hand-dryer texting my housemate (my co-workers must think I have a severe digestive disorder)*.
Procrastination, however—like any fun thing—has its drawbacks. There is nothing like procrastinating to kill workplace morale. Once you’ve procrastinated, you can call it a day. There’s no coming back from it until you start fresh the next morning. If you do it enough, you might get reckless, and find yourself openly browsing Tumblr on company time, not caring who walks past and sees you salivating over a Scanwich. Eventually your cubicle buddy is bound to notice that you’ve been working on the same payment for the last hour and a half, or that your phone has rung twice while you’ve been “on hold”. The dishes you’ve been putting off washing will eventually become host to a small family of cockroaches. You’ll find yourself desperately clawing at Wikipedia because by the time you got to the library all the critical texts on your topic had already been taken out by more diligent students. Life will crumble around you and you’ll figuratively and perhaps literally drown in regret and self-loathing. Procrastination, kind of like tequila, is what I like to call a Sometimes Activity. Frequent use is dangerous. You might not end up puking cactus from your nostrils, but the consequences of procrastination are just as dire. Nobody likes to get fired, do they? Unless they’re Lano and Woodley, in which case, hell yeah.
Anyway, having written these completely useless paragraphs of blatant time-wasting, and having, twenty seconds ago, survived a close call with my boss who (I hope) actually believed that this was an email to a client, it’s probably about time for me to recuperate over lunch and get stuck into some highlighting. Maybe. Or I could go lean against the bathroom wall and watch episodes of Lano and Woodley on Youtube. Decisions.
*I feel that at this point, it’s necessary for me to make a disclaimer. If you are a potential employer and you are reading this, please note that all procrastinatory tales herein are exaggerated for (admittedly poorly) comedic purposes, and that I am actually a very efficient employee. I might steal some biros and tissues from your supply cupboard, and I never wash my own coffee mug, but I never procrastinate until my job is done. Srsly.
i’m getting too old for this January 15, 2012
Posted by Emma in Observations.Tags: drinking, hangover, no regrets except maybe the yiros
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the photographic record of my night stops here
I’ve spent the last eight hours on the couch. I’m wrapped in a blanket under the air-conditioning, distributing my attention evenly between bad television, my Tumblr dashboard and a book. I’m not even fully dressed and the only time I’ve moved was to take the pizza delivery menu off the fridge. I’m 99% sure there’s gold eyeshadow on my cheek and when I exhale a toxic cloud of Jagermeister and Fresh Pussy shots visibly manifests like on a cold day except for it’s some kind of toxic colour like acid green. I’m so hung over it’s not even funny.
You know you’ve had a big night when you use the traces of your 5am homecoming littering your apartment to help you figure out what happened between the taxi and the bed. It looks like I discarded one shoe in the living room and one shoe in the bathroom. I brushed my teeth in the shower without taking a shower and apparently read five chapters of Fight Club before falling asleep in a t-shirt with a full face of makeup holding a bottle of water like a teddy bear. I am Joe’s complete lack of surprise.
My iPhone’s messaging inbox helps me to determine the rest of the night. Apparently my taxi driver and I discussed the probability of a 2012 armageddon (he was for it, I was against it; he acquiesced because I claimed to be ‘Biblically Experienced’). I ate a chicken yiros the size of a small Chihuahua and danced, probably alone, to T.A.T.U’s ‘All The Things She Said’. I smoked cigarettes in the toilets like a fifteen-year-old at a Catholic school and spoke terrible French to a bartender who I imagine got pretty sick of ‘je voudrais un fucken shot mate’ rather quickly.
Now my cat is eyeing me warily as though I don’t even smell like me anymore and I’ve eaten so much pepperoni pizza I think I’ll be plagued with regret for the rest of my life. I remember a time when this would happen two to five times a week but now I just can’t figure out how I used to manage. This revelation is simultaneously relieving and embarrassing, but mostly it’s just hurting my head. Marge Simpson is crumping on my television and that’s my cue to leave.
’tis the season, i guess December 21, 2011
Posted by Emma in Observations.Tags: christmas, wine
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i am an excellent artist.
Sometimes when you feel like adorning sackcloth and ashes and walking around beating on your chest and moaning tormentedly about your first world problems you instead have to put on a brightly coloured paper crown and maintain a perky smile that can open and close to permit forkfuls of turkey. Christmas waits for no man.
That’s why I love wine.
Don’t get me wrong – I love Christmas. The Jones Family Christmas is an institution. You’re probably all jealous that you don’t get an invite. We have the best custard this side of the equator and once my Aunty put vodka on the Christmas pudding because there wasn’t any brandy and it was quite the pyrotechnics show. Christmas Day itself is wonderful and magical and everything the Christmas carols promise it will be but without the snow which having experienced a wintry Christmas I can safely say is a plus (36oC on Sunday anyone? YEAH.)
The reason wine pulls me through the festive season is pretty much to cover the horror of the rest of December. Think “what did you get from your Secret Santa? I got lotion which isn’t awkward AT ALL”, “did you seriously tie tinsel around your cat’s neck?” and “omg Rundle Mall the week before Christmas is like the depths of Hades except with Hare Krishnas”. Think a pile of files taller than my entire body looming ominously on my desk screaming “PROCESS ME BEFORE FRIDAY BITCH” and me weeping quietly into my phone headset to the IT support guy who isn’t quite sure how to tell me that no he can’t fix my headache but my scanner should be working now.
So I drink wine. Chin chin to you all and merry Christmas. x
disaster chef December 14, 2011
Posted by Emma in Rant.Tags: choccywoccydoodah, cooking, don't ever eat anything i give you, food, man i could go some peking duck right now, things i am bad at, what i would be like if i had lived in the 1950s
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I don't even know what half of those utensils are.
Now when I say I can’t cook, I mean I REALLY can’t cook. I live on grilled cheese, boiled eggs, frozen garlic bread and food cooked by other people. I’ve tried to cook. I made a curry once in the slow cooker and it tasted like the bottom of the fridge. When I cook rice it goes all hard and sticky and coats the saucepan so stubbornly you have to hack at it with the blunt end of a knife to get it off. Sometimes I get all nutrition-minded and make steamed chicken and salad, which is about as far as I can culinarily venture without killing myself and/or others.
This wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t obsessed with food. I love to eat and I love to eat things that are almost as hard to cook as they are to say out loud. When I go to my parents’ house we put on the Lifestyle Food Channel and I happily watch people like Rick Stein and Maggie Beer and Nigella Lawson doing things I’ll never be able to do in the kitchen and I comfort myself with an inner monologue like this: it’s okay Emma you’re only 24 and you don’t even have a husband or children and you only really need to worry about knowing how to cook the day you find out you’re knocked up because kids need to eat and you can’t bring up a child on frozen garlic bread no matter how freaking delicious it is. Then my mother says that I have a weird look on my face and am I ok and I reply with yes but sssh the guy on Choccywoccydoodah is making a 50 KILOGRAM CHOCOLATE REINDEER which is why I love this show even though it has the most ridiculous name of all time. My dad sits and watches these conversations with a baffled look on his face and wishes he’d had more sons.
ANYWAY, the point is I wish I knew how to make delicious food. I wish I knew how to fillet a fish. I wish I knew how to make Rogan Josh not from a jar. I wish I had a little herb garden on my windowsill and chopped fresh thyme into my pasta sauce that I am making on the spur of the moment because I just happen to have a fridge stocked with Atlantic salmon and crème fraiche. Does thyme even go with that recipe? Is thyme even existent outside of Simon and Garfunkel? What even is thyme? I wouldn’t know; I just have garlic salt and something called Mixed Herb Pizza Seasoning that tastes like the shit on Pizza Shapes and goes wonderfully with everything I cook which is not surprising because everything I cook is melted-cheese-related.
And why do I want to know how to cook? Aside from the fact that eating is fantastic and I’d love to be able to do it all the time without having to get dressed and leave the house, it’s IMPRESSIVE. How much more impressive is “come over for dinner, I’m making lobster bisque” than “come over”? I mean, my supposed natural endowments should be enough to impress without needing to hurl gourmet dishes at a man until he relents and goes to bed with me. Whatever God gave me, it’s never let me down yet. I just feel as though I’d be EVEN MORE impressive if I could cook something with more than three ingredients.
I shouldn’t worry. It’s not the 1950s anymore. (Incidentally, can you imagine me in the 1950s? My debonair husband would come home from work at the advertising firm to a messy house and 2.5 snotty-nosed children with the weird combination of my jaw and his lips and I would be standing in the kitchen sobbing over a collapsed soufflé and there would be some kind of batter all over the walls and flour on my face and he would stand there in his suit and pomaded hair and RUE THE DAY HE MET THIS INCOMPETENT DEMON OF A HOUSEWIFE and then just as he is about to break the ice and suggest we go to his mother’s which I don’t want to do because I swear that bitch hates me the fruitcake in the oven that I had completely forgotten about spontaneously combusts and our house explodes and falls in flakes of ash on the sleepy neighbourhood and all the people come out and hold their hands palm-up to the sky and wonder why it’s snowing failed marriage.) But it doesn’t matter because if I really need to use food as a weapon I can always order high-quality takeaway, dirty up a couple of pans and woks and pile them on the sink for authenticity, and have a steaming plate of Peking Duck or some other such food that I could never realistically cook or even afford to eat waiting on the table. Or I could just order Domino’s and put on Master Chef and suggest that we try and merge our sensory receptors and pretend that what we’re seeing is what we’re eating which is what I do because then low-grade pizza miraculously transforms into a magical feast in your mouth. I LOVE TELEVISION.
“it’s not indecent exposure if your dick is in a sick bag”: surviving economy-class transport December 7, 2011
Posted by Emma in Observations, Rant.Tags: cheap travel, greyhound, indecent exposure does not actually figure into this blog entry my apologies, overland
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Economy Class Travel is a polite term for Being Locked In An Enclosed, Moving Tube Of Steel With Screaming Babies And Pant-Shitting Geriatrics. Whether your steel tube of choice is a plane, train or bus, I can tell you, vehemently, that I have travelled in them all, and they were all shining examples of You Get What You Pay For.
I fondly recall the days when Tiger Airways actually flew to Adelaide, and flying in and out of Melbourne for a big weekend was cheaper than catching a taxi to and from the city at home. The reason for such affordability was that very rarely did the plane leave the tarmac within 54 hours of its estimated take-off time and also there was some airline safety thing that I didn’t pay attention to because I flew with them too often and didn’t want to know about it if I was risking my life for a suitcase full of second-hand books and a hangover.
Now Tiger is gone and with it dirt-cheap fares ($36 RETURN THE VALUE HURTS ME IT PHYSICALLY HURTS ME). With my pithy two-digit budget, the alternatives have been tested, and have led me to believe that maybe flying Jetstar for $160 isn’t so bad and maybe if it is so bad staying at home eating Doritos and watching So You Think You Can Dance is at least free as long as my housemate bought the Doritos.
The Contenders In 25 Words Or Less
Greyhound buses, or “coaches” if you’re fancy vs. The Overland, a train for old people.
Passengers
Okay, here’s a life lesson. Catch a Greyhound overnight and you are bound to find yourself standing outside some godforsaken roadhouse at 3.30am while a raving drunk man of 65 spits incoherently at you through his gums and thinks it is a great idea to light a cigarette near a refueling truck. That’s one end of the scale. In the middle you have poor, mildly frightened students like my friend Flux and myself, peering at each other over our hangman game in horror as the tangerine bitches behind us compare tit sizes. And then there’s the guy who actually asked the waitress at the Tintinara Roadhouse at midnight what kind of cheese was on the croissants (pronounced the French way) and was it gruyere and maybe were there baguettes. THAT REALLY HAPPENED.
Does that frighten you? I’m not surprised. Catch the Overland if you’d rather be surrounded by snoring retirees. It’s far more peaceful. Definitely wins this one.
Toilets
Both bus and train had creepy toilets that looked like they would suck me ass-first out of the vehicle and onto the highway/train tracks. Said toilets were rarely equipped with toilet paper and in some cases did not even contain water. This was especially off-putting on the bus as some poor soul was seated directly across from the toilet cubicle and probably didn’t want to be woken up at 4am by my inability to stand up straight on a moving vehicle and/or the sound of liquid hitting metal. Gross. Nobody wins with a toilet on wheels.
Duration
Greyhound: quick and direct, 8 hours, overnight so you can pop a Temazzy on Franklin Street and wake up on Spencer Street.
Overland: scenic, 426 hours, during the day so you can admire such things as “The Horsham Train Station” and “Grass”. I’ll leave the winner of this one up to you. Would you rather rip a bandaid off quickly, or peel it off bit by bit?
Food
The Greyhound provides its passengers with the miracle that is roadhouse food. Unlike Mr. Gruyere from earlier, most people actually really enjoy pies, FUICs (if you don’t know what it stands for you don’t deserve to drink it) and anything greasy with bacon on it. Roadhouses also have the added benefit of providing pit-stops for those of us who want to partake in any of the following activities: smoking, using an actual toilet, charging a phone or standing upright.
The Overland had a snack cart but my friend Caitlin and I were devastated to discover its lack of proverbial bar cart. The food was pretty good but a quiche and a scone is not quite a bacon roll and a sprinkle donut now, is it? Greyhound wins this one, mostly because if you sit near the back you can quietly sip Vickers from a paper bag and nobody will tell the driver.
Seating
Either way you’re in a bucket seat with your face pressed unattractively up against a window. Greyhound promised us foot-rests but Flux and I were obviously jipped because we totally didn’t have them and so pressed our knees/feet/shoulders, depending on the way we were contorted, into the seats in front of us instead. This was justified by the knees/feet/shoulders I could feel in the small of my back through my seat AT ALL TIMES. I’m going to give this one to the Overland; leg room is all-important when it’s your entire realm of personal space for 8-12 hours.
Entertainment
There are fun things you can do on a long journey. On the Overland, Caitlin and I took it in turns to listen to my iPod, made a bajillion fold-down stories that got more and more vulgar as time progressed and took photographs of ourselves in hilarious poses in various carriages on the train. We both napped. We thumb-wrestled. I did a French assignment. Then it was 6pm and we were in Spencer Street station ten minutes away from getting ourselves totally wasted. Success!
On the Greyhound, Flux and I were forced to watch in-bus movie Maid In Manhattan (WHY??????), and then they turned the lights out so we couldn’t do any of the reading or fold-down-story-writing we had planned. Greyhound tried – they had a movie and a driver with dad-jokes on loudspeaker. They let themselves down with Maid In Manhattan. The only winner in that movie is blatant racism. This one goes to Overland.
I think in the end we’re at Overland 3, Greyhound 1. The whole point-giving system was redundant anyway because the bus is overnight giving me optimal shopping time upon my arrival and is also cheaper, but I’ve just noticed Virgin has $75 flights to Melbourne. I’m not gonna lie, I’ll probably have spontaneously booked some by payday.
pro-cat-stinating November 4, 2011
Posted by Emma in Observations, Rant.Tags: cat, exams, procrastination, this essay isn't going to write itself, true blood
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My cat is like my best friend except that she never responds to my verbal cues and she shits in a plastic tray full of tiny rocks. I got her from an ad in the classifieds and I bonded with her immediately because she was super-cute and did not make her separation anxiety or rancid flatulence immediately apparent. When I got her desexed she came home with a little tag that said “Tilly Jones” and I got all emotional like I was bringing home my firstborn child. Now she sleeps in my bed with me every night warding off potential boyfriends like a possessive miniature dragon.
Tilly and I have a mutual hatred of Dave Hughes (“it must be 7pm again, hey Tilly?”), a mutual coffee appreciation (“get your tongue the fuck out of my coffee, Tilly!”), and a mutual disregard for my housemate’s sleeping patterns (my drunken 3am stumbling, Tilly’s persistent door-scratching). I feel that our relationship is on an even footing. Take just now, for example. I was about to start writing an essay when Tilly jumped from my lap to my desk and sat in front of my computer screen. The look in her eyes said: “NO! YOU CANNOT WRITE AN ESSAY WHEN THERE ARE 4 EPISODES OF TRUE BLOOD SEASON 4 ON YOUR COMPUTER THAT YOU STILL HAVEN’T WATCHED”, and I was like, “thanks Tilly, I don’t know what came over me”.
After enjoying 2 hours of naked muscly supernatural creatures together (Eric and Alcide are our favourites (I mean COME ON)), Tilly and I had a nap and now I am blogging. I am glad that I have a cat who helps me to keep my swot vac study-free, but I should probably start looking at that exam question now.
disney: always relevant October 23, 2011
Posted by Emma in Observations.Tags: childhood trauma, disney, drunken conversations, i'm really not as funny as i think i am, sex, the lion king 3D
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Everybody has shameful secrets. Some people like Two and a Half Men; I’m a cinema crier. The other week my friend Caitlin and I, like 2489057 other nostalgic twentysomethings, went and saw The Lion King in 3D. Mufasa’s death is probably the single most traumatic event of my childhood. I feel like there’s probably a hole in the market for group therapy for those of us still scarred (heh) by this devastating loss. Predictably, I cried. Crying in the cinema is bad enough (cry on the first date, he won’t call again), but crying into your 3D glasses is even more awkward. I was a snivelling mess right up until Circle of Life Reprise, when Caitlin vowed to disown me if I ever cried in public again or something to that effect.
Anyway, this little injection of nostalgia had me thinking about Disney and its life lessons all weekend. Some of the life lessons in Disney movies are pretty shallow – be gorgeous, overcome anything! Have beautiful singing voice, marry prince! Stalking is encouraged, beauty comes in every natural hair colour and submissive females get their happy endings. As a little girl, all of this seemed perfectly believable to me. I’d walk around the village with my nose in a book hoping I’d be inadvertently abducted by a horrific beast with whom I’d eventually fall in love after a little persuasion from his anthropomorphic home furniture. Sadly, ‘Emma’ isn’t French for ‘beautiful’, my father isn’t an eccentric inventor and the village beefcake doesn’t have perpetual wood for me, so that dream died early. By the time I actually got my first boyfriend, Disney was no longer the leading influence in my love life decisions; trashy teen magazines and Freddie Prinze Jr movies had given me a far more liberated view of How To Get The Guy. (Are you a NERD? Submit to a makeover montage, put on a slinky red dress, walk down the stairs and hey presto! Homecoming Queen! Yeah, that didn’t work either.)
I veered off-topic there, as I am wont to do. What I was trying to get at is that over the weekend, after many mango margaritas and a healthy amount of $4 vodka sunrises (THEY’RE MADE OF SUNRISE OKAY), a balcony-and-cigarette conversation that also encompassed “zomg we should totally move to Iceland and live happily ever after under the Northern Lights” and “do you think demonic possession is actually possible?” lead to this: THINGS FROM DISNEY MOVIES THAT YOU CAN SAY DURING SEX THAT ARE HILARIOUS AND INAPPROPRIATE.
Yep. I’m so busy not getting laid that I’m thinking of bad 90s pop-cultural one-liners other people can drop when they actually do. (Sorry to all family members who just read that. Please don’t visualise. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE DON’T VISUALISE.) Moving on from that awkward statement, we came up with some corkers. Well, at the time I thought they were corkers. I wrote them down in my notebook in shaky blue biro under the heading “MUST BLOG. Too drunk to blog right now but haha”. So now, in classic Emma-blog-entry fashion, I will end this pizza-fuelled rant with a bullet-pointed list of those one-liners and leave the rest to your unsavoury imagination. Context is key. Happy sexing.
THINGS FROM DISNEY MOVIES THAT YOU CAN SAY DURING SEX THAT ARE HILARIOUS AND INAPPROPRIATE (it is a disappointingly short list after all that build-up):
- ‘Be prepared…’
- ‘You have touched the forbidden treasure!’
- ‘Only one may enter here… the diamond in the rough.’
- ‘It is time.’
Well, that was appropriately anticlimactic.
NYWF redux October 4, 2011
Posted by Emma in Observations, Things I Like.Tags: National Young Writers' Festival 2011, NYWF11, somehow i am STILL stupidly hung over
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A BRIEF PREEMPTORY NOTE: According to my blog, I have not blogged since June. This is not because I have been particularly busy. More because I have been exceptionally lazy, and also because I bought a notebook and have been pen-and-papering rather than blogging. This is superfluous information, but I did want to clarify that I am, in fact, alive. At any rate. Let’s proceed.
This photo is called "hahahahahahaha NEWCASTLE", or "i can use instagram".
I just got home from the NATIONAL YOUNG WRITERS’ FESTIVAL. Among other things like GETTING DRUNK and EATING BACON, the festival made me feel particularly guilty for having abandoned my blog for what would probably be about three months now. I’m just not good at long-term commitment. So I’m taking a stab at a return to my FORMER GLORY with this post. And, apparently, by capitalising words tourettishly. (That is an adjective I just invented. You can use it if you want.)
Anyway, please allow me to self-indulgently share with you some things I learned at the National Young Writers’ Festival. You may notice that very few of those lessons have anything to do with writing whatsoever. That is because I spent 15% of the festival listening to wonderfully talented people talking about writing, and the remaining 85% of the festival drunk in a succession of hovels.
Anyway. Enough of that. Here are SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT THE NATIONAL YOUNG WRITERS’ FESTIVAL THAT AREN’T REALLY THAT MUCH ABOUT WRITING:
1. The importance of collaboration.
2. There are, apparently, more tendons than bones in the human foot.
3. Never put your iPhone on the counter of the store you are buying clothes in, unless you don’t want it back like ever (or until tomorrow).
4. Never have I ever played such a competitive game of never have I ever.
5. There will always be somebody who has written more terrible poetry than yourself. Somebody who is willing to stand up in front of a crowd of people and read it out loud.
6. Conversely, there are many people who write fucking brilliant poetry. These people will stand up in front of the same crowd and read it out loud, making you feel inherently shitty and incompetent.
7. This.
8. Writers don’t really want wives all that much.
9. How to spell ‘bivouacking’.
10. To always, always pack an umbrella. And maybe a raincoat. Or a boat.
11. The city of Newcastle, NSW enjoys phallic monuments.
12. When staying at a backpacker’s hostel, try to check in early so as not to be stuck with the bed near the toilet.
13. Student media is pretty fucking great. If you don’t believe me, check out On Dit, or my new friends Farrago, Woroni and Tharunka.
14. When drunk, eat pie.
15. And finally, possibly the most important thing I learned all weekend: NEVER leave the house without your magic toothpaste in your pocket.
money, money, money June 29, 2011
Posted by Emma in National Young Writers' Month, Observations, Rant.Tags: money, shopaholic, shopaholocaust, shut up i love my $100 peter alexander ugg boots okay
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So I went and saw a clairvoyant the other weekend. It was pretty weird. I mean really. There’s not much that can out-weird sitting down with a total stranger who knows nothing more about you than your name and star sign and being told intimate details about yourself that you thought nobody else knew.
Anyway, she told me, among other things, that I need to change my attitude towards money. Changing attitudes towards things often involves a lot of reflection. And where better to reflect than on the internet? Airing personal thoughts on a public forum is oddly therapeutic.
So, money. Or as Pink Floyd would say, “MONEY!”. Or as my bank account would say, “what the hell is this money thing everyone keeps talking about? I’ve never seen it”.
Okay so here’s the lowdown. I’m 23. I’m single. I’m a student and I earn less than $15,000 a year. I’m also a retail therapy success story. Depressed? Shop! Angry? Shop! Bored? Shop! When I’m having a bad hair day, I’ll buy $100 shoes! When a guy doesn’t call, I’ll buy overpriced lingerie! When I’m surfing the crimson wave (always wanted to use that phrase, will remain unapologetic), I’ll buy pizza and cigarettes! Where does this money come from? I don’t know! I pull it out of my ass! I bleed it out of a stone! Some idiot let me get a debit card and now I can spend up to $50 that isn’t mine before bank fees kick in! The hysteria is contagious! Look at all these exclamation marks!
Money is a drug. This may be an exhausted analogy but it’s really true. I check my account on payday and I feel like Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish with a fresh stash of heroin. Then I spend it all and it’s like an eyeball-injected high and I’m sitting at home drowning in gratuitous purchases and then all of a sudden I’m engulfed in buyer’s remorse and living off Mi Goreng wishing I hadn’t bought those $100 Peter Alexander ugg boots so I could afford to go out for dinner with my friends but god my feet are warm (true story).
So basically what I’m getting at I guess is that my clairvoyant was barking up the wrong tree. Asking me to change my attitude towards money is like asking a junkie to change their attitude towards heroin. Is there a financial equivalent to methodone? Shopaholic rehab? Shopaholocaust. Too soon to joke? I don’t care. My eBay notifications are going crazy so brb gotta buy an enamel horse statue. It’s totally necessary okay.
ruminations and the kitchen June 16, 2011
Posted by Emma in National Young Writers' Month, Observations.Tags: emo, kitchen, maybe i should stop drinking wine at this time of day, sunlight, wine
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My kitchen is filled with sunlight.
It’s streaming in, optimistically, through the window. It illuminates the dust particles floating, aimlessly, colliding with one another and drifting away; a crowd of people, a city in my kitchen, lit by yellow, filtered through the cheerful plastic flowers on the windowsill.
I’ve been drinking wine and my mind is cloudy and sad. The kitchen window is dirty. There are coffee cups on the sink. That’s all that’s ever on the sink. Coffee cups and wine glasses. A liquid diet is good for your health! Something like that.
In a minute, I will walk outside to smoke a cigarette. I will disturb the dust particles. They will swirl in my wake, briefly purposeful, and they will lose themselves again, floating in the late afternoon sunlight, settling on my things. They’ll probably stay there a while. I’m lazy like that.
