an adventure into the mythical world of channel 10 reality television

Last night I went to the casting call for Channel 10’s sure fire trash hit, Taken Out. You know, that super-judgemental dating television show where there’s thirty girls in short dresses and one weasley guy out there copping all the flak and the girls turn off their lights if they think his jeans are too short or he has too much nose hair. It’s high-brow stuff.

So why did I go along? I have no trouble asking out guys, this was not an adventure with romantic intentions. I have no desire to plaster myself with fake tan, get breast implants and discuss the pros and cons of the skinny leg jean with thirty other girls. I don’t want to be famous and wake up two years later in a pool of my own vomit with a photographer from new idea taking pictures of me with my underwear not present. I went along with a friend from work who wanted to make a zine about it. Just for the record I would never have gone along by myself.

I filled out the 5 page application form with such impressively well-thought-out questions as ‘What was your most hurtful dumping experience’ and ‘Describe your flirting style’. My very funny friend had some incredibly humourous answers on hers, it provided much laughter. Using the incredibly detailed map we had (it resembled a sort of biro scribble with names) we found ourselves in the Fremantle Media audition room, being plied with fruity lollies and taking many a stealth photograph to use for later comic relief.

I won’t go into deep detail because my friend and I will be writing a zine detailing our excellent adventure but needless to say, it was awesome. And I mean, change my life kind of awesome. Awesome in the way that Neil Armstrong would describe his moonwalk. Awesome in the way you feel when you realise the metcard machine isn’t working and you can therefore, legally fare evade.

And now we wait to see if we get on the show.

alas, I am without my umbrella ella ella eh eh eh

I peered outside the confines of the internet cafe which is slightly a little too homelike for my comfort level and saw it is raining. I am without my umbrella and wish Rhianna was here because she promised I would always have her umbrella rain protection when the fancy cars are in the dark, which now I believe that they are.

In other news, this blog post is purely obligational because I just joined facebook (let the poking begin) and I want to go back to my little site in a minute and see if I have two million people just begging to be my friends and since there’s only about four websites that I ever really visit, this being one of them, here I am posting and awaiting the rain to stop or an RnB princess to step into the light bearing a big, shiny umbrella and wanting to shelter me from the inclement weather as I parade home to her soulful beats and the hooting of car horns.

i’m back in the world and non-dependent on my doona

It’s been a rough week. Germs seems to like me, so whenever someone coughs within a 1km radius of where I am standing, inevitably they seek me out, like a heat seeking missile, attach themselves to me, like velcro, and infect me, like infections. I was lucky enough to have bronchitis and tonsilitis at the same time this week, which believe me, is way more fun than you’d think it could ever be.

So I’ve spent the last 3 days straight in bed, in my apartment, with next to no contact from the outside world, except for the lovely man from the Nepalese Take Away place who feeds me once a week, that delivered my food on Wednesday night and who ran away quickly when I began coughing uncontrollably and he caught a glimpse of my doona and tissue filled apartment. I watched a lot of Seinfeld (I mean a lot. I now know pretty much all of the last season word perfect and I think I may even have begun to look a little like George Costanza). I ate a lot of cornflakes (they’re the only thing that didn’t make me want to throw up for the first 2 days of my convalescence). I drank many fluids (mostly water and flat lemonade). I didn’t do my hair, get dressed or wear shoes (I looked like a hobit by Thursday evening).

And now I am out in the world again, albeit slightly coughy and very tired but I am vertical and non-dizzy. I made my way here to the internet cafe without dying and I felt an immediate sense of popularity when I saw how many emails I had missed.  So whilst I have most definitely not been involved in the world as of the last 3 days, several things did happen of which I will now give you a comprehensively short run down.

1) I am now a working volunteer at Sticky Institute. I had my first shift on Monday, then went down like a huge sack of potatoes monday evening, thus eliminating Sticky from my life for the rest of the week, but I will return there next week. Come in, say hi! Meet me, worship me, kiss my converse clad feet.

2) I have a zine stall at TINA in Newcastle. This means I sit there and sell my zines all day. It also means I didn’t book accomodation in time and will therefore be staying in a 4 person mixed room at a youth hostel just off the beach. I am not wealthy and cannot therefore afford the five star option of the hotel on the beach with my own personal massuese. Hence, I will sleep with 3 other strangers who I know nothing about and who are likely to kill me in my sleep and I will wake up and realise that I’m dead.

3) My feet have shrunk. I’ve gone from a size 9 to a size 8. How? HOW????

4) I had Lord Of The Fries for the first time on Monday. Oh lord. I have seen the light and am now a believer.

5) You get looked at wierdly if you are pale, coughing and bedraggled on a tuesday evening at 9pm when you are at coles and you buy a bag of frozen potatoe wedges, a 24 pack of panadol and a box of 3ply tissues. Never do this unless you can absolutely avoid it. People think you’re a psychopath.

6) Never live alone if you are very very ill. It sucks. No one is there to clean up your vomit. No one is there to complain to. No one will find you for days if you die on your doona. If you live alone, get housemates immediately to prevent this from occurring.

Now, I’m going to go see if the lines at Centrelink have gotten any shorter in the last 3 days.

the dress effect, young lawyer toilet humour and cereal from baking dishes

It’s well known that I’m somewhat of a boyish dresser. I genuinely like the way men’s clothes fit on me and they have a way better variety than some of the polyester/lycra/small furry animal with slightly pointed front teeth clothes that a lot of today’s pretty young things get around in. However, yesterday was the launch of the zine thingo that I’m involved in and I wanted to look semi-skirtish so I decided to glam it up a bit in a dress.

Needless to say the effects of this experiment were all positive. One of the first things my dad said to me when he saw me was ‘You’re wearing a dress?!’ and this little proud look glinted in his eyes, that sort of said ‘I’m responsible for breeding this large haired little person and fair enough she may be totally overwhelmed right now by the amount of red fizzy and cookies she’s been eating all day, but I bet she’ll go home tonight and be glad she wore a dress after she’s stopped twitching from the alarmingly large amount of refined sugar parading around in her bloodstream’. And I was. And I want to do it again. Soon. I feel the impression I made on the various people I met, including a rather good-looking and cheerily-dispositioned with a propensity for the most timeless humour of all, toilet humour, lawyer type young man, as well as four boys in a holden ute who tooted their horn at me when I was hanging around in the city afterwards (solid confirmation of my thoughts that the dress made me pretty) oh I lost myself. 

And I also noticed something alse. If you live by yourself and have spent the previous night baking three types of cookies in a one person kitchen with a trans-sexual oven called Edna, when you return home having left your dining plates at the library and facing a rather unstable fortress of dirty dishes blocking the natural light from your kitchen window, chopping boards or the back of a whiteboard can be convincing subsitutes for dinner plates. You can also eat cornflakes out of a casserole dish and I’m just really pleased that I have a tendency to steal cutlery from work and have built up a rather impressive collection of black market forks and spoons, so that at least I didn’t have to eat my cereal with a fork like some sort of deranged lunatic who’s trying to bring down the conventions of society by switching his cutlery every so often and you’ll see him on the corner of a street, spooning coffee into his mouth with a fork and eating ice cream with a whisk.

if you see me today, I’ll be funky

I unearthed a jacket from the bowels of my closet today that I haven’t worn in so long and now I feel all funky. Not having had the most spectacular few days (I ran out of chips!!! and stubbed my toe!!!) I am now full of a supreme sense of funk in my perfectly shaped, dark jade green jacket/blazer/shorter than your average blazer but long enough so that it doesn’t look freakish on a 5 foot 8 inch lass such as myself. So if you see me walking down the street soon on my way to Medicare, I’ll be funking it up in my funky colon-insppired jacket.

irrational spider reproduction fear as pertaining to an extraordinary lack of sleep

This is the fifth time I’ve tried to write a blog post here. It’s not as if nothing interesting has happened of late, it’s just that I’m pretty tired from last night and my usual quick wit and wordy banter aren’t coming as naturally to me as I would have hoped. Last night I participated in a sleepover which was super fun, we stayed up all night painting each other’s toenails, talking about what our respective first kisses will be like and daydreaming about one day creating our own real life baby sitters club.

But, as referenced in a previous post, I am an awkward sleeper. This person has stayed over before so you would think I would know what to expect in terms of breathing patterns and sleep positions, but no, I still lay down next to them and was immediately awkward. Is it offensive if I fidget? What if I fart in my sleep? What if I drool? What if I drool on them? What if I roll over, land on top of them and then we both wake up to find ourselves in a strangely awkward situation involving flanelette?

So to avert any disasters, I simply didn’t sleep. And now it’s 1pm. I have to go to work soon and sit in front of a vividly blue screen and try to get complete strangers to participate in surveys and try deaperately to stay awake and not fall asleep on my cubicle wall thereby knocking it down and creating a collapsing cubicle domino effect. I would be shunned from the office if that happened.

And, just in case this person reads this post (someone reads my blog? No way!), I want them to know that I in no way blame them for my total lack of sleep. It is my own fault. I was in my bed. I should have a reasonable enough brain to realise that nothing awful is likely to happen to me when I’m sleeping next to someone who doesn’t snore or fidget a lot and that the chances of a huntsman spider crawling into my mouth, trotting down my throat and landing in my stomach, then proceeding to lay millions of baby spider eggs in my stomach which will then grow up and eat me to death from the inside out in a massively painful Melissa buffet frenzy, are actually quite slim.

a way to spice up your sleeping life so that it no longer smells like a donkey

My bed is a pretty awesome place. A lot of good things have happened there (not sexual, get your magenta-minds out of the gutter) and I plan to continue having good things happening there for a while yet to come. However, of late, I’ve gotten bored of my bed. Sure I could move the bed into a different position but I’m certain there are monsters living under there who wouldn’t be too happy with me that I’m disrupting their natural environment and the last time I ventured under my bed, a nasty piece of broken mirror bit my toe and almost sliced it in half. Also, I am superstitious and my bed just feels wrong when it’s facing in a different direction.

So I’ve devised a new sport. Extreme Sleeping. It’s really fun and super exciting! The first part of the sport (for those of a beginner level) is to not assemble your bed properly because the Swedish schematic diagrams didn’t make sense and your arm-muscles aren’t powerful enough to properly use an alan key. By doing this, you’re setting yourself up for your bed to collapse at any moment. You’re just easing into bed after a really long day of wandering the streets aimlessely looking for greenhaired people to talk to, and crash, the slats of your bed half fall through the bed frame and hey presto, you’re at a 45 degree angle to the world! This is even more fun if you have someone in bed with you and they don’t know that you’re an Extreme Sleep junkie. They get into bed with you and when the bed collapses, look at you as if you’re mad that you’ve thrown both arms in the air, screamed ‘Woo Hoo!’ and start going on about the adrenaline rush.

The second level of the sport is more advanced and should only be undertaken by those with no significant back or infestation problems. You make the rule that for the next few nights, you can’t sleep in your bedroom. Anywhere else in you home is fair game. You can try the obvious ones like the couch or a paticularly comfy chair, but if you’re really hard core, try the bath or, my stalwart favourite, the floor. But play it safe. Always use a blanket, always use a pillow and don’t do this if you have someone staying over, because, from experience, they get slightly put out that they’re hopping into bed and you’re bedding down on the floor of the living room.

In all honesty, if you don’t regularly spend your nights sleeping next to an axe-wielding serial killer who smells faintly of donkeys, and are as such, getting a little bored with your usual sleeping routine, I encourage you to partake in Extreme Sleeping. But, please, play it safe. Don’t try these activities naked or near open flame as you may get singed or badly bruised.

the remnants of a weekend spent in hibernation

I called in sick to work on Saturday. And I really was. My throat had a decidedly gooey feel to it and everytime I got vertical, the room would cruelly spin fast in a counter-clockwise direction. I spent most of Saturday asleep in a sort of blanket and cushion nest I assembled on the floor about 3 metres away from the television, venturing out only momentarily in search of edible food. Sunday was similar, although it involved less gooey-ness but more generalised yawning.

But yesterday, Monday, when I had to get up and awake from my state of hibernation in order to continue living, as I was going out the door, I turned, looked back at my living room and was 50% shocked to see how I had been living for the last 48 hours and 50% sad to be leaving such an environment.

Between my nest and the television, I had devised a sort of paper/crockery mountain which had just sort of accumulated through my wanting to have everything within a arm’s reach away from me to avoid the vertical dizziness fear. In the three metres between the television and my hibernation bunker, were the following; 1 lap top, 1 scanner, 10 copies of my zine, 2 draft copies of my new zines, 1 box of blank CD’s, 1 box of tissues, roughly 2 years worth of open day information that I haven’t gotten around to putting in the recycling bin, 1 whiteboard, 2 glue sticks, 2 mugs 1 half full of cold coffee, 1 piece of chocolate that quickly found it’s way into my mouth hole, 1 pair of jeans, 2 cardigans, 1 hat, 3 socks, 1 copy of The Age (unread) and 1 copy of The Herald Sun (unread except for a large amount of staring time at the pictures of male divers wearing very little), 2 plates, 2 remote controls, 4 seasons of Seinfeld, 1 half empty pack of envelopes, a small amount of launch invitations, fluoro green, about 2 million pens of various colours and 1 book of Shakespeare’s Collected Works.

And I really couldn’t believe it. I’m sure some people wake up on a Monday morning with an octopus in a blue wig beside them on the couch and Boy George making them scarmbled eggs in the kitchen, but I was a little shocked to see the remains of my weekend. I didn’t even touch it. I just left the house, knowing that I would return to it later that day, but also knowing that when I did, a little bit of the weekend nest magic would be gone.

an invitation and many canine-oriented love words left floating in the air

Yes, I admit, I have been neglecting the blog somewhat. But I have good reason!!! I’m a part of a group Street Press thingo that’s full of incredibly nice and attractive people and we are launching our first zine!

I’ve attached the invite. However, since the only people who really read this blog are members of said attractive and nice people group, it’s sort of a redundant action.

Also, since for some reason the blog monster won’t let me only insert 1 image into the post, I’ve also attached a picture of the most wonderful dog in the world: my dog.

His name is Reco and he’s a kelpie crossed with many things, including Batman and an 80 year old man named Roger.

He’s my absolute best friend and I totally love him. Look at his picture! How could you not? He’s got a muddy tummy because he’s been running around a lot and his big bacon tongue is hanging out of his beautiful nuzzle muzzle. His noodle brain is thinking ‘Oh I better show my good side in this picture!’ along with the thought that he hopes he gets Eukanuba’s and steak for dinner, with tomato sauce since he really likes that.

To sum everything up…I love my dog, I have been busy, the call centre is decidedly less than awesome, my hair is well-volumed, I am currently wearing shoes and I think I’ve hurt my neck quite badly somehow. Also, I made a New Zealand friend yesterday on the tram, I’ve decided I should’ve become a gymnast and am wondering why I didn’t since they get to wear leotards with sequins on and they’re not considered freaks like I would be if I chose to wear a sequined leotard on a day to day basis and lastly, I think it’s pretty obvious that chocolate is the absolute best thing in the world.

hannah & the public display of rhythm (non-music review)

Okay, this is in no way a music review or advertisement. I don’t own a fly buys card, I am not a gym member and I am not the leader of some sort of religious sect where I will lure you into my fold by the power of my mind and levitation skills.

On Wednesday night I saw a really awesome band called Hannah & The Public Display of Rhythm. I went with absolutely no idea of what their music sounded like, given that I missed their EP launch due to a cough due to cold. And I have to say, very pleasantly surprised. Really good lyrics, Hannah has a seriously good voice and the band’s general level of cool made me, a consistently cool person, question my own level of cool.

However, I don’t want the band to think that I didn’t have a good time, nor the people I went with, nor anyone who was in direct eye line of me. I have a condition, you see, called publicmovingaroundalotphobia. I can’t move at gigs. I can’t dance. I can’t do the nodding to music thing that most people can do. I can’t tap my foot, click my fingers or sway in time to the supposedly phat beats. I do my particular dance move which consists of me standing dead still, arms crossed and every so often, I uncross the arms and play with my finger nails absently because I thought it would be rude to take a Rubix cube with me so that my hands would have something to do. Sometimes I lean on things. I might smile too and if I’m drinking lemonade, I focus very intently on the position of my straw in relation to the ice. To those unaware of my condition it would seem that I’m not enjoying myself.

But I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY am! I’m just not able to physically show it, beyond a smile and an enthusiastic clap. There are reasons, of course, but there is an element of it that remains a mystery to me. Firstly, I usually have a bag the size of egypt with me and since it carries pretty much everything I own in there, including my Star Wars DVD collection, I don’t want to put it down for fear of thieves. So if I dance with said bag, it’s kind of like there’s a fully grown male hanging off my arm, but who is nothing but dead weight and is definitely not moving in time to the music. Secondly, I’m a poorly balanced person. If I dance, even in my living room, I fall over an awful lot. I consider it a vital public safety infringement if I dance within a three metre radius of anyone so that rules me out for most venues apart from gigs on a giant salt lake. Thirdly, I can’t do sexy. I can’t do the whole worship my lady lumps with the seductiveness of my very glossy lips boy, movement. My brand of dance is more full frontal bodily assault on all the optical senses and usually involves some sort of jumping so I feel a little self-conscious doing this in front of rational thinking people. The fourth element is a mystery to me. I can’t explain it.

But in summary, Hannah & The Public Display of Rhythm, I loved your gig and your overall coolness and plan to see you again live sometime soon. You won’t miss me. I’ll be the one, leaning, standing still, crossing my arms and gazing wistfully at the dance floor as everyone else does what I sorely can’t.