Recently we had an unsettling airport experience at Phuket, mainly because all passengers had to get both their hand luggage and their suitcases searched. I was nervous because I had bought some “valium” from a pharmacy on Bangala Road and tossed it inside an empty vitamin bottle which now lay at the bottom of my suitcase. I hefted my bag up onto the counter and unzipped it, trying to act casual.“You have firework?” the Thai man said, patting my dirty underpants and wet swimmers.
“Have a nice fliiiiiiiiight.”
In addition to the luggage search, we were subjected to four security checkpoints, where at each one I was forced to throw out all the bottled water I had purchased since the previous check. By the time we boarded the plane, I had thrown away seven fully-sealed bottles of water and I was pretty pissed. Ryan had paid for all the water, so he was a little more pissed.
A few rows ahead of us, a young blonde woman fussed around her bags as her husband held their 6-month old baby, who immediately burst into tears. In any other situation, people would tsk tsk affectionately and smile sympathetically at the couple. “Babies will be babies!” you would tell them. But on a plane, the mood is different. To carry a crying baby onto an international flight is the fastest way to make 300+ people passionately hate you. There were several babies on this flight, and they were all beginning to wail.
“Ughhhhhhh,” I moaned, rifling through my backpack for a pair of ear plugs.
“They’re like dogs,” the man beside me observed, “As soon as one starts howlin’, they just set off all the other fuckers.”
“Why doesn’t she put it in the overhead locker?” Ryan said.
For the next nine and a half hours, the blonde lady paced up and down the aisle while her baby screamed. Every time I nodded off, she would pass our row and wake me up. I began to fantasise, unashamedly, about ways to kill the baby.
By the time we reached Sydney, the mother looked as though she had experienced the longest nine hours of her life. Again, under normal circumstances, I would have felt sorry for her. But I didn’t. Because thanks to her, I had now been awake for two days. And also, because even though I don’t have children, I can give totally advice on how to travel with them.
Tips on how to travel with a baby
1. Don’t take it on a plane
Just don’t. At least not on an overnight flight. Babies don’t like planes. They will probably cry when they are forced to get on one. That tiny person who has no inhibitions, isn’t toilet trained, can’t equalise their ears, and is probably terrified because they don’t understand what the hell is going on? Just take them on a road trip this year, because when you get on a plane with them, everybody hates you. So you don’t get to go to Fiji this year, tough shit. The baby won’t know the difference between a trip to Fiji and a cardboard box. Plus, it’ll probably be more fun for you in a few years time once the kid is a less of a fucking nightmare to travel with.
I’ve spoken to several okay-seeming mothers who have doped their babies on flights and so far none of them have stutters or eat cat biscuits. Not only will sedating your child spare all the other passengers from nine hours of torture, but the kid will get a good buzz out of it too.
If you ignore number 1 and 2, and your baby is upset about being on the plane (which is likely, as explained in number 1), just go sit in the toilet. Sure, it’s probably not the most pleasant place to spend a flight, but your baby is clearly already hating everything about this experience. What’s it going to do, cry?
If you’re a parent, you’re probably reading this and getting all bent out of shape because I don’t have kids. You probably think that bringing a baby on a plane is fine, maybe it even adds a bit of excitement to an otherwise uneventful ten hours. But you have crossed over. Try to cast your mind back to before you had a kid and gave up on personal comfort. And if you absolutely must fly with a baby, make it a day-time flight. That way, even though you’re still annoying the shit out of everyone, they were probably going to be awake anyway. Getting on a 10pm international flight with a shrieking baby means you are really going to fuck up everyone for the next two days. We know it’s not fun for you either, but you are better equipped to deal with the sleep deprivation and noise torture, because you love your child. Nobody else does.
There are a lot of things in life that I don’t care about. Horoscopes, fashion, hearing about people’s dreams, vegans, etc. But what I really don’t care about, what I could absolutely not give less of a fuck about, is what you and your boyfriend are thinking of having for dinner. Or whether you miss each other. Or the fact that you just wanted to say hello from the office.
It’s as though some couples are so blinded by their love for each other, they have forgotten that there are a hundred ways to communicate with a person other than writing on their Facebook wall.
So here is a handy rundown on alternative methods of contact. If there is someone in your life who has totally forgotten basic fucking communication skills, please feel free to pass this along to them.
Might seem a little daunting at first, but totally easy once you get the hang of it. Just go to www.gmail.com or your preferred email client and sign up. Once your partner has also registered for an email account, you can send each other perfectly private and instantaneous electronic communications. They can even reply to you straight away!
Don’t waste time pining for the sound of your beloved’s voice during the work day. Just ring them on a phone and you can discuss anything at all to your heart’s content. The great thing about phone calls is that you can speak directly with the person you want to talk to, rather than posting a message on one of their public social media profiles. Amazing!
Don’t be fooled into thinking that phone is just for voice-talk. Now you can take advantage of the wonderful world of Short Message Service (or SMS as I like to call it) by typing a text into your phone, hitting a button, and BOOM – sending it instantly to your BF/GF’s phone. They can read it whenever they want and reply to it whenever they want. And best of all, no one else will have to read the fucking thing.
This is just a fancy word for “instant messaging.” There are so many ways you can do this, and I have found it to be a really effective way of communicating with all kinds of people, including my significant other. My favourite ways to IM include Gchat, MSN messenger, Whatsapp and Viber, but feel free to explore the internet and find one that suits you!
Now we know you’re comfortable on Facebook, because you use it as your main medium for 80% of your relationship interactions. So perhaps you’ve already come across the Messaging feature but you just couldn’t get the damn hang of it. Well, never fear because I am here to save the day.
Here’s what you need to do:
- click on “Messages”
- then click on “New message”
- enter your boyfriend’s name where it says “Name”
- type your message in the box
- Have I lost you? Don’t forget to hit “Send” when you want to send it!
I personally guarantee that if you use any of the above methods to contact your partner, it will be just as effective as writing on their Facebook wall. In fact, it might even be more effective since you would actually be directing your message to the person who needs to read it, rather than your entire list of mutual Facebook friends who are bored as shit.
But wait, I’m missing the point. Obviously you’re not actually posting on your partner’s Facebook wall because you need to tell them something. It’s because you need to tell everyone else something: that hey, just in case we didn’t notice, you have a BF/GF. Well for the record, most of us don’t give a shit. But if you’re still feeling the need to publicly announce this fact, I have a few more tips for you:
- tattoo your partner’s name onto your forehead
- put out an ad
- head to Speakers’ Corner in the Domain, grab a soap box and start yelling at strangers like the rest of the crazy pricks down there.
Or if you really want to keep it on Facebook, maybe you should just own it. Why not avoid all the subterfuge and just make your status the truth?
- Listening to my neighbours rotate a limited playlist at extreme volumes that would normally be appropriate for Mardi Gras comedown parties, 14 year old girls, and the autistic.
- Seeing an aboriginal guy take a shit on Crown Street.
- Being woken up regularly on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings around 4am when the girl next door would bring home whoever fingered her at the pub and then act coy by chatting to them for 45 minutes outside my bedroom window.
- The tranny who used to steal my mail.
- Calling the police every Friday and Saturday night to come and clear away the hipsters drinking goonbags in the gutter.
- The cockroaches.
- The maggots.
- The wasps.
- The time a rat ran up the stairs.
- Finding a homeless person in my garage.
- Having your front door pissed on.
- Listening to idiots setting off their own car alarm (at least once a day.)
If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen some moronic updates floating through your feed lately about people going to various countries for various periods of time even though they’re not. The conversation usually goes something like this…
Idiot: I’m going to Spain for 4 months!
Curious friend: Omg really?
Idiot: Nah it’s for breast cancer lol!
Curious friend: wat.
Idiot: You choose the country that matches your bday month and then your bday date is how long you’re going for and then you change your status
Curious friend: (deletes you from Facebook because you’re a fucking idiot)
This kind of genius has been around for a while now. It usually starts with a message people forward around to their female friends that goes something like this:
Hey ladies! It’s that time of year again when we annoy the shit out of our friends and contribute absolutely nothing towards raising awareness about breast cancer!!!
This is how it works. First, choose the number that matches your IQ:
1 – blue
2 – pink
3 – black
4 – yellow
5 – red
Next, how many people would admit to being your friend?
1 – syphilis
2 – chlamydia
3 – gonorrhea
4 – the clap
5 – herpes
Then update your Facebook status with the colour and STD that match your answers! For example, “Omg my bf’s balls are red, think I have the clap?!!”
Now remember, don’t tell any of the boys what your statuses mean because we need to maximise the awareness!!! Keep them guessing so more people learn about it. Also pass this on to everyone you know so they can raise a awareness too!!!
Ugh. Just ugh.
1. Do we really need to be raising awareness about breast cancer?
If you can show me three people over the age of 12 who are not aware of breast cancer, I will start watching Glee, because neither of those things are ever going to fucking happen.
Where are these people? How often is this conversation happening?
Judy: Excuse me sir, but I’m going to need some time off work because… well, I have breast cancer.
Boss: What’s that? Never heard of it. Should we all get tested? I really don’t understand.
We’re all aware. Breast cancer gets more publicity than Kate Middleton holding her hand over her stomach in a few photos like she’s totally pregnant. Why not try and raise awareness about something that people don’t generally know a lot about, like melanoma or how to clear your cache. Or if you still want to keep the focus on breast cancer, why not aim to raise awareness about its symptoms, detection methods, treatment options or other ways to help. Or fuck, why not just really go for it and try to raise something actually useful, LIKE MONEY?
2. How does not mentioning something raise awareness about it?
Here is the other way these status updates are often received…
Moron: I’m a champagne flute so tuck it back.
Innocent friend: What are you talking about?
Moron: I can’t tell you lol.
Innocent friend: Don’t call me anymore.
The dumb bridge club president who comes up with these brainwaves and composed the original message urges people not to disclose the reason behind their mysterious status update. Now I’m no genius, and I only just found out that reindeer are real so who am I to judge, but I do have one question: how are people supposed to know what cause you’re supporting, if you don’t fucking say it?
I really want to know how the conversation went when this was decided.
Shirley: So then we get everyone to update their status to raise lots of awareness….but it’s a secret.
Tonia: Wow, I think it’s a great idea, I mean it’s definitely got legs. But how will people know that the whole concept is about breast cancer if it’s a secret?
Shirley: Because that’s the whole purpose.
Tonia: Yes but shouldn’t we mention the cause or maybe include a link to a site with information on breast cancer, maybe even a site where people could donate money?
Shirley: Nah, nah, nah. Trust me, it’s better this way.
3. Doing lame crap like this gives people a false sense of action
Telling people that they can help raise awareness about breast cancer by posting something inane on Facebook is counter-productive, because some of those people who wanted to help might have ACTUALLY supported the cause through donating things like time/money/ideas/labour/goods/etc. But instead, they will now sit back on the couch and tune in to Oprah, satisfied in the knowledge that they’ve done their bit for breast cancer.
4. It’s really annoying
Stop it. Not only is it annoying, but you might find that it actually achieves the opposite of what you were dumb enough to think you were doing. Most of the time, when people discover that a particular brand is behind an ad or campaign that they find super irritating, they feel less sympathetic towards that brand. I’m not saying I am pro-breast cancer, but I’d probably chuck my dollars into another cancer charity that wasn’t being endlessly touted by a bunch of idiots.
Of course, having said all that, there is a silver lining. If you are keen to cull your Facebook friends, little initiatives like these will help you sort the wheat from the chaff. (Checking which of your friends have liked the Two and a Half Men page is also a good method.)
Ryan: I watched Drive today.
Me: How was it?
Ryan: There’s no story, absolutely nothing. It’s a 20 minute script shot in slow motion to make up an hour and a half of footage. Mostly it’s just shots of Ryan Gosling wearing a gold jacket and chewing on a toothpick. He also walks down a lot of hallways. And there’s no driving. It shouldn’t even be called “Drive”. That’s misleading. It should be called “Ryan Gosling chews a toothpick in slow motion for ninety minutes”. If you want to know what happens in Drive, just look at the DVD cover. That’s the movie. The whole thing.
Me: I heard the soundtrack was good?
Ryan: I can’t remember, I’d have to watch it again. And that’s not going to happen because it’s fucking boring.
Orthopaedic shoe inserts are potentially the biggest scam of the twenty-first century.
Introduced at the beginning of the new millennium and hailed as the western-world’s answer to childhood obesity, impotence, and red licorice, orthopaedic shoe inserts cost $4,000 each and can result in death.
You should not use orthopaedic shoe inserts if you are French or pregnant.
This is why:
I have been to Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, France, Spain, England, Italy, and Greece. During those journeys, I worked in orphanages, AIDS homes, and boarding schools, and gained a pretty thorough understanding and appreciation for other cultures. If you had bothered to click on the tag that says “travel” before you commented, you would have been able to answer your own question and save yourself from getting so upset.
I work full-time and pay my own bills, but yes, I do live with my parents at the moment if you count that as being “dependent.” The reason I never finished uni is because I didn’t want to, and my degree was useless for the industry that I am now working in. Also, feel free to call me a hippie, but I don’t think that a tertiary education based on an outdated syllabus is the only way to educate one’s self.
As far as friends who love me are concerned, just read all the comments above yours and tell me the ratio of negative to positive ones. I think you’ll find you were the only person who failed to understand that it was a tongue-in-cheek story, not to be taken overly seriously.
Here’s an idea – if you’re going to get all hot and bothered by random blog posts on the internet, just don’t read them. And if you can relax your sphincter enough to remove the giant pole that is currently lodged inside your anal cavity, learn how to take a joke and do your research before you have a meltdown and humiliate yourself online.
Not only was I unfortunate enough to be born with scoliosis and eyes which look in different directions when I am over-relaxed, but I also belong to a set of parents who insist on living in the Hills.
For those unfamiliar with Sydney, the Hills is an entirely stagnant and insular area north-west of the city where people are born, educated, employed and married all on the same block. People who live in the Hills go to school, church, soccer practice, work, the pub, and the movies all with the same group of friends they have had since pre-school, and they will continue to do so until they all rot beside their colostomy bags at the Anglican Retirement Village on Old Northern Road. If you suggest a visit to a city club or a day trip up the coast, Hills residents will smile and shake their head at you as if you are retarded. “Why would we trek all the way over there when we have everything we need right here?!” In this way, the Hills is exactly like America, but thinner.
The only way to get out of the Hills is to go to uni so you can secure a high-paying job and afford to move somewhere less conservative and tainted by Christians. But if you failed uni, like me, then you have to catch Hillsbus everywhere.
Hillsbus is the only way to get from the Hills to the city without paying $40 in tolls or trawling through three different forms of public transport. It is a privately owned company, which means they have a total monopoly on the norwest city-workers’ commute and can bump up their prices at will. The result is 60,000 passengers who fork over $50 each week for the privilege of spending 2 hours every day standing on a crowded, stuffy, perpetually late piece-of-shit vomit yellow bus. It is inevitable, like the tides – anyone who catches Hillsbus is a cunt.
“Umm Neek,” I can hear you say, “You catch Hillsbus. Does that make you a cunt too?”
Well yes, it does, to be honest. I live my life in a cranky state of constant exhaustion because my commute is so fucking long and tedious, I have considered simply sleeping on a yoga mat under my desk at work and giving myself sponge baths using the office water cooler. I also catch approximately six colds every winter because Hillsbus is so crowded that you will perform fellatio, on average, every three weeks simply by sitting in the aisle seat. I hate everyone on Hillsbus and all the filthy diseases they carry and sneeze on me. I never give up my seat for pregnant people or old women because the ride is so long and expensive that on the rare occasions you can get a seat, you hold onto that fucker like it’s going out of fashion. If someone wants to carry another human inside them for 9 months or commute long distances once they’re past the age of sixty then that’s their business, not mine. You should have thought about how you were going to work that into your life without counting on the generosity and kindness of strangers because really, the average person is fairly shit.
Last week, I was waiting at the Hillsbus bus stop after a few post-work beverages, when I became aware of some crazy bitch screaming up the road. Naturally, I turned to look, but my alcohol-riddled brain was too slow to look away before I had accidentally made eye contact with this raging meth head. I turned away anyway, hoping she would let it go, but ten seconds later I was grabbed around the head and dragged 3 metres by my hair. At this point, my brain cut out and I could not feel any pain or really register what was going on. I assume this is the same protective mental mechanism that shields me during sermons, conferences, and twenty minutes into any family dinner. Also, I was too smashed to know quite what was happening. However, I was aware of being slammed up against a wall and thrown to the ground, while being screamed at and called a cunt, a bitch, a whore, whatever else. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I assumed the fetal position and tried to cover my head. My friend Julia was on the scene fast, and yelled obscene threats until the ice junkie retreated, then she helped me to my feet.
“Are you okay?” Julia said.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to sit down?”
“Do you want some water?”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“Give me three.”
As we stood back in the bus line, because there seemed little else to do, I became aware that every other person waiting in the queue – all thirty or so of them – had simply watched me get bashed by an ice addict and decided that being a witness was the best civic duty they could provide in this particular situation. One lady (who was not a cunt) phoned the police to let them know what had happened, but everybody else just stood there guarding their place in line and staring at me. I knew they wanted tears. They wanted hysterics. They wanted blood. Instead, I held my cigarette at a jaunty angle and immediately pulled out my iPhone to tweet about the experience. I tossed my hair and LOLed. “Can you believe that just happened?” I asked Julia, who had not blinked or exhaled since the junkie first approached us. As soon as I know somebody wants something from me, I do everything within my power to prevent them from getting it, simply because I can, and I am selfish at heart. So these Hillsbus cunts could have their bus seat, but they wouldn’t get a show out of me.
When I got home, I took three valium and had a bath. Then I stood in front of the television and told my mother I had been attacked by a meth addict at the bus stop.
“That’s awful!” she said, putting down her crossword puzzle book. “Was anyone there?”
“Yeah, but nobody did anything. They didn’t even ask if I was okay. Those arseholes just stood in line watching. Like it was fucking street theatre.”
“Well I probably would have done the same,” Mum said, picking up her book again. “You don’t want to mess with an ice junkie. Besides, you’d never risk losing your place in the Hillsbus line. Those bastards will sidle up like you were never even there.”
The above image was brought to you by the genius man that is @bobearth and my power to persuade people to photoshop genitals into ordinary pictures.
Most of my relatives live interstate or in France and the Sydney ones don’t like us, so my family usually spends Christmas day getting drunk in our living room and letting out all the pent-up rage that has accumulated over the year.
“Why should you get to park in the driveway while my car sits out on the street like a whore?” I snap at my brother, tearing open a carefully wrapped gift from my mother. “Oh look, more Bryce Fucking Courtenay. You know he hasn’t written anything good since Four Fires. Buy me some Tim Winton or something. Goddamn it.”
“I’m the oldest,” my brother says, slurring slightly, “I get to park where ever the hell I want.”
“You’re the ugliest,” I retort. “Besides, you sell cleaning products, you’re going nowhere in life. At least I went to uni. I tried to make something of myself.”
“Yeah, tried being the operative word. Unlucky for you, there isn’t much demand for ice-queen bitch accountants with half a degree under their belt and a drinking problem. Face it, Neek, you’re a fucking failure. You have no career prospects, and no man will ever marry you because you have terrible genes. No offence, Mum.”
“You cunt, I’ll kill you,” I say, smacking his beer off the coffee table and reaching for his eyes, which were recently operated on and cost him $9,000 in medical bills.
At this point, my father rises from his cane chair and sighs. He walks over to his new electric piano and plugs in his headphones. Then he sits and plays Gershwin for three hours, until we have all passed out or gone to our bedrooms. The piano is my father’s happy place. He is an amazing musician, and people often go to my parents’ church just to hear my dad play. But at home, he plays to himself through headphones while the rest of us sit on the couch and watch television. Eventually, my mother falls asleep on the lounge and my brother goes to the garage to work on his motorbike. I walk down the road to the park with play equipment and sit at the top of the slippery-dip. I smoke cigarettes and ash onto the slide, thinking about all the local children who will now go home to their mothers with ashy, smelly pants. I think about how much I hate my family. I think about how much I hate Christmas. I think about the arbitrary cruelty of having a designated day of the year where I am forced to spend 24 hours with my family, regardless of whether I am in a good mood or have a sufficient supply of valium to see me through the holiday.
It wasn’t always like this. We used to have guests over for Christmas. Not traditional guests (ie friends and family) but random people my mother had met throughout the year who didn’t have anything better to do on Christmas day, because they were so scummy that they had failed to achieve basic relationships in life and had nobody to hang out with on the most important holiday of the year.
First there was Warwick, a thirty-something IT professional who lurked around my parents’ church and rode his bicycle everywhere. He came over for Christmas each year, and I hated him passionately.
“I think he’s a pedophile,” I told my mother as we stood at the kitchen window, looking out at Warwick in the backyard. He was sitting by the pool, supervising the neighbour’s children as they swam.
“Do any of you kids know what skinny dipping means?” he asked them, trailing his big toe through the water. “I like to skinny dip.”
Then there were the pregnant bikie trashbags. They only came once – the last year we had guests. My mum had invited Gail, a crusty woman she met at TAFE, and her daughters. They showed up for lunch at 4pm and were all wearing leather jackets.
“Sorry we’re so late,” Gail said, picking something out of her teeth. “Young Natalie here had to stop every five minutes to take a piss.”
“I’m pregnant,” Natalie explained.
“Cool,” I said, draining my wine glass.
“Not cool!” Gail shouted. “Do you know how many times I’ve driven her to the abortion clinic? She pussies out at the last minute every time and decides to ruin her life instead.”
“How old were you when you had Natalie?” I asked pleasantly.
“She was sixteen,” Natalie replied, “Just a year older than me now.”
“What a charming family tradition,” I smiled, pouring myself a gin and tonic. “I recently turned sixteen myself.”
“If that’s the case,” Gail interrupted, “Should you really be drinking, young lady?”
“Well I’m not pregnant,” I replied.
Just then Warwick entered the house, holding a dripping child under each arm. “Did somebody say something about babies?” he gasped.
“Yeah,” I said, “This is Natalie. She’s pregnant, but she’s still trying to work up the guts to have an abortion.”
“I beg your pardon!” Gail spluttered.
“I like babies,” Warwick said.
“Oh my god, we’re out of wine,” Mum whispered to me.
“I’ll get some more,” I offered. I caught a bus to the local shopping centre and smoked a joint on the loading dock. Then I watched The Ring three times because nothing short of the apocalypse would cause Greater Union to close their doors. By the time I got home, Mum was asleep on the lounge, Dad was playing the piano, and my brother had disappeared to the garage.