A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Pretty much any sentence sounds better with the phrase "in my pants". Hey guys, there's another Is Not Magazine party... in my pants. We have another issue of the magazine out soon, plus Corporate Love Day is coming up and we would like to maximise your chances of pants action so that you may, for instance, take a date to an inappropriately named restaurant, like my local Vietnamese joint.

Me and Tash (aka all-conquering DJ duo Plump'n'Rosie) will be playing our patented dancefloor-igniting mix of pop, R&B, Yacht Rock, Awesome Power Rock, and 80s film soundtrack songs. We are so hott that last time we played, someone kicked a hole in the dance floor. Plus I will be curating a special selection of pants-themed songs, spearheaded by 2 Live Crew's "Too Much Booty". You should totally come!

Falling out of my skin. On Tuesday, while we were at the pub, Amanda informed me that she had a photograph of me on Friday night, in which I appeared so drunk as to be "falling out of your skin". Would you like to see this photograph? I knew you'd say yes.



I was not actually this dishevelled - I was pulling my hair over my eyes and looking through my lashes in an ultimately failed attempt to impersonate an emo. I remarked to Amanda that the final effect is probably more Oliver Reed.



But when I mentioned this, Amanda did a Google image search and found a photo of Reed from some Hammer Horror film he made where he was a werewolf...



In that spirit, here's a picture of me hanging out with the internet on Friday night.



I really need to watch my drinking. As any reader of this blog will realise, I am a complete lush, but I don't think I've ever been so bad as last Friday. It's not just that I couldn't remember things afterwards - Sandor informed me today that I was even experiencing memory loss at the time- three minutes after a topic was mentioned I would bring it up again. More alarmingly, after my dinner with the internet last night, I was informed by one of my manboob-groping victims that I had actually asked to feel him up in order to ascertain his bro (or man-siere) size! (I had declared him to be an A-cup.)

This turn of events mortified me.

Alcohol is such a large part of my life that I am not really sure how to phase it out. Check out the sight that greeted me in the bathroom this morning, when I was towelling myself off and happened to glance up at the top of the shower, where we keep the bottles of shampoo etc.



I swear I did not put that bottle there. I figure one of my housemates must have absentmindedly left it there when they went to the loo. Or perhaps they are washing their hair with beer. (I hear that beer makes your hair very shiny.) But it was a wakeup call for me. As any reader of this blog will know, I am a complete lush; but I don't want to be a shambolic object of pity, and I have a rather pettish desire not to be predictable.

The dinner with the internet went quite well. They are a very nice bunch of people and I would like to befriend them. It is so hard, though, to befriend people deliberately when you are an adult. As a child, you'd just invite them over to play after school. Now, I tend to invite people out to a bar to play after work.

Me mum: source of wit and merriment. Last night I visited my parents' house and as I walked up the front steps, I noticed my mum sitting in a chair on the verandah as though whittlin' or something. This struck me as weird because she has never been known to do this.

"Why are you hanging out the front?" I asked.
She eyed my cleavage and replied, "Why are you hanging out the front?"

Drinking with the internet. On Friday night I went drinking with the internet. This is in line with one of my New Year's resolutions: to broaden my circle of acquaintance. These people go out drinking together every Friday, and I decided to go because: a) they were drinking in the city, rather than in Richmond or Fitzroy, so it was convenient for me; b) some others who'd never been had expressed interest in going, so I got a "newbie-friendly" vibe; c) Reuben and Elaine were going to be there.

I would say the enterprise had mixed success.

My first impression was that the internet was fatter than I had expected. Not that they were unattractive; some people were indeed hot. I was just relieved because I had been worried that everyone was going to be gorgeous rock scenesters and that I myself would prove a disappointment in the flesh. I should add that it was a pretty spur-of-the-moment decision to attend this event, and so it was only because I had plans later that I was even looking half decent. (The rest was indecent, as I was wearing a low-cut little black dress.)

The second thing was that I got really, really drunk. Oh, the litres of beer I must have drunk. I don't really want to think about it. I was drinking pints like they were pots. I must have had about four pints, and then I went for dinner with four others, at which I drank a glass of white wine for no particular reason, and then we returned to the pub and I can't recall whether I drank any more alcohol, and then I bought a longneck at the bottlo downstairs and took it to Amanda's housecooling, where I had meant to go many hours earlier but had been waylaid by the internet.

I'm unclear about how I got to be eating dinner with the four other people, in a cheap and cavernous Chinese restaurant that I had never been to before. I must have been invited because I would hardly have gone otherwise. One of the four was this chick who had been rather cool to me for the entire evening. She had been a chat for some time, and I got the impression that she was annoyed by my puppyish enthusiasm, when she was looking forward to seeing her friends and having some drinks. When I was first introduced to her, I believe she actually rolled her eyes.

But anyway, you must imagine the scene: the five of us sitting at a round table like poker players, my bag occupying the sixth seat as if it was going to be ordering a meal of its own. (YEAH STAM YEAH! Okay, I've got that out of my system now.) I was so drunk that I was having difficulty keeping up with the conversation, which in any case was peppered with references to things and people the others knew and I didn't. Anyway. At one point this chick mentioned this guy Alex who was in the English department with me, whom I can't stand. Gemma can testify that I once sent her an email with the subject line "Alex is such a cunt."

"I can't stand Alex," I chimed in. "I think he's a cunt."
She replied, "He's actually a good friend of mine."

Nobody else said anything. "I went to uni with him," I added lamely - as if that explained everything! Now I realise the correct follow-up ought to have been: "Well he may be a cunt, but he's not a fucking cunt." As it was, I recall an awkward silence which wasn't as awkward to me as it could have been, seeing as I was so drunk. After the dinner, it was decided to return to the pub to see if anyone else was still there, as the others had decided to go to some strip club.

Now back at the pub was where the manboob-groping incident occurred. My memory of how this occurred is in pitiful shreds, but again, I console myself with the thought that I wouldn't have felt up two complete strangers unless I had been invited to do so. Here are some random memories from this part of the night:

there was a reality show with chicks in bikinis on the pub's TV
I remember thinking to myself, "I am actually talking quite eloquently right now"
my trivia nemesis has the same mobile phone as me
I recommended not going to Charlton's on a Friday night but was most effusive in my support for M+N karaoke on a future occasion

At some point I looked up from my conversation and realised the people I'd dined with and inadvertently insulted had all vanished, presumably for this strip club. I banished the nagging thought that they had deliberately given me the slip, and headed to Amanda's. By the time I got there my memory breaks down more or less completely and I have very little idea what I said or did, except that sitting in a circle in the backyard were a bunch of people I was most delighted to see. Although I am assured that I was lots of fun ("on fire" was allegedly the expression bandied about) and danced to MC Hammer. And I remember stumbling down Rathdowne Street - actually stumbling so that I ricocheted off walls and fences.

I am pretty sure that I didn't throw up or get naked, which to my mind is a successful avoidance of drunken embarrassment. Astonishingly, I managed to spend the next day waitressing with relatively few ill effects. My high point was telling a customer who asked what Scottish kippers were: "Well, they're much the same as English kippers, but with a slightly different accent." He looked at me blankly and said, "What are kippers?"

Jeremy was excited and scandalised that I had been drinking with the internet. "Screen names! I want screen names!" he said. He's just jalooz because they shouted him down on a thread this one time.

Today I was back on the internet without shame. I'm going out to dinner with the internet this Wednesday.

Edit, 23 January: This morning I picked up the dress I was wearing that night from my bedroom floor and noticed it had crusty white stains all over the front. I am choosing to believe that these are from dip at Amanda's party which I dribbled all over myself in my lack of hand-mouth coordination.

My coke addiction. I drink way too much Coke. I used to drink it in the 600ml bottles, then I weaned myself off it, but now I can't resist the cans. They are the precise amount I like to drink, and Coke tastes so much better out of a can. Plus, I know a place that'll sell them to me for $1.

Here is a picture of my office wastepaper basket:



Is that not shameful? I deliberately didn't buy one for lunch today, even though I wanted to, real bad.

Damn, I could do better than this. I remember sometimes I used to say to Eric, "If you need a cartoon for this issue, I can do it!" And he used to smile at me wryly as if this was a fine joke indeed. But evidently some random journo or sub at the Hez has made the same request because their cartoonist is on holidays. Only difference is, the Hez took them up on it. (Click to enlarge.)



Am I alone in thinking how lame this cartoon is? It looks like its author has collaged some MS Word printouts on top of a doodle they did while they were on the phone. And the grass and leaves in the left-hand frame are so absurdly shonky. The sentiment is also really lame. Surely the art of the editorial cartoon is to highlight some absurdity or irony in the events of the day. Whereas this is treacly anthropomorphism grafted onto the idea that summer is killing trees.

It's not as if I am a great genius in drawing cartoons. But seriously, it has to be a pretty crap cartoon when I think to myself "Damn, I could do better than this!"

Wasting time on Mess+Noise. I have been afraid of this website since it was mono.net. It is a monster of cultural capital - if you don't know what to say, or what tone to say it in, they'll bite your head off, but if you can get your head around the in-jokes, the jargon, the relationships between the users, it is really addictive.*

I have wasted monumental amounts of time on M+N over the last few months. I really want to quit but it is probably the ultimate resource for someone who, like me, requires constant new internet stimuli and flies into rages of boredom if I don't get it. I mean, you can only constantly check blogs and emails for a certain time. Goddammit, I even wrote a story about people wasting time at work.

Shit, I should probably go home. It is so hot in this office. But I have so much work to do. Only three more naff bite-sized stories, Mel... only three more!


* Also I enjoy the flirting. I need to keep my spirits up, after all.

Unintentionally hilarious moments in art direction. I can't get over the poster they're using to advertise the new Supremes movie, Dreamgirls.



This isn't the exact poster they're using in Australia. The one I've been seeing around has the three actors' names at the top, then the silhouetted image of the three women below with the title along the bottom. So it's suggesting that this is some kind of Priscilla-esque Motown drag flick, with Jamie Foxx the woman on the left, Beyonce in the middle while Eddie Murphy is on the right. That would actually be an awesome movie.

It might seem dumb, like people ought to be sensible enough to realise that this is a film about a girl group and that the two male stars play different parts. But by contrast, here's another poster I found on the internet:



See - it actually has pictures of the actors named, directly under their names.

Noo-year's Day! It gave me considerable pleasure to wish people a prosperous 2007 in the American fashion, that is, emphasising the "new". I did this a lot on New Year's Day. I shouted this a lot.

On New Year's Day the magazine had a party at St Jerome's. It was a financial disaster. Seriously, I fear the magazine will be going out of business in 2007 unless something truly revolutionary happens. Like us finding a crashed plane in the snow which is filled with cash.

But strangely enough, it was a really great party. Sitting around in a bar, catching up with friends, having some drinks and listening to some great bands, is a wonderful way to spend the first day of the year. Also, once it became evident how much money the magazine was losing, I took John Belushi's advice and started drinking heavily. I had two Red Stripes, two ponies from Reuben and Elaine's longneck and three longnecks to myself. I was talking all manner of dreadful crap with all manner of people, such that I can't really recall to whom I said what. (I do remember holding forth on dandyism at one stage.)

By that stage I had run out of money, so I stumbled to the ATM and purchased a tinnie with my newfound riches. But then a bunch of my friends left en masse to go to some handsome young men's house. I didn't know who these people were, but the house was just around the corner from mine, so off I trotted, still with my unfinished tinnie in hand. Then I got a call from Penny saying she'd forgotten a bunch of stuff when she left, so I went back to the bar to get it, and then took the tram to my house to drop it off before I continued on to the handsome young men's house.

My other friends, who were equally drunk yet had purchased a slab of VB on the way to the house, hadn't noticed my absence until they all got there, by which time they assumed I wasn't going to show up. So they were overjoyed when there came a knock on the door and it was me, still with my St Jerome's tinnie clutched fiercely in one hand. It is quite astounding, retrospectively, that I remembered the address. The handsome young men busied themselves putting suitable music on their iPod, then ponced about to The Cure with each other.

After I finished the tinnie, I went into the kitchen of the handsome young men's house in search of other things to drink. I opened up the fridge and, for some reason, a bottle of salad dressing caught my eye. It occurred to me that this was what I really wanted to drink right then. So I had a couple of little sips out of the bottle. It was delicious. Like salt and vinegar chips without the bothersome chip part. I slipped out of the living room several more times to sip from the salad dressing bottle. When I left, I even ducked back in for a little dressing for the road.

So that was how I finished up the first day of the year. Drinking salad dressing from the fridge of a complete stranger. I have no idea how much of it I drank. Imagine if these poor guys want to make a salad tonight and go, "Hey, what happened to all our salad dressing?"