Winner!
URGED by Cosmopolitan, I submit three potential date outfits to a website for consideration by a bunch of anonymous ladies. One’s a wild card. I mean, only a macrame owl-loving, gallery-loitering kind of chick with quirky specs would wear outfit No.2, in which case a date’s unlikely to be a pressing problem, right? Let’s call that one a test for the gals of Go Try It On.
I suspect this is all pointless protocol unless some blokes secretly log on and vote – it’s a bloke I’m going out with, after all. Girls think berets, rabbit brooches and clogs are cute. Men, so far as I can tell, do not.
Here are my three frocks and the ladies’ comments: www.gotryiton.com/looks/7AC1040/ although “nice for $lutt!ng it up” is not particularly ladylike.
NB: I didn’t get round to the hair, okay?
Keeper? If I ever turn into the sort of woman who dresses for women.
A TATTOO with a friend is a terrific idea, but a home tattoo is even better. Nicole’s a right game bird, and I actually pictured her putting up her as yet unblemished arm to volunteer even as I pressed send on my spam email to all and sundry.
We convene at her kitchen table a few nights later with some needles, thread, a lighter, a couple of biros and a bottle of Indian ink. The instructions, naturally, are from the internet. We’ve decided that a simple star will always remind us of this mission to live well, which is a relief, as rejected symbols include a smiley face, a reiki sign and a foot. Nic takes quite a laissez-faire approach to permanently marking my skin, eating a curry with one hand and occasionally texting some dude with the other. My disgruntlement is short-lived though, when I return the favour and completely stuff it up.
At first it’s hilarious. Look at those ink blotches! I can’t see where I’m bloody going, can I? Then there’s my wobbly eye – an old shopping trolley accident that has taken this moment of extreme concentration and close focus to play up. And then there’s the off-putting sucky noise one’s wrist makes every time you pull out the needle. Gee, this is a lot harder than Nic made it look.
Like any bad workman, I blame the tools – Nic made the stabby implements after all – and then Nic’s skin itself. “It’s all rubbery,” I complain, pointing at the evidence.The mood turns sombre as we survey Nic’s star. “It looks like stubble,” she says flatly, and takes another large swig of Bundy. Sure enough, there’s a hazy constellation of dots, in almost all the right places.
“You’d better finish yourself off,” I offer.
“Nobody’s said that to me for ages,” she mutters, and sets about stabbing at her arm.
I realise, as I watch my friend toil, that every time I look at my little star I might now feel burning shame, rather than a sense of liberation, but I am hoping that this too shall pass.
Keeper? Er, yes.
WHAT a fraud. What a skulking, low-down dirty snake. To feign positivity to a string of unsuspecting stooges when merely feeling ambivalent. Still, here goes.
I decide to channel my friend Jenni, who is always relentlessly upbeat in the face of adrenal fatigue and a declining ad sales market, and manages it with good humour and pizazz. My usual bedside manner swings from terse editor mode – I’m very busy, you know – to infuriatingly vague though, so unsurprisingly some people are alarmed.
“Words, baby, words,” thunders publicist Stacey, who’s onto me. “Mean nuttin without the honest intention, which you don’t have. You will just sound like a publicist.” She’s got a point. Coming from me, a cheerful reference to someone’s attributes sounds vaguely threatening (“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment,” Zan observes). In the case of those I barely know, I find myself resorting to a deranged: “You’re tops!”, which I’m sure they are.
This experiment does have its practical advantages. For example, the time I slapped on my out-of-office with the message “It’s deadline. The answer’s no”, I wound up inviting a whole steaming heap of bad karma to my door, whereas today I’m getting smiley emoticons back tenfold. It’s like one of those chain letter scams where you send off ten pairs of new undies to ten people and get ten thousand back.
Those who ignore my courteous comments, however…? Noted.
Keeper? Sporadically. If they deserve it.
ACTUALLY, this experiment comes straight from the steel-capped toe of a swift dumping – you know, the kind that leaves you thinking you can’t do anything anymore, whereas you used to be able to tie your shoes and go to work quite capably.
Hence, I must do everything.
So, meditation.
I’d speed-read a tome on the train called Meditation in a Hurry, or Hurry Up and Meditate, or Oh Come On, How Hard Can it Be, or something, and I’m going for an elementary exercise that focuses on breathing. Something deep inside’s been stopping me from attempting meditation till now, as though it would be betraying some fag-stained fibre of my former self that I should be true to for some reason. As a family, my clan scoff heartily at serenity and seeking spiritual planes, which will come as a surprise to no one who’s ever come round for a barbecue and left four times over the limit and strangely despondent.
Anyway, the breathing’s all right – I hardly get distracted at all, although I’m only starting with the recommended ten minutes. I’m disappointed I don’t reach the dizzy heights Elizabeth Gilbert does in Eat Pray Love, where she’s warbling around in a netherwordly vortex like she’s in some late-night rage video, but to be fair she did put in the hard work. Even so, I feel like I’ve tapped into the godly feeling I revered when I went through my religious phase as a kid… which morphed into an attributing-godlike-qualities-to-unsuitable men phase… which morphed into a desire for the comforting arms of alcohol and pharmaceuticals. I’d better keep close tabs on this one.
Keeper? Yes.
IT’S true, I reinvented the wheel when I quit boozing and carrying on, but this is one of those feats that are only really recognised in the eye of the beholder. And so it was down to me to behold the shit out of it.
For the next year-and-a-half I took to this task, severing myself from impolite society to rattle my chains in the countryside, where I could ponder, sigh and regard myself and my hideous past (of which I was now absolved – hooray!), with the odd foray into bilious contemplation. Eventually, once I had completely lost my sense of humour, my ruminations ran dry.
Around this time, I heard eulogies about a man who had lived life to the full, even in the face of terminal illness, obstinately taking up inventive new pastimes whenever his failing health took old ones away.
I stopped thinking about myself to think about his approach to life. When your eyes are as flat as pennies (I poetised), and your mouth is turned down like a fat girl at a dance, you need what’s colloquially known as a kick up the arse. And here it was. I would start living.
The second this notion occurred to me, I felt better.
Australia 2012. It's okay, we're friends.
Hey man, now you're really living 
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