The Break Up Diary

So I started writing this when Tom and Katie split, which was what, like two weeks ago? And now I sit down afresh and the news has passed. Thankfully, this whole RPatz/Kirsten Stewart* implosion has happened so this is all still valid. (BTW in other celebrity news, Michelle Williams’s getting engaged to Jason Segal, and I really approve of that because if I can’t marry him, it might as well be her as she seems sane. Moreover, I think he’d make a really nice stepdad, so go them!)

Annywaay.

Breaking up with people, or them breaking up with you, kinda sucks. Regardless of whether you’re having all your personal Scientology sex secrets are being dragged through the headlines of Ninemsn or just setting fire to each other’s stuff in the back yard of your fibro, when someone decides they don’t like you as much as they did - or you arrive at that decision about your partner -  feelings get hurt, egos get bruised and people are sad.

Coping mechanisms! Figure out your way of handling this shit. Katie Holmes and RPatz** were sensible enough to extract themselves from their situation with as little drama as possible. Kirsten Stewart, in her 22 years of wisdom,  has decided to traipse out her infidelity as publicly as possible like the rest of us actually give a shit, like it’s world flippin’ news. Tom Cruise chose to throw money at the problem*** and continue being crazy, a business plan that has certainly been good to him in the past.

You might choose to tragicraft, experiment with your sexual orientation for a while, or become a cat burglar and destroy a department store for fun. You could also let yourself go in a spectacular pancake flop of hairy jumpery gross.  I chose to keep a diary. Below are some excerpts from the last heinous break up I underwent.

Day 1: Cried in the shower, cried on the way to work. Was told to go home because of the crying. Mother and sister watched me cry and eat. Met a friend in similar position. We cried. The waiter didn’t ask, he just poured the wine and walked away…

…Day 5: Went for incredibly long walks. Began drinking, eating and dressing like John Goodman. Have been crying so hard I think I have dehydrated myself. The purple giraffe put me to bed…

…Day 12: Decided to pack up everything he’d ever given me into a box under the bed. Found it really hard to heat up chocolate pudding with the microwave down there. Went to sister’s to do other stereotypically cliché breakup things. Watching Steel Magnolias is very boring. Ice cream and pizza is not. Ha fucking ha…

…Day 15 Monday: Have finally stopped crying all the time. This is good. May be able to regain dignity now and stop buying frozen Bavarians in bulk...

 You may have noticed a bit of a theme running through that - oh the eating I did! That’s not really a recommended coping mechanism, binge eating. I made it worse for myself by having a nervous condition which makes me throw-up when I’m stressed. That particular emotional stop-gap ended up being an incredible waste of money, equivalent to making a children’s piñata out of fifty dollar notes.  

But this diary thing really helped me. I re-read  passages and chortled myself back into reality. At the end, when you are further away from the horror of realising that someone doesn’t want to kiss you anymore, you can start to have fun because some break ups are kind of hilarious, funny because they can be so amazingly tragic.

I think it’s important to enjoy some of the operatic, deep and ridiculous tragedy of a breaking up; cancelling the romantic holiday you dreamt up, returning your hypothetical wedding dress, killing off a family of imaginary children you’ve housed in your fantasy the castle in the sky. Treat your break up like a temporary end of the world! It’s sad, this is sad, you’re allowed to be sad, so do it!

Enjoy that for a couple of weeks then get your shit together and start behaving like a grown up again. Regardless of feeling frequently confounded, slightly destroyed and a smidgeon relieved, there’s a good reason this has happened. Maybe you’re going to be better off, maybe they will come back when the timing is better or maybe you were just supposed to learn something. Cos think about it, you rarely break up with the person you are meant to be with in the end.

*Kirsten, seriously, what the hell did you think you were doing? You are what, the highest paid actress in Hollywood right now, how did you think you could do anything secretly? Surely you’ve worked out you can’t eat a sammich without someone taking photos of you, how the fuck did you think you’d get away with an affair with a married guy!?! SERIOUSLY, YOU ARE A MORON!

** Apparently he’s ‘inconsolable’ and ‘distraught’, and that’s totally understandable, cos he’ll never find love again or anything like that, cos he’s so unappealing, and I’m a giant spotted elephant named Fritz.

***He must have put down a bit of cash to avoid a crazy divorce circus, I know it’s none of my business, but he must have.

Dear Michael Fassbender

Dear Michael Fassbender,

What’s up, you ridiculously smoking German/Irish man you?

As your future wife I have to say that I'm thrilled with your current popularity. I don’t think I’ve used the phrase ‘on trend’ in regards to a person so much in my life as I have in the last year and a half. You’re the current talk of the town, the cock of the walk and the captain of my heart and I have to say I’m really glad you’ve found a niche playing handsome weirdos in every other movie going.

Moreover, I'm really glad that the time has come where everyone stopped all this ‘OMG RYAN GOSLING IN MY PANTS PLS!’ nonsense and remembered that there are actual men still alive in the world. Actual real men, walking around on strong, manly, Olympian thighs of gods, with thrillingly sharky sharky smiles.  Are you about to kiss me, or take a bite outta me? I dunno, but I think it’s just… neat.

What’s the deal with Gosling anyway? I completely fail to see that dork’s appeal. Honestly, you, mo mhuirnín,  make him look like a wet cocker-spaniel puppy with a cold who has just been told about Bambi’s mum from the bottom of a well , i.e.  drippy, wet and annoyingly pathetic (P.S. could you please shield me with your amazing manly arms of wonder when the Gosling fans come baying for my blood? Those hounds! Thanks.)

All your hotness aside, it doesn’t really change the fact that you are a probably more than a bit creepy. And it’s not just because my mother thinks your eyes are too far apart. It’s your collected body of work. I just watched the viral for Prometheus, David 8 in which you appear to be some sort of TERRIFYING FLOWER SNIFFING ROBOT BUTLER from the future.  Add that to:

• Serial Shagging addict 
• Serious Doctor/Patient confidentiality breach
• Secret Wife Haver
• Masochistic Spartan 
• Sadistic Roman
• Giant magnet with a serious chip on his shoulder

And those are just the one off the dome, I'm sure a couple of hours of IMDB research would yield more proof of your sexy creeping, occasionally in German. Oh Michael, just how many languages can you act in, mein lieber schatz?

On the crazy and hot celebrity scale (1 being the lowest, Justin Timberlake = Surprisingly Normal and 10 being the highest aka Christian Bale = probably would eat someone) your collected body of work (not to mention, you know, your body) would probably earn you a solid 8. This means you've probably got a couple of years before you go Oliver Reed/ Richard Harris style bonkers, drink yourself to death or start narrating IMAX features.

But Mikey… Fassi… Bendi? We’ll sort out the nickname situation later. It should be said that it’s not just your glorious jolie laide face, stupefying bod or air of crazy danger that has us so excited, it’s the fact that you may have the ability to refresh the power of the edgy UK actor once more. 

The golden boys of the nineties are gone; the Rickmans, the Oldmans, they have become jowly and old.  The hotties of the 2000s- Ewan McGregor, Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler-  have failed us with shitty rom-coms like Down With Love, Maid in Manhattan and that one with Katherine Heigl… eurgh Heigl, she is pure whitebread boring and I'm gluten intolerant!

And what are we left with? Can we really rely on Rupert Penry-Jones to deliver strength, or Benedict Cumberbatch to supply sensuality? Neurotics and mad geniuses maybe. The truth is, Mister Fassbender, fan girls of the world need you to deliver obscure United Kingdom hotness out of the dark depths of Middle America date movies and ABC costume dramas and into the white hot light of good films with self-respecting actors.  Come on, Toms Hardy and Hiddleston can’t do this all by themselves. Fassbender, my heart, we are all counting on you.

You future frau/bean chéile,

Joe

The Queen of Pain

A note from me: Looking back at this past week, and the things that have happened in it, it feels as though this post has some resounance beyond that initially intended, for me anyway. It’s extraordinary the amount of emotions that a person can experience over 72 hours, and how simply being at a particular place at a particular time can change you. But I am being terribly mysterious and this must seem uncharacteristically sombre. So I’ll just get on with the post.

I did something horrific to my back during ballet this week and have now become the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was my own fault; I think I may have been showing off, so I probably deserve to make involuntary squeaking noises every time I move. Not that I’m moving that much, watching Tim Burton's 1989 Batman should give you give you an idea of my range of motion. I’m wearing a solid rubber cowl of pain.

Pain is a fascinatingly subjective experience, and despite studies and neuroscience and all that jazz, it can still be quite mysterious. Pain is physical, yet it’s emotional, measurable yet unrelatable. Pain is either what makes us interesting, or depending on how much you have, what kind it is and how often you talk about it, makes us real bores to have around.

Physical Pain: Injuries and sickness

As you can probably tell I’m a bit of pain wuss, which is bad because I’m also accident prone. I’m always stabbing myself with scissors, tripping over my pants and walking into poles. Although I am the first to acknowledge that I probably acting a lot more seriously injured than I am, I defy doctors, nurses and other first aid professionals to accurately diagnose me as a drama queen.

Allow me to explain. If you go to a hospital for something, let’s just say you’ve dropped an iron on your face (which I have done) and are temporarily unable to talk, the doctor could potentially try to assess your pain using the Wong-Baker pain scale.

Now, inferring as I can from this image I can only assume that Wong and Baker were a pair of eleven year old girls trying to devise a universal pain intensity indicator for a HSIE project. It’s not terribly comforting to me that a doctor could look at me and say, ‘Nurse! We’ll need to administer 20 ccs of morphine immediately! This woman hurts a whole lot!’

A six year old child could manipulate the Wong-Baker scale! This is a medical scientific thing apparently, yet it could be faulted by good actors and adamant complainers.

Hangover pain: Alcohol poisoning and regret

I wish that I had no memory of New Year’s Day 2010; unfortunately I remember the pools of eviscerated watermelon and the smell of old camembert vividly well. Of the worst days of my life that was one of them and there was no one home to pity me greatly or scoff at my self-inflected liver wounds.

Oh! If only I knew then what I know now! The great secret miracle hangover cure which I am now going to bestow on you!

Have you ever woken up at half past six in the evening with your face in a bucket, surrounded by empty bottles, the sound of the air moving past your ears roaring like a fighter jet? Well rather than making a bacon sandwich and watching daytime TV til it’s time to sleep again, pull up your big girl pants and head to the nearest body of water for a swim! Nothing washes away the sins of the previous evening like a long soak in at the pool or the beach. It’s like a baptism for your brain and liver, delivering you once again to the land of the sensibly living.

However this can backfire if its winter or your local pool is a Ripples style indoor pool, which is like swimming in an extremely loud and incredibly close nightmare even in normal circumstances, and it’s very likely you won’t be the only one to throw up in the water that day. If this is the case, take a bath.

Emotional Pain: Heartache and suffering

Much like hang overs, I try to cure emotional pain, stress, anxiety, sadness etc. with swimming or bathing, but mostly I just end up being sick. There was a week last year where all I did was shower and throw up.

Being sad to the point where it hurts is a terrible thing, and I think the trick is to let your sad and hurt out in a creative way, even if that is ‘creatively’ breaking a bunch of stuff. Write some high school grade poetry, use your tears for watercolours then fold up your work and put it away for a time when you’ve figured out the lesson your sad, hurt time taught you.

The good thing about being sad for a little while is it makes the time when you are happy seem so much more sparkling.

What’s important to remember is that pain is a desperate physical or emotional response to damage; it’s letting us know when something is wrong. Without pain, we could break a leg or break a heart and never know, letting the damage worsen and worsen until it becomes irreparable. Feel your pain, acknowledge it, treat it then get better.

Australia, Australia, Australia. We love ya.

So it’s Australia Day, we all got a holiday and another excuse to have a barbeque!

I’ve finally come through my adolescent activist angst surrounding this day (an angst that coincided with the Howard years funnily enough, because what wasn’t to hate back then) and come to thoroughly appreciate the celebration of living in a moderately egalitarian country with a decent healthcare system, great public education and weather that generally doesn’t necessitate a large coat.

But, in addition to these blessings that have been afforded the lucky country (and very much avoiding problems like poisonous creatures on land, air and sea and a tendency to say ‘somethingk’) there are a couple of things that I am particularly happy to celebrate this Australia Day.

-Lamingtons

Whilst there are many different version of when, how and why the lamington was created, one things for sure, it’s as Australian as Vegemite and flat white coffees but not Pavlova, apparently New Zealand had dibs but I’d like to see them prove it! I found out on Tuesday that there’s such a thing as a lamington eating competition and Papa, I want in! I’ve often dreamed of entering an eating competition and unlike pie or hot dog eating competitions I think I could kick a lamington eating competition in the arse with a glass of water and an empty stomach.

-Thongs

There’s nothing more satisfying than the ‘slap, slap, slap’ of thongs against feet. Chuck on a pair of double pluggers and you can go pretty much anywhere and still be well dressed. I totally get why people overseas might call them flip-flops, especially if their already using thongs to describe underpants, but we call those G-strings, call erasers rubbers, call ‘rubbers’ frangas and call everyone mate. If you’re from overseas and are at any point lost in the lingo, call someone ‘mate’, we’ll hear the ridiculous way you shorten the ‘a’ and understand you’re not from round here.

-Fireworks

Australians will celebrate anything with fireworks. Seriously.

‘Cool, I just opened a can of beans!’

‘Yay! Fireworks!’

‘I just brought the cat back from the vet!’

‘Catherine wheels and those Saturn wavy ones that go PAATT-EEEW!’

‘I just passed a clean urine sample.’

‘Whoooo! Golden shower off the bridge!... wait… Eww!’

Australia is renowned for our fireworks, which is weird considering we're a wide brown tinderbox. Our Sydney NYE works started the tradition of insane pyrotechnics and we will continue setting more things spectacularly on fire for years!

-Flying your flag

On Australia Day, you are obligated by law to sport the Southern Cross somewhere on your person, worn on a bikini or temporarily tattooed on your face, if you haven’t gotten it and your post code tattooed on your back already.

We wear our flag on our backs like a cape, which is very enterprising, turning every drunken sunburnt teenager into a dashing superhero. If Australia had a superhero, Aussie Man, his super powers would be getting drunk, starting fights and speaking with a rising infection or somethingk?

-Being drunk

We Australians are number 1 drunkest nation in the world (according to a study I made up). We have an appauiling reputation overseas as Foster’s swilling sots and do nothing to tarnish it. Heck I’m drunk right now, and it’s a Thursday! I would have been drinking since 10 if I had gotten up earlier. But that’s what Australia Day in about. Eating sausages and being drunk. Check and check my friends.

Costume Drama-Mama

Ladies of a particular generation and type! It’s Sunday evening yet again, and I don’t know about you but I am feeling the undisputable adolescent twinge that only comes when the Sunday night ABC costume drama should be only two hours away.

The first costume drama I remember watching during that time slot was Pride & Prejudice back in 1996 when I was 9, the one where Colin Darcy comes out of the lake wearing the wet shirt. After that I assumed that all costume dramas were enriching epic romances which were as good for the intellect as they were the soul. However, now that I am older, and perhaps wiser, I can see how insidious they really are, and how they given me a slightly skewed perception of romance and life.

Unrealistic Expectations I have developed by watching costume dramas through my formulative/adolescent years

1.All English dudes are handsome gentlemen who explain themselves eventually.

It’s true that there’s no ‘he’s just not that into you’ in costume dramas. If you are the heroine, everyone is into you, and they're all really hot in a sexually repressed way. All you have to do is pick the one with the most money. Even if a dude appears to actively dislike you, it’s only because he’s so besotted with you. Being incredibly rude, ignoring you and making your father bankrupt is the only thing keeping his propriety.

And at the end, once you’ve emerged unscathed from the siege of death, disenfranchisement and misunderstandings that constitute your life, you will get an explanation so eloquent and lovely and convenient that all the suffering worth it. Unless you’re Tess of the d’Ubervilles, because by that time, you’re already dead.

2. Your life as it is would be really great if it was transferred into that setting

You’ve seen Lost in Austen, where a modern girl goes into Pride & Prejudice land and manages to fuck everything up so amazingly that she can’t possibly fix it and Jane ends up Mrs Collins? Well the experience on the whole would be something worse than that.

Whilst I would be the daughter of a wealthy Industrialist, with two older sisters married, an allowance of 50,000 pound a year and a house in town, I would also probably be far too old to be married, far too single to be proprieties, far too sarcastic to be demure, and far too well educated to be content. I can’t play the piano forte, embroider or sing and I think I’d get so bored I’d start racing the servants for fun.

3.Bad guys are obvious from the beginning

A musical sting, an odd filming angle, a nose and a beard skulking around a corner. Oh, that must be the bad guy! I wonder who he’s about to beat with a cane or knock up or send to Australia? Dickensian baddies are just so obviously bad they make the lipstick on pantomime dames look subtle. When I moved to the city I was so busy listening for bassoons and watching out for pock-marked men with club feet lurking in doorways, I could get pick pocketed by green camels and not notice.

4.Ioan Gruffudd can act

He can’t. He just can’t. We all wanted it to be true to give us an excuse to demand his sculptured cheek bones and expressive eyebrows be in more things. Well, we got that what we wanted didn’t we, Rise of the Silver Surfer exists and we only have ourselves to blame. And you know what, I watched Hornblower the other week and not only does his name have hilarious homoerotic implications, he comes across as a bit of a weeny. Sorry.

5.Woman may be soppy objects for barter but at least we had lovely things

Are you kidding me with this one? Women those days had about four dresses that were supposed to last them years of their lives. They bathed infrequently and had no such thing as deodorant, shampoo, toilet paper or feminine hygiene products. Their silk, lace and linen dresses may have been beautiful masterpieces of haberdasherical engineering but they would have smelt worse than a dead tramp in January. More to the point, your hat offered little or no sun protection.

For an authentic experience of the Georgian wardrobe, wrangle your way into the BBC costume department. After years and years of being passed from Emma Thompson to Billy Piper to Gemma Arteron to Julia Sawalha, reused in endless productions from Fanny Hill to Watership Downs* those dresses would probably be so crusty with sweat, make up and soup from the catering van they would varily stand up by themselves.

*Before you say anything, I know, it's about rabbits, okay?!

Oh brother...

To say that I am a bit of a day dreamer is a bit of an understatement. I like to see myself more as a modern day Walter Mitty with a fringe. Usually what’s going on in the real world isn’t half as fun as what’s going on in my head. When I’m out walking, on the train or trying to sleep I get myself into a kind of reverie that can totally block-out the rest of reality. My favourite day-dream is the one about my imaginary twin brother, Johnny.

John Lincoln would be a tall gawky dude named after grandpa, who looks like my dad with eyes like my mum. He’d wear scarfs in the winter, and cut down singlets in the summer, and grows a beard just to annoy Scooter. He could be sent into space as Earth ambassador for ‘guys’.

Johnny and I would live together in a messy home somewhere in Sydney’s inner west. He could look at the kitchen and it would be filthy and, despite my best efforts, our mum would always look disappointed at the state of the toilet. Every other month I would rage and decide I will move to a nice clean girl’s house, but the ever changing parade of Johnny’s hung-over mates, strange girls, rescued kittens and children he teaches guitar in the living room would keep me there, to be their hostess with the mostest.

My dad would have made sure that Johnny was musical and if he wasn’t in a band, he’d working in JB, Billy Hyde’s or Allen’s Music. The discount he gets is worth it and our music collection would rival all. Eventually we’d run out of storage space, and would have to sell the keyboard he bought me one Christmas to make more room. We’d use the cash to buy a slab and drink it in the garden and make up country songs about the people we knew.

Johnny would be handsome, in a hipsterish, groomed way that men are when they were raised with sisters. When we were teens, he was Dingo and my personal Ken doll, with the distinction of being the first guy at school to wear skinny jeans. I would constantly be fielding questions from girls of my acquaintance about him. I’d tell them that he was hopeless, they’d only get hurt, but I knew that it was him who was always falling in love every Friday night only to be heartbroken on Sunday.

We would jokingly resolve that that brother and sister were enough for each other and to spend the rest of our lives together, knowing there was no way we would ever let that happen. I would keep making morning cups tea for girls that I secretly resented and he would keep telling me about his friends that said I was cool. Eventually we would go our separate ways, partner up and marry. He said he'd be a groomsman, because to be a male maid of honour is weird.

I have three sisters, who are the best sisters in the world but if Johnny was there, life would have been different. Johnny would be able to be brave, to deal with life. His eyes are calm and clear. Johnny is all that I am, and all that I’m not.