Whatever happened?

whatever happened to my patience and ability to be alone?
whatever happened to the days where I was only allowed to talk on the phone between 8.30 and 9.30pm?
whatever happened to the days where I would sit in front of the Tv for hours and not be checking my phone or my email or my facebook?
whatever happened to being alone? being sans boyfriend or lover. being by yourself without having to have a thousand different ways to be connected with the outside world, and yet so disconneced from it at the same time?
whatever happened to being able to just daydream about someone, without having to have them right there either saved in your mobile phone, right there on facebook or a mere moment away via email.

for the purpose of this rant, i see my life in six stages.

stage one: 0 - 5

i was completely dependant upon my parents and my family. they chose who i spoke to (except for that time i disappeared off the beach to go eat icecream with a nearby family), the chose who i played with, they chose what i ate (except for that time i disappeared off the beach to go eat icecream with a nearby family). my only choice was how i felt about it, and practically the only thing i remember from before the age of three was the nemesis i made at my 2nd birthday party, and vomiting in my mum's bed.

stage two: primary school

this was the stage where i broke free of my family. made my own friends. swapped lunches with willing counterparts.
i attended occasional sleepovers and gained my pen license no thanks to my teacher's discriminatory attitude towards my lefthandedness. got nits at least three times and had at least 10 major crushes on boys long forgotten. I would talk to my nan on the phone every few days and to my friends when we were organising a bike riding adventure on the weekend.

stage three: high school- pre mobile phone

this was where hearts were won and broken. i figured out a bit of who i was. began my descent into acquiring what is now an unquestionably questionable gutter mouth. this was where my mum enforced the 1 hour a day phone call rule. fair enough. i would have schemed the demise of the universe had i been allowed anymore. one hour was enough time to catch up on the shit that had happened less than seven hours ago and and plot tomorrow's happenings- most of which i have forgotten now. stage three was a fun stage. of course, i had my emo year at about 15 where i thought the world was against me just as i was it, but otherwise, i was always pretty happy. of course, during this stage, a few select people had mobile phones. massive brick looking contraptions that surely provided many chiropractors to a lift in clientele.

stage four: high school post mobile phone

after hours of painful begging and debate, i was given a mobile phone for my 16th birthday. it was a sagem (shittest phone ever) and i was with telstra. i had wanted a nokia 5510 (which i later got, when everyone else had 3260s or whatever the hell they were) and to be with vodafone, but it was a start.
this is where my parents began expecting to be able to reach me at any given time. my then boyfriend and i got free phone calls to eachother if we had at least 22 cents credit. not too much changed because i never had enough money to buy credit. but, if i had a fight with a friend or boyfriend, there were now two phones to sit next to, waiting for them to ring. twice the disappointment. twice the anxiety.

NB: having said all this, this is also when caller ID came in and the ever popular call screening began. as accessible as we all were, avoidance now became so much easier.

stage five: employed with (some) money, mobile phone and internet

this is where i had completely forgotten what it was like to be in stages one and two. to this day it still blows my mind that in my lifetime, people didn't have mobile phones. do you know what this means? perhaps you remember?
if you were late to work, the boss got no call of warning. people could show up two hours late and just give their reason, and life went on. these days, if someone is 15 minutes late and not answering their mobile phone, in our minds, they are all but dead.
if you were picking your friend up and they didn't hear your car horn, you had to physically GET OUT OF THE CAR to knock on their door! imagine such a thing!
and craziest of all, people had to actually TALK TO EACHOTHER to talk to eachother. you couldn't just message the dude you met in the bar the night before asking for sex or whatever it is you wanted. you couldn't plan your replies with your friends. you had to actually speak to them. talk about on your toes!
by this time, i had enough money to have phone credit most of the time and was a regular ICQ user, but nothing crazy. I never checked my email because no-one ever wrote me any and ICQ was a means to talk about stupid shit with my friends.

stage six: technology taking over my life and making me crazy

i'm morbidly addicted to facebook and my iphone. it's a known fact that i update my status an annoying amount, and while i try to be witty in the process, i wonder what ever happened to my stage one through fiveness. where did the quiet me go? the one who didn't feel the need to publish her every thought. the one who could go to work and actually work without having to have sexually explicit side conversations with my best friend who i see and speak to all but everyday?

i have so many ways to say so many things to so many people, but one day i will have spoken so much that i'm afraid there won't be anything left to say.
with every relationship i've ever had, i've had everything i wanted instantly. i've never waited for anything or fought for anything or had to really put in an effort or prove myself.

what do i know about waiting? if someone doesn't reply to my message or email or facebook message or instant message within 15 minutes, i think they're either dead or a total fuckwit. and i wonder why i'm stressed out 24/7 about the most trivial of life's nothings.
if only i had the patience of an 18th century maiden of leisure. getting my hair curled and taking sponge baths while waiting for my husband to return from war or wherever the hell he was for those few years. waiting for a letter in the post inviting me for a lunch date in three weeks. no tv. no phones. no microwaves. no vibrators.


so now, i am dedicating my time to finding something exciting in the little things. in the things that so often we would take for granted. i turned my phone off today. and when i turned it back on after five hours, i had no messages. it really pissed me off. but tomorrow, when i turn it on after having had it off all day, maybe i'll have a message that will make me smile.

i'll save things to tell people next time i SEE them, rather than having to share everything i feel at that very second through whichever medium is more convenient to me at that particular moment. i'll wait for things to unfold instead of pressuring the fuck out of the situation until something happens.


in an effort to rekindle myself circa stages one through four i renounce the overuse of facebook, iphone, email and instant messenger. i renounce expecting everything i ever wanted and for it to have arrived 5 minutes ago. i renounce only going for what's easy. and i wish i had a wittier way to end this rant but i'm pretty fucking tired after renouncing so much of what i hold dear.

G-Strings and Wishes Gone Wrong

I was at a café in Bondi a few weeks ago, casually enjoying banana bread and a cup of tea, when I was struck with a social dilemma which left my mind stumbling for days.

Before me was a fairly overweight girl wearing a tiny purple g-string bikini, a small white t-shirt and black platform thongs- and she was walking AWAY from the beach. I was utterly horrified and if I wasn’t so hungry I would have been turned right off my food.

Here is the question- How far does one have to be from the beach before it becomes socially unacceptable to be wearing such questionable nothingness?
The café I was dining at was at least 300 metres from the beach and I deem that distance enough for this woman to start thinking about donning some pants.

I mean, I could handle a bikini top and some shorts. That is acceptable in any coastal area. She could walk for miles along the coast in a bikini top and shorts without a problem. Take that inland though, and she faces problems. Within the suburb of Bondi Beach, it is fine. Bondi Junction is a whole new ballgame.

But come on! A t-shirt with g-string and platform thongs…well, other than the sandy shores of the beach, I just see absolutely no need for it. And at the risk of appearing sizeist, I think the bigger the woman, the smaller the gap between being undressed on the beach and needing clothes on the street.

FAT= get dressed before leaving the beach.

SLIM= depending on bodily elements, it might be a good thing if you leave the clothes off around the beach areas. People might be a little happier for having seen you.

After seeing this girl, I began watching passers by with greater interest. I then became bored with watching everyday happenings and started wishing for something funny to happen. I willed someone to fall over. Love a good stack.
A minute later a little boy came running down the hill, tripped over his own feet and slid along the gravel. I couldn’t help but think I had caused this.

Moral of the story?
No g-string in street scene and be careful what you wish for.*

* Now I wonder- had someone wished for the g-string girl to walk past and been horribly disappointed when she turned out to be fat, just as I had wished for someone to fall over and felt terrible when it was a child…? Next time I wish for something I will be painfully specific.