I for one am happy to see the back of 2009. Heck, I’m glad to see the end of the 2000s (and yes, I am aware that pedants would argue that the new decade starts on 1 January 2011 but to them I say bah). 2000 started promisingly enough (you know, after Y2K didn’t mark the beginning of a new dystopian age where disputes were settled in the Thunderdome), but in terms of politics, global relations, the environment, pop culture, economics, and the movement for equality, it has been a pretty dire couple of years. Plus, I’m glad to see an end to discussions of the ‘noughties,’ a term that always seemed weirdly coy and which I refuse to use, because saying the word makes me feel like dry heaving.

On an intellectual level I know that it’s naive and simplistic to assume that a new year or a new decade automatically means that things will change, but on the symbolic level, I do feel like a change in the calendar marks at least the possibility of a ‘fresh start,’ the chance for new paths to be forged, for new initiatives to be pursued, for mistakes to be put to bed. It is thus no surprise that I’m a believer in New Year’s Resolutions, in making lists, setting goals, and trying to turn over a new leaf. Like most people my resolutions quickly fall by the wayside, but I like the ritual of sitting down and pretending that I could, through just a bit of effort, be a ‘better’ me.

Sadly, however, most of my resolutions are fairly pedestrian. Exercise more, read more novels, be more organized, save money, volunteer, travel somewhere new, try not to obsess over things. Blah blah blah, even I’m bored. Thus, I have decided to come up with a list of ‘Fake Resolutions,’ things which, for a variety of reasons, I would never do, but which would make me into a completely new type of gal.

1) Stop smoking cigarettes and start smoking cigars. For additional awesomeness, learn how to blow elaborate smoke rings.

2) Forget about general exercising and health and focus all my efforts on developing immense arm muscles. Cut the sleeves off all my t-shirts so as to more effectively show off my arms. Learn how to make my muscles pop and quiver and start telling people I have two tickets to the gun show. Go out of my way to demonstrate how strong my arms are – possibly by allowing children to hang off them.

3) Abandon my ‘uniform’ of t-shirt and jeans or blouse and pants and start dressing in costume. This could sometimes be themed  (e.g. when we have the week on the 1920s, wear a zoot suit), and then on non-teaching days I could simply extend the principles of costumery into everyday life. When I was 16 I used to have an outfit that I wore to parties which made me look like a skinny female version of ‘The Man From Another Place‘:

It was fantastic. This resolution requires that I get back in touch with that vibe. You know, view life as performance, clothes as costume, attire as a form of play. Perhaps I might wear a tail.

4) Attempt to be hip and relevant. Assume that ‘the youth of today’ are heavily invested in internet memes. Pepper speech with abbreviations and out-of-date slang – lol, bff, wtf, k thx bye, O RLY?, h8ers, teh Interwebs, pwned. Use lolspeak on PowerPoint slides. Say ‘yo’ a lot. Possibly refer to fellow staff and/or students as my peeps. Wear a Three Wolf Moon Shirt.

5) Abandon therapy and mindfulness. Instead, learn how to shoot a gun and start going to the gun range. Although Betty Draper is only firing a BB gun, you have to admit, she looks serene:

To that end, I’d now like to present a short tale about my first sexual encounter after the break-up, an encounter marked by alcohol, vomiting, and an ominous painting. It is this encounter which led me to fear I was pregnant.

In September, I began communicating with a 30 year old psychiatrist I met on a popular dating web site. We talked on the phone a few times and although I was kind of nervous (as I have a terrible phone manner at the best of times), conversation flowed easily, and I found him interesting and charming and intelligent. We arranged to meet for a coffee, and had quite a nice casual encounter that lasted for several hours and involved a walk by the river and a stroll through the art gallery. The conversation ranged over a wide number of topics: our mutual dislike of the city we live in, his time living in London, my love of history, and a lengthy discussion about people who collect mannequins (an aside, this led me to tell him all about “Pin,” one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen). He was cute, had a job, and didn’t live with his parents. Despite these positives, I should be clear and say that even under normal circumstances I probably wouldn’t have wanted to have a relationship with him, because although we got along, there wasn’t really any great ‘spark.’ Since I didn’t want a relationship, however, he was just fine and dandy, and he made it fairly clear that he wasn’t looking for an ‘exclusive’ relationship either, so we seemed perfectly suited.

However, there was one thing that surprised me a little bit, and that was that he was about 5cms shorter than me (and I’m not exactly a giant, standing at around 170cm). Later on I went back and checked (after our second, less successful date), and noted that on his profile he claimed to be about 8 or 9cms taller than he actually was. The height thing didn’t really bother me, and in fact since my type has always been tall skinny guys, I thought maybe it was good to start broadening the pool. It would later turn out, however, that he was one of those short guys who, after a drink or too, overcompensated by being quick to be offended, seeing insults everywhere and becoming increasingly blustery and antagonistic. In short, he was a bit of a braggadocio, a personality type I really don’t like.

Anyway, after our successful first encounter, we made tentative plans to meet up again, and on the Thursday he texted me because he had been given tickets to a performance by the symphony orchestra the next night (note the texting, late nature of invitation, blah blah, just emphasizing here that this guy was clearly wanting to keep things pretty casual). We met outside and stayed until intermission and then took off to have dinner, going to a very nice restaurant that he suggested. I actually wasn’t hungry (and made that clear), so I ate only an entree, but between us we shared a bottle of red wine. This time, conversation was a little more stilted (I’m terrible in ‘date’ settings), but things were still ok, although after he’d had a bit of wine he kept going on about how the waiter was being rude to him (something I did not pick up on and frankly do not think was happening). The bill came, we split it, and then he suggested grabbing a cocktail at a bar a few blocks over.

Now while he may have been a bit pompous and quick to feel slighted, I do have to say that the way the evening unfolded was largely my fault. I like drinking. I like getting drunk. I hadn’t really been drinking at all for a couple of months, so I was keen to imbibe. Plus, I find it quite hard socializing with people and drinking makes me feel more comfortable. One last point, I can  handle my drink, and I sometimes forget that not everyone can (and I’m especially used to hanging out with guys who can drink and drink heavily). Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that while he may literally have meant one cocktail, we ended up drinking maybe four or five cocktails each (and that was pretty much at my behest), and we split the bill, because I am always adamant about not letting guys pay for me.  Several hours passed. We talked about all kinds of things and it was generally fun, but he kept claiming that various guys there were slighting him or being vaguely insulting, at one stage even telling the waiter he was a ‘cheeky so and so’ (and even though I was drunk, I found this quite unappealing, a bit paranoid, and slightly too aggro). Eventually we started making out in quite a sloppy and adolescent way (note, I initiated it, not out of any great passion but simply to get that tension out of the way).  After the bar closed he suggested that I come back to his place so we could have another drink. He stressed that he had a spare room that I could sleep in (although when I got there I did laugh when I discovered he had a spare ‘room’ but no spare ‘bed’), but look, I’m not an idiot, I went over there assuming that sex was on the cards.

Although I was feeling increasingly diffident about him by this stage I poured us two strong G&Ts and we eventually recommenced making out. Because I’m a bossy shrew I do remember stopping the fooling around to tell him that his taste in music sucked and I got up and insisted on playing my music, putting on The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Psychocandy” (and since I’m pretentious and slutting it up a little bit I now always play The Jesus and Mary Chain because their songs are my kind of slow jam). We get to the point of actually getting naked and it’s only then that I start to realize that we’re both quite wasted. As I’m giving head I can’t help internally singing the lyrics to the Dead Kennedy’s ‘Too Drunk to Fuck‘ which made me start to laugh and which of course I couldn’t explain to him. His erection comes and goes. Eventually he was hard enough to put a condom on and so we start actually having sex. At one stage he stops and asks if I’m alright, but actually, I had started to fall asleep. It takes him ages to cum (I’m not even close but am beyond caring) and then we both pass out. In the middle of the night, I’m disturbed by weird noises but assume I’m just having crazy gin-soaked dreams.

When I did wake up, disturbed by the pre-dawn light, I realized that I had not dreamt the noises – my date had been vomiting off and on throughout the night. I realized this because when I sat bolt up right, which disturbed his precarious slumber, he had to dash to the bathroom to be sick again. Plus, I discovered he had a bucket by his side of the bed. I strongly considered getting up and leaving then and there, but sitting up had made my head swirl, plus I was having enough trouble just finding my underwear. I went back to sleep, putting my head under the pillow to drown out the sounds of him heaving. Even as I fell back asleep, I knew that I never wanted to see this guy again. Who knows how I would have felt if he hadn’t spent the night puking – maybe I would have been happy to see him occasionally to hook up, maybe not, but the brutal truth is that while I’m willing to swap various fluids with virtual strangers, vomiting early on is a dealbreaker for me (and I’m quite happy for people to apply the same standard to me). I need at least a couple of dates/hook ups before I can be tolerant of someone puking (and I have to also like them), because frankly, it takes the gloss off everything rather abruptly and feeling disgust about someone is not conducive to getting it on (or wanting to have sexy times at some stage in the future). Plus, the fact that he was vomiting while I simply had a medium hangover made me feel pity towards him, which again, is not conducive to desire.

Several hours later, at about 10am, I woke up again and quickly extricated myself from his bed, searching for items of clothing that were strewn about the place. I went into the kitchen to drink a huge glass of water (and to search for aspirin). I then went to the bathroom, washed my face, and planned my exit, grumpily realizing I should at least murmur a goodbye. It was at this moment that I noticed that many of the things in the house were weirdly flowery and middle aged, and I realized that his mother (whom he had spoken about a lot and who seemed to have helped him make most of his life decisions, including his choice to be a psychiatrist) had probably done much of the decorating. As I stood there, judging and ruminating, I was struck by the memory of something from the night before, something I was sure my mind had made up, but that I really wanted to check. In the spare room I had glimpsed a painting on the wall that had freaked me out, but now I couldn’t remember what the painting was of. Realizing that I was safe to be a bit of a snoop (because if he moved at all it would be accompanied by loud groaning), I opened the door and was confronted by a lovingly rendered painting of this:

Now I like Bret Easton Ellis a lot. I’ve read everything he’s produced and whilst I’m aware of the criticism, I personally think “American Psycho” is brilliant. However, I wouldn’t be moved to create a piece of artwork in tribute to the book, and even if I had done such a thing when I was younger (I mean, I’m hoping he made that painting as a teenager) I probably wouldn’t hang it in my house now (although I did wish I had my camera so I could record proof that the damn thing existed). Frankly, it gave me the creeps, but has also allowed me to refer to him with the nifty moniker of ‘Vomiting American Psycho’ guy.

Did I feel shame or regret as I said a quick goodbye, sidled out the door, rummaged in my bag for a cigarette, and tried to work out where the hell I was? No. I felt glad that my ex was no longer the last person I had sex with. I felt triumphant, like I had burnt a bridge to the past. The fucked up part of me also felt pleased that I had been debased and that I had debased someone else, someone so arrogant and cocky (but that is probably part of the reason why I see a therapist). I strutted away. Sadly, those feelings didn’t last, and the next day I called my ex, with disastrous, heartbreaking results, but that’s neither here nor there.

One thing that surprised me was that the guy that I’d left dry heaving in his Calvin Klein underwear simply acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and tried, two days later,  to organize a date, with no mention whatsoever that our last encounter had been a disaster (and that is a fairly generous assessment). If it were me, I would have written the whole thing off and vowed never to see the other person again, but I guess guys are different. Anyway, I politely but firmly made it clear I wasn’t interested in seeing him again. I may be a fuck up with low-self esteem, but even I knew that there was no part of me that was into him, and even though I crave affirmation and human contact, I wasn’t going to spend time with someone simply to be less alone.

I’m not sure where I picked up my sailor’s tongue but I’ve had it for longer than I can remember. My mother loves to tell the story of how I, her flaxen haired, bedimpled, shy and otherwise sweet natured three year old, would not stop saying “fuck,” despite numerous attempts to explain to me that that was naughty language (which should not be said loudly in a sing song voice).  Apparently, after one too many displays of my ‘adult language skills’ in front of, well, disapproving adults, she had had enough, and made good on her threat to spank me. (Since I was almost never punished I certainly remember the spanking , but have no recollection of why I got in trouble, so I have to take her word on this one). The spanking certainly didn’t cure me of swearing, although perhaps it cured me of embarrasing my mother. The anti-swearing lesson was really only hammered home when, at the age of 6, I loudly called a bullying boy named Andrew an “asshole” – the other little girls fell silent and I felt, well, judged.

As a bolshy teenager however, I abandoned many things, including peer acceptance, and I graduated from classic swear words to beautifully grouped phrases (which did not always involve actual swear words but were still graphic and vulgar enough to make people blanch). I collected a veritable compendium of obscene turns of phrase, and I didn’t really care what others thought. One boy once told me he thought it was off putting when girls swore – I laughed in his face (and I still stand by that response – it’s fine to be against all swearing but to make it an issue of being unladylike or unfeminine will always get my dander up). Another aside, although I used to have a problem with the word cunt, somewhere along the line it slipped into my vocabulary, although I still dislike the way most men use the word as synonymous with ‘woman.’ Anyway, below are my favourite phrases and creative pairings (plus their origin, where I can remember), as well as a new and inspiring defense of the simple pared back approach to swearing:

* Like many girls who were sentient in the late 1980s, my introduction to creative swearing came from “Heathers” (I think I was 8 when I saw this film, and it had a formative effect on me in many, many ways, although my appreciation of the swearing only kicked in when I was about 11 or 12). Of course, “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” is the famous quote, but the casual and constant swearing, and lines like “you stupid fuck,” “mega bitch,” “shower nozzle masturbation material,” and “suck my dick” (said of course, by a female) all seemed darkly adult and aspirational and glamorous to me, and they set the bar pretty high in terms of future swearing efforts.

* “Eat my fuck” and “scumfuck.” These phrases, along with many, many other lines that I used to say when high/drunk/bored, come from one of my all time favourite movies, the vastly underrated “The Doom Generation”, directed by Gregg Araki, an American director who is often overlooked or sidelined but who I really adore.

Not only is the movie funny, violent, sexy, surreal, and nihlistic, but the three leads are fanfuckingtastic, the soundtrack is awesome, and it has blink and you’ll miss it appearances by Skinny Puppy, Margaret Cho, and Parker Posey. Plus, a horrifying scene that always comes to mind when I hear either the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance (which in my field of work is fairly frequently).

* Blow me? No, let ME blow YOU!” Now while this isn’t a ‘swear’ I deployed it as a substite for “fuck off” or “go fuck yourself.” In retrospect, this probably confused people (ok, males) quite a lot because  I, a surly teenage girl, seemed to be aggressively offering to give head. Oh well, it made sense to me, because it was a shout out to Crank, a webzine that I was obsessed by. Although I was a lowly teenager in Brisbane, I feverishly devoured that zine. It taught me about DIY trepanation, how to get away with drink driving and stalking, and had articles like this, which includes a description of fisting that has forever scarred me.

* Random couplings – who knows where they came from, but when stressed they come tumbling out – “fuck knuckle,” “fuck stain,” “fuckstick,” “fuck face,” “jizz junky,” “asspony,” “slurry,” “scull fuck,” “famewhore,” “douchebag,” and “assclown.” These are clearly the ones that have stood the test of time  for me on a personal level (e.g. these are words I’ve used in the last month, unlike “maggot cunt” which I haven’t said since I was about 19).

* Sadly, this enthusiastic embrace of swearing as artform is now pretty much a thing of the past, and in the last year or so, as I’ve become more professional (read, ‘the man’), I’ve toned down most of the outrageous swearing, and can generally get through a lecture with only the occasional “damn.” However, when things do go wrong, I’ve developed the weird and almost unconscious tic of saying “fuck me” and saying it over and over again. This is problematic, because if you’re standing at the front of the lecture theatre repeatedly saying “fuck me” when the DVD isn’t working, it maybe sounds a little more porno than I would like. Only recently did I realize that I’d picked it up from “The Wire,” specifically  from the glorious Bunk. Speaking of which, like all amateur swearers, I stand in awe of this scene from Season 1, which I think rebuts any/all arguments about how swearing is a limited form of expression and reassures me that although I may slowly lose my more colourful turns of phrase, there is a simple beauty in sticking with the classics:

Now that’s probably a bit dramatic. It’s not like I ever stopped reading, and in fact I probably read quite a lot more than most people, but for the last few years a lot of that has been for work. I’m interested in my field so it’s hardly a chore, but I approach the material in quite a different way, and tend to be constantly thinking about how the content can be used either for my own research or in various teaching contexts. It is not reading simply for pleasure, and it’s not quite the kind of stuff where I might look up and realize that a whole afternoon has disappeared while I’ve been curled up in an armchair, somethings that can well happen when I’m absorbed by an old favourite like ‘Member of the Wedding.’

Another, more subtle factor, was the fact that I was in a relationship, which tended to take up a lot of the time that I had dedicated to reading when I was a nerdy child and moody adolescent. Although I still read fiction, after a few years of cohabitation this was generally snippets at the end of the day, and during the last two years of my PhD candidature most reading for pleasure took place in two small windows in the year (which normally coincided with the end of each round of teaching). Furthermore, my ex was not really someone who read fiction (nb. this seems to be the case with a lot of men). He personally preferred to lose himself in theory (you know, Negri, Deleuze, that kind of stuff), which actually became a source of serious tension between us because I felt it was evidence that he had no division between his PhD and life. I mention this simply to make the point that I wasn’t around someone who enjoyed reading simply for pleasure (or at least, not in any sense I would understand), which is probably also a small reason why I slowly stopped being the voracious reader that I had been in my youth (because boy was I a bookworm until I was in my early 20s).

Now the tide has turned. My teaching is done, and with no partner or drinking buddies about I’ve fallen back on the book in a big way. In fact, on a couple of occasions I’ve actually wagged work to spend the day at home reading simply for pleasure (using the logic that I had earned a few days off after my months enduring the crazy work load). This is my bedside table at the moment:

All of these are ‘on the go,’ so to speak. I’ve got my classic literature (‘Madame Bovary‘), some poetry (T.S. Eliot), some historical fiction (‘Ragtime‘), short stories (‘Girl with Curious Hair‘), and not one but two books on horror movies read through the lens of feminist film theory (Carol J. Clover’s superlative ‘Men, Women and Chain Saws‘ and Barbara Creed’s amazing ‘The Monstrous Feminine,’ who, btw, was an academic that I had a big lady crush on when she taught me as an undergraduate). I bought the two film books as a sort of reward for getting through these last hellish few months, and when they arrived I wriggled with delight like a puppy.

You might think that I’m all set, but now that I’m back in the saddle (so to speak), my desire for books grows unabated. I’ve been spending my hard earned cash on more and more tomes (although most of these are for work, which gives me a different kind of delight as my office shelves fill with weird and wonderful texts by academics that I so admire). When it came to thinking about what I want for Christmas, I instantly realized that the best course of action was to request only novels for presents – I want them, they’re easy as one doesn’t have to worry about sizes or style, and they’re relatively inexpensive. I spent a lovely morning working on a long list of suggestions, with these books highlighted as the things I really want: ‘Let the Great World Spin,’ ‘Homer and Langley,’ ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,’ ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming,’ and ‘2666.’

I’m quite looking forward to my literary haul, and particularly to such simple presents that will transport me to different worlds!

To cheer myself up at the thought that we’re at the beginning of my least favourite time of year, I have decided to come up with five things I do like about summer – things I can look forward to as I slather on the 30 plus SPF, fill the ice cube trays, and fossick out my collection of eccentric summer hats.

1) I adore the fruits of this season – peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries, but most especially, mangoes. I don’t think there is anything on earth like the smell of a mango ripening in a fruit bowl, and they are an incredibly delicious and sensuous fruit to eat. I am a bit of a purist about mangoes, which is why they are such a summer fruit for me. Although mangoes start to appear at the market in late spring, I won’t eat those because they are not the right kind. Ideally, I like to eat only Bowen mangoes (also known as Kensington Pride), and they really come into their own in January (although you can normally get them easily around Christmas time). Once they are in season, my family buys them by the crate and divides them up, and days pass where I’ll eat so many that I start to get a slight rash around my mouth (this seems to only happen when you spend a lot of time sucking the seeds).

2) I LOVE the sight of men in business suits eating ice creams, to the point where I want to stop and take a picture (indeed, when I was in London during their summer I routinely saw men in three-piece suits eating ice cream cones, and it made me wriggle with delight). Something about the juxtaposition of patriarchal seriousness with childish enjoyment just makes me smile like a fool.

3) This may make me sound like a junior alcoholic, but I love drinking an icy beer, or a gin and tonic, or a vodka, lime and soda, or indeed any cool refreshing alcoholic concoction, on a hot evening after work. The combination of alcohol and the last rays of the sun really feel delightful and is incredibly relaxing. In short, summer makes me want to get my drink on, and in years past, my summers have certainly been filled with drunken revelry. This year, now that I am a ‘professional’ in a city where I have acquaintances rather than dear friends, things will obviously be different, but I can still enjoy the sensation of cold booze meeting an overheated body. Thus my freezer is filled with ice cubes and bottles of gin and vodka, and I’m seriously searching for my ‘signature cocktail,’ a perfect beverage that will encapsulate the summer of ’09/’10 for me. At the moment, I’m considering the Grapefruit Gimlet, although a part of me wants to drink only Vodka Greyhounds and thus be like an auxiliary character from Less Than Zero.

4) Although I’m self conscious in my bathers and when I’m in the sun I fry like a rasher of bacon, I still love swimming in summer (preferably at the beach, but even a chlorinated pool will do). My mum tells tales of how I used to rush into huge waves even when I was a wee ‘un in diapers, and it’s true that I do feel immensely ‘at home’ when I’m immersed in water, even though I am an average swimmer and pretty crappy at body surfing. I never end up swimming that much over the course of summer, but it is something I enjoy and look forward to, at least as an abstract concept.

5)  Although airconditioning is more effective at the actual nitty gritty of cooling me down, there is nothing I like more than hot nights in a bed with a clean sheets while a fan buzzes in the background. Of course, ceiling fans are my favourites, bringing to mind languid air being sliced in a smoky private investigator’s office, but any kind of fan will do. I find the associated noises (the hum, the clicks, the rattle) to be soothing background static, a form of white noise that helps put me to sleep and paper over the sounds of the night. And when a pedestal fan gently sweeps in an arc over my bed I feel incredibly peaceful, an experience akin to being cradled and blanketed by the air itself.

Stress can disrupt this glorious monthly cycle, and since my time of heartache and sorrow began, my period has been a bit erratic.  Recently it got to the point where I was over the two month mark and still no ‘monthly friend.’ Now in and of itself, this might not have freaked me out so much (after all, I’ve been so stressed and tortured that I’m practically vibrating when I walk), but about five weeks ago I had a one-off sexual encounter with a guy. While I remember him putting a condom on, I was so unbelievably drunk that when I thought back, I could not be sure that the damn thing stayed on and didn’t break, and since he was still passed out/hungover asleep when I left we didn’t really engage in any kind of small talk (let alone the more clinical pleasantries that would have calmed my mind).

Initially, I was too busy thinking about work and life to notice ‘how long’ it had been since I bled from my vagina, but about two weeks ago I suddenly realized that it had gone from being, ‘gee, it’s been a while,’ to ‘gee, it’s LATE!’ And of course, once you have that thought, your mind relentlessly pursues it, hunting it into dark corners and chasing it round and round. And suddenly I remembered all that nausea and all that achiness and dizziness and I realized that maybe those weren’t just physical manifestations of my broken heart, that there might well be an underlying cause that connected everything and that was far more concrete than just ‘heartache.’ Since life has been kicking me over and over again, I have spent much of these two weeks terrified, absolutely stone cold terrified that I had managed to get pregnant from one disastrous fuck. Because really, that’s what this year needs – a secret abortion – a veritable cherry for the ice cream sundae of shit that has been my life over the last few months.

After a period of denial, then endless hopeful Google searches (‘late period NOT pregnant?’), and then more depressed searches working out where I could get an abortion if necessary (and what the trimester cut off point is), I finally went and bought a pregnancy test last Thursday. Boy was that fun (another day where I really felt like being female is the short straw). Now I’ve taken a few pregnancy tests over the years, and they have an almost Pavlovian effect, in that they scare the crap out of me (even just holding the box makes my heart race). During the actual moments after I’ve peed on the stick, I’m a sweaty palmed maniac, imagining multiple alternate versions of the future as each second drags. Kind of like this, but more menacing:

As an aside, it always does my head in that most people probably take these tests hoping for the little positive sign, because when I approach the stick it’s with my heart in my mouth hoping not to see what I view as the sign of doom and despair. Anyway, after two minutes of pacing about resolutely not disturbing my little peed on stick (because the instructions were quite stern on that point), I turned it over, and let out a mighty whoop, because, to quote the Magic 8 ball, signs pointed to no. Whatever else was wrong with me, I wasn’t pregnant, and that news was enough to actually make me rejoice and feel happy for a brief while (lowered expectations and all that jazz).

However, even with the reassurance gained by peeing on a stick, my mind was not completely at ease, and thus I think I can safely say I’ve never been happier to wake up to stabbing abdominal pain and blood stained underwear. This morning I found myself saying an internal word of welcome and thanks to my extremely tardy friend.

Even when I was in the thick of it, I was still objectively amazed by the fact that as everything crumbled around me, I could keep ploughing on. There were certainly moments where I thought I wasn’t going to make it (especially that first lecture, literally only four hours after my ex told me BY TEXT MESSAGE that he definitely wasn’t moving over) and granted, there were a couple of days where nothing was achieved, and many moments where not even the thought of referring to military leaders by their entertaining nicknames talking could stop the tears. By and large, however, I just kept slogging along, working often quite literally through my crying jags. I wrote lectures, prepared for tutorials, read multiple drafts of my Honours students’ thesis, peer reviewed an article, gave a guest lecture, attended an array of pointless and time consuming committee and departmental meetings, underwent irritating staff training that ate up my valuable time, helped a bit with the organization of a conference, all whilst treating eye drops and caffeine and my anti-depressants like they were air. At the end of the semester, despite my continued belief that I may well be a ‘bad’ lecturer, I could nevertheless feel an objective sense of pride. Sure, some of my lectures weren’t great, sometimes I was so tired I probably seemed like a zombie, but it all got done, and it all got done on time. I met every commitment and disappointed no one (sometimes at the expense of my sanity and my health).

This was a bit of a surprise to me. Firstly, I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a slacker. Lord knows that during my postgraduate years I was the first to try and get friends to have a beer (or twelve) at midday in the middle of the week (in fact, I developed a simple hand gesture to signify my intentions, and by the end of my PhD I had become a bit notorious for this habit, well beyond my friendship circle). In short, I fully enjoyed the freedom that my PhD (and its attendant scholarship) gave me, and I got used to the dismissive comments that some people (like my ex’s family) made about the lazy, indolent lives of PhD students. Now on balance I can see that I was often working quite hard, because I also tutored throughout my candidature, worked as a research assistant, worked at a library, was involved with a postgraduate journal, went on several lengthy research trips to archives, and still managed to achieve the all-important timely completion. However, I never thought of myself as someone who had much of a ‘work ethic,’ and I had always quietly disapproved of the way that many academics worked, and often talked about the need to be pragmatic and to set boundaries. In short, I swore to myself that I would never be one of those academics who had no life. (HA!) So my first revelation was that when it came to the crunch, my work ethic trumped everything else – trumped my emotional distress, my misery, my loneliness, and the more physical manifestations of my heartache (complete with nausea, vomiting, weird ulcer-like cramps, eye twitching, headaches, dizziness, etc). Through it all, I never thought about giving up, of not writing the lecture, of not marking the essays.

Initially, work seemed like the most unbelievable burden. Sometimes, my tears were partly out of self-pity because I couldn’t simply ‘take a week’ and give myself over to grief. There was no time for me to sob for days, to lie in bed eating bonbons, no room for the classic movie montage of a disheveled blonde in sweatpants, surrounded by balled-up snotty tissues, crying whilst paging through a photo album. Instead, I found myself leaking tears on the bus (behind my trusty sunglasses, of course), crying in my locked office in the break between lectures and tutorials, weeping in front of my laptop, and always, crying last thing at night and first thing in the morning. I longed for the space to just give myself over to my feelings, instead of having to look up from a fit of weeping and get back to that thesis draft.

After a few weeks, however, I realized that the work, the constant, ever present (and ever growing) list of things I needed to do, well it forced me to keep going and to focus on something outside myself. It was real, it was tangible, and it had little to do with my emotional state. Furthermore, as my emotions became deeper and nastier, I increasingly realized that giving myself over to my grief (which was quickly and intimately connected to darker themes of self-hatred), well that wouldn’t necessarily speed up the grieving process or help me in any way. So work became a way of trying to tamp things down, to put off self-reflection, to compartmentalize things. That may not be particularly healthy, but as a coping strategy, it was pretty good. Furthermore, losing myself in my work, losing myself in the detail, in the facts, well that actually gave me a small amount of pleasure. And not to be glib, but write a few lectures about shitty human behaviour and you’ll find yourself completely unable to take your own problems seriously (at least, for a while).  You may still cry, but at least you’ll be crying for someone other than yourself.

To sum up, I had the startling revelation that work can set you free.

Of course, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks over night. I’m still cautious and shy and you know what, I’ll probably never be the kind of girl who goes to a bar solo and picks a guy up. So I’ve turned to the internets (specifically to internet dating – I haven’t been cruising online communities and picking up local guild members from WoW). During the semester I was too busy to really put much energy into the whole enterprise (although there was one entertainingly gin-soaked and embarrassing encounter that is a post for another time), but now the semester is over, the sun is out, and I want to have some fun.

I have a few ground rules. I only plan to sleep with people I’m physically or intellectually attracted to (because, given the elements of sexual rejection involved in the breakup, it would be quite easy to fall into viewing being desired as a band aid for my wounded self-esteem and thus to sleep with guys I’m really not into, and I don’t think that would be good). Before the deed occurs I’m going to be upfront about my current lack of interest in monogamy (because clearly, some men on these sites are really looking for happily ever after, but I  don’t kid myself and think that lack of exclusivity would be a dealbreaker for most guys). And of course, I’ll keep in mind the advice that Condoman dispensed in these PSA-type cartoons from my youth:

Already, I’ve realized that internet dating sites are weird. If I was too fussy I’d get nowhere. Some of my early criteria (that I’d only communicate with men who could generally spell, who shared at least some of my taste in books/movies/music/tv, or who weren’t creepy and sleazy in their profile) have gone out the window because goddamn, that would make the whole enterprise just about moot. Because I’m a bottle blond, still in my twenties, and have a nice smile, well all kinds of men (many more than old enough to be my father) have ‘winked’ at and ‘kissed’ me (ugh, these sites are so twee in the way they structure encounters), despite the fact that early forties is my absolute max. Plus, when it comes to constructing my profile, I’m not going to ‘dumb down’ the fact that I can think, write, and reason, and I find myself constitutionally unable to talk about ‘Mr Right’ or  cuddling (ok, that could be because I’m a robotic monster sent back in time from the future). However, I’m trying to remain open minded about the whole thing, and to remind myself that I’m not looking for a companion so much as ‘company.’ For my purposes, maybe it doesn’t matter so much if I don’t have that much in common with a guy, and up until now, I’ve always had a pretty clear type (skinny, tall, brainy, funny guys), so perhaps I should broaden my horizons.

I think this summer will be an interesting experiment, where I think about sex and men in new ways. *fingers crossed* Being in a strange new city has its advantages, because I can’t make the obvious mistakes (like sleeping with friends) and because my dalliances will be mine to divulge or keep to myself.

And the title. Well, in “Heathers,” one of my all-time favourite movies, Veronica, a junior in highschool,  is at a college party having been set up with a guy called Brad. After an evening of awkward conversation, he crassly propositions her for sex. She  declares, “You know, I have a little prepared speech I tell my suitor when he wants more than I’d like to give him. Gee, blank, I had a really nice…” and Brad, who is sprawled on a sofa, drums his hands on his chest and interupts with the titular line. It has always cracked me up (even when I was an ignorant ten year old who didn’t know who Malcom X was), and now it makes me laugh for a slightly different reason – I want to claim a little Brad for myself and tell some hapless guy to put out or get out.

This thought is with me all the time. It’s like the baseline to every song I hear, a theme in every lecture I give, a factor in every fourth or fifth thought I have. It pops up over and over again. I slow it down, I break it into syllables, I speed it up, I emphasize different parts, but always the same denouement. ‘Oh look, a gourmet cheese shop’ – ‘I wish I was dead.’ ‘How do you like this new city?’ – ‘I wish I was dead.’ ‘Hey, are they playing Laurie Anderson’s “Oh Superman?”‘ – ‘ I wish I was dead.’  Most painfully, people skirt around the question of my relationship staus and I frantically think, ‘I wish I dead.’ Of course I don’t say this,  I equivocate, I umm and ahh and ensure that no one feels uncomfortable (except, of course, for me).

A friend of mine, with whom I have a complicated relationship, told me off about my use of this phrase. Her brother commited suicide a few years ago, and she declared that it had made her hate it when people casually wished for their own death. My response was weak and sarcastic and was all fake defensive, like ‘if I really wanted to die I wouldn’t joke about it,’ but in reality, if something killed me, say a falling electrical line, an out-of-control car, or a gas fire, I would welcome it. There are no disclaimers. I really do wish I was dead, and I wish it over and over again. I wish so hard I find myself repeating this mantra in bathrooms at parties, I find myself thinking it as soon as I roll out out bed, I find myself internally repeating the phrase during lectures until I can lock myself in my office and have a good cry. Of course, I cry a lot now, but don’t  let them kid you. I have discovered that giving in and having ‘a good cry’ does absolutely nothing in the long run.

I don’t act on this wish primarily because I know it would devastate my family.  I am not holding on with the hope of something better. There is no outside.

When these thoughts roll around inside my head, I smoke a cigarette. I savour it, I suck it down, and I think about the slow private death it represent.

Through it all, my mind works feverishly to impose order, to make sense of things, fixating on small details to spin alternate scenarios. If I hadn’t got the job, would we still be together? (almost certainly) If he had moved over at the beginning of the year, would we still be together? (quite probably) Did he get together with this new girl two weeks or four weeks after he told me he wanted a break, and if I had called him, if I had visited before that happened, would that have changed everything? (unknown and does not bear thinking about) Even the kinds of condolences that people offer are clearly intended to impose some meaning (even if that meaning relates to hypothetical wrongs). Numerous people have told me that I’m better off knowing now what kind of man he is, as though this has fortuitously happened to protect me from future and supposedly greater pain.

Seemingly unconnected events are made to fit into my quest for an ‘overarching’ story. A job in my field has been advertised back in my hometown – this job is a two-year position with good pay at a very good university, in short, a position as rare as hen’s teeth. Seeing it advertised made me cry, because my brain sees it and thinks, if only this had been advertised this time last year, I would have had a good chance to get it (because I know someone in the department), and hence I wouldn’t have left and  my relationship would almost certainly still be intact. Although my friend at the uni is really pushing me to apply, I can’t bring myself to, in large part because it would render this year, this horrible torturous year, a mistake, a blip, and I would return to my old town to be reminded constantly of everything I had lost by making the ‘wrong’ decision (because I suppose I envision my story as a choose-your-own-adventure, in which there are right and wrong choices).

I know these kinds of mental gymnastics do me no good, yet on some level I clearly believe that a narrative must exist, that life and all the component parts aren’t just a series of random events. This is funny, because in many ways, that is exactly what I always thought I did believe, and yet clearly, on some deeper level my mind and heart refuse to accept it.

So my new goal is not to be happy or to make peace with everything, but to give up on this quest for meaning. To accept that things happen and that there is no particular rhyme or reason. I want to reject all attempts to produce a ‘take-home’ point to this breakup, and I want my brain to stop producing endless counterfactual accounts where one small change would have stopped this all from happening. I want to remember that every days, millions of people suffer things far worse than what I’m going through, and that my pain is but a drop in the ocean. In short, when I think about how I was Bart in this scenario:

I want to be able to simply know that ‘shit happens.’

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