Not to be Rude: Intemperate outbursts from one nutty broad!

Case

Introduction

What I will grandly call this ‘collection’ of what I will grandly call ‘columns’ (you say ‘blog’, I say ‘column’) is taken from the two websites into which I’ve stuck an unmanicured claw, The Scrivener’s Fancy and Imagined Slights. It feels about a hundred years ago (it was 2009) that Tony Martin was kind enough to ask me to write regularly for The Fancy, which I did under the pseudonymn Avril Rolfe. That lady, for anyone who may not know, is a character from that almost indescribable English nineteen eighties attempt at a soap opera about the rich and glamorous, Howards’ Way, which featured water sports conducted in the freezing cold and arguments about boat building. The popular Fancy offered weekly columns from Martin, Matt Quartermaine and me, as well as an impressive array of guest columnists. When it came to an end, I went out on my own with Imagined Slights, in the Australian-humour-website equivalent of the least-respected Beatle releasing a solo album. At any rate, all this activity has meant that I’ve written enough words to put together this little ebook.

And, I must say, reading back through these pieces has been a fascinating lesson in how little I have grown as a person in the past six years. A topic I’ve canvassed on several occasions is the fact that I am what they like to call ‘childless by choice’ (as I’ve never actually tried to have a child, possibly it’s not by choice but I can think of no other term that will serve my purpose). Now, one of the great things about this state of affairs is that it’s enabled me to maintain the kinds of interests that are reliably to the fore in this collection, such as my passion for the television series thirtysomething, for the movie T.R. Baskin, for the ‘Battling Burtons’ and for Cybill Shepherd; less happily, there is my displeasure at Grace Kelly’s life choices, my frequent disappointment when I attend live performances, and my loathing of tapas, second-hand booksellers, Audrey Hepburn, talking to people, and musicians deciding to ‘have a jam’. All the above is underpinned by my hate and fear of work, not to mention my puzzlement as to why other people hate and fear fashion models, and liberally peppered with references to Icehouse, The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young Doctors.

Finally, I should point out that these handpicked pieces are all two years old, at least, apparently indicating that, even though I continue to write new pieces for Imagined Slights, my best days are behind me. So, on that note …

Sarina Rowell

2015

One: What’s the Point?

You’re Having a Friend of Me

28-5-2013

Recently, I decided to write a piece on the topic of feeling vexed in the face of sanctimonious opinion pieces on the topic of how very terrible social media is because people don’t have real, human friends anymore, which has led to a lack of Wandin-Valley-consider-the-wombat-style ‘community’. I am not even sure why I vowed to write something about ‘social media, what does it all mean blah blah’, given that, first, I find the subject uninteresting in the extreme; and, second, that what I had really wanted to write about was how crazy I am about Cybill Shepherd, despite, or because of, the fact that I have read her memoir, twice, and she sounds like a lunatic. At any rate, I then made my customary mistake of reading the weekend papers, and discovered that Meshel Laurie had beaten me to it, with a Herald-Sun column entitled ‘Digital friends as good as real thing’. As anyone who reads this ‘blog’ would know, ideas are few and far between for me, so this was damned annoying.

However, once I actually read Laurie’s column I found that she was defending social media on the grounds that it allows her to catch up with her real, human, friends when she would not otherwise be able to; and that it has also meant she has formed friendships with people she has never actually met, based on their common interests, and that one day she may actually meet them in person anyhow, as with the way folk would catch up in a saloon in the olden days. However, while I think that every one of these points is an excellent one, I would like to take things a step further. Yes, I am always the first person to admit that I’m a sociopath, but I believe that a strong argument can be mounted in favour of getting rid of flesh-and-blood friends altogether. The thing is that, contrary to what popular culture would have us believe, the type of friendship in which people actually interact with each other physically is frequently about as durable as a ten-dollar watch. There are countless ways in which a friendship will have the varnish removed, but, at the risk of this column going all Sunday Life, here is a mere handful of them.

Working for a friend: Let’s face it, as soon as a friend is paying you money to perform a task, your relationship becomes so unequal that they may as well just grow mutton chops and start signing their name Josiah Bounderby. As the employee, you will feel, and probably entirely correctly, that they are taking advantage of you in a way that they would not if you were not friends; as the employer, they will feel, and probably entirely correctly, that you are taking advantage of them in a way that you would not if you were not friends. The much-vaunted ideal of friendship is never going to overcome the reality that the nature of the employer-employee relationship has always been, and will always be, that each side is convinced the other is ripping them off.

Ceasing to work with a friend: On the other hand, it is endlessly depressing how you can be excellent friends with a colleague only to discover as soon as you cease working together that you have about as much in common as Sonny and Cher. What should be being praised to the heavens in the context of humans existing in offices is not friendship but, rather, the much-maligned activity of engaging in office politics. I have always found the customary advice to ‘avoid office politics’ to be completely absurd: first, because good fucking luck avoiding them; and, second, because as both an activity and a topic of conversation, office politics are completely awesome. In fact, they are pretty much the only point of working in an office.

Living with a friend: Sharehouses almost always start off with a jolly camping-trip feel, with in-jokes galore and everyone being all brotherhood of man, often to such a degree that there is an uneasiness-producing, even cult-like, exclusion of outsiders. However, these establishments always descend rapidly into every inhabitant being a volcano of hate about money, cleaning and incursions into ‘personal space’. The only exception to this pattern is if a sharehouse began with every inhabitant being a volcano of hate about money, cleaning and incursions into ‘personal space’.

A friend moving overseas: When you are Australian and your friends move overseas, there is simply no way in Hell that they are not going to become incredibly irritating. First of all, there’s the friend who moves overseas and develops a stupid accent in no time at all. An acquaintance of mine who had a spell in London was talking in a Sloane Ranger-ish strangled bleat before she even landed at Heathrow. Australians who settle in the United States, on the other hand, tend to develop an equally hateful, though more hybrid, accent that I long ago christened ‘the Peter Allen’. Second, you just know that when this friend returns to Australia for a visit, she will have a really superior attitude. She will, for example, consider this country’s politics to be as insignificant as a row between toddlers, and will make a massive deal about not bothering to read our newspapers but will, instead, ostentatiously go online to read, say, the Irish Examiner. Third, there’s the friend who is astonished that, living way down in Australia, where she herself lived for thirty or forty years, you are acquainted with the existence of, for example, the Empire State Building or the British royal family. This requires much incredulous asking, with strenuous employment of the new accent, of the question ‘Oh, do you know about that/him/her here?’. Fourth, it is highly likely the friend will have had a book signed by Martin Amis, and be eager to tell you what she said to him and what he said to her.

Setting up a friend romantically: I’ve set up friends in romantic couplings on a few occasions, and it’s certainly true that exerting a Rasputin-like influence over other people’s existences has given me the greatest satisfaction of my life so far. However, these set-ups have ended in divorce, with none of the parties having spoken to me for years.

A friend becoming really successful: The fact is that a person only ever wants their friends to be exactly as successful as they are. If your friends are less successful than you are, they may want to borrow money, and generally resemble Baz Schultz, Kim Gyngell’s character in Heaven Tonight. If they are more successful than you are, you will feel like a sack of grated rat’s balls mixed with green glacé fruit in comparison to them and their glittering attainments. Personally, I can’t recall a single occasion on which I felt unadulterated joy at a friend’s stroke of good fortune; the fact that I’ve never wished a friend ill doesn’t mean I actually wish them any good, unless the day should come that I become the most successful person in the world and don’t want others dragging me down (see Baz Schultz). Yes, it is a shame that the triumphs of a hideous person you don’t know are so much easier to take than the triumphs of a person you know and like but it is, nonetheless, the way of the world.

Disagreements in taste: Friends having tastes that are different from your own makes you want to slaughter them. Yes, you can, and do, disagree with people with whom you engage via social media, but you don’t have to look at their smug faces while they air their mad ideas.

There are, of course, a million more ways than the above that friendships will go to the bad, and I’ve not even touched on what can be unleashed when you want to have sex with your friend’s husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend. But, don’t mistake me, in no way am I denying that flesh-and-blood friendships supply an enormous amount of the interest in life; while many may only have the longevity of the ten-dollar watch I mentioned above, at their best they also give momentary pleasure that is massive both in quantity and quality. Who doesn’t enjoy a friend giving them a Partridge Family lunchbox? Who doesn’t enjoy living with friends and thus not having to go to the physical effort of seeing them? Who doesn’t want to take time out with a work pal to examine online the gift registry for Liza Minnelli’s wedding to David Gest? I am merely making the point that it’s an underacknowledged benefit of purely social-media based friendships that they have almost no capacity to disappoint, unless the person in question never bothers to check their Twitter feed and read – and, ideally, retweet, or at least reply to – all your hilarious observations.

I admit that I’m still hoping the day will come when robots will do our housework and we dine on capsules instead of actual food, and that my ideal existence therefore comprises living with Metal Mickey in a multi-function polis. This being the case, and in a gesture of friendship, I encourage you to watch on YouTube a vintage story about multi-function-polis mania from The 7.30 Report; aside from anything, it is remarkable how long it is.

As Good as I Get

24-7-2010

The other evening as I exited my place of work, a man said, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ and asked me for the amount of thirteen dollars, which he told me he needed for his night’s accommodation. After listening to his story, I gave him the sum requested. I did so because, first, his honest face made me think it was conceivable he wasn’t merely ‘grifting’ me; and, second, the explanation he gave me about why he needed the money was a refreshing change from the Sydney junkie’s shakily voiced plea of ‘My mum’s sick and I need to get the train to Newcastle’, to the Melbourne junkie’s corresponding plea of ‘My mum’s sick and I need to get the train to Geelong’. Ultimately, though, I gave this man money less because it would make me feel good about myself, than because I would possibly feel commensurately worse about myself if I didn’t.

Therefore, the heart of the matter is that I handed over the notes because it was the easiest thing for me to do; I could do it and presumably never see him again, and also not have to worry that I’d condemned him to sleeping on the streets, when, let’s face it, nobody could call July nights in Melbourne balmy. By opening my wallet, our business was done and dusted. In contrast, I am sorry to say, there are many times when I don’t buy a copy of The Big Issue for the sole reason that I just can’t stand the thought of there being anything else lined up for me to read. While The Big Issue is an excellent publication, there have been a lot of occasions when its vendors would have had a better chance with me were they peddling giant foam shamrocks. Thus, we have the sad situation that a man who was perhaps spinning me a cock and bull story did better out of me than does the average friendly, hardworking Big Issue vendor, because me giving the man in question money wouldn’t lead to me having to exert myself any further with the written word. Naturally, none of the above means that I didn’t still feel a stab of regret at having to pay thirteen bucks to gain peace of mind. I can assure you that even as I handed over the cash, I was having several thoughts along the lines of ‘If only I hadn’t stopped to read the comments under that article about online dating agencies for domestic animals, I would have avoided this encounter’ and ‘I could have spent that money on a Logan’s Run DVD’.

The other factor was that because this exchange happened outside my office, part of me was hoping that a coworker might see me engaged in a generous act. This then got me thinking of other means I’ve employed to feel and look like a terrific person. The surefire one has always been making sure that, as much as possible, I have the correct pronunciation of movie people’s names at the tip of my tongue. There were countless terrible things about living before the Internet, such as having to wait passively to read, for example, the latest thoughts of Green from Scritti Politti, but one of the main ones was not having a ready tool to check how to pronounce the names of the famous. Thus, in the old days, I would read articles about certain Hollywood individuals and keep careful mental notes of how to pronounce, for example, ‘Joaquin’, ‘Coppola’, ‘Liotta’ (as an aside, Liotta has allegedly admitted to doing Operation Dumbo Drop only for the money) and ‘Basinger’, and then pray that these people would come up in conversation. The ultimate triumph for me in this area is witnessing even the professionals falter in a way that I have tried never to do, like the night, long, long ago, that I heard Margaret Pomeranz make the fatal error of pronouncing ‘Joaquin’ the way in which it is spelled.

Another tool I have employed to feel like a terrific person is taking time out to read glowing feedback about myself on eBay, of which I was once a very enthusiastic customer. I remember that in one particular buying frenzy I spent a week on tenterhooks while bidding for a box of cocktail forks; a lavish black and white booklet celebrating the marriage of Princess Margaret to Lord Snowdon; and ‘Starstrips’, which were the product of once mighty Sydney radio station 2SM. The Starstrips are black and yellow pieces of cardboard dated 1977, and I believe the concept behind them was to peel off a strip to reveal the name of a star – such as, I assume, the great Pussyfoot or greater Noosha Fox – and somehow win a prize: of a cassette deck or some transfers, no doubt. (Incidentally, the only person I’ve ever known who won a prize on the radio did indeed do so by listening to 2SM, but the prize was tickets to and the soundtrack album from Australian film The Chain Reaction, which had as its subject a leak at a nuclear storage waste facility.) As, however, I am keen to keep the Starstrips in their original state I don’t really have any idea what happens when you begin peeling bits of them off. Anyhow, whenever I made such a purchase, I was careful to pay my money promptly, so causing my eBay identity to have a run of positive feedback, which I would then consult on a daily basis. Unfortunately, though, I’ve now forgotten my password for PayPal, so eBay is as lost to me as those marvellous wrappers they used to have on Club Chocolate that featured the silhouette of a sophisticated gent sitting in a chair.

My final way to make myself feel like a terrific person, and to look like one in the eyes of the world, is to have others witness me cry at something it is highly acceptable to be seen crying at. This would be, for example, at a classy piece of music, rather than at the skilful employment of James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’ on the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack after Dawson’s dad died in a head-on crash having, from memory, bent to retrieve a scoop of ice-cream that had fallen off a cone; or when Jimmy Osmond, while playing a young man who was, as they used to say, ‘simple’, sang ‘Penny Lane’ in the television series of Fame. If I’m with someone I want to impress and I can’t manage actually ostentatiously to cry at what’s going on in front of me, I’ll have recourse to thinking about something that really did make me cry, such as when they played ‘Fire and Rain’ in Dawson’s Creek or when Jimmy Osmond sang ‘Penny Lane’ in Fame.

It is certainly not out of the question that the man I gave the thirteen dollars to was just ripping me off, and took my thirteen dollars and went and drank imported beer. Luckily, I’ll never know because, even though, yes, I could afford to give him the money, so who cares really, if I found out he had been spinning me a web of deceit, I would feel like a chump. Not as much of a chump, on the other hand, as I feel at having forgotten my PayPal password.

The Class Struggle

13-10-2009

One thing that I don’t think I will ever do again is get on the evening-class merry-go-round. I have done a few such classes in my time and what’s especially pitiable about this is that I always get really excited about the prospect of them. I lay my hands on a community college brochure and start thinking that I’m clutching the antidote to the futility of my existence.

Now, I have often made the mistake of taking evening classes with someone else. My trouble is that whenever I do anything with anyone, the other person will be better at the activity than I am. This was the case even when my best friend and I collected for the Red Cross. I was twelve, but doing the collecting because I thought it might somehow enable me to find a rich future husband, if my friend and I were particular about in which suburb our manoeuvrings took place.

My attempt to shore up my romantic future had been inspired by the 1979 Rex Smith vehicle Sooner or Later, about a thirteen-year-old girl in love with seventeen-year-old aspiring musician Michael Skye. After she confesses that she’s only thirteen, they agree to ‘take it slow’, although the film does conclude with them kissing in a way that, these days, would see Miranda Devine needing to restock her printer toner. In any case, no, I didn’t find a future husband, and my best friend always collected a lot more money than I did, which, as she and I operated in a pair, taking it in turns to give the same short speech, with an equal lack of conviction, preys on me to this day.

Anyhow, in 1995, my then boyfriend and I enrolled in a cooking class, because, I felt, it would bring us closer. Our teacher took the approach – which I could only applaud – of, to save time and bother, simply doing the cooking himself, so I don’t remember anything of what I was supposed to have learnt. I do remember, though, that one of the other members of the class, Mark, was quite handsome and the class cutup – I’d always hankered after a cutup – and, as I knew from relentless eavesdropping on everything he said, didn’t have a girlfriend! I couldn’t believe it; my boyfriend and I weren’t getting along that well anyway, and now, here he was, standing in the way of a glorious future for me, like he was Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. Ultimately, and again through eavesdropping, I heard Mark’s views on how ‘the Jews run everything’, which made him a less attractive prospect, but, nonetheless, my first evening class had merely made a bad situation worse.

A couple of years later, though, a friend talked me into signing up for a tap dancing class. Not that she had to work too hard to persuade me; for many, many years, motivated, I think, by That’s Entertainment! and That’s Entertainment Part II, I had had a fervent ambition to give tap dancing a try and, what’s more, was secretly convinced that I would excel at it. Sadly, though, I was unable to master even the simplest step, while my friend was apparently Ruby Keeler raised from the dead. She kindly attempted to rectify the discrepancy between us with external coaching, like she was Kevin Bacon and I was Christopher Penn in Footloose, had Footloose been made in 1932, but I think I somehow managed to be worse at tap dancing by the end of the course than I’d been at the beginning of it.

Nonetheless, a few years after that, I decided that the solution to my world-weariness was to take an evening class in Russian. This was despite the fact that I am no good even at those foreign languages with which English shares an alphabet. Still, I was convinced that I would do extremely well and bought about a hundred books to help me with my studies, in which, I was sure, I would be engaged for the rest of my life. I even believed that I might move to Moscow and be a kind of Eastern European Mary Tyler Moore. Well,