someone else’s mother. I would have no trouble sharing the above duties but I flat out refuse to be someone’s Kitchen Bitch, Cleaning Lady, Ironing Lady, Washer Woman, and/or Waitress. One in all in, or buggar off you lazy pest.
Thou Must Have Own Car
What does it say about a person when they are an adult, live in a city that has a shonky “hail and ride” on a “sometimes schedule” public transport system if they don’t have wheels? If they can’t drive, they can walk the plank out of contention of hanging out and being cool with me.
Thou Must Have a Family that is Easy to Get Along with – i.e. Their Parents Must Have Human Qualities, a Sense of Humour and No Pokie Addictions
I have seen how many old buggars hang out at Clubs and RSLs just to donate their pensions to the bright lights of the pokies and I’m not into witnessing that on an ongoing basis. That’s not in my lischt of things to do. Neither is a man who’s Mother hates my guts or doesn’t laugh at anything that is actually funny, said by me or anyone.
Thou Must Be Active
This is something I could possibly forego, since I have enough issues of my own conducting physical forms of exercise.
Thou Must Have a Secure and Long-Term Job
Due to my eternal desire to land a permanent job, I expect nothing less than the same from any spouse worthy of hanging out and being cool with me. It’s nice to have dreams but it’s better to have stability whilst funding the possibility of bringing the dream to fruition. So while I’m not a bubble burster, I’m foremost a stability junkie.
Thou Must Not Be a Tight Arse
Bum jokes aside, there’s a time and a place for being frugal but it ain’t at every opportunity. I will only accept 5% Frugality to 95% Making Hay While The Sun Shines. I struggle with the attitude that you should save almost everything for retirement. What happens if you kark it straight after you retire and you don’t end up living at all? What if you have been a miserable prick all your life with your money, who would want to mingle with you anyway? You would be entering whinging old miserable bastage age by the time you let loose on your bank account. So Fishes, Frogs, and Ducks have no need to apply.
Nice to haves
Light eyes
A love or tolerance of Country Music
Will pick the pants out of my bum should I encounter a wedgie.
By the end of the list, tears were flowing freely and she was in full acceptance of her seemingly unlovable-ness and the too high expectations of her wish lischt. She ripped the page into three pieces, crumpled it up into a loose twist and walked over to the already tied up kitchen rubbish bag and poked it in to the top of the bag in a drunken attempt to discard it forever.
With tears streaming down her face she grabbed the steadily disappearing bottle of Jim Beam, a 1.5 litre bottle of coke and another milkshake size plastic cup and walked over to her CD Player. Then she tugged at her box of CDs, spilling them all onto the floor. “Where are you ladies? I need you!” she slurred, rifling through the many country music discs she owned for her favourite group The Dixie Chicks. “There you are my darlings,” she said and put the Wide Open Spaces, Home, and Taking the Long Way albums into her six-stacker CD, leaving the other three spaces empty. Setting the song selection to random, she hit play.
“Am I The Only One?” played first. Kylie turned the volume up to a little over half way and crawled to her lounge room window. Placing her drink on the sill, she pulled the couch over so that she could rest her elbows on the window sill and her knees on the comfort of the arm rest. She sang along with the song at the top of her voice and in between the shuffle function finding the next song she could hear a dog barking next door and cats calling from outside on the street. It was the first noise from outside that she had heard since getting home after work. When the next song started playing she didn’t care about conversing with the dog, she just chose instead to communicate with the cats. The next song to play was “Voice Inside my Head”, which was normally one of Kylie’s favourite songs from the Chicks. But tonight it was a cat calling cry, a tool for Kylie to convey her feelings to the felines in the neighbourhood and hopefully for them to feel welcome enough to scratch at her door and let her pat them from now on. If there was a Doctor Pusslittle that spoke directly to moggies, Kylie was it.
“Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Me-yow, Me-yow, Me-yow, Me-yow Me-yow, Mee-yooow, ee-yow, ma rowo, rowo, rowo, rowo row row,” Kylie sang, perched up on her window sill like a feline herself.
Kylie’s faux feline reciprocation not only triggered a response from the neighbourhood cats but also started all three of the dogs howling from across the road. Kylie was slowly but surely, pet by pet, pissing off the neighbourhood in the wee hours of morning.
“I Believe in Love” came on next and she was all out of meows and just sat there with tears running down her face, some falling into her drink from the end of her nose. There were a lot of happy songs on those three CDs but every sad and lonely song played on shuffle for Kylie that night – Heartbreak Town, Hello Mr Heartache, Once You’ve Loved Somebody, You Were Mine, I’ll Take Care of You, and Cold Day in July. Every song epitomised the loneliness she felt and the sadness she thought she would never pull herself out of. Even her favourite “Goodbye Earl” was sung with venom and spite instead of her normal sass.
After the songs began to repeat themselves she pressed stop and turned on the television to watch Rage. The difference in music enabled her to dance but after an hour the guest programmer for the night started picking music Kylie had never heard of so she turned off the sound and kept the light of the TV on for company as she swapped her country music CDs over for her best of the Nineties selection and a mixed CD that had songs on it by Safri Duo “Played-A-Live The Bongo Song” and “Swamp Thing” by The Grid. As soon as she pressed play the songs played one after the other and she erupted from the floor in an excitable bopping frenzy, running into the kitchen to find pots and pans she could play the bongo’s on and air guitar the banjo out of Swamp Thing. There was almost a smile on her face until she flashbacked to the times she used to dance to this very music with all her friends at the Irish Club back home.
It was about this time that she went foraging for food. Finding a couple of bags of chips in a cupboard, she grabbed both and threw them on opposing couches so she would have a bag close by no matter where she ended up sitting. Handfuls of chips were stuffed into her mouth as if she was consumed by the fear of starvation. Half the chips were being spilt down the front and inside her pyjama top and she washed each mouthful of chips down with sloppy gulps of bourbon, which would pour out each side of her mouth and be left for her forearm to wipe up. Kylie was a mess. Luckily she was sitting on her own mat on the lounge room floor when she spilt half her cup down the front of her face. Her pyjama top soaked up most of the overflow and after unsuccessfully trying to suck the bourbon out of her top she wrung the liquid out of the fabric into her cup and drank it. After all, she didn’t want to waste any of it.
After eleven long hours of hooking into it, Kylie thought she might feel better if she had a shower. But actually she didn’t feel better at all. As she took her clothes off, chips fell all over the bathroom floor and the wet weight of her shirt dropped heavily onto the bath mat. She opened the glass shower door and immediately sat on the floor of the shower. Putting all her weight onto her left bum cheek, she was completely unaware that it rested partly on the shower drain and folded her arms over her bent knees, her head facing towards the floor. The sad and blank expression on her face emulated the nothingness she had felt for most of the night.
