Posts Tagged → On Dit
Six Months of Free Wine, Tiny Soup and Meltdowns
Prelude: As I wrote this article, back in the middle of 2009, Steph and I were a single day away from our three-week holiday from On Dit. We felt more like we were three weeks away from getting committed to some sort of mental institution, quite frankly. The weekend just gone was one of a Pete Doherty proportion meltdown, one that actually kicked me hard enough to re-evaluate how I was going about life arse-over, but that’s what unknown chemicals will do to one’s conscience as you lay in a bed, insides cramping and afflicted with fever-sweats, but that’s another story for another time.
The social life of an editor is a strange one. With deadlines constantly overlapping, nights become long and friends and family are soon left behind in lieu of first of all the business at hand of creating a student publication, and then later for the heady world of red carpet events and after-parties. It is these that truly skew one’s life into a sort of strange caricature of how ‘important’ people live.
As an On Dit editor you begin receiving invitations to various events sch as the Adelaide Big Pond Film Festival opening night, Cabaret Launch Party and so on. You stop paying from tickets to concerts and sporting events, your name perpetually inhabiting door lists, admitted with a mention of credentials and a knowing nod.
Having never been to this sort of thing before, we snapped up our RSVPs and dived in feet first. There’s the fun of getting needless haircuts, dressing up in dapper outfits and the polishing of shoes, and then there is the mingling and schmoozing. The most fun thing about this is that you never really feel like you belong here at first, so it’s all a big game, playing grownups so to speak.
The after-parties themselves were a world like I’d never encountered before. Important old people in dresses, suits and jewellery more expensive than my first car flitted to and fro. They threw back their heads and laughing at inane witticisms, sipping on seemingly bottomless glasses of champagne. Waiters wove their way through the crowd of cackling bourgeois yuppies, carrying trays of tiny, tiny food.
We were proffered shot glasses of a thick green liquid, which I assumed to be some sort of organic liqueur, and threw back what tasted like blended lawn clippings, nearly choking on the tiny prawn floating in the miniature swamp I held in my fingers. The snooty waiter promptly advised me it was chilled cucumber and dill soup. “In a shot glass?” I asked rhetorically, before grabbing another 8 or so and downing them in rapid succession. Food this small you can’t eat fast enough, at least not fast enough to counteract the copious amounts of free alcohol sloshing around one’s stomach, a vile mixture of beer, and wine both red and white, with bubbles and without, the cocktail added to as each sort of free alcohol slowly but surely runs out.
Eventually you meet people you probably shouldn’t ever meet, let alone under the influence of too much drink and too little food.
Through bleary eyes you seen Margaret Pomeranz standing proudly out front, a defiantly cracked laugh issuing from her mouth as a sophisticatedly length cigarette hangs from her lips. You say something inane and slightly slurred and you get a smile, the polite sort a world away from the face you saw upon approach. Her hand feels like the bark of a tree and she says how lovely it was to meet you and she turns away and goes back to laughing uproariously with her friends. You’ve just made an arse of yourself and realize you’re out of your depth, socially. No one else is as drunk as you, knowing that the alcohol is free to spare them of the petty act of exchanging moneys rather than so you can drink to the point of social, if not physical impairment.
You’re not meant to drink all the beer, and all the sparkling shiraz, and the champagne, and the regular shiraz and the chardonnay. Next thing you’re appearing half-cut in the social pages of a dozen Adelaide publications, slamming booze like a frat-boy. That’s what office parties are for. Two days later my house was inhabited by 60+ editors, subbies, student pollies, friends and family members. We drank and danced like we’re meant to, with reckless abandon, $500 woth of advertising-funded alcohol sloshing about in our bellies, full of real food, dancing to real music with real friends, exactly as it should be.
Fuck red carpets. Fuck after-parties. This is how we roll.
Sealing the Deal: A Success Story
If you read Social Fumblings in Elle Dit, you will no doubt had a laugh at my somewhat tragic misadventures in trying to figure out the fairer sex. Despite the logical conclusions one might draw from such an article, I’m not a total failure in love and have done all right by myself over the years.
While ‘How to get dumped and remain single for 12 months’ covered the ins-and-outs of meeting a girl, getting a date, making a move etc, there were some other ‘ins-and-outs’ it didn’t cover, if you get my gist. That’s right: Sealing the deal. Going the Full Monty. Um, stealing fourth base. Read between the lines! Don’t worry; this isn’t going to be a pornographically graphic description of my Viking-like honour-roll of conquest (I wish!), but a practical guide to making that final, potentially doomed, move, and yes, it will be accompanied by the comical tales of misfortune you’ve come to expect from Social Fumbling.
Picture the scene. You’ve scored yourself a sweet hook-up on a night out/house party/bar mitzvah, and gotten them back to your/their crib/pad/digs (much like yourself right now, the scene is vague at best), you’re steadily working your way through the bases (see diagram below, courtesy of webcomic xkcd.com) and hit third, wherever that lies on your own sensual radar, and are eyeing off that final glorious home run. What next? This is delicate. Screw this up and it’s going to be a long awkward night ahead.
The Baited Trap
It is said that the meek shall inherit the earth. They never said anything about getting any. In some instances you can probably wait for them to jump you. If you’re a female, chances are you’ve been fending off attacks to your ‘maginot line’ at the club you met him at, the alleyway you passed, the McDonalds line you ordered food in and the twenty minute cab ride home, so you can probably get away with a mere lowering of the defences. If you’re a guy, this is probably less so. Not to generalize, but no girl wants to be thought of as ‘easy’ so it’s probably going to be up to you boys to buck up and do something before the third hour of dry humping gets a little old.
Verbal Confirmation and/or Written Notification
Okay, so maybe not quite that bureaucratic, if things are going the way you hope they are, this will probably work, if only for honesty and no-bullshittery points. There are however, ways to do this, and ways not to do this. While it may not be the most romantic or sensual thing, the gasping mid-pash request for a condom paints a pretty clear picture of what’s going on, at least in your mind. The awkward cry of “erm, uh, do you want to have sex? Cos’ I’m down with that” generally won’t carry too much weight, unless your newfound bunk buddy has a thing for British bank clerks. You could always go for written notification, that waiver just might get you out of some legal indemnity later on. If so, go for the full non-disclosure contract, y’know, just in case…
The Trouser-Plunge
When one moves, one should be bold and move with impunity, and so it goes in matters of the loins. Just because someone is happy to make out with you and even rub against you semi-clothed doesn’t mean that they want to go the whole way. Or maybe they do, but don’t want to risk losing dignity and appearing like a slut, man or woman alike. There is but one brutally direct way to show them what’s on your mind: Put their hand down your pants. It’s just crazy enough to work, and following a short survey of some of the drunker and less-dignified members of my social circle found that it does! Tallying up the stats and we found the thus dubbed ‘trouser plunge’ to be ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SUCCESSFUL!!!
Now I’m not condoning unwanted or unwarranted sexual assault, such behaviour not befitting everyone. But busting a daring move always has its place. I guess the thing to remember when you dive past that final catcher (and begin to run out of ‘base’ metaphors) is to do whatever feels natural, and be yourself whether that be a timid officious sort or a seafaring Casanova. But seriously. Their hand. Down your pants. Guys and girls. Guaranteed*.
*Not actually guaranteed.
Platonic Defenestration
On April 26th 2009 there was an incident in the (new) On Dit office, of potentially dire consequences. As Ms. Stephanie Walker was finishing her cigarette she turned and began to climb back through the window, which we smoke through. I, having just finished a cigarette myself, gave Ms. Walker a playful shove as if to push her through the window. She then said, quite firmly “don’t push me”, to which I pushed her, not especially hard, but ‘boy’ hard. It was to my horror that I saw her crash into the office, hitting her head on a pot plant and dislocating her knee. As I watched my co-editor’s body crumple into the ground I realized I had crossed the platonic female friend line.
Steph can definitely be seen as one of the boys, happy to drink, smoke and talk loud nonsense, at least until it gets a bit too ‘bitches and ho’s’ as she so succinctly put it. But while a girl can inhabit the ‘boys world’ for a little, eventually it will come crashing down, like an editor through a windowsill.
Guys grow up with roughhousing and it never truly goes away. Add to this the injection of alcohol to social situations and the testosterone fuelled moxie of post-pubescence and you have what can be a rough part of town so to speak. One party, after completing a game of centurion (100 shots of beer in 100 minutes, fucks you up real good, real fast) I was play fighting with my housemate Mr Metaphor/ when he pushed me, my alcohol-addled body limply falling, my head crashing into the car park ground. I was unconscious for a full 15 seconds, during which Mr Metaphor/ thought I was dead and promptly freaked out and ran away. The point of this story is that I groggily picked myself up, had a cider and a smoke, and went about my night, no hard feelings.
It’s not the first time I have been injured by and/or injured my mates in the course of having a good time and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Drunken boxing matches, beer bottles waved in the air with reckless abandon, people being thrown into the boulder-rimmed pool. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then it’s hilarious.
Girls are great to have as ‘one of the guys’ type friends, but beware, they’re not quite as hardy as the rest of your beer-swilling mates. If you were to knock a girl out in a car park by accident, it would be a disaster of potentially party-ending consequence. Much like playing pushing a girl through a window. No one laughs, everyone feels bad, even the victim somehow.
Steph was okay, her knee popped back in (unlike the last time when her friend Jake was the perpetrator, and she had to pop it back in herself then went into shock) and I spent the night feeling like a dick, apologizing and offering to get her stuff. Our first aid kit contains only some gauze eye-pads, sunscreen and aromatic shower gel, but I did read the St. John’s Guide chapter on what to do if someone goes into shock, just in case.
We have however established some new boundaries. She’s still one of the boys. Just not one of the boys you push through an open window.
How to not, not embarass ones’self.
When I began editing On Dit with Steph and Clare, they began to hear some of my drinking tales and tragic romantic misadventures upon our time bonding together in the office at On Dit. It was quickly decided that I should write a regular column entitled ‘Social Fumblings’, to publish not so just the terrible things I end up doing, but the comically self-deprecating way I manage to spin these tales.
The tale of my shaming of On Dit at the 2009 Express Media Conference begins thus…
The first day of the Student Media Conference was drawing to a close and we were descending on the scrappy remains of the catered ham & cheese sandwiches when Zoe Barrow (the amazing young woman who organized the conference) announced that there was a friend-of-a-friend’s house party that night which we were all invited to. Being somewhat partial to the odd house party I quickly scribbled our contact details down and scarpered off to the nearest Liquor Land Express and purchased the cheapest bottle of nondescript Gin my $100 per diem would fund.
A few G & Ts and Black Russians on the hostel roof and it began to dawn on Clare and Steph, who had never seen me drunk in the flesh, just how rowdy I tend to get on the sauce. Nevertheless they shrugged my slightly increased verbosity off and we sauntered back to our dorm for a nap. Not being very tired, while the girls napped I drank Gin on my top bunk and tried halfheartedly to flirt with the German girl in our room in my very broken German – this has since been dubbed my “C game” (versus “A game”).
Cue several hours later to house party – a small single story cottage just on Brunswick Street. Student types milling about with punch in the kitchen, the few smokers milling outside in the fairy-lit backyard strewn with retro couches and picnic rugs. I sat down with the editors of Vertigo, a Sydney based paper, and soon began to put away G & Ts and Black Russians at a prodigious pace. Slowly, my mind fades to black.
What follows was pieced together from various accounts from my po’ faced co-editors and other Conference panellists, with somewhat good reason for said reactions.
Two-thirds of a bottle of Gin and who knows how many Black Russians down in just under 2 hours and I emerged from house announcing loudly to Steph how ‘some nice people in the kitchen gave me shots!’ Soon I began to swap scarves with Steph. This is a bad sign, scarf-swapping drunk. The last time I was this drunk I woke up with the make-up of a single-mother smeared on my face, narrowly avoiding a fight with a man in a taxi rank on Frome Rd.
Back to Melbourne, two and a bit hours into the party and I am shit-faced drunk, belligerently voicing my opinions on matters that aren’t even being discussed to pretty much anyone in earshot, as I try to pair up my co-editors with any male in sight. ‘This is all you need’ I slur, motioning with my hands to the space between Steph’s head and waist. The decision is made to leave and I am walked out to the street t get a cab. We stop by a MacDonald’s and I demand a cheeseburger and try to walk into traffic to hail a cab. Tully, panellist and former editor of Farrago saves me from being hit by traffic and we taxi is back to our hostel.
My next clear memory is sitting in the communal meal room. Clare, Steph and Tully are engaged in an in depth conversation about something important. I have no idea what they are talking about, being very busy using all of my willpower to not pass out on the table. Everyone is aware of this. I announce that I am going to the toilet, politely refusing any assistance getting there. I get halfway there and fall into the wall and proceed to grind my shoulder along the wall the rest of the way to the toilet. I am very impressed. Steph and Clare are not. I return to the table and announce that I am going to bed, Steph making the executive decision to abandon the conversation and escort me lest I get myself into any more trouble.
Still legless, I swipe my access card through the magnetic reader a dozen or so times before realizing Steph has opened it for me. How I got up on my bunk I have no idea, beyond my ability to pull out some semblance of motor function when necessity dictates.
I wake up in my bed feeling a little foggy-headed but relatively not hung-over. I am naked and all of my earthly possessions are in a mountain in the middle of the room. Steph and Clare look at me with scornful eyes. All I can think is how surprisingly handsomely I’ve managed to pull up. This is because I am still drunk.
Student Media Conference, bless you.