On 22

My confusion is thick. It soon makes way to irritation, frustration, before morphing unsuspectingly but rapidly into all encompassing, hot-headed, full blown fury that turns the grey walls white and the blue sky red. My rage is often founded on comprehensible things. The injustices of modern society and the seemingly ignorant stupidity of those in charge of running it; the way innocence is so often caught up in crossfire with there no one left to pick up the pieces; the hurtful, horrible and hateful things that people do to each other. But I would be lying if I said all my anger was valid, justified and well thought out. The questions that inundate my everyday life are generally of the more mundane, the less pressing, the mostly obvious. Why is Ikea furniture actually impossible to put together? Why do my clothes remain stained even after the use of stain remover? Why does the garlic always burn when I put it in the frying pan? Why do gas, water and electricity bills all arrive at the same time? Why are supermarkets not uniformly set out Australia wide? Why does my mother call at 9pm on a Saturday night when I’m burbling beer banter, sitting in a rainy ash covered pub courtyard somewhere and never at 3pm on a Wednesday when my eyes are rolling back in my head with boredom and I will do anything, anything to not write another word of this assignment? How do I go to the supermarket every day yet never have enough ingredients to make more than one meal that isn’t pasta, or toast, or spinach leaves with some sad tomato and mustard dregs? My anger usually dissipates when I’m wasting hours with my elbows turning black from newsprint or lying in a pool of sunscreen scented sweat dripping watermelon and giggling reminiscence, when the daylight hours have been many but the curtains are still drawn. Tell me what it means to be an adult, I plead with the plethora of overdue notices, the decisions that make my stomach twist and flop, the situations that leave me a wrung out dithering mess, because I still do not know.   

 When someone asked me how I felt about turning twenty two, my response was fuelled by a stream of cheap champagne. I answered with my mouth full of dip from the platter that I’d been dreaming about making for weeks, so excited I was to have a justification to buy expensive cheese. ‘I’ve never known so much,’ I declared, ‘but I have never known so little about what to do with that knowledge.’ I was quite pleased with how that sounded, believing it to be clever and prophetic, and repeated it several times over the coming weeks when people asked me about my birthday, even inscribing it in the notebook that was reserved for writing down things I wanted to remember when I was 97 years old and riddled with dementia. Trying being grown up on for size is a recurrent daily activity. Caught somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, forcing myself to try and grasp the concept of delayed gratification, of foresight without being suffocated by hindsight, shaking off the warmth of nostalgia and embracing the chilly unknown comes about as easily as constructing flowery metaphors after a semester of banging my head against a brick wall of statistics.

Am I real grown up now? I’ve asked, too many times to count, as we chit chat in pretty dresses, amongst the beginnings of lives so carefully but accidentally created. In the beginning there were milk crates with cushions, an old laminex desk and a basket for dairy. ‘Isn’t there something that should be in that hole?’ visitors asked quizzically. Long-life milk will never taste okay again. Even the purchase of a fridge after six weeks of sweaty cheddar and broccoli-in-the-pantry did not segway to functionality. Illusionary grand future plans, lengthy lists, strict budgets, forbidden chocolate, academic and social successes for every week of the year, melt and congeal into a barely recognisable puddle that looks a lot like 40 hours of work and two hours of idle study, eleven dollars for as many days, where I serve flat whites and  scrambled eggs every Sunday while willing myself not to vomit, phone conversations are had with a face buried in featherdown, Rihanna rattles windowpanes and the washing basket overflows.  

Then something happens to remind us of our mortality. I cried when I was watching the news, learning of a brother, a son, who would never go home again. Had he not died, his name would have never passed my lips: it was only in the wave of public mourning that I knew of the life wasted. I walked home in the shroud of darkness, the ebb of fear making me sneak glances behind my shoulder, my stare fuzzy with wine and the warmth of friends but still suddenly attuned to the things that are okay when you do it all those other times except for that once.

I do not always understand, when people envy me my youth. I make the same mistakes often, I want to say, I never have any money, I want to say, I lack certainty, clarity, stability, I miss deadlines, flights and birthdays and I am always graced with realisations long after the moment has passed. One Sunday morning I hobbled home with hollow eyes and a wrung out soul, stinking of cigarettes and of all the fleeting decisions I had made. I lay outside in the dappled light of the fading sun that afternoon and for the second time in a year wished for all things ordinary, for love, a vegetable garden, summer heat to wrap around me like an old friend. This tumultuous wave of life heaves me up and spits me out shuddering onto wet sand, nearly drowned every time.

Case and point, the realisation always comes after the storm, and the temptation to now recite cheesy song lyrics or to summarise in a neat and packaged cliché is overwhelming. While I ignore all the things I should be doing and faff about finding lost socks to put into pairs and writing ambitious To Do lists for tomorrow so I can justify going to bed at 9.30pm and watching Season 2 of Skins for the ninth time, I can see real adulthood hovering in some sort of illusive glass box just out of my reach. There’s a great danger if I grab at it suddenly it will fall and smash into a million smithereens. Best let it suspend there for a while, and I can say I couldn’t be happier about that.

Debunking hippie myths: how one cynic had the time of her life at ConFest

‘Do you want to go to ConFest over Easter?’

The question hung in the air as I pondered my response. I didn’t really know what ConFest was, though I felt the ‘fest’ fulfilled the criteria of the good time I was looking for. I did know that it had been months since I had escaped the smoggy urban fullness of Melbourne, since I’d seen a moon without an orange ring circling it. It’d been months of being surrounded by other people, a bustling populous of order, time, deadlines and ticket inspectors. A five-day adventure beyond the metropolitan postcode area that cost $80 for a ticket sounded like exactly what I wanted to do.

ConFest stayed simmering on the backburner until a few days before the midsemester break. Were we going? Attempts at research were met with a website that appeared not to have been updated since 1994 and a Facebook page where people with names like ‘Phoebe –Lou Raincloud Desiree’ argued about whether the recent floods and the increased mosquito population were going to ruin their time. Where exactly did this ‘event’, that claimed to be non-commercial, family-friendly and host to about 3000 people, take place? A map and directions highlighted a space 13 kilometres west of the NSW town of Deniliquin. Apparently it ran for anywhere between 4-6 days , where alcohol, drug and sexual abuse were not tolerated but since there was no actual security or paid work personnel, issues of this nature tended to be ‘negotiated.’ After I finished reading the spiel about the workshops (commonly yoga, meditation, or discussion groups centred on topics of earthly well-being and sustainability), the drum circles, the fire twirling and the fact it was a ‘clothing optional’ event, my cynic’s highbrow was raised so far it had disappeared into my hair. Despite my scepticism, we visited Coles on Thursday night and bought cans of lentils and baked beans. There were cooking facilities there, so at least we were saving cash. We went to the bottle-o and bought a slab of tinnies, red and white casks of wine so if the actual river that was said to be a part of the idyllic bush setting turned out to be crap we could be sustained by a river of goon.  We drove for seven hours under the Good Friday sun, boot packed to bursting with mosquito repellent, Doritos, deckchairs, lanterns and 500 tealight candles (there turned out to be a total fire ban and we had 3 torches between 17 people).

We arrived and were greeted by a naked man who grinned at us and handed us our tickets and a booklet. There were testimonials inside one in which a woman claimed that she had lost hope in life before attending ConFest. We wound up the windows against the dust and navigated our convoy through the tent settlements while people stood in front of the cars hugging and children rode bikes with no shoes or helmets. We pitched camp in the rapidly fading light next to the river while the wind whipped through the gum trees and the nudist couple in the caravan next to us looked on with smiles. There was no phone reception and we drank punch made in a 10-litre cooking pot. We danced in our underwear at the silent disco and tentatively moved our bodies to the beats of the drums in the marketplace.

In the morning we woke with the sun and the birds songs’. Less than half an hour elapsed before we picked our way through the burrs lining the river banks and slid down the muddy sides into the water. Maybe there was actually something in the river I can attribute to my ensuing feelings. I ducked my head under, letting my cynical and grime-covered self be soothed by the current.

If someone had told me of the sheer happiness I would feel over the next few days and why, I wouldn’t have believed them. Climbing naked into a pit of liquid grey mud with 15 strangers? Washing off said mud in the river shallows before traipsing past barrel fires into the slightly-eucalypt, mostly-feet smelling steam room, before drying off and adorning myself with body paint in the presence of other strangers and mirrors? Lying in the litter of the bush floor with my eyes closed, listening to warbles of an incomprehensible ancient tongue whilst wind chimes flutter next to my ear and ants crawl into my underwear, and this is meant to be giving me insight into some kind of journey?  I sit in my lounge room listening to the cars drive past and remember letting myself be washed downstream by the river current before making my way through the silent trees, bark crunching beneath my feet. Sitting in circles of friends, forgetting where I ended and they began, humming ditties to a guitar’s tune while the moon rose behind the trees and the whole Milky Way filled the sky. I remember the unbridled joy that filled the faces of the people who danced in front of the fire, the beating of the drums that filled the air for what seemed like always. This was human emotion in its purest form, untouched and untainted by daily routine, societal life, having things to do and places to be.

On the last afternoon when our spirits were beginning to waver thanks to the relentless wind and dust eroding our faces, we participated in a spontaneous choir that swelled from 10 people to 150 in the thick of the ConFest village. After leading us through an array of activities that included speaking jibberish and yapping like small dogs, the conductor arranged us into two lines facing each other. One by one we were led through the procession holding onto the shoulders of the person in front. Each person we passed would say ‘I love you’ into our ear. Even with my newly found optimism and acceptance for the diversity of human behaviour, I was unsure. I doubted the sincerity of being told I was loved by someone I had never met. As the procession had passed me by, I repeated ‘I love you’ over and over. I was even more sceptical. The words felt like they had no meaning and were forming a lumpy one-sound phrase I was having to push out of my mouth. I took my turn in the line: I had come this far, need I back down now? I couldn’t recognise any of the voices – they could have belonged to anyone. My friends were dispersed amongst the crowd but I couldn’t pick their docile tones from any of the other whispered confessions of adoration. Whilst I had felt as though each ‘I love you’ I had uttered, became less and less convincing, it wasn’t the case as I took my turn.  Even after someone whispered in my ear ‘I want to lock you up in my dungeon’, I  was expelled at the end of the parade with my eyes half closed and my face swimming with drunken bliss. My heart was calm and my soul mended. I was dropping out of uni and moving to Nimbin. Fuck society, I was home.  

Now that I am home, I can say that I enjoy eating my breakfast from a bowl that isn’t caked with last night’s pasta remains, and I haven’t had too much trouble swapping river baths for showers involving soap. With that said, ConFest rekindled a fire that was dwindling to cooling embers inside me. Believing in love and believing in the goodness of the world and in other people doesn’t seem like ideas that are so farfetched anymore, or ones reserved for hippies who take too much acid. The spirit that filled the air in the bushland somewhere between Moulamein and Deniliquin, that filled me as I sat in a spa chatting to a 50 year old man named Grant about grammar at an unknown hour of the morning, that filled all of us as we arched our necks back and howled to the moon, can still exist here, in the urban practicality of Melbourne we call home.   

One Student’s Struggle: is working in hospitality a rite of passage or just a soul eroding monotony?

On the good days, I find commonalities with someone from an opposite life. I banter and joke, there is a spring in my step, I turn my face to the early morning sky without a thought of the hour of the day and I smile at the sallow-faced commuters one-by-one. On the bad days, I scorn every inane request, every ‘excuse me’, I have no tolerance for the noise, the rush, the things that go wrong. On these days the hours trickle by and I grit my teeth as every minute passes, unsure as to whether I will finish my shift with my sanity and will to live intact.

Jobs within the hospitality and retail sectors are far from uncommon for students, particularly those still in secondary education or the early years of an undergraduate degree. These types of unemployment took on a new role of emphasis for me when I moved out of home and my income was no longer purely disposable. Start and finish times suddenly mattered more, since rent and bills had to be paid and milk and bread bought and when I put ladders in all my stockings there was no parent figure around who might kindly pick me up some at the supermarket.

All of these lessons provided me with sound and valuable learning curves, and I can hardly say my everyday quality of life has diminished since I flew the nest. With that said, years on I am still trudging my way through what feels like the world’s longest university degree (please stop asking me how many years I have to go, it makes me despondent) and still slaving over tables with coffee permanently ingrained into my skin for what feels like a small cut above the minimum wage.

‘Oh it could be worse!’ I singsong, but as I approach my fortieth hour in the week of meeting other people’s needs before my own in shoes that give me no back support, I very much doubt it can.

A summer of sweating in a café in a suburb where the closest thing to a seaside breeze is when a rubbish truck drives past has given me plenty of time to ponder the pros and cons of working one of the bottom rungs of the hospitality ladder. I don’t feel like I’ve grasped onto any final conclusions but I have come up with the following.

1. Thank God for Centrelink

As many profanities have been muttered regarding the government department that begrudgingly provides us with a fortnightly allowance, existing without it would prove near impossible. Despite the bitter employees and handfuls of bureaucratic red tape, we are lucky to live in a place that supports students, and pretty generously at that. Sure, by the time I graduate I’ll have accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in HECS debt but since that will be slowly whittled away from my tax when I have a ‘real job’, I’m happy to place that at the back of my mind. My only gripe is Centrelink’s makes-little-sense eligibility criteria – surely if I live out of home and study full time and you live out of home and study full time we should be receiving the same benefits? With that said, Centrelink – thank you. I hate your automatic voice recognition feature (which doesn’t work, by the way) and I can never remember the answers to my secret questions in order to use your online services, but I know I am lucky to have you.

2. Summer Motivation Hits its Peak

I have never been filled with more ambition to fulfil my career dreams than after a shift where I have washed 30 salt shakers, accidentally shattered a latte glass into a pram ( fortunately without a baby in it) and served a table of beefcake Collingwood supporters with face tattoos ‘bundy and coke thanks luv’ at 10am. With every fork I polish, I think about what I want to do for the years to come, and I know it’s not this. Whilst this industry is made for some, and I admire those with a passion for it and wonder how on earth they summon the tolerance – it’s definitely not for me. I feel another line appear on my forehead every time someone orders a ‘quarter strength decaf soy latte with Equal and no lid on the cup thanks’. But all the hours I spend raging over how shit the human race can be remind me of why I’m studying – so I can end up in a job I care about, doing things I find interesting and engaging. My passion for my studies usually reaches its peak in the middle of summer, though I wish I could bottle and preserve some of that enthusiasm and ingest it during SWOTVAC when I’ve been hitting refresh on Facebook for three hours while twelve weeks of lecture notes on statistics remain untouched in front of me.

But in the mean time, I think of this as a means to an end, where the end will be that much more rewarding since I’ve placed 8764 cappucinos in front of people who don’t say thank you. But that’s okay, because I can see the end.

3. I Am a Good Customer

I am nice to people who serve me in restaurants, I make few alterations to the menu, I don’t get cross if I’m given a flat white instead of a latte, I’ll happily sit on a communal table and when I put my knife and fork together, yes I have finished my meal and you can take my plate, thank you very much. Working customer service jobs make you a kinder, more understanding and empathetic person. Even if your train comes in two minutes and you’re pissed off because you forgot your lunch and your umbrella and you were woken up by a leaf blower at 7am, you smile at the person who takes your coffee order because you understand and know what it’s like to be them.

4. The Value of the Dollar and the Meaning of Hard Work

I understand them. In theory. Even though I can approximate how many tables I served to obtain the paycheck clutched in my hot little hand, it doesn’t stop me blowing it in the first three days, then making 20 bucks last for the next two, before having to use my debit card to make a six-dollar purchase at Coles because I no longer have enough in my account to withdraw cash. Despite my lack of money management skills, I’d still like to think I understand what it means to earn it.

5. It’s Probably the Most Productive Thing I’d be Doing Anyway

This applies to the days where I wake up feeling like I’ve slept face-down in the Sahara desert in the middle of the day; where I can taste every minute of the last 12 hours and I regret it all.

‘Well I may as well be working when I’m that hungover,’ I said to a friend recently. ‘I wouldn’t be doing anything else anyway.’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But it’s hell.’

It is hell, from the moment you walk in and the room is still spinning, to the moment you walk out feeling like you’ve just run a marathon and your muscles are starting to be eaten away by septic acid. But, I argue, at least I can rock up five minutes before my shift starts smelling like a pub floor, eat two hash browns and drink five litres of apple juice, and still manage to perform my duties to a reasonably satisfactory level. As long as I don’t vomit when I’m clearing a table or drop anyone’s breakfast, though everyone notices my bloodshot eyes and shallow breathing as I will away the nausea, they mostly ignore it.

So even though I spent most of my rent money and have once again disproven the highly contested theory of If You Go to Bed Before Midnight You’ll Be Fine, at least I’m at work earning it back and trying to regain status as a functional member of society.

Plus there’s usually someone worse off than me.

6. So At Least

Days of assessing the alleged silver linings of the hospitality industry have left me feeling lightened. Even if everything I’ve outlined above is blatantly untrue, the knots in my back are starting to unclench as the realisations dawn upon me. Crap hours, crap pay and the broadcasting of humanity’s really ugly qualities – ticking all the boxes. But you have to crawl before you can walk, so I guess that means I have to have surgery on my arm for a burn obtained from carrying a chicken parmigiana plate, before I can get paid for doing what I love.