Tomorrow is Valentines Day. As much as I'd like to pretend that I'll spend it cackling at the concept with friends; the concept of being one-of-two smitten summery lovers, collapsing into Parisian bliss... the reality is that I'll no doubt wind up wrapped in a blanket at home, scoffing down Light & Creamy mango ice cream, whilst glued to Sex And The City trying not to shed tears, and wondering where in my life it all went horribly wrong.
I have never had a Valentine. I have never been asked to be someone's Valentine. I have never been given a one-dollar chocolate from a secret admirer on Valentines Day courtesy of my high school.
My Valentines day experience generally consists of this: Fantasising about James Franco or Eddie Redmayne appearing magically at my front door, suddenly so painfully sure of their sexuality... that is, being dramatically converted to homosexuality - and being all too willing to wisp me off into the night, where they will dance with me and serenade me until midnight, when Valentines Day falls away into the 15th. Then, when the night is dead and gone, Eddie, with his London charm and curiously muscled bod (of course) will carry me to my front porch as though I were a genderswapped Cinderella, the night dead and buried. He will bid me adieu in his orgasm-inducing accent - but the stupidly handsome international-celebrity-actor-of-my-choosing will seek me out forevermore, simply smitten, our incredibly vapid and otherwise entirely artificial romance cascading into years of blind love and possibly even marriage.
These are the giggly daydreams I ponder over Valentines Day - but if you ever asked me how I really felt, I'd never, ever confess.
When one falls into the category of Perpetually Single - as I quite am - and have been a merry singleton for the entirety of ones life, one tends to develop a sort of protective shield - an anti-romance force field, if you will - that radiates destructively outwards, repelling all romantic gestures and cliche shows of affection on and around Valentines Day. Often doing so with great and squawking velocity. One rejects all clear-cut notions of Valentines Day romancing, and talks whimsically of their singlehood and how so! very! happy! they are to not feel tied down - and, ultimately, how little they give a flying fuck about Valentines. You'll pretend it's just an excuse for consumers to consume on behalf of their lovers, and you'll say it's just another day, and why the Hell shouldn't we love our partners with such passion every other day of the week?
This, however, is an age-old and mystifying lie. The lie of not caring for Valentines.
It starts in high school. Picture a boy of fourteen years old - not particularly attractive. Actually quite sad-looking. Acne-strewn, pubescent, still thinks excessive hair gel is acceptable resulting in a massive forehead punctuated by a kind of sticky verandah stretching overhead. Not yet up to dating, but not entirely unaware of the concept. It's Valentines Day yet again, and the kid has no clue what the fuck that shit means. A stall is promptly set up in the middle of the school courtyard, being captained by two senior students. The function of the stall is that if anyone wishes to send a 'love letter' (that is, a small piece of candy punctuated by a cute little declaration of affection) to a secret somebody, they need only sign their name, pay a dollar (to a charity of the schools' choosing) - and wait until after lunchtime, where the letters will be sent out to The Chosen Ones in their various classes.
The boy thinks, oh. Oh my. What if... what if someone sends one to me? What if someone is kind enough to send a stick of gum my way? What if someone likes me? What if someone actually likes me? ('Likes me' being the adolescent term for 'expresses some form of romantic affection towards me'.)
Alas. The candy-dispensers come around to the boys' classroom, giving 'love letters' to every person in the room - except Hair Gel Verandah Kid. The popular kids, of course, are practically showered in gifts. But the dorks, the 'losers', the 'uncool', the hair gel kids and weird anime girls with their heads in a book - they go without. The boy sighs to himself. Welp! It's not my time this year. But I don't care. I just don't care. Who the hell would care about Valentines Day? Who gives a shit?
The boy hi-fives his loveless peers and expresses a vocal lack of concern. He will carry about his life - he will drink illegally, experiment with drugs and engage in a variety of pointless one night stands. His skin will clear up (somewhat), he'll abandon Excessive Hair Gel Verandah; and all the times he never received his minty fresh stick of love on Valentines Day will be remarked upon as not ever affecting him. Dude, why would I care? It's just another day.
But that lack of giving a shit is only a cover - a cloak to prevent the world from seeing just how torn apart he really was. Just how loveless and besmirched he really felt. He will always remember how it felt to not receive a love letter on Valentines Day. And it will sting.
And that is how one becomes chronically obsessed with hating Valentines Day. Totes not about me, by the way. TOTES.
Try as you might to pretend you don't give a damn, but tomorrow I know where you'll be, oh single lady of leisure. I know what you'll be up to. I know how you'll be feeling. I'm onto you.
When you're sitting down on February the 14th, done posting your obligatory status update about how you've run out of fucks to give for Valentines Day, I know what you'll do. The lights will dim. The tissues will come out, and the KFC bucket chicken will appear before you like a bucket of slow and steady death ready to euthanise you. You'll turn on your television - and chuck on The Notebook.
Because no matter how hard we try, every Single Lady remembers the pain of not getting anything on Valentines Day.
So if you're taken and expressing romantic affection for your partner, whether it's a Public Display or a Facebook Status Lined With Love Hearts, and someone comments expressing their desire to throw up onto their laptops, just remember:
They're the fourteen-year-old pubescent boys with acne and excessive hair gel. They're the weird girl with her nose in a book and the anime addiction. They're the kids high-fiving each other for not receiving any one-dollar love letters or sticks of gum. Sure, they might be older now - 20 and at university, even - but take pity.
It's just a sad lie. It's nothing more than a lie. It's the lie of not caring for Valentines Day.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
The Clueless New Millennial and how I'm severely limiting myself for no good reason.
I'm in trouble, friends. I'm in a fair whack of a hard time at present.
No, a friend hasn't died, and no, assorted relatives and cousins haven't been bashing me mercilessly to the point of post traumatic stress disorder. I haven't been witness to a violent crime of such a staggering and heartrending capacity that I've been left in a state of depression and confusion. Of all the "difficult things" going on at present, none of those are even close to being one of them. So I guess that makes me pretty damn privileged.
I'm currently going through strife due to being one of the thousands of people in Melbourne that aren't currently employed. And I'm being a bit of an asshole about it.
We're going through the aftereffects of what has been dubbed "The Great Recession". The Great Recession is similar to The Great Depression, except back in the decade preceding World War 2 we didn't exactly have government cash-handouts for the drug-addled and unemployed. In this day and age we have a plethora of jobless folks getting by on two-to-four hundred dollars a fortnight doled out by Tha Guvament, with very few jobs to go around and more than a few Seeking Employment, so in that sense we're doin' okay, despite nobody being able to get a fucking job.
I, however, am not entitled to weighty Cash Dollar Benefits at the discretion of the Australian government, as I am not struggling. No, I'm not a wealthy Toorak gentleman mooching soullessly off my wealthy parents who occasionally forget I exist; nor am I the type to simply swipe Daddy's credit card - "borrowed" - in purchase of Ksubi's new collection. I am not 'one of those'. I am the post-adolescent, the middle-class, the ordinary citizen: the people who by rights should be getting the fuck out of the nest, but can't fathom fleeing the nest, let alone fathom paying for their own abortions.
I am a Clueless New Millennial. It's a thing.
We New Millennials are the ones in their twenties. We are The Connected, the social media bandits. We are progressive optimists who would legalise gay marriage in a heartbeat, if Parliament weren't so stacked with post-menopausal septuagenarians. We are the ones who slave away in lower-echelon retail jobs, while having never gotten our hands dirty outside of the house. We have never cut wood, but we've certainly worked cash registers. We busk for beer money and borrow twenties off our parents. We furiously press the importance of justice and nourishment for starving Ethiopians to our bored parents or housemates at the dinner table - before feasting ravenously at our home-cooked meals as though moments earlier we weren't stressing global awareness. We are vegans who sneak cheese, and get band tattoos at fifteen years of age because Marilyn Manson Saved My Life. We are pathetic, lazy and Just Don't Know How Good We've Got It.
We New Millennials are the ones who don't have a clue how to survive out on our own, and have about as many life experiences as we do qualifications by the age of twenty. This is who I am, and who I will forever be judged as, by the strength of my pop culture knowledge and overwhelming quantity of Facebook status updates alone.
My cousin moved out of home when she was thirty - shortly after getting married. My other cousin moved out of home when he was thirty - shortly after getting engaged. My third cousin from the same family is still living at home. He's twenty-seven.
The products of Generation Y, the Millennial Generation, are sure exhausting their time spent with the fam. The standard Gen Y doesn't have to worry about getting out of the house to aid their ailing family. They can't even imagine trekking five miles in the snow out to the old lumber mill to cut wood, stack 'em high for mere pennies an hour. They aren't forced into precarious jobs down in coal mines, and aren't left with no other option but begging in the streets. They can sit at home FOR MONTHS job-seeking, and not worry about going broke - because they don't need to worry about being thrown out in a rage. The standard Gen Y/New Millennial knows what suffering is, but only through the lens of A Current Affair and the break-ups on their Facebook feed. With the combination of that and the post-Great Recession lack of employment on offer, more and more Gen Y's are being left unemployed and a nuisance to their families.
Like me. Little old irritating me.
But then I stop to wonder: is it possible I'm just not trying hard enough? Is it possible that I'm deluding myself into believing I'm trying my hardest? Is this all I've got, or am I really just lounging around day after day, occasionally popping onto Seek.com in-between episodes of Elementary and Doctor Who? Do I award myself points for sending a resume every once in a while, like a high school kid who pats themselves on the back for titling an essay? What's the deal here, Brandon?
Then I realise that I'm holding myself back.
Of all the job fields out there one could peruse, my field of preference is in Administration. I desire to work in an office. I like computers, I like word documents, I like writing, and I can type like Roadrunner on a good day with a pretty damn good accuracy rating. My handwriting is flowery and elegant like what I imagine Taylor Swift's vagina must look like. So what's holding me back from shooting out more resumes than Perez Hilton can spit celeb-oriented venom?
It's the phones, I realise. It's the interacting with total strangers.
I don't want to interact with people. I don't want to look at people. I don't want to have to smile and tell them where the lavatory is. The idea of it makes me feel slightly nauseous - not because I'm an asshole, but because I have *wait for it* crippling social anxiety with strangers (when entirely sober). I sit on trains and imagine junkies boarding with the intention of knocking me out. I worry that making a minute mistake in front of a crowd will warrant pitchforks and torches being brandished, an angry mob shrieking my name. I fear dropping coffee on patrons and copping homophobic abuse from dudebro patrons in a standard retail job. You'd think after almost two years doing club photography, I'd have quashed the social anxiety. Nope, still there, just waiting for the day I get knocked out for looking at someone the wrong way, or 'giving someone tone'.
I don't want to have to talk to people. I just want to sit in a room or cubicle all day and collate. Sounds depressing? Not for me. I prefer being bathed in fluorescent lights to skipping daintily through green pastures. I love the sound a printer makes when it presses ink to a page row by row. I find the clicking of pens mentally stimulating. I find the saving of completed word documents a relief. I find putting paper through a shredder a god damn orgasm, kind of like how serial killers must feel when they dispose of their victims and can finally move on to the next one.
Worried by that analogy? Me too.
Either way, I don't want to interact with people. I've done the retail thing. I've done the customer service thing. I've recently finished doing the club photography thing. I'm done with interacting with strangers; with smiling at them and making them feel wanted. I'm done with pretending I give a shit about you people, god damn it! Just kidding, I totally do. But I'm seriously done with 'customer service' - I just want to please myself. I want the universe to chuck this Clueless New Millennial a line - a line in the form of binder books, Excel spreadsheets and mindless collation. I want a pleasant job in an office that I can go to in the daylight hours, so I can finally move out of Mum and Dad's place, get my own and surround myself with an ocean of cats to snuggle in the nighttime. I will then sit on my porch with a cigarette, and cackle maniacally at the thought of people older than twenty ever daring to bother their parents by staying at home.
But you just can't get there without having to talk on the god damn phone.
Maybe it's time to suck it up and get a job at Maccas.
No, a friend hasn't died, and no, assorted relatives and cousins haven't been bashing me mercilessly to the point of post traumatic stress disorder. I haven't been witness to a violent crime of such a staggering and heartrending capacity that I've been left in a state of depression and confusion. Of all the "difficult things" going on at present, none of those are even close to being one of them. So I guess that makes me pretty damn privileged.
I'm currently going through strife due to being one of the thousands of people in Melbourne that aren't currently employed. And I'm being a bit of an asshole about it.
We're going through the aftereffects of what has been dubbed "The Great Recession". The Great Recession is similar to The Great Depression, except back in the decade preceding World War 2 we didn't exactly have government cash-handouts for the drug-addled and unemployed. In this day and age we have a plethora of jobless folks getting by on two-to-four hundred dollars a fortnight doled out by Tha Guvament, with very few jobs to go around and more than a few Seeking Employment, so in that sense we're doin' okay, despite nobody being able to get a fucking job.
I, however, am not entitled to weighty Cash Dollar Benefits at the discretion of the Australian government, as I am not struggling. No, I'm not a wealthy Toorak gentleman mooching soullessly off my wealthy parents who occasionally forget I exist; nor am I the type to simply swipe Daddy's credit card - "borrowed" - in purchase of Ksubi's new collection. I am not 'one of those'. I am the post-adolescent, the middle-class, the ordinary citizen: the people who by rights should be getting the fuck out of the nest, but can't fathom fleeing the nest, let alone fathom paying for their own abortions.
I am a Clueless New Millennial. It's a thing.
We New Millennials are the ones in their twenties. We are The Connected, the social media bandits. We are progressive optimists who would legalise gay marriage in a heartbeat, if Parliament weren't so stacked with post-menopausal septuagenarians. We are the ones who slave away in lower-echelon retail jobs, while having never gotten our hands dirty outside of the house. We have never cut wood, but we've certainly worked cash registers. We busk for beer money and borrow twenties off our parents. We furiously press the importance of justice and nourishment for starving Ethiopians to our bored parents or housemates at the dinner table - before feasting ravenously at our home-cooked meals as though moments earlier we weren't stressing global awareness. We are vegans who sneak cheese, and get band tattoos at fifteen years of age because Marilyn Manson Saved My Life. We are pathetic, lazy and Just Don't Know How Good We've Got It.
We New Millennials are the ones who don't have a clue how to survive out on our own, and have about as many life experiences as we do qualifications by the age of twenty. This is who I am, and who I will forever be judged as, by the strength of my pop culture knowledge and overwhelming quantity of Facebook status updates alone.
My cousin moved out of home when she was thirty - shortly after getting married. My other cousin moved out of home when he was thirty - shortly after getting engaged. My third cousin from the same family is still living at home. He's twenty-seven.
The products of Generation Y, the Millennial Generation, are sure exhausting their time spent with the fam. The standard Gen Y doesn't have to worry about getting out of the house to aid their ailing family. They can't even imagine trekking five miles in the snow out to the old lumber mill to cut wood, stack 'em high for mere pennies an hour. They aren't forced into precarious jobs down in coal mines, and aren't left with no other option but begging in the streets. They can sit at home FOR MONTHS job-seeking, and not worry about going broke - because they don't need to worry about being thrown out in a rage. The standard Gen Y/New Millennial knows what suffering is, but only through the lens of A Current Affair and the break-ups on their Facebook feed. With the combination of that and the post-Great Recession lack of employment on offer, more and more Gen Y's are being left unemployed and a nuisance to their families.
Like me. Little old irritating me.
But then I stop to wonder: is it possible I'm just not trying hard enough? Is it possible that I'm deluding myself into believing I'm trying my hardest? Is this all I've got, or am I really just lounging around day after day, occasionally popping onto Seek.com in-between episodes of Elementary and Doctor Who? Do I award myself points for sending a resume every once in a while, like a high school kid who pats themselves on the back for titling an essay? What's the deal here, Brandon?
Then I realise that I'm holding myself back.
Of all the job fields out there one could peruse, my field of preference is in Administration. I desire to work in an office. I like computers, I like word documents, I like writing, and I can type like Roadrunner on a good day with a pretty damn good accuracy rating. My handwriting is flowery and elegant like what I imagine Taylor Swift's vagina must look like. So what's holding me back from shooting out more resumes than Perez Hilton can spit celeb-oriented venom?
It's the phones, I realise. It's the interacting with total strangers.
I don't want to interact with people. I don't want to look at people. I don't want to have to smile and tell them where the lavatory is. The idea of it makes me feel slightly nauseous - not because I'm an asshole, but because I have *wait for it* crippling social anxiety with strangers (when entirely sober). I sit on trains and imagine junkies boarding with the intention of knocking me out. I worry that making a minute mistake in front of a crowd will warrant pitchforks and torches being brandished, an angry mob shrieking my name. I fear dropping coffee on patrons and copping homophobic abuse from dudebro patrons in a standard retail job. You'd think after almost two years doing club photography, I'd have quashed the social anxiety. Nope, still there, just waiting for the day I get knocked out for looking at someone the wrong way, or 'giving someone tone'.
I don't want to have to talk to people. I just want to sit in a room or cubicle all day and collate. Sounds depressing? Not for me. I prefer being bathed in fluorescent lights to skipping daintily through green pastures. I love the sound a printer makes when it presses ink to a page row by row. I find the clicking of pens mentally stimulating. I find the saving of completed word documents a relief. I find putting paper through a shredder a god damn orgasm, kind of like how serial killers must feel when they dispose of their victims and can finally move on to the next one.
Worried by that analogy? Me too.
Either way, I don't want to interact with people. I've done the retail thing. I've done the customer service thing. I've recently finished doing the club photography thing. I'm done with interacting with strangers; with smiling at them and making them feel wanted. I'm done with pretending I give a shit about you people, god damn it! Just kidding, I totally do. But I'm seriously done with 'customer service' - I just want to please myself. I want the universe to chuck this Clueless New Millennial a line - a line in the form of binder books, Excel spreadsheets and mindless collation. I want a pleasant job in an office that I can go to in the daylight hours, so I can finally move out of Mum and Dad's place, get my own and surround myself with an ocean of cats to snuggle in the nighttime. I will then sit on my porch with a cigarette, and cackle maniacally at the thought of people older than twenty ever daring to bother their parents by staying at home.
But you just can't get there without having to talk on the god damn phone.
Maybe it's time to suck it up and get a job at Maccas.
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