Photo/Jamie Hawkesworth.
For over a month and a half I have been ignoring this blog and pretending it doesn’t exist. This has been made especially easy as I don’t have a laptop at the moment (and haven’t for months) and I went to Europe on holiday and then I’ve been busy at work so at times I’ve forgotten that I even had a blog in the first place. The long stints of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ have been interspersed with occasional periods of feeling guilty and like a lazy piece of shit every time it gets mentioned or if someone asks me about it. The whole experience is akin to the feeling you get when you’ve got a pile of washing or you know you have to go to the dentist and the thing needs doing and you know it will be really great if you just do it but also you’re like, nah if I put the washing in my boyfriend’s kids room and shut the door I can’t see it and then I don’t have to put any effort into thinking about it. Like I said, out of sight really is out of mind.
So why am I here, now?
Two things happened. Well, three. The first was that I thought of a thing I wanted to write about, a kind of stupid thing I remembered that happened ages ago that I always thought was a weird thing that people might like to hear about, and then the second thing was that I was getting dressed after having a spa in the changing rooms of the Next Generation Lifestyle Club or whatever they call it, and this girl comes up to me and says “are you KatherineIsAwesome?” and immediately I felt so bad like, fuck, for starters I’m not wearing any makeup at all and I have a giant ‘period pimple’ (or at least that’s what Lani called it) on my chest and I’m standing here in a bra, and then there’s the fact that this person knows my blog exists and I haven’t put shit up there, I am really the worst, zit-covered, laziest blogger of all time. Today was the final straw. About 7 minutes before I started this post, a thing popped up in my Facebook feed, and it was about how Maddy Budd had posted a blog post and then I was like, jesus christ, if Maddy can get her act together and do a million other things in New York, I surely am the absolute, absolute worst.
So now here I am, it’s 4.29pm and I’m at my real job using my work computer and I’m going to just tell you about the thing that happened ages ago that I just remembered. I mean, the story is kind of a non-story but hey, take from it what you will.
Ages ago – years – in fact, I will look up the year now so I can be more accurate.
Okay, so in late 2012, I was in this weird period of time in my life where I had a breakup, and then I had like a full rebound relationship. I basically broke up with my boyfriend and immediately replaced him with someone else who wasn’t really into being my boyfriend (probably should tell that story another time) and then after some real ups and downs and real traumatic shit, that thing with the second guy was over and I was in this real dramatic downer lull like, ‘hey, I’m not cool or pretty and I’m going to be alone forever, I have nothing going for me, I don’t have a real job, I’m back living at mums again, I don’t know what I want to do’ and I was kind of just, well, desperate I guess. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t know, all I know is I was hanging out with people that I probably wouldn’t normally hang out with (not bad people, just like people I didn’t really have anything in common with, etc) mostly just because I was happy that anyone wanted to hang out with me.
Anyway, I was at dinner with a person I probably wouldn’t usually hang out with. It was a weird situation because I half thought this guy wanted to get in my pants and I was kind of just rolling with it, but I was half like, does this guy hate me also at the same time? I can’t say for sure, like maybe he just really didn’t like me but I’m pretty sure what he was doing, or trying to do was that weird negging thing that you read about, that whole thing where if you insult a girl she’s apparently going to now really want to hook up with you or whatever the theory is. We were at this Japanese restaurant and he drove either a BMW or an Audi, can’t remember, after this whole dinner of weird neggy convo, and this whole weird situation with who was going to pay, he dropped me home and he parked outside my house and we must’ve got ice-creams from the gas station or something because he had a Trumpet and here is the thing. He unwrapped the Trumpet, in full. The real pedantic, control freak part of me hates that already because I’m always thinking you should leave the bottom half of the wrapper on the Trumpet because what if the ice-cream leaks out the bottom, you know? Anyway, he got the whole wrapper and then he pushed the little button to wind down the electric window, lifted the wrapped and dropped it right outside. He just put his arm out the window and threw it on the ground.
I’m not exactly the biggest environmentalist but even I was pretty weirded out. Enough to say something anyway, like “um, what are you doing?” And he was all, “I don’t want this dirty ice-cream wrapper in my car, it will dirty my car”. I know you have read a lot to get to this point and it probably doesn’t seem like a big deal but even now I think about this and I’m like, what the actual fuck?! Who DOES that? Who just parks their car OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE and then winds down the window and throws a whole ice-cream wrapper on the ground? I found it so weird and I remember being like, ‘this person is so different to me, why am I here?’ I mean, I actually was thinking ‘this guy is a fucking asshole’ but when I think about it, he’s really just super different to me.
Anyway that’s the end of my story. I’m not sure what the point is. I guess I just was reminded of that time in my life, and I knew the guy was like this when I went to dinner with him but I remember thinking to myself, ‘no one else is interested in you, of course you should just ignore your gut feeling about him and go’ and I really wish I could go back in time and tell myself to just grow some balls and some confidence and really just believe in myself and I keep thinking about other 20-something year old girls out there wasting their time with guys that throw litter out the window outside their houses just because no one told them that they’re better than that.
The end.
PS: I don’t know if that guy is reading this or not because back then I do remember he was heavily against the internet and social media, (like, didn’t even have a personal email address) so probably not but if he is, hey man, I have polled at least 8 people about this littering thing and all of them think it’s a fucking weird and stupid thing to do okay, not just me!
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