Hangovers, unalienable proof of the law of physics that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

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Recently I gave up drinking.

Something I decided about drinking was that the fun I enjoyed was hardly worth the pain I went through. More importantly, they were about equal. You see for every action in life there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Sober weekend

Friday night

Friday night involves being stuck at a bad party, totally sober whilst talking to someone about their tattoo. It’s in a foreign language because culture is so like totally cool and like being like open minded is like totally like their thing. Then someone spills a drink on you (or as happened to me a few weeks ago, vomits on you). You’re driving because your not drinking so you find yourself patiently waiting for your anonymous friend to whom you are intending to give a lift home. First, she must finish making out with the ugly guy she’s picked up.

This situation equals pain rating of about 3 out of 5 hairy spiders or fun rating of about -3 out of 5 lollypops.

Saturday morning

You jump out of bed at 9:00am, well rested and ready for a big day.

A quick room tidy is followed by reading the paper over a cup of carefully crafted coffee. The day progresses by hitting the gym, a late brunch with a friend, a quick bit of shopping during which you find some awesome tights in your size on sale, a phone call to a friend who is going through a bad breakup, then sorting through all your reading required for next week’s politics tute. The evening consists of heading out for a dinner date and then meeting friends at a new bar and a late night dumplings session.

This situation mixes productivity and a bit of socialising with an aggregate fun rating of 3 out of 5 lollypops.

Ok so now let’s replay this situation when drinking is involved.

Friday night

You have pre-drinks at a girlfriend’s house and borrow a hot dress so you are feeling fine.  At the party you are talking to someone about their totally awesome tattoo when the buzz from vodka kicks in so even though it’s a bit rude you pawn this boring person off to a recently acquired friend who you met a few hours earlier when you split a cab. You make your way over to the best looking guy at the party and just when he mentions his girlfriend (who does med and washes dying babies when she’s not attending to her Miss Australia duties) someone throws up on you. Perfect excuse to leave the conversation... From nowhere a total hottie (who you didn’t notice before) who is half God, half an exercise is the perfection of Latin genetics appears, helps you clean up in bathroom whilst complementing your great dress. Then he invites you to another party and because your friend is making out with some ugly guy you agree to go with. Turns out the other party was hosted by professional skateboarder who has a massive place including pool and heaps of free drinks.

After a game of twister with three professional athletes who were all shirtless for some mysterious reason and an impromptu salsa class with your Latin love interest, you gorge on two minute noodles and crash in a huge double bed upstairs.

Fun rating for the evening was about 5 out of 5 lollypops.

Saturday morning

You wake up and you can taste every single thing that you eaten and drunk in the past four days because the residue has remained on your tongue and fermented into distinctive fuzz, a new life-form named Gerald.  Whilst you are wondering where the tiny homeless man who slept in your mouth has gone, you roll over and smell your hair which has absorbed all the aromas of the past evening, cigarettes, latin sweat and vomit. Suddenly you remember that the previous night someone did in fact vomit on you and the remains of that vomit are probably still there because you did a half arse clean up job because you were trashed. You look down at your friend’s dress which you now have to wear home with massive heels and realise that it’s going to cost about $20 to get it dry-cleaned so that it doesn’t smell like sin. Money you don’t have because you spent it all last night keeping the cap driving population of Melbourne alive and well. Creeping out of the house induces waves of vomit (your own this time). They roll up and down your throat, contained only by the pounding of your brain that seems to keep everything down... in particular your spirits and self-esteem.

The 20 minute walk home give you time to complete your daily administrative tasks... you cancel brunch with a friend, delete a text message from another friend about her break-up (get over it girl, I’m dying) and bail on your dinner date because you’ve lost your voice and don’t want him to think that you’re a transvestite.

Once home you have three tasks left for the day. Shower, dress, go to supermarket for Gatorade.

The thing about being hungover for me is that it is painfully upsetting for me to make decisions. And being hungover means many decisions. Firstly, to purge the contents of your stomach or not. The thing is that you MUST brush you teeth soon or you will kill small children and the elderly with your gaseous bad breath. The problem lies in that it’s the most efficient use of your time to brush after vomiting so the decision becomes, SPEW NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR SPEW. The problem is that when it comes to forever holding my spew, well that’s just not a guarantee that I can make my friends. The spew train is a ride that I often take multiple times in a day.

After 45 minutes I’ve resolved this issue somehow and attempted to erase the memory from my brain. After another hour trying to remove my now fossilised eye make-up I must dress myself. OH WHY! WHY MUST WE WEAR CLOTHES? WHY DO SOCIAL MORES DESPISE NUDITY? OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Finally I put together an outfit and accept the consequences of its woeful existence.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. I’ve broken so many of the fashion commandments that I’ve lost count. I have brought ugliness onto the suburb of Glen Iris and shame upon myself.

Now you are in the supermarket. It turns out that the supermarket is the mothership of choice, the epicentre of decisive action where the indifferent come to be tortured by the market mechanism with its product differentiation, discounts and labyrinth style aisles containing gratuitous choice at every turn.

You are lost. An internal dialogue commences. RICE! I don’t need RICE! I need caffeine and a brain transplant. WHY AM I LOOKING AT RICE? Brown rice, long grain rice, risotto rice, instant rice, sushi rice. WHO KEEPS INVENTING RICE?? THIS PERSON MUST DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally you flee and are long last in the appropriate place to be bombarded with the million billion choices of liquids. Coke (close but alas it’s not the powdery kind), 85 different varieties of juice, granny smith apple juice, pink lady apple juice, nudie juice. OH I SEE HOW IT IS... THE JUICE CAN BE NUDE! HOW IS THAT FAIR?

Here you are yelling and the Powerade and the Gatorade. YOU ARE THE SAME DRINK! WHY DO YOU HAVE DIFFERENT NAMES? GET INTO THE SAME BOTTLE NOW! I’M GOING TO COUNT TO THREE. ONE... TWO... DON’T MAKE ME COME IN THERE. THR... Then you bump into your primary school teacher from year 5 who gives you a look like “Oh dear, you had such a bright future and now you’ve become a deranged homeless woman who yells in the aisles of the supermarket.” You splutter something about too much choice, economics and politics, Melbourne university... poverty alleviation... terrorism.

Tragedy. In your efforts to try and redeem your teacher’s respect for you you realise that your explanation of your double degree in Arts/Commerce with politics and economics majors with a particular interest in poverty alleviation and terrorism looks like a crazed conspiracy theory in which you intend to carry out a terrorist attack on Melbourne University because you can clearly no longer contain your hatred of market freedom and your hypothesis that your poverty is something to be blamed on various state-sponsored institutions. She scurries away, probably to contact the authorities.

And now you weep. You weep for what you have lost. Your beloved sanity, your grip on reality, your self worth and adult coping mechanisms.

OK so for the Saturday we’re going for a fun rating of a -5 out of 5 lollypops.

Quick summary table. Information is more fun when it’s tabular.

Thus my point is (yes there is one, shame on you for doubting me), for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is impossible to have fun without experiencing the consequences. This is how it is and it’s awfully unfair but it’s OK because Shelley is OK (the laws of physics don’t apply to her, like all laws she is above them).

Elle xx

P.S. I have a facebook page now, please 'like' Shelley so that the 9 other people who have don't feel so lonely.

How to have a ski trip: an experienced skier's guide the futile process of preparation and execution

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Something that I have learnt is that there are two types of people in this world... People who understand snowsports and people who don’t.

I fit into the former category and recently I went on a ski trip to Japan. Allow me to explain to you the process of going on an international ski trip.

Step one. Select your country (prey).

If a country wants the Newby family to come and give it a visit, one way of dramatically improving the likelihood of our tourist dollars being spent there is to have had the foresight of developing skiable terrain over the past tens of thousands of years. Like moths to a flame we are called to visit countries that we know nothing about, drawn to them by stories of fresh powder and six-seater chairlifts whose hideous metallic and noisy presence cuts through the beauty of the surrounding serenity much like the ski runs themselves that viciously scar the formerly pristine mountain below.

In December of this year, like a woman possessed I screamed at my mother and brother “JAPAN! JAPAN! JAPAN!”. Because my mother and brother are both skiers they knew perfectly well what was meant by this ancient call of the snow lover... It was a request. As you know I am unemployed, poor and have only my dreams to keep me warm at night and as such my life requires Mum to bank roll any good times. The Bank of Mum despite receiving no assistance from the US government during the great financial saving of arses of 2010 found courage from deep within and replied to the call and said “It shall be so.”

Step two. The preparation.

Country now selected via the rash decision making process as outlined above, step two can take place.

Firstly skiing is so exorbitantly expensive that you must work yourself half to death in order to get the funds for the holiday. Additionally because you must have full time work in order to pay for this outragely expensive activity you will have little to no annual leave for actually spending time of the slopes. There will be no visiting of culturally significant places, no time. There will be no learning of the language, no time. We come, we ski, we leave. It’s a transaction. A country whores its mountains for money and we on our end support this industry via supplying the demand.

When you are not working to raise the funds to ski, you spend your time attempting to get remotely fit enough to actually ski. Skiing involves a series of muscles that no other activity on Earth requires and it can be really difficult to find the time to work out your ankle muscles and such. You also have to be flexible because falling over results in you balancing your entire body weight, ski boots and skis on your spine whilst your limbs flail wildly around to test out the amount of centripetal force that your joints can endure before you snap into eight pieces. Like a butchered chicken.

Step three. The last minute disaster.

Having now spent one gillion dollars on the ski trip which is entirely unrefundable, disaster must ensure. Passports being lost, crises at work and so on (use your imagination, that’s the only limit when it comes to last minute disasters). This year it was of the “you must endure some sort of inexplicable and entirely unnecessary injury” variety of disaster which is a popular choice of the Newby family. This time it was me. I wasn’t looking where I was going and I smashed my foot on the edge of a chair during a conversation with my cat about the progress of her recently lodged complaint to the catering department. Toes broken. Toes that are required to be squished into a ski boot for hours on end every day for 8 days straight.

But the show must go on. You tend to underplay this injury so that your already stressed out mother doesn’t flip out at the prospect of having wasted so much money. Quietly your toe turns purple, hidden in a shoe awaiting the verdict from your brain on whether or not you will be able to amputate it on a flight that does not allow knives.

Step four. The departure/arrival

The majority of your time spent in the gym is actually to prepare you for the immensely uncomfortable chair that you must spend a minimum of 10 hours in whilst on the plane to your destination. As soon as your spine has finished becoming chair shaped you must then jump up, run to your connecting flight carrying a huge suitcase, 6kg bag containing ski boots and another bag containing skis that are both heavy and ingeniously designed such that when carried, your body contorts into a position as awkward as a conversation between Tony Abbott and a pro-union indigenous lesbian who manages an abortion clinic in Brunswick.

The result of the preparation process is that you have no time to do any research into the country you are visiting. You also barely have any time to pack. Thus upon arrival to this country of choice you make a series of cultural faux pas and realise that you forgot most of your stuff.

My brother told people at work that he was going skiing in Japan and people were saying “Hokkaido?” and he was amazed at the number of people who knew the finer details of Japanese geography. It was only when he got to Japan that he realised that Hokkaido was the entire Northern island of Japan and not some tiny ski resort town. Now this sounds stupid but in order to have the time and funds to go to Japan in the first place he had been working 10 hour days for the two weeks before trying to install an entire vision based quality insurance system in a factory before he had to jet off. Both my mother and brother went to the airport straight from work and went straight from the airport to work when we returned. Like I alluded to earlier, skiing is not for the faint hearted.

To find original pink map of Japan see http://www.japaneselifestyle.com.au/travel/map_of_japan.html

Day one of skiing you have to go and buy one of the crucial and hugely expensive pieces of equipment that you left behind. Fortunately this does not take much time because you are pretty used to shopping for this piece of equipment because you forget the exactly the same item every year. At home a huge pile of sunglasses awaits your return and the induction of a new member to their crew.

Step five. The actual skiing

And now we ski.

Riding in chairlifts and sitting in the hotel give us plenty of time to discuss the shear effort of getting the slopes, chaos at work, the progress of a series of injuries, equipment malfunctions, frozen bits destined to fall off at some point and the slightly haphazard design of the networks of chair lifts that service the mountain that could have been done better if it had been planned by people as intelligent as us. Whinging and bitching are interspersed with the occasional piece of skiing.

This conversation is; however, dotted with the occasional question... “So where to next year? Utah? Canada?”

The truth is that we love it. When you are freely riding down a tree lined, fresh snow covered run looking out over a view of Mt Yoti, a gorgeous volcano who is calmly (for the time being) overseeing the proceedings, you feel like you’ve really been given something wonderful and for free. You live in the knowledge that if the volcano becomes upset, she will spew lava all you. Suddenly the pettiness of your life gives way to the extraordinary sensation that nothing else matters. Work, boys, injuries, money can all forget themselves because right now, I am alive and there is a volcano who is allowing me to fly.

 Step six. The trip home.

Much like the trip there except with nothing to look forward to upon arrival except a tonne of work, poverty and the abuse of a hungry kitty.

THE END

Oh and yeah... As for my toes and back, they’re doing OK much like our dear friend Shelley.

New Normals

Bonjour Shelley and others,

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I study economics at university. I have a tendency to apply economic principles to all aspects of my life which is indicative of the fact that it’s pretty miraculous that I have any friends outside my economics buddies.

In truth, I’m no economist. I mainly spend my time analysing the efficiency and decision making processes of things that have nothing to do with my study. A large part of my motivation to start this blog was in order to provide myself with further opportunities to apply economics to irrelevant situations. Here, I drew a graph to demonstrate the inverse nature of the relationship between the usefulness of economics to my life and the amount of economics applied.

It’s a negative relationship. Sigh.

Something that occurs to economies from time to time is that there is a huge shock to productive capacity. An example would be if there was an enormous shortage of peaches because of soaring fruit fly levels because someone didn’t throw out their fruit when they saw this sign.

The minuscule amount of now extremely expensive peaches sadly renders the Australian workforce so weak and miserable that they are unable to work at the same level of capacity. Here I drew you another graph.

Notice that at first the economy is in a stable equilibrium before the shock. Over time it ends up in equilibrium again. So things go from being normal to a new normal. You will notice; however, that the new normal is worse because there is less output and it’s more expensive. There is now less stuff in the economy and that stuff is more expensive. People are worse off and this is evidence that sometimes things change from normal to a new, shitter normal.

Now that I have spent some time discussing economics, I shall apply this principle to something completely and totally unrelated to my studies. Fear not, you won’t learn anything important, I know that you were worried.

I recently hurt my back. Turns out that you need your back to do just about everything so when I went to the doctor she told me to “avoid sitting, running, twisting, carrying anything, driving and jumping.” Lying down and being perfectly still was acceptable though, I was pleased to hear.

Normally when people prolapse a disc, they feel it go. For example, a person will be mid-wrestle with that rancor monster that lives in a cage below Jabba the Hut’s torture arena and suddenly feel it pop. I can’t pinpoint when I actually hurt it which was weird so now when people ask me how I hurt my bad I happily tell them that it was a ‘ninjury’.

The doctor seemed to find it hard to believe that I was a ninja (I know… weird, right?). So she asked me if I could think of anything at all that could have resulted in me hurting my back.

I couldn’t.

I’m not a doctor but this is how a prolapsed disc works as I understand it:

Firstly, something changes for no reason.

Secondly, this change has an effect.

I hurt my back six months ago and I think that it’s back to normal but it’s a new, shittier normal. My leg is pretty numb except for three of my toes which are for some reason really super sensitive.

You see because the nerves are blinded by inflammation, my brain can’t communicate with my right leg very well.

One of the consequences of this new normal is that I can’t do the things that I used to enjoy so easily. When I say the things I enjoy, I don’t mean sky-diving or Olympic sex sessions, I mean things like sitting, running, twisting, carrying anything, driving and jumping. It does make my life a little more interesting because I was pretty clumsy before so now my clumsiness has reached new and impressive heights.

Even though this upsets me, which is does, I am the first to admit that it is funny when people fall over. My friend Gigi and I were in Canberra early last year staying with a friend for a couple of days. Gigi was sitting on a chair drinking a glass of wine chatting to me. She decided to twist her legs around the chair which in hindsight was not really a sensible idea.

Naturally she fell off. Now this shouldn’t be funny. She was holding a glass which of course smashed everywhere. She could have been injured from the fall or by broken glass. When she sat up she looked a little dazed and said that she wasn’t feeling well. Like I said, not funny. Except that it was a little bit funny.

People falling over is a little bit funny.

When I was in year nine, my friends Marsha and Anche and I were walking along grassy area at our school’s rural campus when Marsha fell over for no particular reason. It was a pretty slow fall so we had time to enjoy it. Anche said it looked like a bad Backstreet Boys dance move. Marsha jumped up and did a pirouette and laughed it off but possibly went home to cry and apply band-aids later.

I guess over time my back may return to the original, pre-peach shortage better normal but for now I must tolerate having to fall over even more than I usually do but it’s OK because last I heard Shelley’s OK.

Love,

Elle.

Note: I wrote this post a little while ago (before school holidays).

P.S. Right now there is a swimming carnival happening at the public swimming pool that is located mere metres away from my house and all the children are screaming “We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how ‘bout you?” and I really want to go over there and scream “FUCK NO!”. Then it occurred to me that doing something as proactive as screaming at children is pretty spirited so it would be oxymoronic for me to say anything. So I decided that it was best to share it with you, this way I can make the comment and still appear as cynical as ever.