Roger

 

The acting thing wasn’t going great. I was in a play, but it was unpaid, overly long, am-dram and terrible. I was dressed as a yokel and had to wear fake freckles over my real ones. I wrote myself a note that I stuck on my wall, it said – NO MORE ACTING IN PLAYS. I was sleeping with one of the lead actors who only ate pies and protein shakes. When we met up and decided to call it off I smoked three cigarettes. It wasn’t stressful; I just thought it should’ve been. My flatmate was an alcoholic on the methadone programme who loved Judas Priest and Dolly Parton. He was currently addicted to prescription painkillers and passed out most nights to the sound of the opening title sequence of The Sopranos or The Godfather. The night before my new job, The Godfather seeped into my dream, and I dreamt my flatmate was ripping up our floorboards with a crow bar. I laughed about the dream at work the next day, as I fed another double-sided sheet of paper into the photocopier in preparation for scanning. Watching the magic of two turning into one.

Hard Day’s Work

I haven’t done a hard day’s work in over five years. Not since I walked out of my last shift at Subway Indooroopilly into the pub, asking my coworker to tell the boss in the morning that I had called the store and quit. As I drank that night I promised myself that I wouldn’t be a cog in someone else’s machine again. I owned myself and if I fucked up then it was all on me. I ended up fucking up a lot.

Life and My Box: Dear Sally

Kate Zahnleiter was raised by a single working mother and a television. She writes that “not a day goes by in which I’m unable to relate something which occurs in real life back to an episode of something I watched as a child, teenager or young adult.” In Life and My Box, Kate shares the lessons she has learned from TV. 

Life and My Box: Oz, the Great and Powerful

Kate Zahnleiter was raised by a single working mother and a television. She writes that “not a day goes by in which I’m unable to relate something which occurs in real life back to an episode of something I watched as a child, teenager or young adult.” In Life and My Box, Kate shares the lessons she has learned from TV. 

Cow Tippin’

Earlier this year I introduced myself to my classmates in a university tutorial by telling them I wanted to be a farmer.

Looking back, people probably thought I was trying to be quaint, quirky, or charming. Those kinds of getting-to-know-you speeches at uni can be really competitive by your final year. It’s not enough to just say “um hi, I’m so-and-so… I’m doing Arts and Education… I’ve got a dog,” and then giggle self-consciously like we all did in first year. You’ve really got to bring it these days. Justify why you’re still at university in your mid-twenties. Compose a funny and insightful verbal self-portrait in twenty-five words or less.