From The Desk Of Smackie O: Useful Advice

Re: Sharehouse groceries. Sending your housemate to the shops is a bit like using google. Sometimes when you send them out for milk, they will come back with milk. But every now and then they will return saying "When you said milk did you mean Batman Pez Dispensers?"*. Unfortunately the results aren't always that awesome.

Re: Instant Self-Esteem. Are you feeling a bit down on your self? Here is a handy hint guaranteed to give you the mistaken impression that you are actually quite great. Tell a bad joke to someone in customer service. See, I have worked in this industry and if you don't laugh at your customers' jokes, well, that's BAD SERVICE. People in these jobs are obligated to make you think you are totally funny, regardless of how godawful your joke was. Here's one I like to whip out when I'm feeling a bit low:

Shopkeep: Ok, that comes to $19.20

Me: A good year, that.

Shopkeep: HAHAHAHA.

Re: Pickup Lines. Some women take the time to be offended by pick-up lines. I think this is silly. All you need to do to make sure they don't get away with being a jerk is to openly laugh in their face. Usually this is easier than you might think because most people's pick-up lines are really pretty amusing. The people who use them generally do so because they can't think of any other way to express themselves. They usually have a bit too much confidence about what they are saying. I was once approached by a stranger who asked me if I "had a license for those". Yes, I completed a two year course and as a result I am qualified to have large breasts. Good one, representative for the male gender.

Re: How to have great anecdotes. Vegatrain recently postulated to me that perhaps I sometimes do things just so I can tell the story. He would be wrong. There is no 'sometimes' about it. Most of the things I do are purely so I can tell the story afterwards. Why else would I have gone to Apocalypse Party? I am well aware that I am too introverted for all that jazz. But let's face it, that's a pretty ok story. The only downside is that sometimes this involves making impulse purchases and ending up with a cavalcade of items that I am not sure what to do with. Vegatrain and I are planning on setting up an ebay store very soon ("paying the rent"), but I'm not sure there is anyone out there (apart from myself) who would be remotely interested in a tie that has pictures of ties on it. Anyone? It's very meta.

Re: Don't Listen To Anyone Who Has Studied Journalism. It's an awful shame, but somehow studying media leaves you with an insatiable urge to be unnecessarily, misleadingly terrifying. I remember once a friend of mine was talking about feeling sick after going for a swim. Most people chalked this up to stomach cramps, but I thought it would be best to mention the Dracunculiasis. I told him how it gets into your body while you swim and then grows to a ridiculous size before creating a painful blister from which it will ultimately burst out to go infect others, a la "Alien". I did add the disclaimer that this parasite is now pretty well restricted to bodies of water in Sub-Saharan Africa, but by that time he was substantially terrified. This is what studying journalism does to you. The only reason I am able to prevent myself from doing this all the time is because I dropped out before the end of my degree.

Re: Making Money From Justice. This is not one I can vouch for from a legal standpoint, or from an actually working standpoint, or even from a not getting the crap beaten out of you standpoint. But what I CAN vouch for is that I think it's a great idea and can someone with more balls than me please try it so I know if it works. So, I'm no lawyer. But when I was at uni I did have lunch with people who studied law every now and then. Sometimes they talked about their homework and well, I listened. I took notes. From these notes, I am under the impression that a citizen's arrest is a thing that you can do. So, here's my idea. What about a citizen's on the spot fine? You can't let people just get away with jaywalking, can you? In the name of keeping our streets safe, you should ask them to hand over their $50 on the spot fine directly to you. Some people call this "mugging". I call it "justice".

Re: Selling things on ebay. Here is something I have observed: just about anything will sell if you tag it with the words "PUNK/EMO". I am assuming this is something to do with there being a lot of people out there who don't really understand how to fit in and need an ebay product description to help them out. Of course, this is something you can and should take advantage of. I have seen Hannah Montana products with this tag attached. Sailor Moon as well. Admittedly I am so far removed from popular culture that these things could well be considered some kind of ironic form of hip with the kids, but I don't know. I don't think I can really classify Miley Cyrus as a punk and feel ok with it.

Hopefully these hints will help you a lot in your day to day life as they have helped me.

-Smackie Onassis

*Admittedly, that was me. But come on you guys, Batman Pez Dispensers!

Tales from the Year of Four Houses

For the duration of my childhood, I lived mainly in the one house. My parents house was familiar and although none of the doors properly fit the doorframes and the whole place was built on a slant (god help you if you put your pen down on the kitchen table and expected it to stay put), it was fairly stable.

However, I eventually got around to vacating the nest and introduced myself to the wonderful world of share accommodation. Since then, I have lived in a few different rentals with a bunch of different people. Between January and December last year I moved house no less than three times, for a total of four houses in a year. Over the course of all this, I have come to the conclusion that no share house is complete without at least one nutter.

Admittedly, I have been that nutter. My first rental place was lovely, a two-storey, high-ceilinged flat with a balcony overlooking the beach, which I was amazingly only paying $118 a week for. Unfortunately for everyone, my housemate was what you would call "a normal human being". See, I have this habit of saying a great deal of things that don't make a lot of sense. I know they don't make sense, I will be the first to admit that. But I figure if I say enough things then one day something will actually be interpreted as insightful, or at least witty. Example:

Housemate: I found this really great cereal at a shop down the road

Me: One might say that you yourself are a really great cereal from a shop down the road.

Nonsense, obviously. Sometimes I accidentally say something that makes sense and am rewarded. For all the others, I simply get a small kick out of being a walking non-sequitur. I live in a house at the moment where this is almost acceptable, but my first housemate didn't really understand this kind of thing. Eventually, I moved out.

When I first moved to Adelaide, I shared a small suburban house with three other people. For the sake of this entry, we will call them Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear. Mama Bear was a down to earth country girl whose family ran a quandong plantation in Broken Hill. She was a vegetarian, and although I ate the occasional piece of chicken, I preferred to avoid meat where possible. At the time it wasn't a moral thing, more just that I thought meat tasted too much like dead animals. Either way, it was something Mama Bear and I bonded over. Baby Bear was inoffensive, a friend of theirs who kept to himself most of the time. Papa Bear, on the other hand, he was something else. He was in a relationship with Mama Bear, and no-one I knew could figure out what on earth a girl as good as her was doing with such an awful human being. Vegatrain refused to come over to my house on the basis that he couldn't stand to be within a ten metre radius of the guy and most people I knew thought this was a fair call. I think the problem is that he couldn't express any kind of opinion without sounding furious. I'm honestly not sure how he accomplished this, but I would hear him screaming and swearing at the tv, even is he actually liked the show he was watching. He was studying quantity surveying at TAFE, but was always coming up with a bunch of ideas about how he was going to get rich. His favourite was his idea for franchising fish farms. He thought this was nothing short of genius, but couldn't get anyone to invest in it. The last time I saw him he and Mama Bear had split for good, he had threatened to beat the crap out of Baby Bear for so much as implying to her that he had cheated on her (even though he had) and he had moved on to studying something else. I am so, so glad I moved out before all of this went down.

I could go on to talk about more share house nutters, past and present, but this entry is probably long enough without it, and also Buglustre is going to be here soon to take me to the optometrist for some new glasses. This is always an exciting occasion.

-Smackie Onassis