So this day was always going to come. That I managed to stay in High Street Thornbury for the whole time I was publishing this blog, all through performing the show adaptation, up to almost Christmas 2016 was in and of itself a miracle. Two and a half years I lived there, the second longest amount of time I’ve spent in any one house!

But it’s happened.

I’ve moved again.

Twice!

However the rule of this blog is one story for every address so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One at a time.

In June 2016 I went on a holiday to New York. For the fourth time. Since 2005, I’ve been overseas five times—six if you count New Zealand, but I forgot to buy ingredients for Kiwi Dip to bring home and I didn’t even get jet lag so I’m disqualifying the whole trip—and 80% of those times I’ve been to New York because I’ve loved it so much. People used to scoff at me when I said I was going to New York again. “You know there are other countries in the world, right?” Yes but none of them have General Tso’s chicken so cram it.

On this fourth trip to New York, after eleven years of coveting the city quietly (*loudly, to anyone who would listen, almost non-stop), something was different. I was tired of coveting quietly (*loudly, to anyone who would listen, almost non-stop). I was tired of wishing and dreaming. After many long discussions with Tracey, a woman I’ve known since my first trip in 2005 and my dearest NY friend, I made the decision: I was going to move there.

I spent the next six months quietly (*loudly, to anyone who would listen, almost non-stop) planning. Researching visas, talking to an immigration lawyer, working multiple extra jobs to raise money (my record was four jobs at once; I was very tired), ruthlessly culling my belongings. By December, I was ready.

My visa, however, was not.

So I did what any self-respecting adult would do when they find themselves in a brief limbo: I moved in with a parent.

And that’s how I, at 36 years of age, lived with my Dad for the very first time.

I wrote on another blog how this was a thing that nearly happened when I was 12, but then didn’t. I won’t rehash it here, because I already wrote it and went to therapy about it, but it’s there to read if you need a recap. Plus I don’t want to bog down in the negativity of why I didn’t live with my Dad until I was 36. I want to be positive and focus on how lucky I am! Not everyone gets a do-over 24 years later!

Okay, so it was only for a month, and for the entire time I was there, two giant suitcases sat in the corner of my bedroom containing all my worldly possessions, giving the whole experience a distinctly surreal quality. But still. It counts.

Dad and Fran have been living in the same house since the early 1990s. This house and my Uncle Ken & Aunty Sharon’s house in Capalaba are the only two houses that have been a constant since my early childhood (and even Ken & Sharon demolished their house and built a new one, so technically it’s only the lawn that has been constant). It was comforting but very odd, after a lifetime of new addresses, to go back to a house that has barely changed since I was 10.

Here’s what I learnt: living with a parent at 36 is not much different from living with a parent as a child. I was fed almost constantly, my clothes were always washed and folded and left on my bed, and on weekends I did jobs out in the yard.

Of course, the whole time I was there, a cloud of uncertainty hung over my head. I had no idea whether or not the visa allowing me to move to New York was going to be approved, so I was stressed and anxious the entire time. It took a physical toll on me: I was not sleeping well at night, so I was napping during the day, and sometimes I was so moody I didn’t speak for hours at a time. I guess for Dad and Fran it was like having a teenager in the house.

And then, on January 18, 2017, I got the news: My visa had been approved, and I was moving to New York. So on January 21, Dad and Fran saw off their adult son as he moved halfway across the world.

All in all, they’d had the kid version of me, the teen version of me, and the adult version of me. We squeezed the whole experience into 32 days!

(I mean, Fran certainly squeezed a lifetime’s worth of ironing into 32 days? You haven’t lived until you’ve put on a pair of ironed underpants. The only thing of mine she didn’t iron was my shoes, and I bet you a dollar she was thinking about it.)

I’m so glad the last thing I did before I left the country was spend Christmas with my mum, sister, brother, brother-in-law and new baby niece, and then spend a month living with my Dad. It gave me a nice closing chapter before I said goodbye to Australia…

…to start a whole new chapter.

It had been over a year since I’d moved out of home for the third time. This time it appeared to have stuck. It had also been nearly four years since the first, disastrous attempt at living alone in my own place, so I figured it was time to give it another try. I’d gone from living in a suburban family home to house-sitting a mansion to very slowly collapsing down the side of a mountain to a fancy Ascot apartment: going solo was the next frontier. My friend John, who also worked at the radio station, had just been offered a job in New South Wales, so I took over his lease and moved into a lovely little apartment in Kelvin Grove.

Kelvin Grove is a nice suburb—walking distance from the city—but I was in an odd pocket of the neighbourhood: I lived directly behind a funeral home, and diagonally behind a KFC. The atmosphere was…odd.

The building was two storeys high; each consisting of three apartments in a row. Underneath the two storeys was a row of six garages. I was fortunate enough to have the garage at the end of the row. No, not fortunate. The other one. Fucked. I was fucked. You see, to get a car into any of the garages, you had to drive parallel to the building down the narrow driveway and pull a magnificently tight 90 degree turn at the last second to ease into your designated garage. On top of this, the garage doors were manual and opened outwards, so in fact before your magnificently tight 90 degree turn, you had to stop the car, get out, open the garage door, get back in the car, magnificently tight 90 degree turn, park, get out, and close the garage door. This seemed like all too much work for the other five residents, so they usually would just park against the wall on the other side of the driveway, right in space I needed to get my car in and out. My car was a great hulking 1981 Holden Commodore station wagon: roughly the size of a Texan hearse, magnificently tight 90 degree turns did not come easy to it. I needed every inch of space available to steer that cow, so all it took was one car parked along the driveway where it didn’t belong and I would find myself blocked in.

Being quite timid and deathly afraid of confrontation or conflict of any kind, I would normally do nothing about it. If, upon readying myself to leave for work, I noticed that I was stuck, I would simply set off on foot, calling ahead to let work know I would be late. Sometimes I would catch the nearby bus. For months this went on, and I realise this was a mistake, because it taught the other five tenants that parking in the driveway was NBD, because the guy whose door they were blocking never seemed upset by it.

Meanwhile, over the past 18 months, Sarah and I had slowly been working our way into an increasingly prominent on-air role at the radio station. “The Hot Tin Roof” had gone from a two hour show at midnight on a Friday night, to a two hour show at 10pm on a Tuesday, to a three hour show on a Saturday morning. We’d also become the regular fill-ins for the breakfast show, meaning we had a regular weekday breakfast spot three or four times a year.

The first time one of these breakfast spots came up while living at The Tuscan Quarter, I panicked a little. Four weeks of 4am starts. This meant no buses, and no extra time to walk. I just had to hope that nobody would park in the driveway during those four weeks.

Helpfully, I stuck a sign to my garage door. “Hi! Please don’t park in front of this door: my car is a giant station wagon with no power steering and I can’t get it out if your car is parked there, and I’m about to start early morning shift work. Thank you!” It was polite and inoffensive. If anything, it was a bit naff, but I hoped it would do the trick.

On my VERY FIRST MORNING FILLING IN ON A CAPITAL CITY’S NUMBER ONE RATING RADIO STATION BREAKFAST SHOW, I found myself blocked in, and I didn’t know whose car it was. I was so upset that I was at risk of screwing up one of the greatest career opportunities I had ever been given, I did the only thing I could think of: I honked my horn.

Well, “honk” isn’t really the right word. To describe it more accurately: I hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonked it. It was about forty-five seconds of long, continuous honk, at 4:15am. And 1981 Commodores do not have pretty sounding horns.

My entire life, I have endeavoured to be good. To not be mean, or demanding, or troublesome. But for those forty-five seconds, I was a total fuckbag.

If you accept that previous sentence is true, then what followed was a complete cock-up on the universe’s part: the only person awoken by my fuckbag honking was the very person whose car it was. He opened their apartment door, saw the situation, and immediately without a word, moved their car. Not a single person in the building ever once admonished me for the honking. It wasn’t even acknowledged. But for as long as I lived at The Tuscan Quarter, no one ever parked me in again. So, essentially, being a fuckbag got me exactly what I wanted.

I wish I’d been smart enough to take that lesson to heart. I could be a magnificently wealthy, successful, feared and respected fuckbag by now.

:+:+:+:+:+:+:

*While Sarah and I were a duo, “The Hot Tin Roof” was always a trio, because neither of us ever learnt how to actually panel the studio desk. We needed an anchor. The upshot of this is every other announcer on B105’s payroll was lumped with us at least once, tasked with doing all the stuff we had no idea how to do, like pressing buttons and telling the time. Over two years, we were “The Hot Tin Roof with Chris, Sarah and…” Matt, Buggy, Jordo, Deano, JP, Kez, Whippy and Lowie. (Yes, I had a favourite. No, I won’t tell you who.) Of these TEN people, only three still work in radio, and none of those three work in regular on air roles, which I think makes The Hot Tin Roof the Ted McGinley of radio shows.

The Black Thunder team at B105 in the early 2000s was a dream team. When your job is to drive around in a promotional vehicle all day, stopping only to give out free stuff, you can’t help but have fun and bond with your coworkers. Even though some shifts started at 2am, and some shifts ended with every stitch of clothing and hair follicle reeking of sausages (from the mass-scale barbecue we put on), and some shifts had both those elements, it was still a blast. Okay, it didn’t feel like a blast at 11 in the morning when you had already worked nine hours and smelled like a butcher’s bin, but still. We were a tight-knit group, and pockets of that group remain friends to this day.

The Black Thunder Pilots (yeah, that’s what we were called) were identifiable by their code names. All names were bestowed upon us by the station’s drive announcer, Deano. They were usually a pun on a popular artist of the time, or sometimes a pun on the person’s name. Sarah (my Bardon housemate) was “Miss Demeanour”. Sarah (my radio co-host) was “Goo Goo Doll”. Jonnie was “Buff Daddy”, on account of his spectacular muscles. Gemma was “Atomic Kitten”, but when the actual Atomic Kitten stopped being a thing (look, it took us all by surprise how short-lived they were) she successfully campaigned to be renamed “Gems & Gravy”. Pete was “Scooter”, Zoe was “Sugababe”, Jayce was “Basement Jayce”, Andy was “The Apprentice”, Mark was “Marky Mark” and Dave was “Just Plain Dave”. Okay so there’s a chance Deano had run out of ideas by the end, there.

Me? I was “Ludachris”, and laugh if you want, but I loved the shit out of my code name.

With Sarah—sorry, Miss Demeanour—having moved out, there was not much reason for me to stay at the Bardon Spider Terrarium/Snake-Specific Possum Buffet. So when one of the other Black Thunder pilots mentioned he had a spare room, I was in like a flash. Not only did it give me the opportunity to move back to *hairflip* Ascot, where the fabulous people lived, but it also meant living with another teammate, which was just tremendous.

To protect the identity of my housemate, as I have done with other names in this blog, I won’t use his actual Thunder name. I’ll make up a new one that’s in keeping with the theme of the others. To do this, I have consulted the ARIA charts for 2004, and the best option for my housemate’s name is…Milkshake.

Milkshake kept a meticulously clean apartment. Which was surprising considering how much time he spent drunk. Milkshake was gregarious; it was his best quality (his dancing was his second-best quality). Milkshake literally believed that a stranger was just a friend he hadn’t met yet. The upshot of this is if he spent a night out on the town, which he did a lot, he would return home with at least half a dozen people he’d met, and invited home to hang out. To know Milkshake was to be continually meeting new people. Now, as someone who finds the idea of meeting new people terrifying, this was nerve-wracking and frustrating. But: I can safely say that I was never, not for one second, ever bored in his presence.

One morning I came out of my bedroom to find our lounge room floor covered in South American tourists, all sleeping off the previous night on the floor. How long had they been there? Who knows. How long did they end up staying there for? Don’t know that either: I left, because it’s surprisingly hard to watch TV with ten strangers strewn about the place like drunk, snoring confetti.

Milkshake’s wild nights out were kind of an adventure through which I could live vicariously, and I enjoyed that. However, sometimes he and I were rostered on to do the same shifts at work, and then it wasn’t quite as adventurous. Well, no, it was still adventurous, I just reacted more bitchily to it.

The worst was the day Milkshake and I had to do an early shift: it was a 5:30am start. At 4:30am I woke up and showered. On my way back from the bathroom, I noted that there had not yet been any movement from Milkshake’s room. He had been out the night before, and I’d gone to bed before he’d come home, but he wouldn’t have been out all night, right? Surely not. He knew we had work in what was now forty-five minutes.

By the time I’d dressed and put my shoes on, it was 5 o’clock. I was going to have to abandon Milkshake and go to work alone. I headed out into the lounge room, and noticed that the front door was wide open. I’d tried to keep my cool when I realised I’d be going to work alone, but this immediately turned me into a prissy, self-righteous tantrum machine. It’s bad enough that he went out all night and forgot to come home, but he couldn’t even shut. the fucking. door. when he left? Not only that, but our door had a hydraulic spring. It shut automatically. So for it to be wide open, he must have…broken it?

Having already gained quite a lot of momentum in my double-black diamond hissy fit, I decided to lean into it. Throwing my hands in the air dramatically (for whose benefit? Nobody’s. Live life like you’re always being filmed before a live studio audience, I say), I stomped over to the front door to a) check the damage, b) slam it shut, and c) flounce off to work to work in a huff, alone, like a martyr. And that’s when I realised: the door wasn’t broken. The door was open because it was being held open…by Milkshake’s feet. Milkshake was passed out across the corridor of our apartment building: his feet propping our door open, his head resting against the neighbour’s door like a pillow, and his pants down around his ankles.

After checking to make sure he wasn’t straight-up dead, I petulantly kicked him awake (I’d been denied my door slam and my martyrdom: I was spectacularly fractious). With surprising chirpiness, he said “Oh, hey! Good morning!”, pulled up his pants, and disappeared into his room. He emerged exactly seven minutes later: fresh, showered, in uniform, so handsome, and 100% ready to go. We both made it to work on time as if nothing had happened.

Milkshake never explained how he ended up pantsless and asleep in our corridor, and I never asked. Our gentlemen’s agreement on this matter has never been broken.

I only got three months with Milkshake before we received the dreaded “the owner is putting this property on the market, BYEEEEEE” letter from our real estate agent. I don’t feel like I got nearly long enough with Milkshake, or with Ascot, but I did move out very quickly after receiving that letter, lest Milkshake enlist me in helping him get his piano out of a third-floor apartment.

One can’t house-sit forever. Especially once the house’s residents return. Doubly especially once more than a month has passed since the house’s residents have returned, and you’re still bouncing about the place like…well, like an unwelcome house guest. So I fired up Flatmates.com.au and did some searching, seeking out the perfect ramshackle oddbox to experience proper, permanent sharehousing.

Simpsons Road, Bardon paid dividends in this regard. During the seven months I lived here, I got the full complement of  He Died With a Felafel in His Hand-esque experiences. I mean, some people take decades to experience the gamut of housemate craziness. I got it all in one go.

For a start, the house was a Dr Seussian nightmare. Nestled about a third of the way up Brisbane’s Mt Coot-tha (you know how you refer to the “foot” of a mountain? Well by anatomical geography we were in the mountain’s crotch), the house perched on the steep ground in such a way that the front of the house was ground level, but the rear was held up by stilts. And not good stilts, either: the building was literally at risk of, at any moment, collapsing and rolling down the side of the valley from which it precariously jutted. A mattress on the floor in one corner of the lounge room marked out where it was unsafe to walk, partly because you could feel the lean of the floor in that spot, and partly for fear of cracking the building in half. To the left of the mattress there was a very fine vertical crack running down the one side of the lounge room wall; by the time I moved out it had become such a thick crack that sunlight shone through it.

The house was also continually under siege from possums and spiders. One spider was so big, as it climbed up a housemate’s lava lamp its legs went all the way around the lamp and met on the other side. One was so heavy, when we finally killed it (it took four people; that is a whole other story), and dropped it in the toilet, it made an audible donk as it hit the bottom of the bowl. I found one above the front door once, killed it with a broom (after all the screaming, obviously), swept the corpse away and by the time I’d turned around, another one the exact same size was in the exact same spot.

The spiders would have been the stuff of nightmares, except it wasn’t possible to have nightmares because nightmares only happen when you’re asleep, and it’s impossible to sleep with the constant CLOMPYCLOMPCLOMPCLOMPING of the possums both on the roof and under the floorboards. The only reprieve we got from the possums was when a massive python decided to move into the roof and eat all the possums. But then we were living in a house with a massive python, so sleep still eluded us.

It was living in Bardon that I got my first (and thankfully, only) taste of housemate thievery, too: six weeks after I moved in, Greg moved out: apparently taking with him one half of season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD and a pair of my shoes. I assume he needed the shoes to go to JB Hi Fi to buy the other half of that season of Buffy?

Greg moving out ushered in another first: living with a friend!

I met Sarah Collins in 2001 when we both worked as volunteers at B105. Today, she is my very best friend slash unofficial twin sister.

I’m sorry. I have to stop. That photo of Sarah and I that I posted is terrible. Let me try again.

Sarah and I realised we were unofficial twins when we kept finding weird similarities about ourselves: we both had family in Toowoomba (Sarah, in fact, was raised there). We wore the male/female equivalent of the same fragrance. We had even, long before we knew each other, both worked at the same glamour photography-selling telemarketing company. At the time of our meeting, in 2001, I was studying at The Actors Conservatory and still in the closet, while Sarah was in the closet about wanting to be an actor. We were two sides of the same coin.

With our lives so unwittingly entwined it was destined to happen at some point: in 2003, we both shared an address. The Bardon Spider Terrarium/Snake-Specific Possum Buffet.

I was so glad Sarah moved in. We hung out all the time anyway; this just made it easier. Sarah was the best person to watch bad TV with, and the best person with whom to orchestrate the perfect timing for doing laundry at the laundromat while simultaneously eating dinner at the Kookaburra Cafe next door*. Also, she gave free hair cuts. They weren’t good, but they were free.

But living with Sarah wasn’t just about good times and asymmetrical fringes. I needed Sarah at the Bardon Spider Terrarium/Snake-Specific Possum Buffet because I needed someone else to experience the wonder that was my other housemate, Ian.

What a conundrum Ian was. Ian, who coloured his hair with intense (and amazing) black and white stripes, but then sulked for weeks afterwards because “people won’t stop STARING at me!?” Ian, who regularly got not-insignificant chest infections, and would try to cure them by jogging up the mountain, because he believed the vitamin D helped him to fight infection. Ian, who so desperately wanted to “damn the man”, but was easily cowed by a single phone call from his mother (to be fair, she was terrifying). Ian, who valued privacy more than anything, and saw himself as quite mysterious, but within hours of me moving in had told me his entire life story in meticulous detail. Ian, who spouted the kind of tiresome, generic anti-American sentiment that was the launchpad for 70% of all our fights—he claimed Lantana was an excellent film because “there’s only one American in it, and she dies, ha ha ha!”—but who couldn’t tear his eyes away from the season one finale of American Idol that Sarah and I were watching one night. He even watched it in hiding, only poking his head out of his bedroom door to peek with one eye.

In Sarah’s first week, Ian insisted on the three of us having a “family dinner” together. He cooked, set the table, turned off all the lights in favour of scattered candles, and even draped a teatowel over his arm as he served dinner, like the Bardon Spider Terrarium’s fanciest waiter. As we began eating, Ian asked Sarah about herself. For twenty minutes, he grilled her about her life: her childhood, her siblings, her parents, her job, her goals, her dreams, her interests, her friends. He wanted to know everything about her. It was intense and weird, and it seemed like the beginning of some kind of Single White Female scenario.

But that’s not what it was.

After Ian’s last question, there was a long pause. Perhaps up to an entire minute of deeply, deeply uncomfortable silence. Then suddenly, Ian turns brightly to Sarah and says “Shall I…reciprocate?” 

Before Sarah could answer—though not before she involuntarily shuddered—he launched into his own extraordinarily detailed life story. The exact same one I’d received when I moved in. Almost word for word. Start to finish. For forty minutes. He did not leave a single thing out.

I usually conclude stories involving other people with a thing I learnt from them. I learnt several things from Ian. The first, and most important, is to own your ego. If you want to talk about yourself, go ahead and have at it. Don’t try to disguise it as something else: you’ll only terrify people. Just go for it. This is a lesson I have clearly taken to heart, as this very blog is, so far, 48,000+ words of me talking about myself AND I HAVEN’T ASKED YOU ANYTHING.

The other things I learnt from Ian were about being a better housemate. Because this is my blog, I have the privilege of talking about everything from my perspective, and I’ve made Ian look like a crazy person and terrible housemate. And look, he was, but he was also very kind and generous. He was, in a way, loveable. Sure, he hugged weird and spent far too long in his room and was quite certain that “dark spirits” were following him around, but he was a sweet guy. He was certainly more tolerant of me than I was of him, or his spirits. I was a terrible housemate. (In my defence, my only other experiences with sharing a house included fleeing in terror after seven weeks and sharehousing by default because I refused to leave my housesitting gig once the owners came back. But still.)

At the end of 2003, Sarah fled moved out, and our delicately choreographed laundromat/pizza dates* ended. In January of 2004, another coworker, who lived in Ascot (Ascot!), started asking around for a new housemate; I took him up on the offer and so I moved out too.

As far as I’m aware, Ian also got out of the Bardon Spider Terrarium/Snake-Specific Possum Buffet, before the lounge room snapped off the house entirely.

:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:

*FOOTNOTE: In case you live, or plan to live, in the Bardon/Paddington area, let us pass on our wisdom:

Christopher and Sarah’s Nine-Step, No-Wait Laundry/Pizza Plan

1. Go to laundromat, put clothes in washing machine.
2. Go next door to Kookaburra Café, take seat, order drink, chat until drink arrives.
3. Drink arrives, order food, sip drink.
4. Return to laundromat: clothes have just finished washing cycle. Put clothes in dryer.
5. Return to Kookaburra: food has just arrived. Eat food.
6. Finish food, order dessert to go.
7. Return to laundromat: clothes have just finished drying. Collect clothes.
8. Return to Kookaburra: dessert is ready. Collect dessert and pay.
9. Go back to BST/SSPB, eat dessert, fold clothes.

Having worked my way from Community Switch volunteer, to receptionist, to Community Switch coordinator, to “Black Thunder pilot”, in 2003 I made another huge advance at the radio station.

I went on the air.

B105’s program director Rex, showing an extraordinarily rare lapse in good judgment, put my coworker Sarah Robinson and I at the helm of a late-night show that we called “The Hot Tin Roof”. I have zero—ZERO—idea why we called it that: we just thought it was catchy. (We were idiots who had no idea what we were doing.)

Our first time-slot was midnight on a Friday night until 2am Saturday morning. Every week we’d utilise our combined total experience in radio (none) to create a two hour show. I wrote and recited long-winded diatribes (yes, I have technically been doing the very style of thing you’re reading right now for over a decade), Sarah told embarrassing dating stories, we would play recordings of us stopping people in the street to ask nonsense questions, and we would mock each other for being dickheads. To recap: we were idiots who had no idea what we were doing. Somehow, it worked.

Eventually, unbelievably, we became a solid enough show to start getting some interviews. We started slowly: our first ever interview was a reserve-grade rugby union player who had yet to take the field. Our second ever interview was Eddie Izzard: apparently the bell-curve of interview quality is quite steep. 

After a few months we got an upgrade to the 10pm-midnight slot on a Tuesday. The jump from an unpaid, post-midnight show on the weekend to a casually paid, pre-midnight show on a weeknight felt huge for us. So imagine the universe-tilting shock when, a few months after that, we were upgraded again: to holiday replacements for the breakfast show. Before we even knew what was happening, Sarah and I were filling in for the on-air-for-13-years-and-number-one-rating-the-entire-time Jamie Dunn and the B105 Morning Crew.

It was intense and insane and we thought were both going to die from fatigue on only our second morning, but we did it. I even remember the first freebies we scored as big-shot breakfast announcers: an alarm clock and a pubic hair trimmer. Both were invaluable to me.

There we were, ass-deep in the world of commercial radio. And at least two people thought we were not horrible. Without even really paying attention, I’d found a career. A career as a professional idiot who had no idea what he was doing.

Perhaps mum saw this sudden upswing in employment quality as an opportunity to finally offload a dependent who was by this point in low orbit over his mid-twenties, or perhaps it was coincidence. Either way, during this period of explosive job accomplishments, mum sat me down for some news.

“We’re going to be moving. We’re moving to be closer to Mike’s work. Somewhere around Slacks Creek.”

If you’ve been following this blog up to this point, from my owning of horses to refusal to eat peanut butter sandwiches to living in a house with faux-crystal doorknobs, you can probably tell how I am going to react to the notion of moving to a place that sounds like a euphemism for shitting your pants.

“Oh. Mum. Uh. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think I want to move to…Slacks Creek. [shudder] So maybe I’ll move out instead, and you don’t need to look for a four bedroom place?”
“Oh. Christopher. Don’t take this the wrong way, but we already assumed you wouldn’t come with us. We’ve only been looking at smaller places anyway.”
“Well, good. Then. So we’re all on the same page? Great. That’s…great.”

Pre-empted by my own elitism.

And so I moved out of home, for the third and final time. It’s been twelve years so far, so I’m almost certain this one’s permanent.

But, to be honest: even on this, my third attempt at living out of home, I cheated a bit. For the first two months I lived in the home of one of my former teachers from The Actors Conservatory: Maria. Maria was easily one of the best teachers I’d ever had: nurturing and inspiring, but she took precisely zero shit, like if Professor McGonagall taught acting. Maria lived with her mother and two small dogs in an enormous house in Aspley, and they were doing a long holiday around Europe, so I moved in to look after the place: rattling around their monstrous house by myself like a five-cent piece in a tumble-dryer.

My only company was the housekeeper, who came by three times a week and managed to find (and wash, dry and iron) my dirty clothes no matter how sneakily I hid them out of guilt: in an empty drawer, under the bed, in the bed, in my suitcase, and in the dryer (to look as if I’d already done them). She knew. She always knew.

The icing on the cake of this two-month housesitting stint was the food. The week before embarking on their European trip, Maria had “catered” for the christening of a family member’s daughter: making six or seven giant lasagnes, and dozens upon dozens upon dozens of savoury pinwheels. But then the christening was moved interstate, and suddenly Maria’s giant freezer was packed to the gills with frozen lasagne and pinwheels for no reason. The only condition of my housesitting was that all the food (which, after a week of cooking, she was sick of even looking at) be gone by her return. Maria asked if I could promise this. I asked Maria if she had ever met me.

To recap: I had home-cooked Italian meals to eat for eight weeks while I lived rent-free in a mansion with a housekeeper.

This is probably why I stayed in the house for another four weeks after they returned from their European holiday, and eventually had to be asked to leave. I can’t blame them for evicting me any more than they can blame me for staying.

The house on Chalfont Street in Salisbury was delightful. It was in no way fancy, but it sat on a quiet, secluded street, backed onto the beautiful Russ Hall Park, and the entire underneath of the house had been converted into a living area, meaning I had what was essentially a studio apartment to myself. Room for my bed, bookshelves, a couch, TV and even including my own toilet, I felt very independent and grown-up living here (and good thing too: I was 22 years old).

The year and a bit spent in this house was almost entirely devoid of drama. Mum and Mike got along swimmingly—to the point where they married; I was continuing to get paid work at the radio station, working my way up from receptionist to “Black Thunder Pilot” to Community Switchboard coordinator; I graduated from The Actors Conservatory, and even performed in my first non-high school play. In short, life was really coming together.

Also, early into 2003, I finally realised who I was. You know, in a sexual sense.

You can look at this in two ways: either as a bitter ironic twist; only when it seemed like the seas of my life were finally, briefly calm did the issue of my befuddling sexuality burst forth (again) to fuck everything up. Or you can see it as a long overdue blessing; that because everything was going well, and I wasn’t feeling in such turmoil, I was able to process something that had hung over my head since I was 15 years old. I have often described it as the former, but I must be softening with age, because I’m choosing today to look at it as the latter.

Now, I’ve heard coming out stories that usually involve a night of flirting with a member of the same sex that finally catapulted over into full-blown, magical passion and a stark, shocking, but ultimately comforting revelation the next morning. Or just out-of-the-blue epiphanies, borne of spur-of-the-moment lust. This kind of thing did not happen to me.

In fact, it could be said that the opposite happened to me. The opposite in every single way.

Her name was Tatiana (no it wasn’t, I made that up because I actually can’t remember her name), and she was beautiful, and I met her while a group of us from the radio station (the “Black Thunder Team”, if you will) were hanging out, post-work, at the Normanby Hotel. I was quite drunk so I can’t remember how I actually met her, or how she ended up with our group, or how I ended up dancing with her: but I did, and she did, and we did. The rest of the group I was with were about as surprised as I was that this was happening: I wasn’t the guy who talked to girls and danced with them in bars. But, I was filled with both Dutch courage and Dutch courage’s way more effective cousin, Uniform courage. Here’s the skeezy truth: working at the radio station was social currency. How much social currency is never certain: I don’t want to be a total dick and accuse Tatiana of only talking to me because I was wearing a shirt with a radio station logo on it, but I can with complete certainty say that I was only able to talk to her because I was wearing a shirt with a radio station logo on it.

Tatiana did say she thought it was very cool that we all worked at B105, so perhaps she was kind of drawn in by the uniforms. She also wanted to know how she could get work at the station. How did we all start? For half of us, it was through volunteering on the Community Switch, of which I was now the chief coordinator, having worked my way up from volunteer, to receptionist, now to almost-full-time-employee! So technically I was the person to talk to?

I took a chance while we were dancing and talking and I kissed her. She kissed me back, and I finally got some kind of inkling into what it must be like to be a sexual person: someone who experiences even a modicum of success, romantically speaking (the inkling passed super quickly, and I haven’t seen a shred of it since). We exchanged numbers, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would call Tatiana my girlfriend.

Not only was I going to break a terrible drought, but I had made a decision! I was straight! The thing that had tormented me since 1996; throwing thoughts and indecision violently around the inside of my head like Kinsey scale poltergeist for eight years, making me hate myself and doubt myself and never giving me a moment’s peace, was to be put to rest. It was such a huge relief. I’d had crushes on girls before, (and I’d had crushes on boys before, for which I felt nothing but shame as I tried to push them down to the bottom of my…pants), but this was a real, organically grown start of something. It felt different.

Four days later, I called her, but got no answer. I left a message saying hi, and tried not to let this first hurdle completely destroy me. She picked up when I tried to call her again the next day, but was unavailable to do anything as she was away all weekend with friends down the coast. Strike two, but the course of true love never did run smooth, right?

I tried to be a bit more casual on the third attempt. I waited until the Sunday of the weekend (I didn’t want to be seen to be bugging her when she’d already told me she was away), and I texted her, giving me the space and freedom to choose my words carefully and maintain at least the illusion of composure. It was, at the time, still something of a risky move, as texting wasn’t yet the ubiquitous communication tool it is now. It could be seen as too casual, even too common. In 2003, there were still a healthy contingent of people who either “didn’t own a mobile”, or “didn’t text”, and both of these phrases were always uttered with the same superior sniff that people today say “Oh, I’m not on Facebook”. I kept it real generic: did she want to come with the movies with me some time? Exactly forty-one minutes later my heart started again when I received the response: “Sure!”

It was hard to schedule this movie date. She didn’t pick up when I called her on Tuesday. And the text I sent Wednesday afternoon went unanswered. By Thursday I was feeling confused, and having tremendous difficulty focusing on my work. Was she actually interested at all? If not, why not just say no when I asked her to the movies? Oh god, did I pressure her into saying yes? Had I been a pest, badgering her until she said whatever it took to get me to stop calling her? Was this part of the rules of dating? Was there some unwritten hint I should have received by now? How, exactly, had I fucked this up?

While I sat in front of my computer, not working, staring into space, my desk phone rang. It was reception. “I’ve got a Tatiana here to see you?”

Oh my god.

Trying desperately to look like I hadn’t just sprinted all twenty metres from my end of the building up to the reception area, I casually flung open the glass door and ushered Tatiana inside. The lack of response to my text messages and phone calls still stung, but this impromptu first date was well on the way to making up for it. Would she like a tour? Had she had lunch? What were her plans? Do we hurry into a supply closet to make out? I’d seen that on the telly, it looked pretty sexy. What did she want to do?

“Um no, I can’t stay, I just remember you saying everyone got work here by starting at the Community Switch, and I wanted to see if I could get a job!”

Somewhere, deep inside my brain, something tiny went “click”. Imagine the tiniest little car you possibly can. Tiny. Like it’s an ant’s car. Now imagine the tiny little gearbox inside that tiny little car. That tiny little gearbox slips quietly from neutral into first gear: that’s how gentle this click was. The tiny little engine in the tiny little car purred tinily, making the tiniest little whisper that sounded like “s t o p   d o i n g   t h i s”. 

I stopped panting. I quietly gave Tatiana the spiel about new volunteers, took her CV to add to the pile, and I didn’t try to call her again.

Look. In the immediate aftermath of this event, and for at least five years after it happened, I painted Tatiana in a very bad light in this story. I was weirdly angry at her, and when retelling this anecdote I would describe this situation in full, martyred glory: she had led me on in an attempt to get a job at the radio station. She never had any intention of dating me. She was simply a gold digger; the “gold” in this scenario being eight hours of unpaid work per week answering phones.

With the wisdom of hindsight, and an active interest in trying, wherever possible, to be neither victim nor fuckwit, I realise I never actually asked whether she had any intention of dating me. I only assumed she didn’t; an act of desperation by what I now know to be a frantic and terrified subconscious, clutching at any straw to stop me pursuing her, even as my conscious remained hurt and confused. Today, twelve years later, I have no need to make Tatiana look bad. Nor do I have reason to lament her not dating me. What if we had? The experience could only have been terrible for us both.

I tell the story differently now. But I still credit Tatiana (the fuck was her name?) with helping me figure it all out, even though it didn’t happen straight away. See, in that moment, I still didn’t understand what the “click” was. It sounded like a profound thing that happened, right? It wasn’t. I thought the tiny whisper of “s t o p   d o i n g   t h i s” meant “stop embarrassing yourself, she’s not into you”. I didn’t immediately realise what it actually meant was that I was into dudes.

That realisation took over a week. And it wasn’t even a week of “debating” whether or not I was gay. It was a week of sulking like an entitled man-baby. Sulking that She Just Wasn’t That Into Me. Sulking that I’d never had any real romantic success, at least not since Sheridan Lunn kissed me in the jungle gym at Mount Isa’s Central State School in 1989 (her name I remember). Sulking that I hardly ever ever ever met a girl I fancied, and when I did it never went anywhere. And even when it went as far as it felt like it did with Tatiana, I still ended up at square one.

Sulking because it just seemed like it was all too hard.

And suddenly the tiny click made sense: it was all too hard. Why was it too hard? Because, DUH: I didn’t actually want the thing I was doing a terrible job of pursuing. I didn’t want a girlfriend. I wanted a boyfriend. I didn’t want to date women, I wanted to date men. I didn’t want to be best mates with Neighbours star Daniel MacPherson because he seemed like a really cool dude, I wanted to wrap myself around Neighbours star Daniel MacPherson like a compression bandage and tell him all my secrets and dreams!

And with that, I finally realised I was gay. I wasn’t proud of it. I wasn’t okay with it at all. But at least I’d realised it.

I could almost kick myself these days for how long it took me to realise who I was. Especially considering the evidence that I kept mounting. Ahem. Especially considering the evidence that kept mounting. I kissed my first boy at age 15 (the boyfriend of the first girl I kissed); my second and third also at age 15 (Paul, the first boy I dated, and Matt, the weird new kid who looked like a surfer); my fourth at age 18 (on NYE 1998 in a relatively hidden gay bar in Toowoomba called “Waves”); my fifth and sixth at age 20 (Name Forgotten, in the back of a car after a party, and Nicholas, whose kiss was actually a scripted part of an assessment performance piece at The Actors Conservatory—but the man deserves inclusion and your respect because he very classily pretended not to notice any of my erections when we rehearsed).

Based on numbers alone, if you add up all the girls I ever kissed and all the boys I ever kissed, including Sheridan Lunn at age 8, Felicity Scriven at age 12, and Tatiana Something-Something at age 23, by the year 2001 I had kissed twice as many boys as I had girls. But I still didn’t get anywhere even near clarity until 2003.

Idiot.

But hey, it’s not cool to dwell on things you absolutely can’t change. I got there eventually. And after that life fell deliciously into place* and I loved myself more than ever** and got a boyfriend almost immediately***.

*life continued to be a mess because this isn’t TV
**I hated myself intensely for at least five more years
***seven. years. later.

Mum and Mike were going strong, and decided to take things to the next level: moving in together. Would this be a repeat of the Nathan thing a couple of years earlier? Did Mike have a poxy little unit we’d be crammed into until one or all of us went insane? No, it turns out Mike had quite a sizeable three bedroom townhouse in the suburb of Nundah.

So, I’d quit my job at the toy store, to take up part time work under my friend Rebecca, who’d become the manager of a video games store at Westfield Chermside. It was only part time work, so I was suddenly on a lot less money. Combine that with the fact that Chermside was practically next door to Taigum, it made sense to move back home. Again.

Unfortunately, the forty-three house moves I’d experienced up until that point had given me a warped view of what it meant to rent a place: I assumed the capricious abandonment of one dwelling for another was completely normal and no big deal. So I called my real estate agent, without a hint of shame or comprehension of the consequences, and flatly informed her that I could not afford to pay rent anymore and would be moving out, but thanks anyway and I’d let her know when it was empty. Oddly, she got quite sharp with me. I mean, here I was giving her a courtesy call and she was giving me attitude? Like, calm down, lady. I’m just saying I need you to cancel my lease nine months early because I’m poor now. Why so snappish? But she refused to listen? She just kept talking about obligations and “breach of contract” and “letting fees” and “cleaning fees” and “paying rent until a new tenant is found” and I found the whole thing stupid because if I could afford any of those things then I’d be able to afford the rent, wouldn’t I? DUH. And anyway, it’s not like I signed a CONTRACT; just a lease, and a lease isn’t…

…what’s that?…

…I see. Oh. Well, then.

LOOK. Was closing the bank account the rent came out of and clearing all my stuff out of the flat in secret the mature thing to do? No. Did it work? Technically. Do I regret it? Yes. Do I wonder how I’ve ever been approved for any subsequent rental properties, since that undoubtedly left a black mark against my name? Every single time since.

And so I was back, living with mum, in Taigum. A suburb not on a train line; serviced only by buses. And this was during a time in Brisbane’s public transport history where half-hour buses were considered “frequent”. The isolation, especially in contrast to Petrie Terrace, where I’d been able to see the city right in front of my kitchen window, was well and truly felt.

So what to do when you’re stuck out in the wops with nothing to pass the time? You find the nearest thing and start doing that, apparently: it’s what my mum did when she walked into the AMF in Kedron and joined a ten-pin bowling league. And it’s what I did when I…copied my mum and did the exact same thing.

Like most of her other hobbies, mum took to ten-pin bowling with an ardent fervour that was short-lived, but intense. At first she was useless at it, but her learning curve was steep: soon there was an actual pile of “Player of the Week” certificates on the table. She started learning how to do the “spin” delivery. She bought her own ball. She had a special glove.

Like most of my other hobbies, I took to ten-pin bowling with an imaginary fervour that far, far outweighed my actual level of talent. I had no certificates. I tried the “spin” delivery once but it hurt my thumb too much so I stopped trying. I wanted my own bowling ball (it was going to be transparent, but with a skull in it, just like Janeane Garofalo’s in Mystery Men), but could never afford it. I didn’t have a glove.

But I did have a nice league team-mate. He was in his forties and had the ugliest mullet you had ever seen, but he was a very friendly person. Were my life some kind of weird romantic comedy, he and my mum would have had a meet-cute and started dating. She would have fixed up his hair, and he would have given her something to do other than try to find wall space to fit all those fucking bowling certificates.

Oh wait, they did do that. They did exactly that. That’s how my mother met Mike. Here’s how I assume it went down:

(Mum’s always on at me about who would play her if this blog became a movie. I guess we now know it would be Lorna Luft?)

I, on the other hand, continued to meet no one. But at least work was fun. The video games store job was the perfect antidote to the toy store job, and continued my winning streak of ridiculously fun-sounding jobs. I can really only think of three complaints I had about working at Game R Us. Firstly, Westfield Chermside is so big, so sprawling, and so oddly shaped that it is impossible to find one’s way around. On more than one occasion I was late coming back from my break because I got lost. LOST. I couldn’t find the store at which I was an employee; the store I’d left not fifteen minutes earlier.

My second complaint would be the one other employee, Carl; an American, formerly of the U.S. Army, who made everything—EVERYTHING—a competition. If you had a black cat, he had a blacker one, etc. Carl also held eye contact a little too long, and talked about the army a little too much. I’m not saying Carl had a human skull in a box under his bed, but he definitely had the box.

My third and final complaint about Games R Us would be the way it went into administration two months after I started working there, and closed down completely one month after that.

That was bothersome.

So, I had a job I hated. A job I’d already quit once, before hastily begging for it back again. What a perfect position I was in, then, to move out of home for a second time? And not into the relatively safe support network of a sharehouse. No no. I was ready to spread my miserable, barely competent wings and FLY.

For $105 per week, I found my haven in one of the most convenient places Brisbane had to offer: right on the border between the CBD and Paddington. Petrie Terrace was one of those streets you could just refer to by name:

“Where do you live?”
“Oh, *hair toss* I live on Petrie Terrace.”
“Oooooooooooh.”

(Full disclosure: Not once did anybody respond to my address with “Ooooooooh”. Frankly, there was a blatant disregard for my quest for socio-eceonomical status within the wider Brisbane community.)

The apartment was a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bedsit. Not enough room to swing a cat. Not even enough room to hold a cat gently with your arms outstretched.

But what did I need with space, anyway? It’s not like I owned anything of note. My only worldly possessions consisted of a TV and a PS2 (because priorities), and a small, cumbersome dining table. That was literally everything. The TV and PS2 sat on the floor, and the table was jammed into a corner; useless because I had no chairs to sit at. I slept on a foam cushion that I’d borrowed from the back of a friend’s wicker couch. It was a pretty meagre existence, until I got my inflatable armchair.

Yes. Inflatable armchair. This was a thing.

Christopher’s Early 2000s Fad Recap (For Anyone Too Young Or Too Old To Remember)
At the turn of the year/decade/century/millennium, there was a brief period where the pinnacle of home furnishings was your own breath shaped into household items. Photo frames, wastepaper baskets, fruit bowls, even furniture. This trend actually made it very easy for young people moving out on their own, because they could deck out an entire house on the cheap: all you needed was fifty bucks and some Ventolin.

So yes. Inflatable armchair. It was huge, and a horrible shade of purple, and it required blowing into no less than four different sections to make its complete chair shape. But once it was fully inflated and you could sit down (which you needed to, what with all the hyperventilating)? It was glorious. It lived inside, but every morning I’d carry it to my tiny, TINY balcony and have my morning coffee while I looked out over the suburb of Paddington.

Meanwhile, in what will come as a surprise to absolutely no one (but shocked the hell out of me), my job and I continued to be a terrible, terrible fit. Though saved from having to go to an outer suburban store (meaning I could still attend acting classes), I was moved to a different store in the city. The new store was much bigger, and contained Briony: a woman so delightful, whenever I picture her she’s always backlit like Monica in Touched By an Angel.

Sadly, Briony was not enough to fix either the horrible job or my horrible attitude towards it. The new store had a huge hobby section: gas powered, radio controlled cars that were built from scratch, model aeroplanes, and those tiny Warhammer figurines. Not learning my lesson from last time, I admitted to management that I knew nothing about any of those areas, and I was particularly uninterested in model car construction: within 48 hours the directive had come down from Springwood that I was to immediately start training—outside work hours if required—to become the new hobbies ‘guru’.

It was a miserable time. For 9.5 hours every Monday to Thursday, 13 hours every Friday, and 9 hours every second Saturday, I would drag myself to work. I felt lost and trapped. I would sometimes feel almost physically ill, like a sinking weight in the pit of my stomach, when I thought about work. I became too tired to do anything outside of work hours: between work and classes, I would simply go home and fall asleep on my sad little foam block.

Soon, the only solace I could find was during the ten minutes I spent in the very early morning, sitting on my inflatable armchair with my coffee, looking out over the balcony. I didn’t have much, but I had those few stolen minutes of me time, which I treasured.

One morning, as I went through this regular ritual of sitting with my coffee in my hideous purple chair-shaped balloon, I felt the familiar sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach—the one that signalled impending work-induced misery. I tried to push it away. This was my BALCONY TIME, dammit. But it felt particularly acute. It was harder to suppress than normal. It was as if my entire stomach was folding in on itself; as if my body was involuntarily curling itself into a ball. I felt a hard pressure against my chest. Was I having a grief-induced heart attack? The pressure on my chest felt like it went straight through me; down my spine to my butt. Could I feel pressure on my butt as well? WHAT WAS HAPPENING?

In my panic, I failed to notice the hissing sound.

My armchair was deflating.

It was the floor pressing against my butt, and my own knees pressing against my chest. I didn’t feel a sinking feeling; I was literally sinking. It wasn’t as if my body was involuntarily curling itself into a ball, it was, in fact, curling itself into a ball. And as I sank, the torn plastic corpse of what was once my arm chair folded in around me.

I scrambled free of my lurid purple body bag before I completely Laura Palmered myself; knocking my coffee cup off the balcony in the process. I stood amid the wreckage, still in my pyjamas, and surveyed my life.

First my free time, then my spirit, then my armchair, then my coffee. The horrible toy store had taken everything. When would the misery end?

Turns out the misery would end that Friday, when my friend and former Tops! coworker Rebecca called me to ask if I wanted to work with her at a video games store in a shopping centre right near mum’s house in Taigum.

And that’s how I quit my job a second time, gave up on living alone a second time, and moved back out to mum’s place in Taigum a second time to work with Rebecca a second time.

Eventually, Mum realised her relationship with her tiny boyfriend Nathan was not reaching the…heights…she was hoping for. Imagining a future with him was rapidly becoming a tall order. She’d made a pros and cons list, and Nathan had come up short. When she ended it with Nathan, she let him down gently; it wasn’t that difficult, as he was already quite low to begin with.

So on top of my new classes starting at The Actors Conservatory (still not okay about the apostrophe situation), and my job soon to be ending at Tops!, we also were moving for the forty-second* time: to Taigum; a suburb of Brisbane that even long-time residents of Brisbane have never heard of.

It wasn’t all bad. Evergreen River Park was like a cross between a retirement community and a fancy suburb complex. By which I mean it was a fancy suburb complex filled with old people; but it did have both a tennis court and a swimming pool. FINALLY, I was living the lifestyle I knew I’d always deserved. Even though I used the tennis court and swimming pool exactly ZERO times, it was good enough just knowing it was there.

Around about the same time we were moving to Taigum, a caught a major break: the owner of a chain of toy stores (one of which was located just underneath Tops! in the Myer Centre) was looking for new staff. He happily took on a handful of us soon-to-be-destitute ride attendants: three of us finished at Tops! on Friday and started at the toy store on Monday. It seemed to promise an even MORE fun job than the one we’d had.

As it turned out, the toy store was a terrible, terrible place to work. Look, I do realise now that I was a stubborn, petulant child, and carry some responsibility for how miserable I was while I worked there, but the psychological warfare employed by the owner, Don, was remarkable. The most noticeable example of this was his weekly tour of all the stores. Every Thursday, Don would stop by all the stores, one by one, to check in. The hysterical displays of fakery that this would elicit were incredible. The scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda arrives at the office and everyone gets in a flap? Exactly what happened.

Now imagine this scene again, except with Furbies and Pokemon instead of expensive shoes and magazines.

Upon Don’s arrival, every staff member would descend upon the doorway like he was Dorothy and we were Munchkins. We would fawn over him, laugh at everything he said, flirt with him, and all the while trying our best to appear so ecstatically happy that our voices would go higher and louder and higher and louder until eventually no sound came out at all, but all the dogs in the vicinity would lose their shit. We did this so as avoid the terror of the Friday morning phone call: Anybody seen to be not as cheek-splittingly cheerful as possible would be interrogated as to their mood and what was wrong with them, and whether they really wanted to keep working for the company. In particularly dire circumstances, you would be summoned to the store that doubled as head office for a face-to-face meeting. To staff, the head office was referred to simply by the suburb it was located in: “Springwood”, as in:

“Don called. He wants you to go to Springwood.”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”

To this day, the very thought of Springwood makes me feel a tiny bit sick. Long after I stopped working there I would drive around the suburb entirely, just to avoid it.

This atmosphere of fear and worship is something he’d created. It was what he wanted. He would make his staff feel like they were worthless, like they had nowhere else to be, or go, and then offer his store as sanctuary. It felt, to me, like the more broken you were, the better you were for him. Because you’d never leave.

Again: I was an inexperienced, petulant, whiny 19 year old who was discovering teenage temper tantrums about five years too late, so my take on this experience is extremely tainted. I’m sure there are people who worked there who loved their job, and Don, and hated having me around because I was a tiny jerk.

But it did really feel like Don was personally out to break me. To wit: I started out working at the store that only sold videogames. I was in my element. I loved the games store, and felt really comfortable there. When asked how I was doing, I said exactly this, and two days later I was moved across the corridor of the shopping centre to the regular store. It was harder work and less fun, but I managed. I was earning a full-time wage and could afford to attend my Actors Conservatory classes. I was as happy as a slightly unhappy clam. Then I started hearing rumours that I was gong to be transferred to an outer-suburban store, meaning I would be too far away to make it back into the city in time to get to class. I mentioned this to a coworker (not to labour a point, but remember: petulant & whiny; I probably didn’t “mention” it so much as “went on and on and on and on like a prissy shitbag about it”), and the coworker immediately reported it back to Don. The next day I was summoned to Springwood (NOOOOOOOOOO), where I was told that outside interests and hobbies were all well and good, but he preferred his staff members’ outside hobbies to at least be vaguely related to toys. Sports were great, remote controlled cars and kite-flying and Warhammer—all activities that required equipment sold at the stores—were fine. But acting? It really showed that my “head wasn’t in it”. Don told me I had to decide whether or not I really wanted to work there. I had to choose between working for him, or “faffing about at your little drama school”.

I chose faffing. I quit my job on the spot.

I gave up the job I needed to pay for my tuition because keeping the job meant giving up my tuition but once I’d given up the job I could no longer afford my tuition. ADULTHOOD, Y’ALL.

Those classes must have meant a lot to me, because three weeks later I took myself back out to Springwood (NOOOOOOOOO), made an appointment with Don, and begged for my job back. I was utterly broken. Which made me a prime candidate. Which is why I got my job back. Everything was back on track!

Did this experience teach me about humility, and compromise, and learning how to navigate the world? Naaaaaah. It taught me I was an unstoppable force of nature who could do whatever he wanted with virtually zero consequences, which is why I announced to Mum that I didn’t need Evergreen River Park’s tennis courts or swimming pool or fifty thousand septuagenarian neighbours: I was moving OUT INTO MY OWN FLAT!

*I’d just like to point out I really resent that my 42nd story isn’t grander than this. I mean. As a Douglas Adams/Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy acolyte (the number 42 is literally tattooed on my body somewhere, but that’s a future story), I really wish this had been more explosive. It’s just poor planning on my part, really.