The Anti-Cool Girl (19 page)

The two boys I'd loved were my friends before anything else, and I'm pretty sure I tricked them both into pairing up with me before they realised what was happening. ‘Oh?' I would say, when they asked about that bikini wax I'd said I got religiously when we were still friends. ‘I said that, did I?' Then I'd hike up my flannelette pyjama pants and spend the night farting in my sleep.

So, relationships, I had done. Hook-ups, I had done. But a date? An actual, awkward, ‘We both know what's going on but we're not going to say it' date? Never. Something about that has always felt . . .
off
to me. Why admit that you like someone and that you're hoping they like you back? Why would you ever give anyone that kind of power?
What kind of sick masochist would enjoy that?

Not me. I was perfectly happy to continue on with my plan of being alone, waiting for the day a smart, funny man would read something brilliant I had written, fall instantly in love, and ironically wait outside the Mamamia offices with a boom box playing that song from that movie I'm not old enough to remember.

But then came Tinder. And after a drunken, embarrassingly giggly cliché of a night with my girlfriends, I promised to sign up for twenty-four hours. And even though I had ample warning from the moment I started playing, I somehow didn't realise Tinder was essentially just an online pimp until about hour twenty-three.

In hour one, I was still finding my bearings. I quickly discovered that, in Tinderland, anybody not asking you about the possibility of inserting a range of objects into your vagina instantly seems like a gentleman. That's how I ended up chatting to someone who enquired about my nipple and its current state of erection. ‘At least he's keeping it above the waist' is actually a thought that went through my brain.

I should have known my standards had dropped dramatically when I started enjoying talking to Nipple Guy. It had only been forty-five minutes and Tinder had already broken my brain.

Nipple Guy messaged me several times the next morning, and, encouragingly, all of it was civil and nipple-talk-free. He asked if I wanted to meet up that night, and with my 24-hour time-limit in mind, I said yes.

At twenty-eight years of age, I had successfully set up my very first date.

Now, as hard as I've tried to be cool since the moment I shat my pants and pretended I hadn't so I could hang out with my big sister's friends, I'm not cool in even the most generous interpretation of the word. So while other people would have wondered if sex was on the table, that thought didn't even cross my mind. When he suggested I go to his house to have a few drinks and watch some TV, I thought, ‘Yes! Amazing! Someone else who hates going out on Saturday night!' When he suggested I come at 9pm, I thought, ‘Yes! Amazing! Now I have time to drink wine in the shower before I leave!'

And that's how I found myself, at 9pm on a Saturday night, having very average intercourse with a dude who had charmed me by being polite enough not to send me a dick pic. And yes – intercourse is the most appropriate word I can think of in this circumstance.

Things started off fine. There was chatting and drinks. I knew immediately that it wasn't a love-connection, but I was determined to commit to the whole experience. (I'm a writer! I must live life! etc etc etc.) I somehow turned the conversation to feminism, which he very politely endured, considering he was probably confused as to why I wasn't rubbing my nipple on his ball sack yet.

Then (and in hindsight, I understand that this is the point I probably should have realised he was really, really hoping for
sex), he stood up, cracked a joke about ‘pants-free Saturdays', and proceeded to take off his jeans. He then sat back down on the couch and kept chatting, like it was totally normal that he was now wearing only underpants.

I didn't quite know how to respond.

‘I'm not taking my pants off,' I blurted out.

‘That's fine,' he said, before continuing on with his very valid point about sexism in the workplace.

Somehow, I still didn't realise that he was hoping for sex. I didn't even pick up on it when he suggested watching a movie in his bedroom. ‘I love watching movies in my bedroom!' I thought. ‘Me and this guy have so much in common! Dating is fun!'

So there we were, sitting on his bed, watching TV. I felt a little strange about the no-pants situation, but who was I to dictate how he dressed in his own home? I figured I must just be one of those people who is so adept at putting others at ease, he just felt like he could relax around me. ‘Well done, Rosie,' I thought. ‘You are so fucking personable.'

But then, just as I was giving myself a mental pat on the back for being so incredible at getting along with strangers, Nipple Guy took things up a notch.

Without taking his eyes off the TV, my date took his left hand and started massaging his balls. And just like when he had taken his pants off earlier, he sat there, eyes ahead, like it was
the most normal thing in the world to be watching TV with a stranger while fiddling with one's sack.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was when it finally dawned on me.

‘Ohhhhh,' my brain realised. ‘I'm here for sex. This is a sex thing.'

I figured at that moment I had two choices. I could say thanks but no thanks, and graciously make my exit. Or, I could commit to what this whole Tinder experience had to offer and, well, go with it.

I went with option number two. And as soon as I realised that getting half-naked was not just an odd lifestyle quirk of his, things moved pretty quickly. Before I knew it, half-naked became completely naked, for both of us.

It soon became apparent, though, that Nipple Guy didn't want to get laid so much as he wanted a head job. He kept contorting his body in a way that meant his dick was constantly in my face. He was like a phallic acrobat.

Now, at that point in my life, I had grown enough sexually that I knew when I really didn't want to do something, but I still wasn't great at
saying
when I didn't want to do something. I was of the opinion that if it could be hinted at with a little delicacy, that was far less awkward for everyone involved. So every time he would try and coax my head in that direction, I would half-heartedly
stay there for five seconds before making my way back up, hoping that he would get the picture.

But then I would blink, and there'd be a dick in my face again. He was so quick. And we continued playing that weird grown-up version of cat and mouse for about ten minutes, until it reached a bizarre kind of sexual stalemate.

He pushed my head down. I moved my head back up. He pushed my head down. I moved my head back up. We kissed for a bit, and he tried to push my head down again. I moved my head back up. Then he actually got up on his knees and put his dick in my face. So then I got up on
my
knees and started kissing his face again. And just when I was thinking I had won this drunken strategy game of sexual etiquette, he actually
stood up on the bed
and put his dick in my face.

‘So this is Tinder,' I thought, as I sat in an unfamiliar room and wondered how much higher this thing could go. ‘Playing Jenga with my face and a penis.'

Somehow, I eventually managed to kibosh the head-job idea without ruining the mood (that is, by forcefully pulling him down from his ridiculous standing-on-mattress position), and after that I was ready for it all to be over.

I wasn't really enjoying myself, and he was taking forever. I even faked an orgasm, hoping that maybe he was just waiting for me to finish before he did. But he wasn't taking forever because he had sexual manners. He was taking forever because he still
wanted a damn head job. So, getting serious motion sickness from all the thrashing and vodka (and really just wanting to get home to watch
Seinfeld
reruns), I sat up against the head of the bed, opened my mouth and let him fuck it. He came in about eleven seconds. ‘Ah,' I thought. ‘So all I had to be was a blowup doll.'

I went to the bathroom to get myself together, and also to try and come up with a good excuse for why I would need to leave immediately. I didn't quite know the etiquette involved. Was he expecting me to stay? How could I leave this place and never come back without seeming rude? I was still trying to figure out what to say when I came out of the bathroom, only to see him fully dressed, looking like he was about to leave.

‘Um, I'm really sorry, but I sort of have to go,' he said.

He had to ‘go'. From his own house.

‘It's my friend, he's going through a really bad break-up, and he really wants me to come over.'

I couldn't believe I was the one getting rejected, when I had just been about to do the rejecting.

‘Dude, I was about to leave anyway,' I said, picking up my stuff with an air of dignity not quite befitting someone wearing her underwear backwards.

We gave each other an awkward kiss on the cheek, and I left (after which there's no doubt in my mind he got straight back into bed). I was so pissed that he had been the one to ask me to
leave first, that I was determined to be the one to delete him off Tinder first. And as I was sitting in the cab, I realised that it had been almost twenty-four hours exactly since I had signed up to what I now understood was essentially an online sex service. Perfect timing.

I deleted my account. Then I asked the taxi driver to pull over so I could spew.

Starting with the pretty pink penis bow and ending with being fucked in the mouth like a blow-up doll, I'd had ten years of sex completely focussed on what the guy wanted. And after I wiped the excess vomit from the side of my cheek and rolled back into the cab, I let the night wind touch my face as I decided: no more! From that moment on, I was going to make sex about me. I was going to orgasm, and not just by myself in the bathroom. I was going to say no when I wanted and yes when I wanted. I wasn't going to follow ridiculous sex tips just because I was scared of losing a man. I decided in the cab that night that I was going to stop trying to ‘do' sexy, and start trying to have sex that I'd actually enjoy.

Sex is messy and funny and weird. You're literally rubbing the parts of your bodies together where your poo and wee comes out. Relax. Remember that it's important that you enjoy it too. Don't do anything you're not comfortable with. And don't ever, ever try to tie a pink bow on some guy's dick.

When you're twenty-seven years old and realise that you have no clue how to post a letter, it's obvious something has gone very wrong somewhere along the line. I suppose spending a childhood begging my mum to stop drinking and put on some pants, followed by an early adulthood imprisoned by mental-health issues didn't help. But you can't exactly use that as an excuse when an exasperated postal worker looks like they're about to punch you in the face.

I had somehow, against all odds, made it to my late twenties, but there were just some things I had missed along the way. How to post a letter was one of them.

I realised my cluelessness not long after starting at Mamamia, when I was one day required to perform the complex, mind-boggling task of sending an actual physical letter through an
actual physical facility. It was all because of some stupid form that needed my stupid
original
signature (trust me, I tried to worm my way around the requirement for weeks) and needed it posted, via snail mail, ASAP.

‘Fine,' I thought. ‘I'll head to the post office. How hard could it be? I've returned stuff to ASOS before.' ASOS understands that most of their clientele deal exclusively in email, so they make snail mail easy – they give you a sticker with an address on it that you just stick on a bag and give to a person who knocks at your door. What happens from there is a mystery to me. But ASOS emails me when they get the returned items, so I assume it all works. ASOS had lulled me into a false sense of security that sending things in the mail was easy.

I looked in my current envelope, the one the form had come in. They'd included no sticker. Hmmm. There
was
some letter that had an address on it, and instructions for sending my signed form to that address, except there was no ‘.com' at the end of it so I was confused. I figured I'd just wing it.

When I got to the post office I had a vague idea of what I would need – a stamp and an envelope. But did people actually just buy
one
stamp and
one
envelope? Or was this a bulk-purchasing situation? I took a slow, hesitant walk around the shop. I eventually found envelopes, but no stamps. This stumped me. I figured it would just be easier to line up and have the post office people deal with this complex problem.

When I arrived at the counter the following exchange took place:

       
Me:
Um . . . I need to post a letter.

       
Counter Lady:
(confused look) There are post boxes outside. You didn't need to line up.

       
Me:
Oh, I know. It's just . . . I, um . . .

       
Counter Lady:
(clocking in brain that I am an idiot) Do you not know what to do?

       
Me:
(trying to save face) What?! I
totally
know what to do, it's just, I didn't have any envelopes at home so . . .

       
Counter Lady:
There are envelopes on the shelf right next to you.

       
Me:
Right, right. So, do you guys sell stamps in singles or . . .

       
Counter Lady:
(over it, big time) The envelopes are prepaid. See that picture in the corner? That's the stamp.

       
Me:
Ohhhhh, I thought that was just, like, a picture showing you where the stamp should go.

       
Counter Lady:
No. It's not. Do you want to buy the envelope?

I bought the envelope. Then I made my way over to the desk to write the weird .com-free address on the front. Again, I was lost. How am I supposed to know how to format an address without Microsoft Word?

I saw a young guy next to me who looked equally confused. We gave each other an encouraging look, as if to say, ‘Don't worry, you're almost through this.' Ten minutes later, after solving the
Good Will Hunting-esque
address formatting riddle, I lined up again so I could send this bloody letter. They need to check it or something, right?

       
Counter Lady:
(about to explode) Is there a problem?

       
Me:
(beaming – extremely proud of myself) Nope! Just want to post my letter!

       
Counter Lady:
Didn't I say before you could just put it in the box outside?

       
Me:
Oh. Right. Don't you need to like, approve it or something?

       
Counter Lady:
(officially over my clueless bullshit) Just give it to me.

I gave it to her.

       
Counter Lady:
(exasperated pause) This address says ‘Reply Paid'.

       
Me:
(worried I had failed at cracking the address code) Um . . . I just copied it straight down. Did I do it wrong?

       
Counter Lady:
No, it's just that – don't you know what ‘Reply Paid' means? It means you don't have to pay. You just put it in the envelope they gave you and they pay from their end. Did they send you an empty envelope?

       
Me:
Yeah, but I didn't have any stamps, so I chucked it out.

       
Counter Lady:
You know you could have just posted this without having to come to the post office?

       
Me:
I'm not sure I know anything anymore. Hold me?

I left the letter in her capable hands and contemplated my complete ineptitude at life all the way home. I knew a big part of my problem was that I had no idea how to interact with adults. When it became clear at Mamamia that my writing was popular and I might be a draw to advertisers, my boss Mia tried to take me to some meetings and send me to functions with other ‘industry' people. I would spend the entire time in virtual silence, wondering how all the women managed to walk in such high heels without falling over. Then I'd start to worry that I wasn't talking enough, so I'd drop some inevitably awkward TV-related line like, ‘So, anyone see that dude get knifed in the balls on
Game of Thrones
this week? That was intense.' I could never tell if they were more perplexed by the fact I had mentioned knifed balls or that I was a 27-year-old woman still using the word ‘dude'. I also still carried a backpack, which I could tell caused Mia actual physical pain every time she saw it.

I'd also recently come to realise that I had no clue how to maintain a house. Or, in my case, an apartment that could also be considered a modestly sized walk-in wardrobe by a rich person who buys diamond collars for their purebred teacup bulldogs.
I only realised toilets weren't ‘self-cleaning' when the inside of mine started to turn black from too much poo residue. I ignored the problem for as long as I could, and was literally just about to buy a new toilet when I thought I'd check with my sister.

‘Oh hey Rhi, by the way . . .' We'd been on the phone for about half an hour, talking about all the times Mum had called us drunk and told us she hated us that week. ‘If your toilet has, you know, stopped cleaning itself, how do you, like, fix that? Or clean it or whatever?'

‘Rosie, are you asking me how to clean a toilet?' Rhiannon asked.

‘Yes,' I said, hanging my head in shame. ‘That is what I am asking.'

‘Oh my god. Does that mean you've never cleaned your toilet the whole time you've been living in that apartment? That's fucking gross!'

‘Well I thought it just cleaned when you flushed it! Like how you don't have to wash towels because your clean body just keeps them clean when you get out of the shower.'

‘Do you not wash your fucking towels? What the fuck, man! That's so disgusting! You are fucking gross, Rosie.'

‘But if your body is already clean when you get out of the shower, then why would your towel ever be dirty?'

Rhiannon sighed down the phone. I seemed to make a lot of adults sigh. Unlike me, having a kid when she was nineteen
forced Rhiannon to grow up pretty fucking fast. She was scheduling dentist appointments and organising after-school care; I was still drying myself in what were apparently towels covered in mini bacteria colonies. And it had probably been about ten years since I'd been to a dentist, since I'd basically stopped going when government-allocated adults stopped organising it for me.

Rhiannon explained that I needed to get something called ‘toilet cleaner' and use that to scrub what was now the almost entirely black coating around the inside of the bowl.

‘Wait – I have to put my actual hand inside the actual toilet to clean it?' I said, horrified.

‘This coming from the girl who's probably never washed a fucking towel in her life.'

Fair call. I wondered if she would book a dentist appointment for me.

Besides the post office debacle and my complete lack of domestic knowledge (including cooking skills – mine had pretty much never expanded further than Rosie's Chicken Soup and using the oven to heat up my filthy bacteria towels), I realised I really had no clue what it meant to be an adult the day I learned about money. The day I learned about money sent me into a complete and utter existential crisis, the likes of which I hadn't felt since I found myself sitting on top of that dirt mound about to get licked by the girl who smelled like cheese.

I started to make some money (at least, a little bit more than student/retail money), when I realised I had been born with a savant-like skill for writing recaps of a little reality TV show called
The Bachelor.
I never quite understood where the skill came from or why it struck such a chord, but as soon as I started writing a weekly satirical review of the show for Mamamia, my popularity as a writer exploded (something I always felt guilty about, since all I did was watch the show and write down what happened. I mean, come on, it's
The Bachelor,
the jokes pretty much write themselves). The posts started getting hits in the millions. The Mamamia website would break whenever one was published. I was getting recognised in the supermarket. Companies were sending me piles of free stuff. And then came the pay rise. To thank me for being born with the very specific skill of being able to write funny, bitchy jokes about
The Bachelor,
Mamamia gave me a pretty hefty pay rise. And finally having some money made me realise that I have a very limited understanding of where that money was going. Not in a ‘Oh whoops, I felt really rich on payday and shouted everyone in the bar' kind of way, but in an actual, logistical ‘How does the financial system work?' kind of way. I basically realised I had no freaking clue how banks work. I honestly just assumed that I put my money in the bank and it stayed there until I needed it, in a setting not unlike a vault at Gringotts or Scrooge McDuck's basement.

It's just one of those things I never really thought about, until I thought about it. I'd taken for granted that it all works and the rest of the details were none of my concern. Like how cows turn into burgers, or how getting a manicure is so cheap.

It was a co-worker (unnamed, by request) who made me realise there was yet another damn part of being a functioning adult I knew nothing about. She kicked off my panic by asking,

‘When you transfer money online, who physically transfers it? Are there truck drivers or something?'

This immediately made me look up from my desk. Good freaking question. Obviously, I understood that the money isn't shipped around in trucks every time you pay an online bill (sorry, anonymous co-worker – even I knew that much), but when you transfer money online, where does it go? Does online money even exist?

APPARENTLY IT DOESN'T. Upon being informed of this, I proceeded to lose my mind in an ‘if a tree falls in the forest/existential crisis/where does space end' kind of way. Here's how the conversation went down, with my incredibly patient and intelligent boss Jamila (who couldn't believe that she'd just caught two employees pondering whether internet money is transferred in trucks):

       
Me:
So hold up, hold up. Is there a physical piece of money for every online piece of money that gets exchanged online?

       
Jamila:
(now questioning my employment status) You mean like an actual piece of plastic with a number on it that one person hands to another person who hands it to the business you're buying something from? No.

       
Me:
But I spend most of my money online. How could it not be real?

       
Jamila:
Well, you're thinking about cash money as if it's something that has inherent worth. It doesn't.

       
Money is simply a metal or plastic symbol of value. It's a construct that allows us to measure the worth of various goods in comparison to other goods, for the purpose of exchange.

       
Nowadays Western society tends to use electronic funds. So, yes, there is a finite amount of physical money in circulation but there is no requirement to actually have that sitting in a little box somewhere with your name on it.

       
Me:
So . . . wait.
Wait.
You're telling me if I get paid, and then I pay a bill online – that money never existed? It was just a
concept?
What kind of hippy philosophical bullshit is that? It's my money!

       
Jamila:
(losing patience) It did exist, Rosie. It doesn't have to be something that is physically passed around, though. Anyway, even if there was a physical cash representation of every cent you had sitting in the bank – the bank would still be loaning
it out. It's not just sitting in a giant – or not so giant – pile somewhere.