The Anti-Cool Girl

by Rosie Waterland

  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.

  You will learn how to be a functioning adult, and realise you don’t care about being a functioning adult.

  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.

  Me: But if the money doesn’t actually exist, what happens if everyone goes to the bank and wants to get their money out at the same time? Doesn’t the bank have a responsibility to make sure everyone’s money is available?

  Jamila: Well, that’s called a run on the bank. Think about what’s been happening to the Greek economy in the past few years, or in Argentina a few decades back now. The problem they had is that people were so concerned about the constantly changing value of their money (this is called inflation) that they became distrustful of the banks.

  But when huge numbers of people are going to the bank, all trying to withdraw funds at the same time, the bank won’t necessarily have the cash on hand to cater for that. So you want to prevent that sort of situation occurring.

  Me: What? But it’s our money! Where is all the money?

  Jamila: The bank takes people’s money and invests it, or loans it to other people. That’s the whole point of a bank.

  Me: I didn’t give them permission to do that!

  Jamila: Well, you did. When you signed up to the bank. And they pay you for letting them use your money while you don’t need it; that’s why you get interest on your savings. That’s the bank basically paying you back for letting them use your money for other things for a period of time.

  Me: But how can they invest my money and still have the money in my account when I need it? What if when I go to the bank to withdraw one hundred dollars, they’re like, ‘Soz, Rosie, your moulah is kind of tied up in Amalgamated Building Society stock right now. We’ll let you know how it goes.’

  Jamila: (silence)

  Me: And what if they lose it! What if they invest my money and lose it? I get like four cents a year in interest on my savings. What if they lose all my money and then are just like, ‘Well, we were giving you that four cents a year so . . . you knew the risks.’

  Jamila: Okay, maybe let’s try a different tack . . . Do you remember what happened in the Mary Poppins movie? When the little boy started yelling that the bank wouldn’t give him his money back? And then all the people thought the bank was in trouble and wanted to withdraw their funds?

  Me: (freaking out and ignoring Jamila) So, let me get this straight. Money is just a concept. The money I earn doesn’t actually exist. Everybody gives the bank their non-existent money, which is then hypothetically spent on hypothetical investments, which means the bank doesn’t actually look after everyone’s money, they just hypothetically send it away. So if everyone wanted their money at the same time, the bank wouldn’t have it. And if the bank invests badly on your behalf and loses everything, the hypothetically non-existent money becomes actually non-existent and then it’s gone. And too bad, that’s it.

  Jamila: Um, sort of . . .

  Me: What? Our money is resting on a house of cards, people. How is this legal?

  Jamila: Well, if you want to have your money in a bank, that’s what you’ve agreed to.

  Me: Can’t I just say to them, ‘Look, guys, I want to keep my money here but I don’t want you doing anything fancy with it. I
’ll pay fees and whatever, but I want my physical money here, in a box with my name on it. When I put money in, it’s in. When I take money out, it’s out. And I’m going to do random cash “spot checks” to make sure it’s all here and there hasn’t been any funny business.’

  Jamila: Well, you’re basically describing the equivalent of a shoebox under your mattress.

  Me: Well, maybe that’s where we’re at now.

  Jamila: (no words, foetal position, head in hands, tears)

  I suppose I was lucky to end up where I did, surrounded by a lot of people who were willing to take the time to explain the ins and outs of adulthood to me. And considering just a few months before starting at Mamamia, I had gotten so drunk I woke up to find that I had shat the bed, I certainly had a lot to learn. A 27-year-old who drinks so much she shits herself is hardly the epitome of adult behaviour. I didn’t think it was possible, by the way. I mean, I can understand peeing the bed, because all that takes is for your bladder to get a little too relaxed. But to shit the bed? You’ve actually got to push that sucker out. At some point in the night, I must have woken up and decided that I couldn’t be fucked going to the toilet. At some point during the night, I had weighed up the options and decided that sleeping in my own shit was worth it if it meant I got to stay in bed. I clearly had some growing up to do.

  I’d been out drinking with Jacob, and when we drink together we don’t mess around; it’s usually eight solid hours of wine and bitching about how unjust it is that people we don’t like are doing way better at life than us.

  I don’t remember the moment when I’d had one drink too many, but I do remember I felt completely fine until I went to the toilet. I’m a firm believer in the theory that you never truly know how drunk you are until you’re sitting in a toilet cubicle alone. That’s when you realise how much the floor is spinning and how you can’t get your eyes to focus on the love poem Tammy wrote about Corey’s sexy rat’s tail in 2002. You go into that cubicle feeling like you could take over the goddamn world, and you leave it barely able to walk. I wobbled over to Jacob and told him the night was over. The ‘I’m about to vomit’ look on my face meant he knew I was serious. He made sure I got home safely. I crawled into bed and puked on the floor next to me, a problem that I decided to leave for Future Rosie to take care of. I passed out, in what was certainly one of the more attractive moments of my life.