When at the office party, do not, I repeat, DO NOT, vomit on the boss's shoes

A lesson in office party etiquette with Adventure Girl

If one Friday night you find yourself trapped in a room with free alcohol, some dodgy dance music and three quarters of your workmates, under no circumstances should you:

• let anyone over 35 or under 25 commandeer the jukebox
• dance around one or more poles
• hit on the boss
• hit on the boss's partner
• hit on anyone
• respond to anyone hitting on you
• drink without eating a proportionate amount of food
• drink while tired
• drink beyond 'happy'
• mouth off about your boss, your boss's partner, or any co-workers
• take bets on who will end up in the most inappropriate or unlikely pash
• offer to take a hit to win said bet
• take said hit
• position yourself anywhere near the designated party photographer
• position yourself anywhere near a camera
• call or text your partner (who is not at said party)
• 'kick on' afterwards
• venture into a quiet corner with anyone as sloshed as you
• find yourself in a position which might result in a walk-of-shame
• do a walk-of-shame

In fact if you want to hold your head up and meet everyone's eyes on Monday morning, the best thing you can do is eat, have one or two drinks, circulate with a quiet smile, then take that cab voucher straight to Boganburbia - do not pass go, do not collect $200.

-AG

Pick me! Pick me!

Christine Priestly on writing the writerly CV

My professional CV has been in circulation in one iteration or another for well over a decade: a catalogue of passionless buzzwords. But when it comes to trying to break into the literary world, that lack of passion slaps me in the face.

I have spent years trying to sell my studies and writerly pursuits as relevant in the professional non-writing world. Now I need to do the exact opposite.

All that business-speak, reams of flow-charts and mission statements, all that jargon-riddled documentation, needs to somehow morph and be moulded into experience that is pertinent and relevant to the literary world.

I need to show why I should be picked above all the other budding 'industriests', that I am dedicated, conscientious, able to work to deadlines, enthusiastic, and that this enthusiasm will translate into producing f-off awesome work.

It’s harder than I thought.

I read over my newfangled CV. Everything turned topsy-turvy, Magic Faraway Tree-style. What will they make of my extra-curricular activities, the stuff that usually sits in the ‘yes, I do have a life outside of work’ category, suddenly thrust into the centrepiece? How can I make the transition from ‘hobby’ (read: die-hard passion) into ‘career’?

And then there are those ten prominent years of analysis and techie-speak, climbing the corporate ladder, which somehow seem like a waste of time, irrelevant, barely transferable. How can I make them fade into the background?

But I know they can't be faded, nor should they be. Those years haven't been wasted and those skills are transferable. If I've learned nothing else, I know I can pick up the ball and run with it when I need to.

So pick me, I say, let me learn and work from the bottom up, because everyone has to start somewhere.

-CP

Sad and sorry this winter eve

Dear Rhonda Perky’s Bits,

I have neglected you of late.

The winter chill has finally made its way into my bones, and the office lurgy has successfully filtered its way through the reconstituted air to settle in my chest and lungs.

Instead of champagne I find myself sipping thermos-flavoured soup, and my silk-stockinged legs seek the comfort of flannelette. Worse, in place of my stilettos, I don a pink pair of slipper-socks and cover my knees in a crocheted granny-rug.

I even missed my naked moonlight-dance and bi-annual goat sacrifice that would normally mark the solstice.

Rest assured, as soon as I am rested, I will be back online, delving under the covers, this time for a bit of extreme burlesque. Stay tuned…

-RP

I'll give you yours if you give me mine

Adventure Girl calls for amnesty on the return of borrowed things

I have a confession to make. I am a serial borrower.

In my study is a shelf bursting with ‘things that don’t belong to me’. Worse, I have a shelf of ‘things that might belong to me’. The problem is I can’t recall what was gifted and was loaned. Books by the same author, one a present, one on loan, and I can’t remember which was which! No tell-tale dog-ears or creases to give it away. These goods belong to people who have cherished and maintained their possessions, forever pristine.

It’s not as though I’ve watched / read / consumed each item and then simply laid it aside. Most times the reason I still have the item is because I haven’t quite gotten around to consuming it. In fact I have a backlog of un-checked-out items that I’m still working my way through. Purchases, gifts, and loans.

Some I’ve had for years and years.

The difficulty now is so much time has passed; it’s like returning that Grade 6 library book you found under your bed having sworn it was returned, the one you fought the crusty librarian over to waive an outrageous $12.93 accumulated fine.

Returning them now is just embarrassing.

But suddenly I find myself as that crusty librarian.

Last night I went looking for my copy of The Emerging Writers’ Festival Reader. I know I have it somewhere; it was a birthday present. In my mind, a niggling memory of someone peering covetously over my shoulder… and me handing it to them. Here, of course you can have a loan of it. Another memory surfaces. Of the Reader sitting on my desk alongside a second hand copy of Sheri S Tepper’s Grass, the one I hunted down for months in dodgy second hand bookshops, and ended up ordering online, just to own a paperback copy at last. You’ll love this, I hear myself say to a friend, Why don’t you borrow it…?

Then I see the empty ‘B’ section of my DVD collection taunting me. The gaps where my copies of Big Love ought to be… Who did I loan them to??? And where did my Presidents of the USA CD vanish to, all those years ago…?

Are all these items perched on someone else’s ‘things that don’t belong to me’ shelf? Are they too embarrassed to fess up and return them to me?

It seems there’s only one thing to be done. I need to hold an amnesty swap-meet.

Not that I can be that candid about it. Instead I’ll host some sort of social gathering out in Boganburbia, and while the blokes are singeing the snags or carbonising onion rings, and the girls are peering at my pitiful stiletto collection, I can subtly point out the ‘things that aren’t mine’ shelf, and veer them past the pile of ‘things that might be mine’, and between rounds of bubbly top-ups and music exchanges, ask ‘where on earth did that Presidents CD go?'

With any luck, by the end of the night, as people step back inside to grab a drink or go to the loo, everybody’s belongings will have returned themselves to their rightful owners, discreetly and anonymously.

And unlike the haunted library book, no one’s things need end up discarded along with that strawberry jam sandwich and mouldy orange you never told your mum about, just for the sake of misplaced pride.

-AG

An issue so close...

Christine Priestly on getting 'almosted'

A couple of months back I submitted a short story to The Big Issue for their big-bang annual fiction edition.

You'll hear either way by 11 June, they said.

11 June arrives. Friday. I pretend not to check my email obsessively.

My inbox stays barren.

I was sure this piece was in with a chance. As soon as I'd finished writing it, I thought The Big Issue. It has to be.

Still no word on Friday night (maybe they'd had to work through to meet their deadline?), or Saturday morning... or Sunday night... (it's the long weekend, maybe I won't hear now until Tuesday...?)

Tuesday comes and goes. I get antsy, post off some more stories. Just to feel like I'm doing something. I hate this waiting, not knowing.

Should I contact them, follow up? Or will that just drive them nuts? They did say they would contact either way, didn't they?

I decide to wait, follow up in a week or so, give them a chance. No one likes a nagger.

And then I kind of forgot about it. Consoled myself with the distraction of new possibilities.

Almost as soon as I had stopped looking, stopped hoping, my inbox filled up. Two acknowledgements from previously silent publishers, and one big fat ALMOST.

Not that I realised at first. It began with the usual, we got lots of great submissions, blah blah blah, too bad, so sad... My stomach began to gnaw. A typical opening for a group rejection. Except that it wasn't. Mine had been considered in the final few.

It wasn't an acceptance, but it wasn't a gut-wrenching blanket rejection either - AND there was the door left open: we may like to contact you...

And then a friend said to me, you should throw an 'almost accepted' party.

So who's in?

-CP

The outsider

Christine Priestly shares her share of another's creativity

Recently I met a fellow writer and was privileged enough to workshop one of her pieces. It was a personal letter about the decay of a creative partnership which was also a relationship. The downfall of one became an emblem for the other. A beautifully melancholy tale, it described her experience sitting outside the creative process of another – a lover, a partner, watching his creation extend and morph beyond them.

What touched me most was her depiction of what it was like to experience the work of a lover and wonder where it came from. Music, art, writing, all comes from a place inside you that no one else can ever know. It is deep and it is raw.

It’s not something I had ever experienced from the other side. I didn’t know the ache of wanting to be inside that part, knowing you never will. Of wondering what your lover felt as they described one character’s love for another, one character’s hate for another. Wondering if they will ever feel a fraction of that for you.

Now I know.

It aches in the worst possible way. As though someone was there, in that part of them, long before you and forever after, someone who stole it for any other.

I’m not jealous like this when I pick a book up off the shelf. Who is that author to me? And with any non-writer, non-artist, I might assume that part simply isn’t there.

But this is different.

Because I know what it’s like to write those words, to create them. I know it’s not creation at all.

And yet because I’m a writer, I know that each piece, each character, is not its own entity, but a part of you. A part that exists both internally and externally. When I write, I write to discover; in a sense I am not a writer, I am a reader. I experience the suspense, the joy, the pain, the emotions, as they fill the page. If someone asks me where a story came from I can’t tell them. Perhaps I write to uncover it myself, as I dig and I dig.

Then I wonder, is it like that for him? Are his words real, or imagined? Perhaps they are cruel manipulation, suckering the reader, with no genuine emotion at all.

And then I realise where the pain comes from. From knowing I will never truly know.

-CP

When True Blood meets the Sex Pouf

Rhonda Perky goes under the covers to discover a miracle cure for Married Sex

As tends to happen in long term relationships, intimate encounters become less frequent, less spontaneous, less imaginative, and before you know it you're having Married Sex* (when you have sex at all).

Some couples go to great lengths to spice things up, frequenting the nearest Boganburbia Sexyland to purchase 'marital aides,' or just popping into Club X with a tissue or two. Others resort to sharing porn, but this can venture into uncomfortable territory... he wants to watch the one where the lesbians cop facials, she wants the one with the well-endowed pool cleaner.

Let me assure you, things need not end in awkward compromise or virtual abstinence.

Take the example of my good friends, Mr and Mrs McBallsdeep, who recently discovered TV’s vampire craze, True Blood. Free-to-air, not explicitly masturbatory (thus avoiding the eyebrow-raising selection of Asian Angels who love Anal), it provides a whole new realm of improbable scenarios for hours of role-play, for example, jumping out of graves or hanging from the ceiling.

Anyone who has encountered the deadly drudgery of bedroom-only sex (or worse, bed-only marital sex) will tell you that new stimulus is only half the battle. You are now in the right mindset, but as soon as you hit the staid floral duvet gifted to you from your mother-in-law, you realise it will take some sort of prop to stir things up again.

Enter the Sex Pouf.**

Not quite as risqué as dogging (public sex), and perhaps not as thrilling as hanging from the ceiling, I'm assured the pouf is very versatile, providing hours of exploratory fun as you discover new and interesting angles that simply can’t be achieved in your run-of-the-mill boudoir. Plus there's no need to secret away your brown-bag purchases as you hurry to your illegally-parked car in the middle of Boganburbia. A full range of socially-acceptable poufs can be purchased at your local Ikea or Freedom store.

So if one day you wake up and realise the washing machine is only ever used for doing the laundry and the kitchen bench for preparing chops and three veg, it might be time to invest in some serious couch-time with Bill Compton (Steven Moyer), Jason ‘I’ll shag anything’ Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten), and his little sister Sookie (Anna Paquin).

-RP

*Note: it is not necessary to be married in order to have Married Sex. My ex-husband and I were having Married Sex long before he put that diamond crusted shackle on my finger. Conversely, not all married couples have Married Sex.

**Or ottoman.