Hello and welcome to 2025.
It’s January, my favourite month of the year. It’s my birthday month, and we’re on an odd year, which bodes well for ME and my superstitions, which are a secret.
New year, same me. Henceforth this weekly newsletter will be much the same, a collection of news, internet bits, anecdotes, memes, reviews and other stuff I absolutely must tell you about, sent at some point on a Friday. It’s going to be less writing, because I’m not afraid to admit it, this shit takes me ages to compose, but I’ll aim to send out bonus longer form essays, researched articles and personal stories every few weeks. Promise!
table of content
+ birthdays
+ ins and outs
+ what do you do for work?
+ updated love list
how to have a good birthday
I am a capricorn, which means every year, everyone is too busy being burnt out and empty wallet from xmas/gooch week/nye and general summer to give me the birthday attention I deserve. From an early age, due to never receiving the privilege of an icecream cake school birthday, everyone constantly being away for my special day and never having a proper party, I developed a kind of birthday complex. If ALL THE ATTENTION wasn’t ON ME, I would FORCE IT TO BE. I spend all year celebrating other people’s birthdays, and just because you’ve gone and had a big summer that is no excuse to neglect ME. I’m not about parties any more: I had a party once and it was nearly the worst day of my life – hosting is balls, my mum and sister set the whole thing up while I passed out from anxiety in my room, and eventually I left my own thing in search of new people. I’m not evil like that any more, but No Parties. For the past six years I have been lucky enough to finagle a trip away for my birthday. If no one is going to be around, neither will I.
I understand a lot of people don’t like their birthday. I offer you my solution: be insufferable. Make it a big deal. Not about gifts, not about events, but in concept. The concept is a Big Deal. Even if you don’t believe it yourself. It’s so much more fun that way. The people who love you will enable you to do this. And since deciding to love my birthday, since implementing the rule of loving my entire birthday month, I have cured my fear of ageing. It wasn’t easy at first, and I still cry every year. But, like with everything, fake it ‘til you make it. If you make it all into a momentous spectacle, a small circle of people who love you enough to tolerate irritating birthday princess syndrome will rally around you. And it will make you feel special. It’s awesome.
ins and outs
If I wrote an ins and outs list you’d laugh me out of the building. You’d call me trite, banal, unimaginative. Because a good ins and outs list is bitingly honest. A good ins and outs list author may not like all the ins, maybe even resist the outs, but that’s their truth. I’m not in the mood for that. In fact, honesty is out. Authenticity is in. And so is being fake.
IN
Acting your age
Acting your tax bracket [rich people only]
Love
Bubble baths at other people’s houses because I don’t have one
Making fun of rich people
Shaming
Shaming SWERFS, TERFS and people with evil jobs
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asking people what they do for work
It’s weird to ask someone what they do for work. I see this line repeated a lot. I don’t believe in this. I believe that if you have an issue with it a) just fucking lie, and b) it’s where you spend 15-40 hours of your week, how can we pretend that’s not significant? I see this line repeated a lot among creative types, which is interesting because how could you not want to talk about your lifestyle? And, a caveat, I know that there are many regular jobs, and sometimes people are embarrassed about their jobs, because it isn’t necessarily where they want to be, and “my job is the least interesting thing about me” is a thing. I feel it too. But grow up. How someone makes their living IS inherently interesting. If you have a boring job LIE, but I promise you you’re the only one who finds it boring.
Another caveat is sometimes it actually is weird when people ask you what you do for work. When it’s the first thing they ask, when they’re clearly trying to size you up, trying to deem whether you’re of any value to them. But this is something that has only ever happened to me in vapid, ultra-capitalism bootlicker spaces, like music industry functions, PR events, and Sydney and it’s immediately obvious when this is happening. It’s not hard to tell when the person you’re talking to is evil. When they’re not asking out of interest, but blatant self-interest. It’s obvious, which means the choice is in YOUR hands to entertain that, or ignore them.
But tell ME what you do for work. I want to know. I want to know what your day-to-day is like. I want to know the most interesting encounter you’ve had today. I want to know what you hate about it. How much you get paid. What your boss is like. I’m not nosy. I’m a great conversationalist. It’s good conversation.
updated love list
Julie’s at the Convent is heavy on my love list. My boyfriend booked us in for our anniversary. The only other time I’d been there was for our first date 364 days prior, and I couldn’t have put it on my love list after that, because he’d booked us in for lunch, I had baulked at the white table cloths indoors and suggested we sit outside on the patio, he barely fit in the rigid chairs and I was too nervous to eat, we had bread and sardines and that was probably it. We stole hits of vape while I rattled off lengthy diatribes on everything my sun-addled mind could grasp, he called me trendy in his red Error 404 shirt and I berated the shit out of him. I liked him so much I suggested we split the bill. Yes. I was in love.
We’re ever so grown now. Now, we sit indoors at the sparkling linen table and share a bottle of wine, we take the three-course set menu, starting with an oyster each. We go outside to share a cigarette in the sun while we wait for our mains.
Between seasonal vegetables and Goldband snapper with Abbotsford Convent garden-grown agretti I marvelled at the ballsy romance of his intended first date a year ago – lunch at this beautiful restaurant near the Collingwood Children’s farm where we’d separately shared so many weekends, in the venue where more than a decade prior we’d both probably not paid for Lentil as Anything [rip], white table cloth, set menu, shared mains, sober, in the middle of the god damn day with someone you’d just met at a god damn festival. Terrifying. It’s so romantic.
As a rule I don’t do sit-down meals on a first date and I’d never, ever had a first date at lunchtime. Sitting inside and… eating? That was simply too much to bear.
Between glorious spoonfuls of olive oil slicked honey parfait I tried to imagine how I would have coped in the fancy stillness of the restaurant’s glowing interior with a near-stranger. I wondered what would’ve happened to us if we’d sat inside. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a second date. Maybe we wouldn’t have had the longest date ever that stretched across Fitzroy pool, the pub, then dinner back at the Convent, Cam’s, where we perched knee-to-knee at the end of a table filled with four friends and an argument and a rushed kiss in the car as he dropped me home and ran back to his parent’s house to sleep for a 4am Christmas eve market trip with his mum. I guess we’ll never know.
CORNY!!!!!!!! So cute. Beautiful venue. Exquisite food. Highly recommend for an anniversary, birthday, or a derailed first date.
The end <3 Thank you <3 I’m writing this on a beach which is something I’ve always dreamed to do <3 But reception is godawful and need to go before I rip my skin off in frustration <3 We can achieve anything we want this year <3 Have a good day <3
Gooch week mentioned