Thanks COVID For Making Me Appreciate The Shit Things In Life
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When you’ve been out of the game of life for as long as Melburnians have, you find yourself appreciating not only the small things in life but also the things you never thought you’d miss, not in a hundred pandemic years (“pandemic years” are like dog years, by the way — it’s 50 pandemic years for every human year).
I am calling it post-apocalyptic nostalgia. It’s a wistful yearning for the things you never wanted to yearn for but then life got so shit that the shit things in life actually looked pretty good in comparison.
Like, the other day I was driving down Punt Road, a road so notoriously awful that it’s affectionately known as C*nt Road. I was stuck in traffic on Punt Road for the first time in months. Out of nowhere, I yelled the fucking C-word at a car that was driving five kilometres under the speed limit (I never say the C-word unless I’m driving on C-Road, by the way). I had nowhere important to be, but my blood was boiling nonetheless. For a brief moment in time, I stopped and smiled and thought, “Gee, I’ve really missed this!”
It also felt weirdly comforting unlocking the door of my apartment the other night at 3 am, stripping off my jeans, ripping my booby tape off, and with it, my booby skin. I woke up the next morning and assessed the damage. Fuck, I thought as I blew cool air on the red, raw patches that were now missing their top layers of skin, MY LIFE IS SO COOL.
Do you want to know what a truly beautiful moment would be? When your intimate partner (yeah, I’m still using that phrase, it really caught on) rolls over onto the other side of the bed and you’re like, “Ugh, there’s no curfew excuse, how am I going to get him out of my apartment by 9 pm so I can put my ugly undies on, watch the season finale of Ted Lasso and eat Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked out of the tub?” This is a hypothetical scenario, obviously.
What about when your meal arrives and you see mushrooms WHEN YOU SPECIFICALLY SAID “NO MUSHROOMS” THREE TIMES TO THE WAITRESS. Oh god, what absolute bliss!
Oh, and what about that waitress the other night who completely ignored you when you asked for salt and then when you went to find her to ask again, she just shoved a salt shaker at you with a dirty look on her face as…
