hot and spicy

Hundreds of years ago this week, I parked my crappy old little chili-pepper-red Mazda Unreliable (at least I think that was the model) beside the river that winds charmingly along the lower boundaries of my chosen Sandstone University -- the Australian equivalent of Ivy League Colleges -- and walked down the long long path to tread the hallowed halls of tertiary learning for the first time.

To be completely accurate, the walk was much longer than I'd ever anticipated -- by approximately 25 years, in fact -- and it was technically uphill, because the nearest car park I could find was in fact billions of miles away from my destination lecture theatre. This factor, I now realise, was influenced fairly substantially by the tens of thousands of OTHER students who had also inexplicably dug themselves out of bed at an ungodly unnatural early hour to arrive in time for the first day of lectures but had mystifyingly NOT been present a week or so before (probably drunk and stoned and having wild sex with strangers while listening to the Sex Pistols as everyone did back then, except me obviously) when I'd undertaken a finely-honed dummy-run with my older brother.

He, Mr Big Cleverpants that he is, had graduated with First Class Honours from Mechanical Engineering at that same venerable (or possibly venereal) institution a few years earlier and had gone straight back to study Medicine. And he decided, in a previously-indiscernible display of fraternal responsibility, that he'd better take me under his wing and give me a whirlwind tour of the safest and best-lit parking areas plus introduce me to the secret intricacies of Student Life (i.e. the libraries, refectory food, cinema, licensed on-campus clubs and birth control clinic) at our state's most esteemed tertiary institution.

His "guide to life" included this pearl of wisdom I take the opportunity to share with you now: "Never date an Engineering student, Hissy, because all they do is drink beer all the time, even for breakfast, and bore the arse off you with long-winded ramblings about fundamental material properties and system-oriented approaches to design and problem solving and standard representation techniques such as orthographic projection and issues associated with moving and rotation machinery such as lubrication, vibration and noise."

(And damnit if he wasn't right, as I discovered years later when I later met and married my own Mechanical Engineer and found myself spending the subsequent mumblemumble decades generally having absolutely NFI what J's talking about most of the time.)

And I'd rather enjoyed Orientation Week with all the live music, spectacular quantities of alcohol to be had (although I was under age and thus technically breaking the law every single day and night for that first year, sadly), weird extreme-sports events and open-air markets all held under the watchful eyes of the fantastic gothic stone gargoyle sculptures that peered down from the columns around the Great Court. Every club and society on campus had set up little store-fronts and was busy employing time-honoured techniques of "Flirty Fishing" by using the most dishily attractive members of their flocks to flatter and cajole and chat up unsuspecting and impressionable and hormone-addled adolescents for possibly nefarious if not entirely downright dodgy purposes.

This is presumably how I ended up simultaneously signed up for Fencing, Karate, Dance, Classics and Ancient History Society, Underground Theatre Company, Law Society, Mediaeval Society, Resistance Club, Language and Linguistics Society, Solidarity Club, Refugee Action Group, Women and the Law, Pagan Society, Vegetarian Society, Rock Climbers Anonymous, Organic Food-Buying Cooperative, the Eric Idle for Prime Minister Action Group, the Keep Nancy Spungen in the Ground Inaction Group, the Future Slaughterhouse Workers of Australia Collective (actually I may have made one or two of those up just now) and some bizarre club that consisted mostly of drunken Science students who enjoyed wearing Dr Who scarves, channelling electricity into their bodies, making fireballs, playing with liquid nitrogen, eating deep-fried insects and having scintillating competitions to see who could recite the most digits of pi.

I had less than negligible interest in participating in pretty much all of them, to be perfectly blunt -- especially those requiring a semblance of energy or movement or activity. What I really was seeking, of course, was a group of like-minded fairly sessile people that kind of sat around in an amorphous lump not doing very much at all except drinking copious quantities of red wine and Southern Comfort and investigating the hallucinogenic properties of a dazzling range of illicit substances and eating slabs of pizza and blueberry Danishes and having lots of wild kinky hurty sex while listening to the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop, all of which I fortuitously found in some of the more hard-core of the devoted volunteers at the university's avant-garde FM radio station (their motto: agitate, educate, organise) a few months later. And I knew the moment I crawled down the steps into their underground dungeon-studio and heard "Oliver's Army" blasting through the speakers for the very first time that I'd found my tribe. But all that was yet to come...

Anyway, on the fateful first day, all the other bastards had somehow got there before me and selfishly nabbed the best parking spaces, and I was left waaay over the other side of the Rugby Union fields to stumble my way past a hundred rugger-bugger boys yelling out the traditional rugby greeting to any unchaperoned woman of, "Nice tits, sweetheart! Wanna fuck?" at me in unison in a sort of an Oggy-Oggy-Oggy-Oi-Oi-Oi Haka-type chant while they bounced balls off their heads and each other's buttocks and testicles (or whatever it is they do).

Meanwhile, I fought my way valiantly through the sprinklers stirring up an entire swamp of testosteroney-sweaty-rummy-mud and across some 274 acres of some philanthropist's generously-bequeathed land to the other side of the campus where my kindly ancient Linguistics professor was rubbing his weary temple and awaiting the arrival of hundreds of know-all Freshers and Freshettes so he could deliver (for no doubt the two hundredth time) part one of his fascinating and earth-shattering series of discourses on Old Icelandic Morphology and Textual Study of Literature Within Its Social Setting and Across a Range of Genres.

I quickly established that Linguistics and I made terrible bedmates, by the way: for one thing, I couldn't really contribute much to the round-table tutorial discussions our sweet fossilised professor insisted on because I was never ever quite sure where Old Icelandic Land was. Geography not being my strongest point, the nearest I'd been to it at that stage (because I doubt Bjork had even been born then, and Reagan and Gorby probably hadn't even clapped eyes on each other) was having a small but tasteful collection of troll-dolls on my dressing table when I was 10.

The rest of my knowledge of the Great White North came from my best friend throughout high school who'd been born in Finland and who, between babbling on endlessly about all the cute boys she'd tongue-kissed that week, had diligently tried to educate me in the arcane ways of Sibelius, Paavo Nurmi, traditional Karelian folk melodies and Koskenkorva vodka while we sweated it out in her sauna and I waited for her to shut up long enough for me to contribute my own infinitely more fascinating stories about cute boys I'd tongue-kissed that week.

Incidentally, she turned out to be a great disappointment to me in the end. While I was off in that first semester of tertiary studies self-righteously feeding my brain and joining the Young Communist Party and piously chaining myself to trees and virtuously eating lunch with the Hare Krishnas (who create the tastiest vegetarian food I've ever eaten before or since, incidentally -- and honestly, if you're ever crashed in the Andes with a Uruguayan soccer team or snowbound in the Sierra Nevada with the Donner Party, I recommend you eat the Hare Krishnas first; I bet you they're tender and moist and taste like chicken) and zealously proclaiming to everyone I met what a radically-informed politically-conscious environmentally-aware passionate dangerous menacing feministic anarchistic atheistic nihilistic hedonistic sado-masochistic post-punk rock party animal I really was, she'd dropped out (of her Environmental Science course at her university) and sold out (her soul) and become The Enemy by starting work as a shallow mindless robotic Public Servant in the Valuer-General's Department, where she learned how to file things in cabinets.

Additionally, she suddenly cast off her black leather jackets and Doc Martens boots and became a sort of Sloane Ranger, turned out in nice little pastel-coloured Peter Pan-collared Laura Ashley blouses and grey pencil-skirts and Alice bands and, even more bizarrely I thought, white shoes with every ensemble -- and usually weird clunky court shoes with big grosgrain bows like Minnie Mouse.

Her strange new image thus complete -- and really, she resembled a frosted cupcake with legs most of the time -- she immediately met a very nice and gobsmackingly boring nerdy Cadet Valuer (complete with clear plastic pen protector in one pocket and a slide rule in the other, if memory serves me correctly, which is admittedly unlikely) whom she later married.

On the day of her lovely white wedding to Poindexter in the Big Gothic Cathedral In Town, by the way, I was suffering from a god-awful hangover and the worst case of beard-rash I've ever had, brought about by engaging in a spirited debate about bolshevism with (plus snogging) a rather swarthy foreign comrade named Leon or Joseph or Vladimir or Fidel or thereabouts while at a Young Communist Party barbecue the night before. Consequently I look a positive treat in the photographs (very fetching indeed, I might add, in a suggestively revealing school uniform, Che Guevara guerilla beret, fishnet stockings and thigh-high black leather boots) of her special occasion.

Mystifyingly, I had NOT been asked to be a bridesmaid for that one. "We're limiting the official attendants to the immediate family, Hissy," she said. "I know you'll understand." The bitch.

But my point -- and I do have one, or not -- is that from the day they met her brain turned to romantic mushy girly-slush and she underwent an overnight Kafkaesque metamorphosis from Suzi Quatro (or at least Leather Tuscadero) to Suzy Homemaker and we had absolutely nothing at all in common any more, mainly because she spent all her time -- when she wasn't filing Valuer-thingies and shagging her pockmarked nerd -- babbling on endlessly about how wonderful he was and the gorgeous new state-of-the-art potato peeler they'd chosen together that day for their future home and how his priest would just DIE if he knew she wasn't a virgin. Consequently, she was of no help to me whatsoever with the specific locations of the untamed reindeer-ridden Nordic lands of the Arctic Circle.

Anyway, to get back to the story, the real problem with that first day as a University Student was -- and this is the ongoing story of my life, I swear -- that my shoes were wrong.

Now, you know me. I am nothing if not a fashionista. (Or a fashionvictim; I always get those two mixed up.) But trust me, I thought long and hard about the precise image I wished to safely convey that first day, at least until I'd assessed the lay of the land as it were. I needed to appear fun and offbeat, but not so scary as to alienate the wacky Arts professors and stodgy Law professors whose goodwill I'd definitely need in those first crucial moments. And what I came up with was that it was essential I portray myself as a kind of moody ethereal artsy writery literary vintage retro vegetarian earth-mothery free-spirited laid-back slightly-angsty gypsy bohemian cowgirly superheroic revolutionary goddess.

Late February was a scorcher that year, as it always is on the steamy tail-end of a BrisVegas summer smack-bang in the middle of the cyclone season, and it must have been already about 110*F when I perused my fabulous wardrobe and selected the day's clothes for ultimate intellectual impact. And so it came to pass that I thoughtfully (and some unkind naysaying critics might say inexplicably) adjudged that a sheer floaty white crinkly cheesecloth strapless drawstring tiered dress (which in retrospect was actually more suited to tossing insouciantly over one's bikini on a beach in Bali than in the halls of serious academia, and seemed to be made of exactly the same kind of fabric as a bag one might keep one's ham in at Christmas time, and which showed off my pert teenaged nipples admirably as soon as the water sprinklers on the rugby fields soaked me to the skin), a fringed purple leather shoulder bag, a floppy fuchsia felt Janis Joplin-type hat with an enormous rhinestone crescent-moon brooch stuck on it, Mexican silver bangles from my wrists to my elbows, massive hoop earrings and a hundred tons of turquoise necklaces was exactly the way to go.

And with it all, even more bafflingly, I did NOT select my usual loyal scuffed hand-tooled kick-arse broken-in buff-tan leather cowboy boots I usually wore everywhere, and which just possibly might have tweaked the startling ensemble to the point that I could just get away with it.

Nope, instead I ran my index finger along my shoe shelves piled ceiling-high with my drop-dead gorgeous collection direct from Mademoiselle magazine's list of "Totally Inappropriate Footwear Favourites of Distressingly Naive and Clueless Undergraduates: The Top 50 Pairs" and thought, "Aha! Perfect!" when I went straight for the jugular in the form of the utterly breathtaking simplicity of my dear little 6-and-three-quarter-inch-stiletto-heeled red satin pointy-toed mules.

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They looked rather like this, only much, much, much taller. And more flibbertigibbety. And they may even have had a teensy saucy splash of marabou feathers on them, for that added touch of burlesque-ish impetuosity.

Honestly, I still have no idea what possessed me to don them for my big foray into the cloisters of academia. I scarcely know what possessed me to buy them in the first place, except that in my defence I will state that I was barely 17 and an insufferably pretentious twat with even less of an idea about, well, anything really than I have now, and they were red and shiny, and I was with my aforementioned traitor-girlfriend at the time, and she had an almost identical pair (except in white with a teensy saucy grosgrain bow on them; go figure) and she persuaded me they looked really good on me and were really comfortable to dance in at really way-cool nightclubs AND walk really long distances in.

Needless to say, this was one big fat ugly lie on all counts.

In fact, I doubt I could have been less restricted in my general mobility if I'd bound my feet tightly in silk bandages soaked in animal blood and numbing-herbs and tottered around dementedly in teensy little lotus-steps. My entire first day at university was spent losing my balance, tripping, falling over, running late for absolutely everything and trying to extricate myself the entire time from a rather fraught-with-danger campus that seemed determined to clutch me to its bosom and wrap itself around me like a fucking Triffid.

Here's a tip for young players: one must be alert at all times to the perils of a university's "built environment". Not unlike a Triffid, it remains docile and passive until it senses the presence of potential prey, when it homes in on the unsuspecting food source (in this case, me) until close enough to ambush. It then waits until the body begins to decay, when it pulls flesh from the body and eats it.

And very nourishing I am too, by all accounts. And I taste like chicken. And Soylenty-good. (And so do you, I expect.)

At any rate, those fucking stiletto heels kept getting stuck like sharp little tent pegs in, and tethering me like a billowy white transparent tepee (or perhaps a circus Big Top) to, the rugby fields, the lush green lawns of the Great Court, the garden bed edges, the melty-bitumen on the roads, the library carpets, the lecture theatre stairs, the bits of soily-stuff between flagstones, the linoleum in the English Students' Common Room, the charming piles of organic debris matter mixed with spilled alcohol and possibly blood and possibly urine and possibly semen lying all over the floor of the refectory (a legacy of the Engineering students having one of their interminable food-fights-turned-fist-fights, I'd wager) AND -- this bit did my wanna-be reputation as Sophisticated Urban Goddess no end of harm, I can tell you -- the ritually-consecrated rock-circle at the Celtic Druid Society's spontaneous luncheon/smudging ceremony/drumming session held on the sprawling parklands beside one of the charming ornamental lakes bobbing with ducks.

To make matters worse (if it is indeed possible, and I assure you it was) I'd cleverly scheduled classes to leave myself at least two hours' break between each, so I could meet up with friends (not that I technically had many, because I was a big LOSER with no dress sense and a very tiny brain and an intellectual arrogance that needed correcting with a lump of wood applied directly to my head) at various points and wittily deconstruct our day. Mindful of the evening lecture I had from 7-9 pm, and a tad concerned about security issues and the long traipse back across the rugby fields to the river in the dark without a flashlight and/or an oxygen tank and Sherpa and/or security guard, my red satin stilettos and I made a spontaneous decision mid-afternoon to undertake the debilitating and perilous journey, in a nice bracing shower of rain, back to my Mazda Unreliable in the hope of moving it to a more desirable (i.e. closer to any kind of civilisation) parking spot.

Which is when the cake-of-the-day's sweet green icing really started flowing down, and I discovered the fucking car had a flat battery.

So hours later, when I'd hiked waaay back up across the rugby fields to the Student Union to find a public phone and trekked waaay back down to the car to wait for the Automobile Club man who eventually located me in a semi-deranged state out there in the middle of Woop-Woop ("I'm wearing a see-through white dress and ridiculously tall heels and I'll be standing beside a chili-red heap of junk kicking its doors and sobbing," I'd explained; "You can't miss me" -- but he evidently did, repeatedly, until I threw myself in front of his vehicle on about his fiftieth run past me and pounded on his windscreen with my fist and begged him please in the name of all that was decent and good to stop and help) and charged it up for me, I droved around aimlessly for hours before double-parking in a Staff Only carpark on top of a hill near the cinema (still remarkably inconvenient to where my evening lecture was being held). Secretly congratulating myself on my spatial cleverness, I finally strode off to my very first Journalism 101 class.

Ahhh, this was where I would find my feet, I thought as I stumbled towards the lecture hall bravely ignoring my throbbing blisters, aching ankles and pinched angry little toes all climbing up on top of each other jostling to escape. Journalism and I are MEANT to be. I, madam, have serious grown-up shoes and I'm not afraid to use them to push my foot in the door for a story. You, sir, are looking at the next major investigative gal-reporter uncovering scandals and corruption at the highest level, perhaps even bringing down a President or two along the way. Was it too soon to change my name Hiss Woodward or Hiss Bernstein, I wondered?

Except that when I staggered to the designated classroom expecting to make my dazzling media debut, there was a tiny hastily-scrawled sign on the door saying, "Due to the larger-than-expected numbers enrolled in this subject because of all those Cadet Journalists out there whose editors have forced them to get a degree, we've had to switch venues and everyone had better now go all the way back across campus in the completely opposite direction to the very far outer reaches of the university to what we like to call the Lecture Theatre In a Galaxy Very Far Away Indeed, well actually it's more in the general vicinity of Ayers Rock so maybe you'd better pack a picnic supper for the trip and phone your loved ones to tell them not to expect you back until at least the day after tomorrow, and also please hurry the fuck up because we don't have all night you know."

But despite these rather formidable spiky boulders the Vice-Chancellor and his Academic Senate seemed determine to sling at me on my pathway to higher learning, my shoes and I eventually reached our destination and I lurched into the room looking not unlike I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards and then roughly fucked by a team of sweaty greasy mechanics named Mad Dog and Gino the Geek and Lenny the Live Rat Swallower. Incredibly, though, I discovered to my immense squealy-pleasure that the Introduction to Journalism lecturer bore little resemblance to the grizzled Old Icelandic bloke with his grey-hair, wrinkled suit, walking frame and full-time nurse on duty with an adrenaline injection at the ready just in case.

In fact, the Journalism 101 Man was a rather youthful dishy dishevelled long-haired shaggy-bearded alternative-looking chap wearing John Lennon glasses and battered Birkenstock clogs, and from the look of things he'd obviously spent quite a lot of time in Amsterdam (as well as winning the occasional Walkley Award along the way -- sort of the Oz equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize).

At which point I swooned (but not at his Birkis, you understand, which would have been just plain wrong), looked down at my funky quasi-hippie dress (which I decided truly rooly wouldn't have been so bad had it been a different colour and style), silently thanked the goddess I'd had the foresight to paint my toenails in the most delectably slutty shade of fuck-me red I owned, stuffed my stupid muddy fraying Jayne-Mansfield-in-Las-Vegas-shoes into my fringed shoulder bag next to my crumpled felt hat and spent the rest of the evening -- and every Monday evening for the rest of the semester, in fact -- in bare feet, gazing in rapturous adoration at the lecturer and drinking in every word he said and giving him exactly what he asked for -- and more -- in all my assignments and exams.

And because mindlessly regurgitating information perfectly is often erroneously misinterpreted as a sign both of high intellect and an aptitude for the subject that doesn't really exist, he in turn adored me right back for it and gave me very high marks indeed. And because I was one of his starriest students (and so outrageously refreshing in my perpetually shoeless state, not unlike Daisy Mae in Dogpatch) I immediately became one of Really Cool Kids.

Hey, it's a cheap fame, I know, but someone has to do it.

And that somehow entitled us RCKs to sit at his feet in his office and drink his whiskey and chat about all manner of wondrous things, like the miscellaneous differences in grammar and punctuation in the written forms of Australian, American and British English plus some bewildering thing called House Style he kept banging on about and of which we journalists apparently needed to know a little.

Also he brought us up to speed on brothels (illegal in Queensland at the time) by describing where all the best bits were to be found in the Walletjes in Amsterdam, and explained why Britain and Ireland tend not to have streets named Gropecunt Lane any more. (Something about offending people's sensibilities or some such tripe, I think.)

Which, of course, is why I deferred my Law subjects a month later and concentrated instead on pursuing a pure Arts degree with Honours as stage one of fulfilling my life-long dream of becoming a brilliant gruff cynical racy sardonic hard-bitten foot-in-the-door award-winning investigative gal-journalist who'd single-handedly change the world.

And which, of course, is why I'm now an unemployed indolent kept slothwoman who reads "Hello" magazine in her garden, between naps and eating chocolate and watching "Murder She Wrote" on TV. (Disclaimer: There may not necessarily be the simplistic direct correlation between the two factors such as I've just suggested.)

Plus, anyway, dropping the Law subjects freed up my days no end and gave me jillions of extra time to spend doing other things besides studying and going to the library and completing assignments by the due date or indeed at all, because we all know that having fun is the true purpose of any tertiary education.

Anyway, the real reason I'm writing about all this is that last week J and I were lounging around on the coast for a few days of R&R&R (Rest and Recreation and Rooting) and we discovered that some of our neighbours was staying at the same resort, a few doors down from our room. They were there because one of their kids was starting university for the first time ever and they'd brought her down to settle her into her new accommodation and make sure she was all in the loop with the secret intricacies of Student Life.

"Say, you've been to university, Hiss!" her father said brightly the nanosecond I incautiously stuck my nose out the door to see if the pizza delivery van were anywhere in sight. Honestly, you'd think he'd been spying on me or something. "Hey, I know -- come and have drink with us and talk to her about what to expect. Give her all the important advice that she needs to know!"

Well, of course, there are so very many things I learned over my hundreds of years of on-off tertiary study -- some of which, amazingly, I even actually remember -- that I barely knew where to begin. Also, I just wanted to eat pizza on the king-sized bed and get back to watching TV and seeing what my husband had in his pants, but alas he was out drinking beer in the courtyard with the neighbour.

But like the trooper I am, I managed to pare it down to the following precis (actually, I suspect it's only a precis if it's a summary of text, but hey, we're not in school now) which I take the opportunity to share with you here:

1. Be yourself. Trying to emulate me, as fabulous as I indubitably am, will only bring you heartache.

2. Wear eye-catching and stylish shoes. They don't have to be red, although a pair of divine little Heidi Klum-designed Aladdin slippers exactly like this (teamed with, say, a diaphanous Demis Roussos kaftan and a rakish Salvador Dali glue-on moustache) is always eminently suitable for anyone's first day in any new venture when you're trying to make a good impression; trust me:

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3. Catch the bus.

4. Don't date Engineering students. They're smelly (as are all boys) and they like drinking too much beer and vomiting on your kitchen floor, then pretending it wasn't them.

5. If you're having it off with your boyfriend in the middle of the day in his ground-floor office with immediate panoramic views over the Great Court, there's a reasonable chance people can see IN nearly as well as you can see OUT. Consequently, it's really worthwhile taking that extra five minutes at the start of shag-time to close the curtains or tape newspapers in the windows. Plus stay well away from any ultramicrotomes during bonkings, because those fragile little fuckers break easily if you grab onto them during a moment of unbridled (or even bridled) passion, and what's more they cost a great deal to replace.

Finally, one very special and universal rule-of-thumb my Journalism lecturer taught me that very first night, that rang out loud and true and strong like a clarion call at the time and has stayed with me forever still clanging in my ears, and to which I adhere every single day in everything I do, and you should too, is:

Never, ever exaggerate the details in a story, and never make anything up. Even if it's plausible.

* * * * * * * * *

Finally, especially for my favourite Mad Cheesemaker who tagged me yonks ago, I give you:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.

Here you go:

"By the summer of 1989, senior Scientologists felt confident enough to invite Tom to their secret, secluded, and heavily guarded Gold Base, deep in the California desert. When he accepted, new leader David Miscavige gleefully announced to his closest staff, 'The most important recruit ever is in the process of being secured. His arrival will change the face of Scientology for ever.'"

Well, gosh. I wonder who can guess what that nearest book was? Here's a clue: it's actually BANNED in Australia! (Well, it's technically more a case of book distributors in Oz choosing not to stock it, and of amazon.com not being allowed to ship it outside the US and Canada, because of strict defamation laws and being as there's a pending legal threat from the particular organization involved that denounces the book as "a bigoted, defamatory assault replete with lies.")

Therefore, in the convivial spirit of genuine religious tolerance and judicious impartiality and sincere openness, honesty, transparency and accountability, I offer a FREE online session to rid one's self of those pesky body-clinging Thetans (which taste a bit like chicken, I understand) to the first one million millionaire-celebrities who correctly identify the book. (Charges apply; major credit cards accepted.)

Hey, trust me. It's not like I make any of this stuff up, you know.

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