The Daley Rant

…Smile

1. Rumour has it… It’s 22 degrees today and word on Meteorology Street is Sydney’s in for an early and warm spring. I’ll hug the sun itself* if this is true.

2. The trouble with fun of being myself. Pretty much everything I do these days – from learning to working to socialising to interwebz – feels a little bit like a genuine celebration of unapologetic absurdity. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy to be a happy dork.

3. My peeps. Y’all make it worthwhile. Fo’ realz.

*I keep hearing about “the power of metaphor” in writing. Well, this one is so strong it burns.

“Are you alright, Glorious N’orious?” my barista asked. Yes, I have a barista. But not, like, a personal servant whose sole task is to make me coffee. That’d be a pretty sweet gig though, considering I only have one a day.

Actually, “my barista” is my collective term for my awesome friends who have been making my workday coffee for so long that they have an assortment of nicknames for me. I was the Notorious Keira D, which was shortened to N’orious, and eventually lengthened again to Glorious N’orious… and occasionally shortened to gn’orious with a silent ‘g’.

I think he made sure he used the full rhyme this time because I looked deflated.

“I’m a bit devo, to be honest,” I said, not-quite-nonchalantly. Can you be semichalant? Non seems too cool.

I’ve spent a bit over a week putting on this brave face. Yeah, I’m cool with it being over. Sure, nothing will ever be as good again, but at least we’ll always have (our equivalent of) Paris. And yes, I still can’t bring myself to change my profile shot of us together just yet. Sure, all the wonderful images come flooding back in my quieter moments, or I’ll find myself smiling or laughing at the hilarious things we said and did back in those heady days when we were so, so happy, only to have my reverie shattered by reality – it was all only temporary.

And, you know, I may have been eating my feelings a bit. And drinking them. There may have been an indiscriminate amount of wine/margaritas/sangria/Listerine consumed. And food of the Italian/Mexican/Thai/Quorn persuasion. And every available kind of chocolate – even the WHITE confection.

I may’ve planned every moment of every day and night since it all ended, just so I didn’t have time to sit alone and think too much about everything we said and did. Maybe I even cried at a kitchen table at 5am when I realised the good times were definitely over and all that was left was running mascara, the stale taste of a cosmopolitan, and my own shaky handwriting in a greeting card in which words like “gratitude” and “wishes” and “monkeys” were scrawled.

Perhaps I feel like this is no ordinary ending and I’ll never be understood nor appreciated nor, I daresay, loved so completely again.

Perhaps… hey, perhaps it’s not even really over. Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up…

“Gn’orious, we’re coming to see your show Friday – can’t wait. Chookas for tonight!”

It’s not that I want to be disagreeable. It’s not that I want find fault. But. When things which should be awesome turn out to be a miserable bunch of crap, I feel it is my duty to say something. Except by duty I mean rabid compulsion.

I signed up for a course which should have been awesome. Turns out it was less awesome and more half-arsed, tedious, and uninsightful. It’s a fascinating creative field with limitless scope for expression, storytelling, ideas, communication, emotional release… And somehow all of this got trampled on or ignored or diluted.

After many attempts to put in more so I got more back, I found that no amount of work, optimism or tollerance improved things. It categorically sucked. In situations like these, all I want to do is tell someone or something that I am unimpressed, disappointed, disillusioned even. I want to make every wisecrack possible.

It’s a way to cope. It’s a way to not get sucked into the suckiness and abandon my natural enthusiasm in favour of a plateau of meh. If I can’t be engaged and inspired by the class, I can throw my passions (especially those for smartaleck jerk humour) into being subversive and a kind of dorky rebel.

It reminds me of those interminably boring days at school. I was the one passing notes with ridiculous cartoons or stupid puns or 17 layers of in-jokes on them. There’s something thrilling about this kind of uber-nerdy badassery. It’s a victimless crime (unless you get caught – then your arse is toast) but it makes you feel great.

It’s an exciting act of creativity – it triggers that mischievous part of my mind that used to bring my toys to life or spot dragon-shaped clouds when I was a kid.

To me, Twitter and the like are a global and technomological equivalent of passing notes in class – we can all sit around and crack wise about the same thing at the same time and have a shit-tonne of fun doing it. We might even like each other a little better for it.

So while it may seem that, yes, I’m just bitter, crazed and twisted for flinging zingers at the things in life that let me down, you should know that making these evil jokes is my version of turning a negative into a (warped kind of) positive (and a positive into 140 characters).

…Things I already miss from [title of show]

1. Ch-ch-check 1, 2. This was my favourite part of the night (show-schmo, audience-schmaudience!). Jess would give us a theme for our sound-check song choices, which was usually followed by: Blake’s soulful serenade, Lizzie’s kick-ass belt, Paul’s loungey croon, and Jay’s Christopher Walken. Yes, you read that correctly.

2. Part Of It All. Lizzie and I had lyric-literal routines for all three of the boys’ duets, which we’d perform backstage almost without exception.

3. Don’t go away, I’m needy! Normally I’m at least a little bit relieved when a show ends, even if it was a good one. Not this time. This time, I could have happily kept going till I was old enough to knit on the bus and truuuuuuuuuck! *sigh*

Hi there,

A little while back I wrote a complaint letter regarding a ticketing issue. I just wanted to say that the situation was rectified in a timely and professional manner. [manager dude] was extremely helpful and attentive, which I’m very grateful for.

I’m also grateful that I didn’t end up missing out on the excellent cabaret shows playing at the Opera House. Hugh Sheridan’s show Newley Discovered was an interesting and entertaining look at a composer I knew nothing about, yet whose work was all too familiar. Elana Stone and Friends was a real treat of mixed genres and moods – a good time all round. And Trevor Ashley was astonishing and hilarious as Every Woman.

And the mulled wine in the foyer bar was a nice wintery touch!

Thank you for stepping up and kicking proverbial.

Kind regards,
Keira Daley