“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).

…Humble pie

1. Sydney Opera House. I called you a jerk when you are, in fact, awesome. I called you to task and you stepped up. I’m going to write you a nicey nice feedback letter of thanks. And maybe make you a mix-tape. You have two ears and a heart, right?

2. Time is never time at all. So I thought I’d be able to do all sorts of other things with my time before and during the run of [title of show]. In reality, outside theatre time, I’ve been able to eat, sleep and occasionally wash things.

3. Promises, promises. I pledged not to whinge about the cold this winter. Yeah, about that…

Hi there,

I’m writing to make a complaint about SOH telephone box office.  The person I spoke to last Saturday – a man with a North American accent – was incredibly rude and patronising.  Worse still, the ticketing info he gave me was incorrect.

I phoned to book tickets for three shows in a package deal.  I’d only just mentioned the word ‘package’ when the man immediately assumed I’d got it all wrong.

“You can’t just book any three shows!” he said.

I told him I was booking three Adelaide Cabaret shows, and he momentarily settled down.  Then I started listing the tickets I wanted, which included some student concession tickets.

“You don’t get a discount on concessions.”

I hadn’t come across that on the website, so I queried it.

“If you look up the definition of concession, you’ll find it means it’s already a reduced price,” he sniped. “It’s the same thing.”

He needs to consult a dictionary himself because, ostensibly, he doesn’t know the difference between ‘concession’ and ‘discount’.

I said it might not be worth my while then and I’d have to double-check.  He told me to “do the math”.

Then I checked your website. It says: “Packages apply for concession as well as full-priced tickets.”

So not only was this person rude and patronising – he was WRONG.

I was so infuriated it put me off booking the 7 tickets my friends and I wanted.  We are all arts enthusiasts aged under 30.  I assumed SOH might want to nurture a younger audience.  Employing people like this man is not a good way to go about it.

Any performer would be horrified to learn that their show lost ticket sales because the phone operator was an ignorant misanthrope who treated potential patrons like idiots before they’d barely even got a word in to prove otherwise.

I would hope that this employee be replaced by a more sophisticated online ticketing system so nobody else has to experience his particular brand of ‘customer service’.

This is very disappointing and just not good enough for one of the nation’s most prestigious venues.

Yours Sincerely,
Keira Daley

Yes, we know astrology is bollocks, but there’s gotta be something to explain away my crises – that is, other than self-indulgence with a dollop of melodrama.  My friendly local astrologer looked at my chart early last year and said my Saturn’s Return would be “relatively pain free”.  But lately I’ve been wondering why I’ve been in a bit of a funk.

Then, I read this on a website:

You may feel weak and vulnerable. You want to move ahead, yet are frustrated by a fear of doing so, torn between a compelling urge to throw off everything connected with your past and an equally frantic need to cling to the familiar rather than brave the great unknown.

Even if your external world seems to be in order, your internal structure may feel as though it’s being assaulted with a battering ram. Nervous conditions, irritability, depression, insomnia, and feelings of insecurity are common. Most people go through some sort of identity crisis.

You can add nightmares to that list.  Disappointment.  Heavy boredom.  And an ever-deepening skepticism at a time when you’d be better off taking a leap of faith.

This is why I haven’t been writing.  I’ve been living on a mental diet of cheese puffs.  I’ve even joined the gym again – not just for physical fitness, but as an attempt to lower my mind-fat percentage.

If this is “relatively pain free”… holy shitballs, Batman.