Humans of Straya

One human garbage story at a time

[humansofstraya]

[humansofstraya]

Good morning welcome to Umptos, my name is Marcia Garcia Mendes Flores from customer service team, I speak like a Mexican-American on helium and mangle my English. I'm totally unhelpful and I don't understand anything you say, but what do you expect from a Filipino call center employee getting paid $2.30 a day to handle complex technical problems caused by your shit telephone/internet provider and its 14 layers of outsourced subcontractors. 

Thank you for calling Umptos and waiting in the caller queue for 5 hours, how may I be frustrating and incompetent this good morning.

Oh, I see, you have an internet issue. That is unfortunate Sir.  I can certainly help with your issue Sir. Can I be checking your identification for your ID check verification purpose Sir. Okay so that's Missus Smith Thomases. No? That's not correct sir? Your name is Missis Smith Thomases? Oh I see, it's Mister Thomas Smith, my apologies for getting your name incorrectly wrong Missus Tom.

Sir okay let me repeat what you just said to me seven times so I can keep misinterpreting it please. You are saying your "internet connection is working". No? Oh your "internet connection is not working" I understand now Sir, apologies this is a very technical technicalos paraparupbabappapbas for me.

My solution is; if you are having internet connection problems, try connecting to the internet. Sir have you checked your modem is on? You need your modem to be on to be connected to the internet. Sir have you checked that you have a telephone line? You need to plug your modem into the telephone line. Sir have you checked that you have a modem? You need a modem for the internet line. Sir do you have hands? Try using your hands to turn your modem on or use your hands to pray for internet being connecting. Have you tried talking to your modem nicely? Sir I have no technical training at all. I escaped my village 4 months ago and it didn’t have running water and here I am trying to resolve firmware bugs on a modem worth more than the entire income of my bloodline. If there are any other problems with connecting to the internet you will need to check the internet for how to connect to the internet. Internet.  

I'm sorry sir I cannot escalate this issue. I also cannot transfer you to my manager as I do not want you to complain about my service to him so I'm going to tell you he isn't available. Yes he died. Everyone else here in my team has also just died right now so you cannot talk to anyone but me.

If you want to cancel your account sir you can cancel your account online on the internet. Yes I guess I can transfer you to our account cancellation team, I will have to put you on hold for 20 minutes while I do something like work on one of my other jobs here in this call center/warehouse/sweatshop like paint some tourist's nails or make a basket out of some palm fronds or stitch up some counterfeit Nikes.

Sir while I transfer your call please enjoy listening to 44 loops of our on-hold recording. There is some bad elevator jazz played on a midi-keyboard and a recorded voice telling you how important you are to our profit margin and revenue. When you come back from being on hold someone will quickly transfer your call to another department so you can explain the last 39 minutes of conversation to them and how you ended up speaking to the sales team, then the call will drop out. You are the only person who will get the irony that Umptos is meant to be a telecommunications company.

[humansofstraya]

Hi my name is Julie Clambulk.

I’m a senior executive sales property agent representative consultant at LandRats Real Estate Asiancy.

I’ve been in real estate for 23 years, by which I mean I’ve lived in a property for 23 years. I started working as a real estate agent in 2013 when I needed to work after my divorce. Despite little to no experience and a 4 week online qualification I am now a sales, marketing and personal finance expert and a property lawyer with a PhD in economics. People often ask me how to read between the lines when looking at real estate ads on the interwebsite, so here is a handy guide to deciphering the most frequently used terms in the property businestry.

Bright: no curtains, enjoy weekend sleep-ins til 5.30am.

Funky: the word I use to make something sound really hip and modern, you know like the Bee Gees, VCR tapes and Mork & Mindy

Vibrant: the area has heaps of homeless and gays and homeless gays

Ensuite: shit in a tiny closet directly next to your bed

Open plan: there’s no room for dividing walls so make dinner in the laundry and sleep on the couch-dining-table

Large: large as in when you used to tell your ex-husband his penis is ‘large’ but really its tiny like a killer whale eating a tictac 

Cottage: the size of a coffin for an ant

Upmarket: full of twats in Volvo or Audi 4WD’s and those knick-knack shops that sell soap for post-menopausal pensioners

Trendy: has a Thai restaurant and a Vintage Cellars nearby and a place that has a chalkboard out the front with a barista with a moustache and some potted herbs, wow

Swanky: remove the ‘s’

Renovators delight: death trap about to collapse in a cloud of dust at any moment and give you asbestosis

Renovated: painted 7 years ago with one coat of diluted liquid paper

Owners must sell: The owner is an foreigner who’s gone bankrupt because he thought opening an understocked deli next to a Coles would be a good idea, his business acumen tells him his house is worth $200,000 more than anyone is willing to pay. 80% chance of Hong Kong Chinese or Indian

Close to public transport: 15 kilometre walk from your parking spot at the shops through dense bogans and across a freeway to a derelict traino

Auction: an event where the social pressure from a cluster of moronic sheep and your fucking incessantly moaning wife will make you bid 80% more than the absolute upper maximum you set yourself 10 minutes before the auction started, enjoy retiring at 95 or defaulting on your loan and plunging your family into financial ruin where your daughters will resent you for being a failure of a man who can’t buy them a Michael Hors bag they saw on some skank at OPorto

Terrace/Duplex: those sounds you hear through the single brick wall are your neighbours fucking each other, or so you hope

Luxurious: the tackiest possible guido interior design, it’s like walking into Fergie’s bejazzeld vagina inside which is a projected loop of a Von Dutch commercial for its new line of protein powder hair extension tattoos with music by David Goiter

"Location, location, location": a reminder not to shit in the laundry hamper again because it is not the toilet

So with that inside information, please have a look at my latest listing:

Panoramic views from this funky sanitary pad

Welcome to your award winning architecturally designed apartment, THE SEAVIEW DIAPER

This generously sized (13.4m2) apartment is nestled in a quiet (during the day) village of state housing and friendly young families of junkies. Take a short, nervous stroll to the trendy Heroin Road with its community legal service centres nestled amongst cafes and popular shops, including 5 loan sharks and a number of hydroponic and aquarium warehouses. This inner-city (49km straight line) abode is all just minutes from the CBD (129 minutes).

Enjoy the elevated, panoramic views that extend from the living area through the master bedroom cell and into the second injecting room. Or head outside onto the balcony through sliding glass doors you can throw your partner into when you find out they’ve been cheating again. The balcony offers truly breathtaking views that will take your breath away from the acrid smog of the local brickworks. Watch the sun set over a hazy industrial wasteland and take in views across the ChemToxCorp Industrial Area, sweeping out to the beautiful oil stained Coal Beach.

This area offers plenty of nighttime entertainment, from the local greyhound races, to the welcoming and chatty locals in tracksuit pants using payphones at 1am, to the local Wheel & Eggfart Tavern where its chicken parmigianas and stabbings are famous with police. All this is within walking distance of the newly built exclusive estate Shiv Shower Juvenile Detention Centre and the lush green gardens of Prostitution Park.

Constructed from single brick and colourbond sheeting this apartment has been converted and renovated from an old fire hose reel cupboard to give it that classic shantytown drug favela charm. The entire apartment comes fully furnished from a previous celebrity tenant who tirelessly collected antiques over many years that were showcased in multiple seasons of Today Tonight.

The main bedroom features mirrored built-in robes so you can stare at your ugly pathetic body in all of its depressing reality each morning before making the Mordor-like trek to your dead-end job where your only enjoyment is Susan teasing you with her big heavy naturals while she gets on her knees to clear a paper jam in the fucking useless photocopier. This room is painted in earthy tones of nicotine stain and smeared faecal matter.

The second bedroom also includes a built-in robe, roof mounted anchored eye-bolts for your selection of restraints and recently replaced carpet patches. This particular room is pet-friendly as it once comfortably accommodated 48 cats.

A well-presented galley-style kitchen offers plentiful cupboard space to grow your weed under UV lamps. It is equipped with bottom-of-the-line Flusher & Puckapunyal appliances that will breakdown within 3 months causing a massive gas explosion.

Hand wash your clothing like a beggar on the Ganges in the single basin of the shared laundry (shared with local meth-heads who will break in repeatedly asking for ‘Kayden’ or ‘the glass’). There is a large neat-and-tidy bathroom with a stupid bathtub shower that is as annoying as it is impractical (please note that absolutely no one* has died in this bathroom) (*Australian citizen).

Outside is a large boring unkempt brick common area that conveniently doubles as a prison exercise yard you’ll be too afraid to use. This is a well-maintained, exclusive boutique complex of just 525 apartments. Off street parking is available (off the other side of the freeway at the Westfield car park).

Savvy foreign investors will love this excellent inner-city apartment that offers a low-maintenance investment guaranteed to attract high rental returns and secure your children a position in a commerce degree at a local university.

Will suit first home-buyer who has recently been released on parole and is used to solitary confinement and wants to transition into a bigger property, or professional couple who would like to create a physical representation of how little they earn and how many decades of work lie ahead of them before being able to pay any principal off their mortgage.

Contact me for a free appraisal of your social status and a report on whether I think you can afford this property based on looking at your car and clothing.

Auction on Wednesday 32th June, 4am. Please note the auction will be attended by 5000 idiots so parking is limited. Reserve set at $13 million yuan. 

[humansofstraya]

Hi, I’m Immortan-Joe Hokey, Australian Treasure Hider for the Parliament Funkadelic.

Despite looking like a crooked, smug, fart-sniffing, thick-necked, no-lip, boiled-egg-eating, pancake-destroying, walrus-bodied, Sopranos-reject, bloated, fucking-goombah, I’m actually an all-round great guy, a man of the people. All of my maids tell me that.

Anyone born after about 1995 is pretty much screwed because all of the people born before then have made housing anywhere near the CBD unaffordable. We’ve had the benefit of stimulus packages, low interest rates, low-doc or no-doc lending practices, first homebuyer schemes and wages that are commensurate with housing prices. Prior to 1995 the banks’ lending practice was to loan a person a maximum of about 4 times their salary to purchase a house. That put an artificial, but tangible, cap on housing prices, somewhere in the realistic reach of most Australians earning an average wage.

Fast forward to 2015, meet Average Joe. Average Joe is on the average wage of $75,000. The average Sydney property price is estimated to reach $1m by the end of the year, or 13 times Average Joe’s average wage.

This means Average Joe can't realistically own an average home. With the average Sydney rent around $600 a week, he will never be able to save enough to get a deposit, to get a $1m loan, to 'buy' a house. I say 'buy' because really, the bank owns Joe’s house for the next 30 years, until he pays off his $1m mortgage.

With interest rates at 5.5%, everyone, including Average Joe and me, Immortan Joe, thinks that housing is affordable. But let’s do something I don’t really like doing as the Tressure Hunter of Australia, it’s called math. We’ll keep it basic because that’s all I can handle. For instance, let's take a look at Average Joe on $75,000 and the average house price of $1m. If you calculate a mortgage with a 30 year loan, for $1m, at 5.5% interest the total interest payment is $1,044,040. Let that sink in for a second. That’s more than the amount of the loan, just in interest.  Add to that the repayment of the principal of $1m, and the total cost of an average house over 30 years is $2,044,040.

30 years might seem like a long time to put a house on lay-buy, maybe you could pay off more, earlier? Well hold on there Donald Trump, lets take a look at this month by month.

From his $75,000 a year, Average Joe earns a net income $4427 a month. The 'minimum' monthly repayment on Joe’s million dollar loan is $5678.

This means that if Joe never ate, never paid any bills, never went out with his friends, never bought a present for anyone, never bought lunch, never serviced his car, refilled it, never caught public transport, never bought any clothes, never had the internet, Netflix, a gym membership, never posted a letter, never bought furniture for his house, never bought a coffee or had a pet... and put every single cent into his 'average' home loan, he would still miss his repayments by $1251 a month, or $15,000 a year (which he would be charged another $800 a year on that missed amount at 5.5% interest).   Let's say interest rates went up, by a few percent, say 1.5% in the next few years and remained stable. That mortgage interest payment would now be $1,395,066 or $350,000 more than the loan at an interest rate of 5.5%.

To put that extra $350,000 in perspective, Joe's $75,000 a year is actually $53,000 after tax. That’s another 6.6 years of annual salary for Average Joe. So for Joe, if he took out a loan at 35, and expected to retire and own his home at 65 he would be mistaken. He wouldn’t be able to retire until he was 71.6. Oh and don’t forget, Average Joe was short $1251 on the 5.5% loan each month. Joe is more likely to die before he owns his home.

What’s my advice for Average Joe. Just get a better job. Get on SEEK and go for it! Don't work a job that pays less than $75,000 or even $100,000 a year. Just refuse to. Someone will find you and pay you more, because of stuff.

If that doesn’t work, just become a boring lawyer, dentist, banker, doctor or some other job with the highest suicide rate, worst working hours and highest incidence of depression. Forget pursuing a creative career and the dream of owning a home, they’re mutually exclusive now.  Instead, devote yourself to being a ruthless, cutthroat money obsessed corporate prostitute drone.

Here are my other great ideas for home ownership and riches, officially endorsed by the Department of Treasury:

be born into a rich family, you can do this early on in life by only being ejaculated out of the balls of a man who either has lots of generational wealth, or is going to be successful (look into the future for this), or make sure you hook up with the egg of a similar woman (again, look into the future and choose your balls/egg combination wisely)

develop an interest in corporate law, banking or cardiology from an early age (7 or under) if you aren't into these topics in your youth then make yourself interested in them, the other option is being poor and not driving

get in a time machine and travel back to the Pilbara in 2002 and get a job doing pretty much anything, like a janitor on $150,000 or a lollipop-man-for-trucks on $170,000

sell your vagina/anus to pay off your HECS debt (i.e. become a highly paid whore)

be a young attractive woman and baby-trap a rich man (i.e. go to a bar frequented by investment bankers and have sex with one of them while lying about being on the pill, give birth to a golden goose baby)

join a bikie gang and sell marijuana or crystal in bulk (note!: don't get murdered or arrested, this is bad for your credit rating)

create the "car-house", my car-house is a 2005 Kia Sorrento. I'm making some money on it by renting the glove box to an international student

be a networker, people love other people who network, constantly pressure people into becoming your clients, they love this

get a TER score of 99.98 or higher, just beat the competition from elite private schools with great teachers and/or Chinese supercomputer children, become an accountant

steal from the elderly, children, cars, work, everywhere, just take it, take things and pretend you didn’t do it, you are Winona Ryder

invent gold

Save every cent you earn, never associate with friends. Get comfortable being described as 'frugal', 'tight' 'cheap' or 'stingey', don't enjoy life, just be obsessed with money. Never pay your share.

cheat a skewed tax system, tell your employer you 'only take cash', claim your tax deductions as tax deductions, invent 12 children you need support payments for

walk out of restaurants without paying, or eating, because you can't afford anything at McDonalds anyway, this is also known as 'not eating'.

get a second job at night driving for Uber, wait tables, work mornings at a bakery then night shifts at a local steel mill, never sleep, become Eminem sell 100 million albums

murder your landlord and assume their identity, your new name is The Talented Mrs Joan Jenkins

become immortal, work for 600 years non-stop and treat yourself with a holiday in Kuta, or Seminyak if you're a real fuckin snob and saved well

marry an investment banker who looks like Alf and probably has the personality of a shoe (my favourite)

join FIFA, the Australian Wheat Board, Australian Water Holdings, a drug squad, or other corrupt organisation such as a local government council or workers union management and take bribes

make your own house out of materials from around the hou... oh wait...

buy a house from Ray's Outdoor Camping World. People might call this a 'tent' but that is an ancient word for 'house'. You now own a 'house'.

[humansofstraya]

I wish I could be a human of Australia, or anywhere other than where I am. Unfortunately, I am a human of a small African nation. I do not even know what this place is called, where I live, because I have never been educated or seen a map. If I did see a map I would use it as a blanket – rather than use it to plan my next Contiki herpes exchange or frame it for my funky gentrified warehouse apartment. I guess I would call where I come from, something like, “Hell”. 

My name is Magumbza Ahbleedin. I go to sleep every night praying to God to help me achieve my 5-year career goal of becoming sponsored by a child sponsored by a World Vision sponsor child. I once met an Australian family who were shooting animals on a poverty safari. I wish they had shot me to end my starvation nightmare.

The boy asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said “4 kilos and alive”. He said he wanted to become a celebrity like Justin Beiber. What is a celebrity? Can you eat one? I am so hungry. The boy asked me if I had seen the Hunger Games. He said his favourite part was Jennifer Lawrence’s jizz covered face from the leaked iCloud photo scandal. I asked him if he meant the Hunger Games that the UN soldiers played – where they would catapult sand filled cat food tins over the Aid Station fence, watch us on the CCTV with some beers and place bets on the winners of the ensuing gladiatorial death match.

The older sister told me that I was her “total ultimate thinspiration”. She asked me how I managed to get such a good thigh gap. I told her “severe malnourishment and the misdirection of Western aid into the hands of corrupt government officials and profit making charity organisations with layers of donation-absorbing middle-management bureaucracy”. She said that was “totes amaze” and she would hashtag that under a photo she was going to post of a no-make-up-holiday-selfie on facebook. I have heard of a facebook before. A Ugandan warlord had a book of the skinned faces of all the villagers he had killed during his raids through Rwanda. He had thousands of followers but not so many likes.

I told her that I hadn’t had anything to eat in over 4 weeks. She couldn’t believe it, she couldn’t believe that for over a month I had nothing to instagram. I once saw a photo of maize, and it made my body convulse uncontrollably from hunger and I could hear my stomach-acid boiling my spine. She showed me a restaurant at the safari reservation she was staying at that was rated 89% on Durbanspoon. She said, it meant 89% of people liked it. The other 11% of people must have been macheted to death before they got to eat something.

The girl told me about a Food Truck craze in Australia, where trucks selling food like tacos and burgers drive around and feed people at street festivals. We have a similar food truck craze here, where the local warlord landmines all of the roads leading into an aid camp and ambushes convoys of Red Cross trucks, then chases down any surviving missionary workers and cuts their heads off. And then drags their headless bodies through the streets, raping the local women and kidnapping babies to turn into child soldiers. I guess that’s kind of like a street festival, or My Kitchen Rules. Sometimes I find a landmine and jump on it to try and put a quick end to my slow death, but unfortunately I don’t weigh enough to make it explode.

The girl’s mother asked me “how do you manage to maintain your figure even though you’re pregnant?” I told her that I wasn’t pregnant. My insufficient protein intake had caused my abdominal wall to eat itself causing a distended stomach. She said she knew exactly how I felt. She recently discovered she was also a closet vegan with a gluten intolerance that also caused her to feel bloated.  She said that even though we lived so far away from each other, we were just like organic peas in a pod, and then she gave me a big hug that broke both my collarbones. I told her I was hungry and wanted some food. She said it’s best to just have a coffee to suppress your appetite, but that coffee sometimes makes you sweat. I said I would like to sweat because it would mean there is some moisture left in my body.

She said that she didn’t like cooking because it took too much time and she hated having to clean up afterwards. I agree. Onions were a pet hate of mine because they made my eyes water. The last time I saw an onion it made me cry from thinking that if I had found the onion a day earlier maybe my mother might still be alive. Having to clean up her sand encrusted eye sockets was also a pain, especially because we don’t have a dishwasher in our hut.

The Dad told me that he tries not to eat too much for lunch, because at about 2.00pm he gets a “food coma”. I told him my baby brother once went into a food coma and never woke up. He said “Haha yeah tell me about it, sometimes I can barely keep my eyes open after a big lunch”. I said, “me too, because my eyelids are weighed down by flies.” He laughed and gave me a big hug that crushed my sternum. I told him that a child in Africa dies every 3 seconds. He was surprised at that. He said “I know black people have rhythm, but that is some amazing timing, you guys should try out for X-Factor”.

He said he couldn’t believe that Ebola was caused by savage, uneducated, African people eating bush meat and not properly burying the bodies of the deceased. I couldn’t believe that there was such a thing as meat in Africa and that people had enough energy to bury a body. I heard that people in Australia sometimes throw food in a pile to make ‘compost’ for a ‘garden’. Whatever a compost is, I want to be one. Come and have a look at my ‘garden’. Here it is. Brown, hot, dusty sand for thousands of kilometres.

I asked them to give me some money. They said that they didn’t like giving homeless people money directly because they would just spend it on drugs. They’re right, I would probably spend it on drugs to treat my dysentery or HIV. They said they would give $100 to their local church when they got home. They said $100 is a lot for them, it’s at least 4 albums on iTunes and a few pro version apps. They said giving the money to the church was a better way for them to launder their guilt. Once the money was given to the church it was no longer their responsibility to find out whether it got to me, a starving, doomed child in Africa whose only thoughts have been of hunger, or whether it went to an Archbishop so he could buy the silence of a rent boy prostitute he had been butt-fucking for the past few years.

To be honest though, all this food talk is making me feel a bit peckish. I had an early lunch, back in 2004, so I guess I could eat something.

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[humansofstraya]

My name is Eleanor Ledpaint. I'm a relief art teacher. The rest of my time is dedicated to educating everyone about unhealthy food you shouldn't be eating, which is everything you ever have eaten, or ever will eat. Or smell. Or touch. All the food I prepare is organic, paleo, gluten free, dairy free, sugar free, flavour free, lactose free and tastes amazingly like a stack of napkins. My grandparents survived the War by eating pure pig lard and stale biscuits that rats had ignored and feeding on their hatred for the Nazi war machine. But, I'll have a seizure if I witness an unwashed carrot. The unlimited food choices of today have given me the freedom to be my true self - a tiresome, fussy little cunt. 

I think I’m a little overweight near my hips, I have a muffin-top. But, please be aware that it is a gluten-free muffin-top. I am gluten intolerant. I cannot have any gluta... glutens... glutium... glutai, in my diet. People who lose weight must either be starving bulimic girls or have ‘good genetics’ – any excuse to explain away the failure of my fad diets. I blame my hips on highly processed foods that I was ‘forced’ to eat for years by society and the media, rather than the simple fact that I consume more calories than I expend on a daily basis. You’d think with all the statistics I spout and all the nutritional information I read on the side of packets, simple addition and subtraction would be easy for me but, no. I’d rather blame ‘preservative 330’ for my stretch marked beef apron than face the truth, which is - I couldn't be bothered cooking anything involving more than a plastic tray and a microwave and I can’t be fucked going for an evening stroll because the X-Factor: Canberra Quarterfinal, or the X-Factor: Best of Tween Homosexuals, or the X-Factor: Tacky Whores Who Sing Like They Swallowed a Vibrator is on tonight

If you search my fridge you’ll find a few ‘treats’ hidden under the tray where I keep my organic, free range eggs that have been carefully incubated in the sweaty corn-hole of some Bikram yoga practitioner. By ‘treats’ I mean $40 blocks of organic dark chocolate that is 80% cocoa. I lurrrrvvvv dark chocolate, the higher the cocoa percentage the better! Because I love eating gritty old coffee flavoured sand. Mmmmm cocoa, it’s fucking rank, but, because it tastes kinda like horrible chocolate I can satisfy my competing “strictly unenjoyable whole food” and “no self-control fat shit” personalities. It’s wrapped in plain paper and has an organic leaf logo so it must be okay right? I eat the wrapper also.

Once I ate four deep pan Dominos pizzas and drank a 1.25 litre Pepsi Max and for some inexplicable reason it made me feel bloated. I farted in front of my friends and that’s when I knew I must be totally gluten intolerant and I could no longer hide my tragic, difficult plight from everyone. From that day forth I made a promise to myself, I said “Eleanor, your vocation, your calling in life, is to inform everyone of the dangers of gluten. No matter how much they might not want to hear what you have to say, no matter how gluten tolerant their tum-tums might be, you have important work to do. If you save one, just one person, from a deadly, toxic, piece of toast, then you have done a service to the survival of humanity”. I'm not even sure what a gluten is anyway. But like Muslims, they sound bad. Buddha help us all if we are ever attacked by a Muslim made of gluten. Worse still, a lactose Muslim selling our children ISIS-cream.

I will invite myself to a dinner at your house. I know you don’t want me to come. You want to eat real food and not be forced to buy stupid fucking ingredients to make some bland recipe from a hipster idiot’s avocado worship blog. What date is dinner going to be? I need to align it with my astro-diet-horoscope. I’m strictly a lacto-ovo-veganist during the waning crescent lunar phases. I can NOT have almond flour, rice flour, plain flour, ego-flour, arrogant-flour or any other type of self-raising flour during Chinese New Year or Ramadan-a-ding-dong. I also have a nut allergy that means I’m unable to lick my boyfriend’s scrote during a high tide.

When I come round to your house I will ask about every step of your cooking process. Did you cook the chickpeas in a pan that has had any contact with any meat, even indirectly, like via a dishwasher or fax machine? Did you know a tomato is a fruit and I’m adopted? That meat says "Halal" does that mean "hello" in terrorist? Did you know I have a fantastic mushroom soup recipe that is great for leftovers, rendering your house or as papier-mâché paste?

When we sit down to eat the food that I have been criticising, I will refuse almost everything you offer me except the most boring, uninteresting side dish you made as an afterthought, knowing I would be a picky asshole.

Don’t ask me an innocent, interesting, hypothetical question about my food choices like “If you were stuck on an island, would you kill a fish to survive?” or “how does our position at the top of food chain sit with your views on food?” I won’t see this as a possible conversation starter, I will take it as a personal attack. My answer will be something confusing that I think sounds intelligent like “hmmpff, well, if all mammals in society acted as if they were given free-will, would you jump off a bridge too?” which will kill any kind of conversation for the rest of the evening. I’ll then continue with some illogical pseudo scientific factoid like “Did you know that 40% of the population eat unsustainably, if we all ate what we wanted then who’s to say we wouldn’t starve, that’s why the soil near farms has AIDS”. I'll tell you something about how the dinosaurs died out because they were on the Atkins diet.

After reorganising the salad you made me into two groups, “possibly lettuce” and “terrorist olives, Pol Pot's own feta, Fukushima tiny tomatoes and misogynist cucumber pieces” I’ll publicly wipe the dressing off the lettuce leaves and reluctantly eat them as if I were competing in a bug eating episode of Survivor. Ironically, my pussy is so disgusting not even Bear Grylls would eat it. If anyone asks me how my meal is, I won’t hide my disdain for it and I’ll say something like “yeah…. it’s fine, but I think I’ll need a 14 day detox now” like the shitty guest I am. I’ll then tell everyone how much healthier I am because I eat a specialised “Replenishing Nourishment Superfood Diet”:

Breakfast: Chew on a forearm-sized piece of ginger like a dog toy, unpeeled (the goodness is mostly in the skin!). A glass of warm un-pasteurised milk squeezed directly from my cat's nipples.

Morning Tea: Low-carb oxygen and a selection of a finest goji berry. A sprinkling of bird seed on a walnut.

Lunch: A disappointing pistachio. A dry, hard, brick of something made without gluten or water, valued for it’s structural integrity by archaeologists.

Afternoon snick-snacks: Burnt kale chips that taste like a napalmed Vietnamese village. A rice-less rice paper roll.

Din-dins: Two raw salmon steaks blended into a yummo, boney, smoothie.

Desert: Tofu, spiced up a little by being left in the same room as a peppercorn.

Before bed: Hot water and lemon squeezed into my eyes. Then feed my hungry vagina with a fair-trade dildo.

So scrummy! Oh reading that list has made me so hangry. I’m going to continue being a killjoy tonight because I’m starving from watching everyone else eat whatever they want. I need to find a way to back out of this diet and into another one without looking like a hypocrite…

[humansofstraya]

I’m Kerrie Natal. I’m a new mother. My entire existence now revolves around telling everyone about my child and the difficulties of motherhood. Now I have this miniature version of me in my life, I feel complete….complete relief. Finally, some purpose in my life, something I can do, something I can show off, something I can talk about with some level of knowledge, something that makes other people ask me questions because they feel obliged to.

This child is my golden ticket through life. I get paid by the government, I get months off work, I can get people to help me out and pamper me, I can get the best seats on public transport, I can swap being lazy for being tired, I can say to everyone who complains to me “well, you should try being a mother!”. If I never go back to work, because “I’m a full-time mother”, then no one will bat an eyelid. I can leave work at 3:00pm each day because “I have to pick my kids up”. I’ll get to the school car park at 3:15pm to gossip with the other school mothers for an hour or so about how hard being a mother is. All while I’m in fleece sweat pants with my hair in a half-bun, until it is really time to pick my kids up at 4:30.

My boyfriend is locked in, he either must marry me, or pay a huge amount of child support. I have found the secret to financial freedom, it’s semen. Once we get married, my husband can’t leave me for at least 10 years, no matter how annoying, lazy or fat I become. I have given birth to a human high interest repayment contract.

I now have a right to give up all of my hobbies, friends, aspirations, hopes, or interests because I’m too busy taking care of my child. If I don’t achieve anything with my life, then the blame isn’t on me, it was my kid’s fault. Anyway, hopefully they can make up for my failures. I will make sure of that, not by educating them about the world (because I know nothing about the world) but by yelling instructions at them from the sidelines of their soccer game from ages 8 to 16.

As a bonus to giving birth, I’ve instantly become a medical expert and child psychologist. Never mind the 5 years of university study followed by 7 years of research or specialisation needed by non-parent doctors. Simply by having an overcooked pork roast push through my vaginal walls, I’ve been bestowed with expertise in all things medical.

My child is above average. Like every mother, I’ll try to convince you how much better my kid is at their age than every other kid at the same age. My child, apparently like every other child, is above average – even though that is a statistical impossibility. There might be 360,000 births per day, but trust me, my child is in the highest percentage average of average curve lines on a graph I’m doing with my hands. I’ll talk about him like he is the next Einstein even though he is 10 months old and has shown no tangible evidence of having any intelligence at all. I’ll ignore the fact that he still shits all over himself and vomits milk he only just drank, and instead tell you that “he looks at everything! Like when the doctor shone a torch in his eyes he reacted by blinking, he is sooo curious…for his age”. My child is also the strongest human being on the planet and he doesn’t even lift. Like he can even hold his head up by himself and he can crawl. Lets ignore the fact that the structures in his body are doing what they are meant to. Please at least fake some interest in the amazing tale I’m going to tell you about the time he tried to stand up, like humans are meant to. Wow he walked around while I fucking fully supported his entire body weight by holding his arms up like a marionette puppet.

I’ll act like I created my child – as if I sat down over 9 months and diligently compiled the humane genome, wrote a personality code, shaped the various stages of growth in clay and kept my foot tapping to create the rhythm of his heartbeart, 24 hours a day for those 9 long months.

Instead, what happened was at 29 my lack of direction made my vagina turn into the Eye of Sauron – convincing me to get pregnant at all costs and leading me to every squalid nightspot in search of The One Dong to Ruin My Womb. So one Saturday night, I got drunk again as usual and fucked a hard working scaffolder without a condom who was out on his local footy wind up. The next morning I didn’t go to the pharmacist to get my usual Sunday fallopian degreaser pill because I wanted to keep this one, and anyway I could always get my oven cleaned at the end of the first trimester if it turned out “he wasn’t the one” like those other 9 guys this year.

He was smitten and in love with my total whoreishness and my desire to do anal constantly. In truth my whoreishness was designed to distract him from the fact I was spawning. Letting him enter what is normally my one-way-exit was just to protect my precious hatchling from getting prodded by its own Dad’s dick.

Over the next month or two I did everything to be the best girlfriend. I made him steak and chips each night, got him a beer when he farted for one, watched 7Mate and talked about how I would rub my gash on any chick from ZooWeekly if he wanted me to, but only if he was fucking her in the mouth. From there, our love blossomed and he fell more and more in love with me. In month three when I could no longer hide the fact I was getting fat and throwing up on mornings when I hadn’t been drinking heavily the night before, I told him I was pregnant. When he asked me “but I thought you were on the pill?” I appealed to his stupid ego by saying “yeah, but you’ve got real strong cum ay, you must have mutant cum like Wolverine”.

Over the next 6 months I kept working really hard on creating my child. I slept lots. Complained about back pain. Did awkward poos. Screamed at my boyfriend for not proposing to me yet which was a great set up for guilt tripping him into getting me icecream from the shops. A few times I really let him know how much I loved him and how much I wanted a family with him by berating him when he returned home after he couldn’t find me a mango at any service station at 4am. It’s so weird but true that women CRAVE chocolate, soft drinks, icecream, and chips when they are pregnant, and also crave those same things when they’re not pregnant. Anyway being pregnant let me run wild, eating everything I love without restraint. I'm eating for two! I'm eating for all 86kgs of myself plus a tiny organism that's roughly 3kgs when full term...

Finally, after much sleeping and complaining, it was time to give birth. And wow, talk about the most painful thing EVER! The doctors essentially disconnected my nervous system from my brain with an epidural, knocked me out with anaesthetic, and cut the baby out of my stomach like a tumour. I woke up a few hours later high as a motherfucker both from the strong opiates circulating my bloodstream, but also from the joy of being able to give up on my life and replace it with my child’s new life.

Nothing can express the joy of bringing a new, precious, unique, baby into an already desperately over-populated world of 7 billion shitty, unhappy ants who spend most of their day worrying about their phone battery.

This was such a transformative experience for me. I can’t wait to be a fully unlicensed, unrestricted, birthing machine, punching out tax-draining, non-contributing hood-rat-little-shits for the next 10 years until my tubes turn into two dry crostini sticks. I can’t wait to have more and more kids that drag my family further and further into poverty and reliance on social welfare. I really enjoy breeding more consumers for McDonalds, Vodafone and Redbull to prey upon. Keep an eye out for my weird and awkward facebook updates about my stupid kid saying a word they made up because they’re ‘funny’ (retarded) and the inevitable images from our clichéd, creepy, incesty, family ‘pile on’ photoshoot at the beach or in the backyard. I’ll invite you to the baby shower and every birthday so you can pay for all the toys and clothes this child, (that I decided to have), needs. My life choices are now your burden.

You should really have kids. It is unavoidable. It is your destiny.  Join us.

[humansofstraya]

Hey guys, I'm Reece Band, have you got your tickets for the summer festival line up? Yeah, have you saved up $19,000 for the next two months of tickets, drinks, drugs, sleeve tattoos, taxis, hotels, morning after pills, jean shorts, spray tans, bottled water and buying cotton-stringlet man-nighties? Me neither, I’m always broke but somehow I manage to find another credit card, or take up selling pingas again, to pay for endless summer festival benders! 

First up is FutureDouche. Have you checked out the line up? Man, you gotta check out the line up! It was released 0.9 nano-seconds ago, I just emailed, snapchatted, texted, facebook messaged and instagrammed it. I want to talk about it constantly. I’m going to let everyone know how much I know about it. I’ve been hanging out for this day for so long so I can harass you into coming to FutureDouche and spending a day squeezing through a hot crammed paddock full of shirtless homophobic-gaylords and dumb girls who wear heels on grass. Oh yeah how about we do that, but with heatstroke and on drugs that give you anxiety and high pressure diarrhoea. Why not add in some repetitive 400 decibel dial-up modem noises for all 10 hours of the festival. I love it. The whole festival sounds like a list of torture methods used on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

EVERYone is going, you have to come man, everyone is coming. Do what everyone else does. Everyone is coming. The whole crew. Everyone. Cameron Daddo, Tania Zaetta, the Pope, Vulcan from Gladiators, Alf Stewart, Obama, Proust, the Asiany guy with the man bun from MasterChef, Magda Szubanski’s wife, Nikolai Tesla, Larry Emdur, those cunts from that breakfast TV show Sunshine or Sunrise, Lisa McCune, Ben Cousins, Matisse, the whole crew is going man, EVERYONE will be there. Check out the line up, it’s sweet as man, it’s gonna be massive. I’ve already planned my schedule man, see:

Albino-Ban X Tandoori-Protein collab main stage

Drape - his middle-class, black enough to be cool, but white enough not to be scary, music is fun and relatable 

UGSIWBAII X3 – some electro-tech act no-one can pronounce

Weird twins from Norway (not sure if brothers or sisters)

Dirty Chuxxx Supawipe – Some cool name and one of their songs got remixed into a hit, otherwise, nothing

A random hip hop act that did that one song about ‘good times’ or ‘weekends’

The Prodigy (again)

RoidRave Punch up tent

A guy whose music I like but he looks like a dweeb from the Big Bang Theory

An old French rapist DJ

Some washed up techno act from 1992 that needs money

CuntFuel Energy Drink side arena

Some hot chick DJ that can’t mix, but I wanna bang her, so who cares

A funky, fat black guy who looks funky but is fat, and black - gross

Two local dickheads called something like “Boat Party DJ’s” who suck, but have free drugs for the overseas acts

Bro, there will be heaps of chicks there that only go because their friends are going and they won’t know a thing about the acts. Just hang out with me and I can talk to them about some Berlin-based Ethiopian grump-house DJ until their drugs kick-in and I can make out with one of them near a busted portaloo that smells like someone is baking a lasagne made out of warm butt-gravy and lumpy sewerage layered between decomposing seaweed.

We can make some sick tank tops, because everyone is doing it. I’m not a poofta though! I just love arts and crafts and showing other shirtless men my nip-nips. We can spend the next six weeks doing the chest press machine and no leg weights. I wanna have the body proportions of Dolly Parton in Auschwitz. 

Mate gotta get your early-bird-pre-sale-triple-VIP-class tickets. For only $595 you get FREE entry, a VodaFone sim card, a Red Rooster discount voucher, free sunscreen, unlimited hot tap water and NO alcoholic drinks included!!! You even get a free undercover drug squad detective following you around all afternoon. Hurry up and get your ticket to this thing you’ll hate and are too old for. We need to go because that’s what everyone else is doing.

[humansofstraya]

Hi there, so excited you're talking to me. I'm Rebecca Plump. But people call me Bekky. Just joking, people don’t call me. At all. I keep posting group photos. My profile photo is a group photo. My cover photo is a group photo. Every photo in my timeline is a group photo. Yes, that means I'm the ugly one in every photo, trying to hide myself amongst my better looking friends. 

I have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with my hot friends. They let me hang out with them because I make them look better, and I want to hang out with them because they attract guys and hopefully a guy for me. Oh and I don’t mean a guy who is also a 2 out of 10, I mean a guy who is a rich Norwegian male model. I won't accept anything less because my friends won’t accept anything less. I think I'm just as hot as they are. They keep telling me that I'm "totes gorge" and "literally, so pretty" which artificially inflates my ego. 

If any sucker tries to talk to my hot friends, I will cockblock them so hard they’ll be in traction for 6 months and wont ever be able to nod again. I'll stand between my friend and them and announce out loud to everyone "he's only talking to you because he wants to have sex with you!" like the world's most obvious but profound realisation. It will throw the guy off because he’s now in a total quandary.  He cant tell me I'm a fat sad cunt because it'll make my hot friend turn on him, but he also can't deny it because then he’s saying my friend isn’t fuckable. Eat shit!

My announcement will make my hot female friend hate the guy, because since childhood she has been warned about men who "just want to use her for her body" even though her body is the only thing anyone values. Oddly, even though all her time and money is spent on making herself more and more attractive, she’ll still be “grossed out” that a male wants to have sex with her. It’s like opening a cafe then telling anyone who orders a coffee to “fuck off you creep, it’s not all about coffee, you just want to use me for my coffee, well you can fuck off, I don't even sell coffee and even if I did I wouldn't sell it to a sick fuck like you!”. After being ignored by fifty to a hundred men I will complain to my friends that "this place is gross" or that "I'm tired" or some other made up complaint designed to get me attention because no is paying me any attention.

If my friends want to dance I will cause a scene, either by pretending to be paralytic drunk or maybe I'll just start crying about my grandmother who has been dead for ten years but the date today reminds me of a calendar that she gave me that also had dates on it, oh god, please I need my best friends to take me home now. Secretly I'm a weird emotional drunk and I'm agitated that my feet hurt because I’m fat and wear dumb shoes. If my friends don’t take me home immediately and ignore me because I do this every weekend, then I'll just have to spend the rest of the night standing at the bar watching all of my friends being hit on by a constant procession of men while I sink deeper into a drunk, depressive state. I hate watching them 'dance'. And by “watching them dance” I mean, watching horny guys dryly gang rape them through fabric in a huge-retarded-eagle-circle-jerk-bukakke-moshpit.

I can’t go and sit down because I fear I might miss out on something. So I guess I’ll just stand here awkwardly sipping the melted ice out of my the bottom of my drink for the next hour and watch from the sidelines.  My feet hurt. My feet hurt because my giant body that doesn’t do any exercise is trying to balance precariously on top of these tiny ski ramp heels strapped with dental floss to my inflamed feet. My foot looks like a loaf of bread being baked inside a hair net. It’s midnight now and I'm pretty sure all the guys here are so drunk, and confident that they’ll pick up a 10, that I've become an invisible blur to them like a predator squatting high in a jungle tree wearing an activated cloaking device. I'm drunk too and it’s so hot in here that my sweaty makeup looks like a Pro Hart painting. My uncomfortable frumpy force field is ensuring no one comes near me or says anything to me all night. No one is even close enough to knock into me and spill their drink on me to start a conversation. I wish a fight would break out so I could walk in the middle of it and get hit in the face. That would mean a man has touched me and hopefully a crowd of people would feel sorry for me and ask me a question about whether I am "alright". Then I could begin downloading all my stories about being bullied in primary school about my curly hair. Wait a minute. Holy shit. A guy is walking towards me. What do I do? Stay calm. Oh god no..... he just asked "are any of your friends are single". I'm going to the toilets to cry-vom. 

I'm thirsty. I've spent $190 on drinks. Meanwhile my friends have been paid over $3000 to take drinks from some of these guys. One guy gave one of my hot friends his wallet and his watch. One of my friends needed to go to the bathroom and a guy offered his mouth as a toilet. Another guy laid on the floor to let one of my friends dance on him. One of my friends dropped her glass and a guy offered to buy her a Dan Murphys and he cleaned up the broken glass with his chest by doing the worm before passing out from blood loss. This other guy literally gave his left testicle to talk to one of my friends. He smashed his iPhone and used the sharp edge of the aluminium case to castrate himself and offered his ball to her in a shot glass. She told him she has a boyfriend but she doesn't. I had an imaginary boyfriend but it turns out he was only with me to try to sleep with my hot friends. I'm going to do a ghostie and see if anyone notices I've gone home, which they wont. Fuck it I'm going to get a kebab and pretend it’s a guy who picked me up in the club and deep throat it in a taxi on the way home

[humansofstraya]

Welcome sinners, I come in the name of the Lord, my baptismal name is Fabian Tabernacle. Please come and pray with me at the New Light of the Way Hill Tune Christian Assembly Church. No this church is different, the priests are called Ministers and they wear jeans.

I’m a bit lost in life. I don’t really know what to do. So I come to church for guidance. I have lots of bills, my dreams are shit and I’m stuck in a boring job, so I think the answer to my problems is to just leave it all up to Jesus to sort out for me... Kind of like hating a TV show and then staring at the remote hoping the channel will change. I believe you need to be patient and just sit around and wait and not help yourself, God has a plan for each and every one of you, except if you’re gay. I also take all my advice from a one-and-a-half-thousand-year-old book because I don’t like information to be relevant. I still use a rotary phone and a two-volume copy of the residential White Pages from 1992.

I come here for the friendships with other people who don't have friends. I like church because it's a ready-made social circle of people who are told by the Bible that they have to be your friend no matter how weird, odd, crazy or dangerously deluded you are, and that's why I like it. Everyone here has to be my friend in a world where no one really wants to talk to me. And also with you. 

This church is so fun and funky. It's not like a traditional church. I get to wear jeans. It's like the casual Friday of churches. I like the music here too. There aren't any hymns or psalms. It's just classic, easy-listening Christian Rock. Imagine Crowded House but singing about treating your neighbour as you would like to be treated, like not being fingered. My favourite God-Rock-Ballads are “Please Lord Don’t Finger Me During Lent” and "Magic Sky Man Don't Burn Me In Hell".

We have been chosen by God, but not in the same way Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants, the Amish, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists or Orthodox Christians all say that God has chosen them. We’ve really, really been chosen. All those other Christians are wrong, how silly and misguided they are. Don’t even get me started on the other 50 or so other large religious denominations! They’re all even more wrong than the other Christians. We are special, Jesus has shown us the light. By shining his iPhone around I guess.

We are the most chosen people. Like you know when you’re hungry and you’re not sure what to eat? Well all the religions are like all of the foods. Then you choose Japanese, well Christians are like Japanese food to God. Then you order the teriyaki chicken. That’s like us, we are the most chosen of all the world's foods and then the most chosen out of all the Japanese foods on the menu. He picked Japanese, but then especially chose Us. We are God’s Teriyaki Chicken.

We’re not a wacky cult, even though people say we are. Just because we have a logo, extend our arms in the air like Nazis, believe in mystical forces, reject any challenges to our faith, exclude outsiders, ex-communicate any insiders who breach our rules and require our followers to give 20% of their meagre income to the church leaders - doesn’t mean we are a cult! Would a cult be allowed to wear jeans on a Sunday?

I know because I once asked our Head Minister whether we were a cult and he said “No, God said don’t talk about that. God told me that you will be punished for thinking that. And for thinking about anything. God said you’re not allowed to wear jeans next week.” I guess God told the Minister all that via a burning bush or SnapChat.

And do you know what, the Minister was right. My asthma came back, I was late for my bus on Wednesday and I got ringworm. I was indeed forsaken because of my sins. God works in mysterious ways!  I had to tell the whole congregation at public confession mass about my sins and punishment. I got on stage and asked everyone to pray to God to heal my itchy sinning ringworm demon butthole. The Minister didn’t really know what to do so he told me to spread my cheeks above a weird bird bath while he splashed it with holy water.

Then I joined the people being healed and speaking in tongues, they were filled by the Holy Spirit and started talking about all kinds of weird things that I think was the Word of the Lord. When the Minister came around to me and laid his hands on my head I wasn’t sure what to do so I just joined in with the others, freestyling whatever I could feel the Holy Spirit urging me to say, and I said “His mom is sweaty, he’s got vomit on his spaghetti, bees knees, his mom is heavy, she’s made of spaghetti, he’s sweating already, time’s up over blauw, oh there’s a rabbit it’s Easter, his mom is  from heaven, Jesus loves spaghetti”. Then everyone stopped and looked at me, and the Minister said mass was finished. He then told me that God would probably give me leprosy. 

Praise be to God. Rihanna in the Highest.

[humansofstraya]

Life is shit. I’m Madilyn Pamper and welcome to my shitty life where I can’t immediately have things that I want. Like, I wanted a fucking Bratz doll set at the shops today, because it’s Thursday, and my parents said ‘no’. They think because I got one yesterday that I shouldn’t want one today, but I do, I fucking do. Today is a new day, which means I’m meant to get new things, that’s not hard to understand you dumb fucks. I want something, I get it. Simple.

My mother tried to use my iPad the other day and she asked me what my password was. Pffft yeah right you old cunt, like I’m going to give you my password! I said to her “it has a password, because it’s mine Susan, not yours. Does it say ‘Susan’s iPad’? No, because it’s mine you bitter old bitch." Susan tried to enter me into a children's beauty pageant once, what a stupid bitch. Do I look like a whore? No. I'm in the front row of Melbourne Fashion week and she expects me to be some little bimbo on stage singing and dancing? I'm insty famous curating a hugely popular instagram fashionista account and she wants to parade me around in a tu-tu? Bitch please.

I hate instagram though, because not enough people regram my photos and I only get 10,000 likes an hour. I’ve heard that Miley Cyrus gets that many likes, but I deserve more than her. Ugh, no one at daycare even knows how many followers I have, except Garth that fucking creepo loser who always wants to sit near me with his cat piss smell that clashes with my Givenchy eu du parfum. I fucking hope Cat Piss Garth dies. He once pushed me over near the sand pit and I chipped my shellac nails. I’m going to get in my Pink Turbo-Diesel Frozen Power Wheels Princess 4x4 Trailrider, drive to his house and crush his whole, poor, cat piss family to death. I would get my ex-husband Kayden to go around there and bash him, but my lawyer told me not to talk to him before our divorce trial at the athletics carnival. My lawyer also said not to say anything about my abortion. So now I have like nothing to talk to my girlfriends about at recess over a much needed go-gurt.

I have to go wash my hair now, fuck I hate washing my hair. What time is it? Oh fuck I’m going to be late for the opening of the new swing set and I look like shit. Excuse me I need to go. Move out of my way asshole.

[humansofstraya]

I’m a big beautiful woman. I'm Eleanor Goiter. I’m large-body-positive! I’m vivacious, curvaceous and something-else-vacious,like inspira-vacious. I’m living-large ‘n’ in-charge – of a mobile defibrillator for my hourly angina attack. My fem-fat friends like my stupid haircut, funky shaped glasses, cute little animal prints and giant polka-dots on everything. I also luurrvvv getting into illogical arguments about gender inequality and fat-scrimination. My favourite topic, besides how much I hate all the air in chip packets, is Nature vs Nurture – I’m unnaturally overweight and have never nurtured anything other than my curvaceous lady lumps.

Did I mention I’m curvaceous? I use the word curvaceous to redefine what most people would describe as “gruesomely obese and incomprehensibly still alive” to mean “oh wow I almost thought you were Jenny, Jenny from the Block, you’re soo curvaceous, num nums”. So yeah I mean ‘curvaceous’ as in “Latino” not “Leggos”.

I’ve been sponging off a government grant to write a thesis paper for my Grad-Dip in Female Genderous Culture Through Pubic Painting and Liturgical Movement. My paper is titled “Cross cultural modes of de-feminisation of post-feminist retail sales assistants assisting in the un-subconscious promotion of female circumcision using men’s cufflinks as a symbol of the patriarchal dominance in suffragette freedom activism”.

I love burlesque, cabaret and circus. I do all three, at the same time. I dress up in a lace bra and panties, and groan loudly while trying to balance on a podium. Burlesque is great. It’s a way for people too ugly to be strippers to be strippers. We can force other fat burlesque trolls to watch us and we can all join in the collective approval of our horrendous bodies.

I’m thinking of doing something about my weight though, maybe I’ll get my stomach stapled - to the front counter at KFC so they can never shut the store and will have to just throw buckets of fried chicken into my face like feeding a killer whale at SeaWorld. I’m fat and proud, of the burden I’ll be placing on our hospital system when I get diabetes and need dialysis and surgery for my crumbling knees and quintuple bypass surgery when my heart says ‘fuck you bitch’ when I’m 38. 

I tell everyone that I’m a good fat like an avocado! Hahah. I eat 27 avocados a day. Whole. Like malteasers. And that’s just on the way to the confectionary isle. Once a week before my hosing down at the local stables, I take a hand shovel and scrape all the build up from under my breasts and armpits. And that is how mustard is made. You’re welcome.

[humansofstraya]

Watch out! This independent woman is about to paint the town red!!! Haha. I’m Kylie Aioli. I’m letting my hair down for my friend’s friend’s friend Karen’s hen’s night. The Bride-to-Be has such a repulsive personality she’s had to ring-in all four of her friends’ friends’ to head out to celebrate that she no longer has to work and can live the stay-at-home-mum dream life. I’m so excited that I’ve been invited to leave my apartment tonight. One less night of stuffing my hungry cooter with a butternutpumpkin to re-runs of Grey’s Anatomy and Offspring. God I am sooo Nina. I make stupid choices then talk about them to myself in the third person.

I, Kylie, am on the prowl. Tonight I hope I can find a man who is the complete package. A balanced guy. A balance between drunk enough to fuck me and sober enough to get an erection to fuck me. I need to trap a man into getting me pregnant soon. My pussy is so damp at the thought of having a child to give my life meaning and a fortnightly payment from Centrelink. I’m sopping wet, I need to wear a diaper it feels like I’ve pissed myself. I’m looking for any guy, even a weird Irish guy, just anyone to throw a load up me and hopefully fertilise one of my few remaining dehydrated raisin eggs before I become completely barren and dusty. Please, someone. I can’t be fucked working anymore, I just want a child and a home I can decorate with cushions.

Maybe I can rape a topless waiter at this male strip club. Karen is so drunk and horned-up that she bit one guy’s cock through his leather pants and he’s sitting down in the corner icing his dick. I wish I was his dick ice. All these penis straws are driving me wild. I’m so horny and drunk on Midori I feel like ramming a penis whistle up my urethra.

I can’t wait to stomp through the centre of the city tonight, like Godzilla on heat. We’re going to shout at people and argue with bouncers that we’re not drunk and that we need to go into this bar because “Kareg ig getting marreeged!” like it is some town council approved password to the City. I’m going to fall over about ten times tonight and nearly snap my ankles. I’ll stack it on the dancefloor to S Club 7 and show you what a gross ricotta canyon my inner thighs create when I’m on the floor slipping in my twelfth daiquiri. If you get horny you can find me later, vomit-crying in an alleyway or at a kebab shop with tomato and lettuce stuck to my purple polyester blouse. Cum get some boys!

[humansofstraya]

No thanks, I don’t need a spotter. I’m Martin Lovehandle, part time exerciser and casual fitness guru. My personal trainer told me I need to do some exercise so I don't die early and my wife told me I need to do some exercise so she doesn't fuck my personal trainer. That’s made me question if I should exercise to delay my inevitable death by a few years, or not exercise and hopefully die sooner. My wife told me that when we have sex in the missionary position she tries not to vomit because my pectoral muscles remind her of Gwen Stefani’s A-Cups and she hates lesbians. I guess I’ll just give this exercise thing a half hearted go like everything else I attempt.

I've joined the gym for the first time ever this year in an effort to tone up and lose some weight off my horrendous meat-costume. I’m pretty excited about it, I’ve read lots of magazines on how to exercise to get a sexy body like David Duchovny.

I've never been to an actual real gym before so it's all new and challenging for me. I’m sure I’ll be fine though, I'm fully equipped in the latest hi-tec fabrics to help me move my body in the way it has been designed to do for the past thousands of millennia. I bought a Nike dri-fit midriff tank top and some size XS three quarter leggings! These leggings are tight though. I hope I don’t see a girl doing that inner thigh spread&squeeze machine because I’ll just daydream about her tight, cigar-cutter-butthole, snapping my cock off like a celery stick and it’ll give me a visible rising bean that she might report to management. I like all these machines, they’re like playground equipment where you can try all sorts of creative fun things, like if you want to you can even do some of the moves on the suggestion cards that each one has, or just freestyle it.  

I've been overhearing some of the other gym lifters talk about their fitness schedules and I've developed my own. I’m using a workout app on my iPad called StrongVulva. I monitor my workouts with a FitClit wristband connected to my iPad via bluetooth that I've wrapped around my scrote. I have to do:

10 raps of Uncline Squirts

Barbara Gorts to fail

20 Crunchy Napkins (left and right side)

CrossStep Taint Logies to 80% erection

Finish off with 10 minutes on the CableRaper machine

Alternate handed 50 minute changeroom shower wank

I’m also on a diet that my wife’s friend gave me. It’s a new one where you scream at a loaf of bread and throw pasta up some stairs. She lost 49 kilos on that diet and got so thin that when she lifted up her shirt you could see all six of her ovarian cysts. She collapsed into a coma before she could reach her goal weight of 400 grams of pure beef jerky. I haven’t heard from her since but my wife says she has a body to die for, and she might.

Anyway I better get back to my last attempt to fold my spine backwards and touch my neck with my feet while lifting this 3kilo barbell. I’m going to strain so hard I’ll look like a mix of Karl Pilkington’s frustrated head and a bag of freshly unplugged tampons. 3, 2, 1, HUUUUUUAAARRRGHHHH! oh fuck, call an ambulance, my spleen is bulging out the back of my sweat wicking leggings.

[humansofstraya]

At my university I was lucky enough to meet like minded losers who were bullied in high school. Together we formed elite social cliques with people who thought: (1) our high school grades in basic biology and year 9 level English made us intellectually superior to Stephen Hawking (2) our middle class background entitled us to act like a villain in a horrid Bollywood romance movie about the caste system and (3) being elitist is a good way to compensate for being a lame outsider amongst normal people. Through continual reinforcement of these ideals, we developed a foul smugness that deters sane people and attracts other smug dickheads to our group. We only talk about work, politics, tax schemes, networking and other inane pseudo-intellectual topics. That's right, I'm a lawyer. My name is Evan Loin. But you can call me Sir Loin.

I’m glad I could meet you here at my law firm’s networking event, where I'll corner you so I can prove to you how much more law-stuff I know. I'm going to show you how much of an expert I am on one of the world’s lamest, most uninteresting topics. I have a great memory for completely useless, boring cases, a skill that has now been relegated to search engines and Wikipedia. If I can’t match your ability to recall some case about a contract for the delivery of wool from 1882, then perhaps I can demonstrate how much better than you I am by discussing other soulless topics. Or even pretentious topics, for instance, have you tried the twenty-twelve Cab-Sav from Motion Grundle estate? I wouldn’t know the difference between it and a white wine with red food colouring, but my friend Simon’s family own that estate and I'm going to wedge the fact that I know Simon into every conversation I manufacture about wine. We should go and stay there, with my friend Simon. At my friend Simon's winery. Maybe I can invite some couples who refer to themselves as a 'power couple', some ugly single women with unwashed hair and a few questionably closeted “funky” “fun” queer single guys. It’ll be a blast. At my friend Simon's winery. We can talk about the latest case law, again and again, but none of that sullied despicable stuff like criminal or family law, just commercial decisions and constitutional challenges. We can all admire Justice Anthony O’Dongle’s pithy comments in Fucked Mining Ltd v Conglomerate Shitheap Pty Ltd, where he said “I do not concur with the decision of my fellow Justices”. HAHAHA what a truly witty man of the highest intellectual calibre.

My colleague-friends and I agreed at the latest Law Society Young Boring Fucks Committee Meeting that common peasant people don’t understand how hard it is to become a lawyer. Imagine an Arts degree like ‘Australian History’ with slightly more reading. See, not so easy now is it. I have to work 90 hours a week, mostly photocopying, reading other lawyer’s long winded lies and creating volumes of my own horseshit to justify the $450 an hour (ex GST) I charge large corporate clients who pay for my firm’s letterhead to scare off other equally misguided companies. My parents were able to send me to an elite, all male, homosexually repressed college, which I take to mean I am a hyper-intelligent-genius selected by God to go and do great things in the world. Despite my God-given divine intellect, I can’t figure out that the legal industry rewards the slowest morons who can spin the most convincing bullshit about why they’ve taken so long to do something so simple like fax a document. The more hours it takes me to do something, the more hours I charge our client, the more money my firm makes, so the bigger my bonus and pay rise! That sounds like a really constructive system that is not open to abuse! Only a shitty soulless human-turd-in-a-suit like me would brag about being a lawyer and drop it into every possible conversation as a way of masking that I am truly just a snobby, boring, egotistical douchebag. Oh yeah, we still use faxes to send documents, back in time to 1997. 

You may not know, but my law degree is from an elite Australian university. It's so elite it's ranked 192nd in the world… Despite what some people may think is a poor education, I treat this degree as the equivalent of being given an honorary peerage from the Queen to become the Seventh Earl of Wessex, which explains the sudden change in my voice and mannerisms to that of an old-money Eton educated Shakespearian Viscount. Away with you commoners, with your long hair and pop music. I now only listen to live performances of Rachmaninoff and drink 200-year-old whiskey. Excuse me, I’m going to lie to some work experience girl about how I can get her a job here at Clunge, Fhartz and Bile and pressure her into sleeping with me after she gets drunk on the power I'm exuding as an Associate Lawyer at this end of financial year "sundowner mixer".

[humansofstraya]

Heeeyyyy guyyyyssss! I’m Nikki Sniz. I'm having a Girls Night OUT!!! 

Oh Ma Gadddd I haven't seen you in like for-ages!!! This is my bestie Tahalia and some other besties but not as bestie, and our Asiany friend Sammy, her real name is Samsonite because that’s what was written on her suitcase when she arrived from Vietnam. We keep her around for pre-drinks because she gets us stuff and is good at doing make up. And because we feel sorry for her. But unless we need to get into some club near China Town for free we’re going to abandon her halfway through the night. 

These are some other moronic whores that I go out with. All of us are going to turn the girls bathroom into Glastonbury but with everyone covered in bronzer instead of mud. We’ll be back on the dance floor whoring for drinks in 2 hours after we’ve all rearranged our extensions, had a runny dump from these smacky pills and have taken and retaken so many selfies that we should’ve just used video. 

Can you smell the new perfume I just bathed in? It’s called Fart by Fart Jacobs. Soooo totes babez!!!

[humansofstraya]

My name is Callum Drendle, but my online alias is TacticalBlanket. I have a question, is it mandatory to have a baby to hire a babysitter? Can I just pay a teen to come over and watch TV and play XBox with me then become my bukkake canvas? 

All my friends are either married or engaged imaginary Anime characters. I tried fitting in with cool people in society and acting normal so I could find myself a 4 foot tall Japanese cartoon wife. I once went to a cool bar with lots of girls with hair. I ate a cigarette and poured whiskey on my feet and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t doing it right. No ladies spoke to me. 

My online friend WomensRightsLOL asked me on XboxLive how he could pick up girls on Tinder.... I gave him a hot dating tip for getting women into your bed or fold out couch: when you can smell your own balls it's probably a good time to pause Call of Duty and have a bath. Anyway, if you're asking me for relationship advice, you may also like to send your breakdancing questions to Christopher Reeve.  

At my age of 34, my Dad had 3 children, a day job, a mortgage and was working nights at a sawmill, meanwhile, I'm wearing a sleeping bag because I have no clean clothes or bedsheets and haven't moved from my fold out couch/bed for a week. It's okay though, I'm acheiving my own goals, I've unlocked a special penis pump weapon in GTA V so I'm really going places.