Everything is funny one day.

This is the only motto I live by that I can think of. Even the most horrendously ball-crushing moments of despair and embarrassment can be reflected upon in a year’s time and chuckled upon.

When Adam and I broke up just over a year ago, we concluded that we’d become different people. Much different people. There was a brief stab at trying things ‘all over again’ a couple of days after we arrived at this conclusion, and this was met with all the success of a gameshow revolving around identification of animal feces for white goods.

It was after we realised that we really did need to take a break from the whole relationship thing that we felt a little more comfortable around each other. Although we’d both gone to work the day that we decided it really wasn’t going to happen, we weren’t able to concentrate on even the most minute of tasks, and our respective bosses told us just to go home - without even asking what was wrong.

We met at Town Hall train station, and I spotted Adam standing at the end of the train platform. I slowly approached him through the swarm of commuters flowing around me, knowing that whatever words passed between our lips would later come to blossom into something that’d stay planted into my memory.

With my thoughts cascading through my head at a million miles an hour, yet barely forming any cohesive decisions at all; he looked up at me and I opened my mouth to greet him.

Then someone beat me to it.

Who should arrive at that very precise moment in time - that heavy-weighted, emotionally fraught tense meeting; at this very place in this city of tumbling, ever-constructing geometry; which one individual arrives here at this place, at this moment in time, from a city with a population of over four million people?

San Fran, the Most Unheterosexual Man in the World.

Oh yes. If there was any suspicion that God was gleefully running our lives around as a heavenly sitcom, it was this. The foppish comic relief character of the ensemble just had to make an appearance.

It’s been a while since I mentioned San Fran on here, but a quick overview: he used to work with Adam, when he was drawing cartoons for the Yellow Pages. A chance gathering of old employees which I attended provided me with a shocking introduction to a young man (although I’m willing to wager he considers himself a ‘boi’) exhibiting every gay stereotype that existed, yet his female friends insisted he’s not gay at all, just ‘a bit feminine’. His fawning over Adam and persistent planting of his hand on his inner thigh made everyone laugh. He later that year admitted to Adam that he was gay, but before this happened we seemed to bump into him constantly at the most inopportune moments. Any moment of emotional significance would inevitably find him strolling up the road towards us clad in beige skivvy and ready to flail his hands all over Adam, asking whaaaat he haaad been dooooing all this tiiiime, and whyyy don’t you ever replyyyy to my teeext messages to goo out for cocktaaails with meee?

So here arrives San Fran, wailing in delight at the very sight of Adam and screaming up to greet him before I can even get a word in. Helplessly, Adam looked at me in terror and shrugged as San Fran managed to update Adam on every minute occurrence in his social life over the past two months in less than thirty seconds, then continued on to his opinion of each individual member of Sydney’s current A-list. Adam’s awkward body language and my aggravated face were not enough to deter him - he had all the charm of a bottle of Eighties perfume.

As our train rolled in, he continued to relentlessly power on about how Adam really should go out for drinks with him, which did not help things at all. As a last minute attempt, he attempted to woo Adam over with some family history news.

‘My uncle is tracing our family tree,’ he beamed. ‘I now find out I have not only Malaysian and Singapore backgrounds, but Japanese a long time ago as well.’

‘Fantastic,’ Adam enthused.

‘I’m PAN ASIAN,’ San Fran added as earnestly as a new convert to scientology. As we left on the train, we were left with little more than a situation even more confused than before.

Oh, but we all laugh about that now. We got back together a month or two later and were ten times the better for recognizing each other’s differences.

Everything is funny one day.

Then there was the time I was working for the man I used to refer to on here as Mr. Marketing, who I liked to perceive as just a no-nonsense down-to-business funnyman; when in actuality he was an enormous bastard who embodied every known form of intolerance and turned it into a new, previously unseen form of hateful taunting.

After he drew his six staff into his office and berated us collectively for ‘not doing anything right in particular’, my anger boiled over a little too far. Even the two meek temping staff who were doing telemarketing for the day were targets of his fury, and the worst thing any of them had done was to have hair with slightly visible roots.

Accusing me of not instituting the proper tone of voice required on the phone when reading off lists of retailers who stocked the company’s products, my token lesbian coworker and I had a fueled discussion hissed between our cubicles about the arrogance of our manager.

‘His eyes resemble human vaginas,’ I clenched my teeth, torturing a stress-ball between my hands as if it were Mr. Marketing’s scrotum. ‘He’s the biggest try-hard mid-life-crisis case I’ve come across. For Christ’s sake, he’s even a fucking DJ on the weekend.’

‘Actually,’ interrupted a stonefaced Mr. Marketing from behind me, ‘I DJ on Friday nights.’

For reasons not entirely disconnected from this conversation, I fled from the company shortly afterwards.

Everything is funny one day.

Finally grappling unforeseen confidence and overcoming a lifelong fear of telling my parents that, well, not only does Adam live with me but he licks my penis as well; only to have your mother scream at you (’Why the fuck did you wait so long to tell me! I’ve known forever!’) is slightly uncomfortable.

Yet she was the first person I wanted to tell. On an emotional level, she’s the parent I’m closest to (but not by much). Yet this slightly more connected relationship was enough, in my mind, to make sure she was the first parent I told, despite the fact my dad answered the phone that day. She then demanded to know why I didn’t tell my dad first, and I couldn’t even explain myself. All I could keep doing was avoiding the argument and reassuring her that yes, I was indeed having safe sex.

Ah, but everything is funny one day.

Being dropped by the only boyfriend you thought you had a decent chance with - dysfunctional relationship with heapings of experimental sex-and-hynopsis issues aside - for the reason that he, in fact, is far more interested in a pair of breasts than your personality leaves nothing short of a gaping hole in your self-esteem. For dessert there was also the delightful snippet of information that he had, in fact, probably given me crabs because he’d caught them off the girl he’d been banging the whole time we’d been going out.

When you’re eighteen, still quite innocent in regards to sexual diseases and continuously barraged with messages from the gay community that imply - quite simply - sexual disease equals imminent death, this can be slightly… traumatic. Until you realise crabs is something you can easily kill with a cream, of course; but oh! How we all laugh about that now.

Everything is funny one day.

When you’re desperate enough for money to whore yourself out to various temping jobs, many involving telemarketing, the experience can be harrowing or a great way to pick up blokes (depending on if you’re a backpacker tourist from London or not).

A couple of years ago I bagged a week of temp work for a company which was gearing up for some major seminar they were holding - likely on some useless technology like WAP. Every Sydney resident who had a vowel in their name seemed to have been invited, and it was our job to pressure invitees who were yet to RSVP to come along. Lengthy lists of people to call were presented to us, and off we went, repeating two sentences for the whole day to everyone we spoke. The experience was not entirely dissimilar to spending Christmas with my family and engaging in conversation with my aunts.

Of course, with such repetitive work, your brain tends to run on an automated basis; so before you know it your mind is wandering to such top ten daydreaming subjects as sexual intercourse, what you’re going to do on the weekend, what you’re going to eat for lunch, and how long a passage of time would be acceptable until you can excuse yourself for another toilet break without raising irritable bowel suspicions.

Repeating the same two sentences over and over to everyone I spoke to eventually caused my brain to regress into sleep mode. This is the only explanation I can offer for calling the direct line of Jamie Packer, second-in-line (and son) of Australia’s richest man’s media empire; and asking his secretary if he was interested in coming along to some dinky little fucking conference called ‘Oooh, Look At WAP!’

All of which lead to a complaint from his secretary to my boss for wasting Mr. Packer’s time, and a warning from my temping agency; which was code for ‘you’ve got as much chance of getting more work from us than Gary Glitter’s proposed appearance on Sesame Street coming to fruition’.

Indeed, everything is funny one day.

One of my earlier jobs comes to mind, where I was occasionally required to process details of people who had recently passed away for a government department. The phone calls were always emotionally fragile and I tried to complete them as soon as possible, because the person on the other end of the line was inevitably a distressed close relative.

The first phone call of this ilk that I took was also my first phone call in a call centre, and I was justifiably nervous. Fortunately, all the questions I was required to ask this person ran on a flow chart, so it was a fairly painless process.

When exactly did Mr. Brown die? Okay, last Friday.

Does Mr. Brown have a surviving spouse? Right, she’ll be eligible for a special payment.

Can you tell me the address of Mrs Brown? Thanks for that.

And who is the executor of Mr. Brown’s estate?

Hello?

Cue loud sobbing.

In my inexperience for the job (and limited vocabulary), I hadn’t pronounced executor in the correct manner, but rather as ‘execute-or’. The terror I’d just compounded upon the caller was doubled when I found out he’d been killed by a thief in the street.

All of which, of course, probably lead to a near-emotional breakdown on the caller’s part and immense moral guilt on mine, but as I keep telling you…

Everything is funny one day.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2002 at 7:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.