Image courtesy of Denis Allbertovich

When you move in with someone for the first time, you come face-to-face with a range of issues that never existed until that moment.

What’s the best way to share the wardrobe space? Who gets to have the first shower before work? Which TV station will you watch while eating breakfast?

When I moved in with my partner Sharon a few months back I was well prepared for all of these issues. After all, we’d accumulated more than six-months-worth of house-sitting in our five years together and we came through it all with our relationship intact and, for better or worse, a willingness to do it all again, albeit in a more formal and a permanent capacity.

But while I was prepared for the trials and tribulations of the domestic domicile, I wasn’t prepared for the cast of sitcom-ready characters in the surrounding apartment complex.

In fact, our first dose of neighbourly affection was upon us before we’d even had a chance to ask: ‘Should there really be water running down the walls?’

As we dragged, scraped and manhandled various pieces of furniture through our seemingly-too-narrow front door (why do they always make couches wider than doorways?!), we noticed a shadowy presence monitoring our progress from across the way.

A little old lady stood in her doorway, directly across from ours, staring unashamedly at the pile of furniture strewn haphazardly across our entrance-room-cum-lounge-room-cum-dining-room.

‘Hi! How are you?’, offered the ever-friendly Sharon, keen to make a good impression with our new neighbours.

While most would reply to the above with something akin to: ‘I’m good. How are you?’, our curious neighbour was going to be bound by no such social customs.

Instead she responded with a dozen steps forward, her feet coming to rest at the base of our front step. She thrust her head unceremoniously through our doorway, peering this way and that, just as a prospective tenant might survey an available rental property.

‘We’re just moving in’, Sharon continued, determined to elicit some kind of verbal response from our slightly-too-eager visitor who, by this point, would have been giving herself a tour of the unit had we not formed an impromptu security cordon.

Having apparently satiated her curiosity, our visitor turned on her heels and wandered off, leaving Sharon and I scratching our heads before sighing and resuming the load-in.

It’s easy to look back and laugh at one-off events like these. But when your neighbours appear hell-bent on employing their lack of consideration for others in perpetuity, it’s a little harder to see the funny side.

Every morning, as Sharon and I enjoy the last snatches of pre-dawn sleep, our next-door neighbour leaves his apartment for work.

Now, I’m not a qualified carpenter, nor do I claim to be an expert when it comes to the construction of front-door locks, but last time I checked, closing a door isn’t the most physically challenging task facing the modern human. You simply apply a force great enough so as to return the door to the shut position and the latch to its companion slot.

That particular memo mustn’t have made it to unit 12. Instead, our early-rising neighbour prefers to combine his departure for work with his training regime for the Australian Door-Slamming Championships.

And so, a little after 5am every weekday, Sharon and I wake with a start, all thanks to a terrifying din that assaults more than just the ears. Teeth are clenched and eyes are squinted in nervous anticipation: will today be the day our front door finally rattles off its hinges and our windows shatter? If not, there’s always tomorrow.

But our neighbours probably shouldn’t shoulder all the blame for our sub-standard introduction to life in Melbourne’s gritty inner-north. The ingenious design of our apartment building should take some of the heat as well.

By some stroke of architectural brilliance, the main bedroom in our apartment – and hence our bed – lies directly beneath the toilet in the apartment above us. It’s something the designers obviously weren’t too concerned about but take it from me: there are few things more relaxing than lying in bed after a hard day’s work, listening to the neighbours use their smallest room.

Suffice to say that few details of the purging process are left to the imagination for us lowly downstairs-dwellers.

I’ll leave with you that appetising allusion and the rather trite suggestion that moving in with a loved one can be a challenging experience — but not always for the reasons you might expect.

I’ve never understood the term ‘night owl’. The word ‘night’ seems more than a little superfluous in this case – I mean, how many owls do you see flying around during the day?

Misgivings about its composition aside, ‘night owl’ is still a term that I identify with quite strongly.  When left to my own devices I’ll often find myself staying awake until after 3am and waking sometime after 10am.

If my mother is to be believed, such sleep patterns can be explained by a phenomenon known as ‘delayed sleep phase syndrome’ (DSPS). According to an article on sleepdisorderchannel.com people with DSPS have an ‘internal biological clock’ that doesn’t match up with the ‘external environment’. Furthermore, ‘patients with DSPS typically are unable to fall asleep before 2am and have extreme difficulty waking early (e.g. by 7am).’

This would certainly explain why I struggle to get out of bed for the 4am breakfast shift. It also gives me a valid excuse for refusing to do such shifts – ‘sorry boss, I can’t. I’ve got DSPS!’

My mother recently cured herself of a lifelong (but only recently diagnosed) DSPS affliction through the use of tinted goggles.

Exposure to blue light is widely believed to inhibit the production of melatonin – a chemical produced by the pineal gland which causes us to become drowsy. By wearing blue goggles in the morning my mother was able to decrease the amount of melatonin being produced in her brain, thereby preventing her from feeling excessively tired. By wearing amber-coloured, blue-light-blocking goggles in the evening she was able to increase her melatonin supply, making her feel tired before she normally would.

I mean, it makes perfect sense. During the day we are exposed to a significant amount of blue light courtesy of Rayleigh scattering. This slows melatonin production and thereby prevents us from falling asleep during the day. Conversely, once the sun has set, melatonin production is able to commence which then begins to make us tired. The use of tinted-goggles merely brings greater control to the system and allows the user to sleep and wake closer to the desired time.

While DSPS can be a great inconvenience to those whose suffer from it, it also has potential benefits. For example, when our hotel’s front office was short-staffed for Sunday night’s 11pm to 7am shift they asked me to switch teams and help out. I agreed straight away, grateful for the experience and also confident that my sleep habits would make staying awake for an overnight shift fairly simple. In theory anyway.

In order to properly adjust myself to the overnight shift I began preparing on Friday night. I got home at 9:30pm and by the time 11pm rolled around I was already struggling. By 3am I had gotten my second wind and I somehow managed to last until 7am.

I woke the next day at 2pm and, after working that evening, I upped the ante, pushing through until 8:30am before finally succumbing to sleep.

To my great surprise I was able to put the late nights to use, getting stuff done while there was no one around. But by the same token, it also gets kind of lonely at the time of night – while normal people tend to be asleep at 4am I was awake, cleaning the house in a haze of semi-consciousness.

To my great frustration the aforementioned haze seemed to linger across the weekend, despite getting eight hours sleep each day. Even now, almost three days after finishing the overnight shift, I can still feel it tugging at my eyelids like some invisible weight. It’s kind of like jet lag without the excitement of overseas travel.

The fact that it was only a single shift probably compounded the problem as I needed to get back into a ‘normal’ routine straight away. Altering one’s sleeping habits so drastically for one night is like, to return to the jet lag analogy, what it might feel like to fly to London for the weekend. Not really worth the effort.

Beyond all that, there is one important issue that continues to confuse me – when you wake up at 7pm after going to bed at 10am, what meal are you supposed to eat? Do you eat dinner, given that it’s 7pm? Or do you eat breakfast given that you’ve just woken up?

But the inconvenience of not knowing what meal to eat and a particular time is of little concern when compared to claims made by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2007. According to Vincent Cogliano from WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) there is ‘enough of a pattern in people who do shift work to recognise that there’s an increase in cancer’. While the evidence is not entirely conclusive, it was enough to prompt the IARC to add ‘overnight shift work’ to a list of probable carcinogens.

Add to that an increased risk of developing depression and I think I might have grounds to refuse any future night shifts…

Catching the train home from work at around 11pm is always an experience. If it isn’t boozed up teens sharing stories of their sexual conquests it’s drug fuelled maniacs trying to start fights with ticket inspectors. Tonight was a little less extreme, but no less fascinating.

As I boarded the 10:41pm Hurstbridge train I became aware of a younger gentleman sitting a couple of metres away from me. As we started our slow journey into the ‘burbs this gentleman started making eye contact with people as they boarded the train. After a few stations he struck up conversation with one particularly attractive young female who happened to be fiddling with her mobile phone; “How much do you pay for that per month?”

A rather unusual choice of pick-up line, I thought to myself, as I waited to see how quickly she could deflect his advances. To her credit though, she played along, answering his questions generously for a few moments before deciding it necessary to make a phone call.

After the lady had left the train, receiving a friendly smile and a wave in the process, the charismatic gentleman set about searching for another person to befriend. Turning to a female backpacker who had sat beside him he indicated to her large pack and asked “Have you got a dead body in there?”

Whether or not this woman didn’t speak English, didn’t understand the joke or just didn’t want to talk to strange men late at night on public transport, I don’t know. Either way she uttered some non-commital response before turning to face the other way.

As the backpacker left the train and Mr. Charisma began to scan the carriage again, I thought I had it figured it out – he was just some lonely dude trying to make the most of a boring train ride home by chatting up attractive girls, albeit unsuccessfully.

As we pulled out of one of the many stations between the city and home Mr. Charisma turned to a rather portly gentleman and, pointing to his dreadlocks asked; “How long did they take to grow?”

Well there goes the attractive girls idea. But then again, maybe he was just a lonely dude who felt the need for some human contact on his way home. Following discussions about the demise of the Glaswegian shipping industry and the merits of international postage insurance the topic of conversation turned to familiar territory – “Are you on pre-paid?”

That’s when it clicked. The lonely gentleman in the corner wasn’t lonely at all – he was a phone salesman looking to makes some commission in his downtime. Sure enough, when Mr. Dreadlocks asked what his inquisitor did for a job;

“I’m a door-to-door salesman, I sell mobile phone contracts for Optus. I’m not getting enough sales during the day so I thought I’d get on the trains and try to sell some phones that way.”

It made sense. I mean, why else would someone ask a complete stranger how long they had left on their phone contract, out of the blue? It also explained the sales and marketing book that he was reading while he wasn’t busy accosting tired commuters.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really care that he was trying to sell his wares at 11:30pm to people who just wanted to get home. After all, it’s easy enough to say “no thanks, I’m not interested”. However, one of his final comments to Mr. Dreadlocks got me thinking. Namely, “you can never have enough iPhones can you?”

Now I must confess a certain desire to join the iPhone flock but the last couple days have had me questioning the merits of such desires.

In an attempt to escape the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, the lady-friend and I headed up to her family’s property in Tolmie, a town 30 kilometres north-east of Mansfield. The property is home to a converted machinery shed that is effectively a house without many of the modern conveniences – electricity, running water and mobile phone coverage, to name but a few.

Sitting down on one of the couches that adorn the shed I faced a crisis of sorts. What is there to do when there is no electricity?

When your whole life is dependant on the constant use of electricity, taking it away does funny things to you. Take this blog entry for example. It’s 3:00am, pitch dark outside and without electricity I would be relying on candles to create enough light in order to write these thoughts on a piece of paper. I take it for granted that I can sit here on my couch as late as I like and that the lights, my laptop and the internet will be at my fingertips as long as I need them.

It all sounds a little dumb – of course we need electricity to power our 21st century lifestyles – but a weekend of tank water, longdrops, citronella coils and no Facebook was enough to give me a bit of a wake-up call.

Having said that, the feeling of being completely disconnected from the outside world is an extremely liberating one. I was able to break out of my busy routine and just sit back, smell the fresh country air and appreciate the simpler things in life. Like the fact that daylight is fairly important when you don’t have electric lights all through your house. I was certainly less inclined to wake at noon than I am when I’m at home, that’s for sure.

So, what does this have to do with iPhones and the selling thereof? I’m not quite sure to be honest. Maybe it’s the idea that the iPhone – and the rampant consumption and consumerism that it represents – is somehow at odds with a simple and naturally fulfilling lifestyle. Or maybe someone just needs to invent an iPhone with solar panels on it. The best of both worlds, and all that…

I try to avoid using this blog to talk myself up – after all, that’s what Facebook is for. However, today I’ll make an exception as I engage in a bit of self-congratulatory indulgence.

As part of a university assignment I wrote an article about the lack of an R18+ classification for video games here in Australia. Despite having strong feelings about the issue I restrained myself and managed to, according to the editor of The Age’s Livewire, “present a neutral account” of the current debate. The aforementioned editor, Glenn Mulcaster, was good enough to publish the article in yesterday’s Livewire, the white pages of the Green Guide. For those that haven’t already caved in to the deluge of links on Facebook, the article can be read here.

As a follow up to that story I thought it would be interesting to describe the process of getting published. I pitched the article to Lawrie Zion, the Editor-in-Chief of upstart, “the magazine for emerging Australian journalists”, and he was good enough to publish it. You can read it here.

For those that are used to my more sarcasm-laden writing style, the aforementioned articles might feel seem a little dull but time and place and all that.

Shameless self-promotion complete…

Update: My last blog entry, “The Good Lord…” was picked up by Lawrie Zion and re-published on upstart. Check it out here.

In my four-and-a-bit years in the hospitality industry I’ve learnt the importance of building a rapport with one’s customers. You know, a question about how the guest’s week has been, a comment about the weather or a joke about something relevant. But, depending on the circumstances, such attempts to build a rapport can either heighten the customer’s dining/drinking experience or can alternatively ruin what would otherwise have been a pleasant evening. Last night it was the latter, but more on that in a moment.

A Cursory Glance… was created almost entirely as a homage to Marieke Hardy’s Reasons You Will Hate Me, a blog that I fell in love with not too long before Ms. Hardy decided to call it quits. I particularly love(d) her uncompromisingly acidic style of writing and tell-it-like-it-is attitude and I find my own writing being influenced considerably by Ms. Hardy’s.

In addition to a great fondness for Ms. Fits’ writing style, I often identified quite strongly with the stories she would tell. In one particular entry Ms. Hardy recounted how she had been impressed by the dry sarcasm of a waiter she had once encountered, his answer to “can we have some plates for sharing?” being a deadpan, ultra-sarcastic “no, we don’t have plates”.

To me, that sort of humour is comedy gold – of course we have plates, we’re a restaurant – but as a I found out last night with a variation on the “no plates” gag, not everybody is of the same mind.

Allow me to set the scene. I’m standing at the host desk at the entrance to the restaurant. It’s an hour and a half after we opened and I haven’t served a single customer. Suddenly, finally, a lone gentleman tentatively pokes his head in the door…

I turn my head toward the empty restaurant, survey the scene and then turn back to the customer.

The gentleman shakes his head in disgust and turns to walk out the door. At this point I’ve started to smile – not only has the customer appreciated the joke but he is playing along by pretending to walk out. As he makes his way out the restaurant door and walks away I can’t help being impressed by his commitment to the joke. And then it hits me – he thought I was serious. I run down the hall and call out to him;

Ok, so that went well. He eventually made his way back into the restaurant and, rather awkwardly and feeling more than a little embarrassed, I went through the motions of getting him watered and fed.

Is my sarcasm so well honed that I can convince a middle-aged man that, at 7:30pm, an empty restaurant is completely booked? Or is my comedic judgment really that far off the mark?

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not the first time a Marieke Hardy-inspired joke has gone awry.

At my previous place of employment I once tried the “no plates” joke to a similar sort of reaction;

I think I’ll stick to comments about the weather from now on…

I think it’s about time that I came clean with you all – I have an addiction. No, it’s not illicit substances or barely legal pornography that keeps me up at night – no pun intended – it’s far more tragic than that – I just can’t get enough of rich-teen comedy/drama TV shows.

I first became aware of my problem some years ago whilst enjoying ‘Schoolies Week’ with some high school mates. In amongst the beer guzzling, trolley stealing and more beer guzzling there was one particular event that punctuated our week down at a mate’s mate’s house in Torquay – the insistance by at least half of the group that all activities be ceased at 8:30pm on the night in question so that the season two finale of ‘The O.C’ might be watched distraction free. At the time I was more than aware of the irony of the situation – a bunch of young blokes swilling beer and watching decidedly un-blokey TV – and I half-watched the episode through a lens of derision and sarcastic comments.

Fast forward a few months and I had picked myself up a nasty little habit. I had purchased the complete first season of ‘The O.C’ on DVD and was going through the episodes faster than Nadya Suleman will be going through nappies. Before long I had convinced myself that $70 was a more than reasonable price to pay for season two, and I set about getting myself up-to-date with everything that had led up to the second season finale, which I had reluctantly viewed some months previous.

‘The O.C’ just seemed to have it all – a catchy theme tune, hot young men and women cavorting around on the beach, and the sort of day-to-day dramas that, while seemingly earth-shattering to the characters involved, cause the audience little anguish, safe in the knowledge that everything will return to normal by episode’s end. It was the perfect feel-good drug – 41 minutes of sexy, funny and (importantly) commercial-free bliss. And then the episode would end.

As the credits rolled I would realise that, rather than sitting next to my amazingly beautiful girlfriend by the swimming pool of my $6 million house in sunny California, I was sprawled all over the couch in my suburban Melbourne lounge room at three o’clock in the morning, decidedly girlfriend free. I would try to convince myself -‘surely there is time for one more episode before bed’ – just one more hit of the drug, one more hour away from reality.

Amazingly, the season two finale of ‘The O.C’ saw the end of my infatuation with the lovely folks of Newport Beach. I quit cold-turkey, leaving the sun, sex and $70 box-sets behind me. Until now.

For two months over Christmas the lovely lady friend and I found ourselves backpacking around Europe, having a most wonderful time along the way. As we worked our way around the various non-English speaking countries we found ourselves desperately in search of a TV program that wasn’t in Greek, Italian, French or German – even Australia’s own ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home & Away’ had been dubbed into various non-English languages.

In Santorini our wishes would be answered, but, unknowingly, it would lead me toward the most cruel of relapses. As we flicked between dodgy game shows and unintelligible new bulletins we stumbled upon one solitary program being transmitted in English – ‘Gossip Girl’. At first it was just a relief to be able to watch something on TV and understand the dialogue, but it wasn’t long before I had laid the foundations for another shocking addiction.

Some weeks after returning to Melbourne I remembered that night in Santorini and set about getting myself back into the rich and beautiful world of ‘Gossip Girl’. For all intents and purposes ‘The O.C’ and ‘Gossip Girl’ are quite similar – a bunch of teenagers date and sleep with each other while experiencing the highs and lows of having been born to ultra-rich parents – just substitute the beach-front living of Newport with the sexy streets of Manhattan and you are most of the way there. You still have the ultra-slick and snappy production, some pretty cool tunes, witty dialogue by characters that seem to know exactly what to say all the time, and of course, the frequent and often predictable dramas that resolve themselves so neatly and unrealistically by episode’s end.

But hey, that’s why we watch isn’t it? Who would wanna watch a TV show where the handsome guy and his beautiful girlfriend get into a screaming match only to not have make-up sex, instead going on to never speak to one another ever again ruining an otherwise completely satisfying story arc?

Speaking of ruining a completely satisfying story arc, you know you are hooked when your day is ruined by the sudden interruption of the episode you are watching by the message; ‘You have watched 72 minutes of video today – please wait 55 minutes or subscribe to the MegaVideo premium service’.

So there you have it folks – rich-teen comedy/dramas are my drug of choice, and if you will excuse me, I believe episode 12 has just finished buffering…

Yes it’s true; I have a dirty little secret. I quite enjoy stealing from homeless people, pushing wheelchair-bound people down stairs and making fun of retarded people in public.

Ok, so I lied. The truth is, I’m in a relationship with a notable age-difference. ‘How much of an age difference?’ I hear you keenly ask, ready in anticipation of the magic number; ready to judge; ready to declare your oh-so-learned ruling on whether such a difference is acceptable. Well guess what? I don’t need your valuable insight into the unwritten law of relationships; I don’t need your holier-than-thou pronouncement of acceptance; I don’t need your blessing. Except that I do.

You see, in a perfect world people would not cast judgment upon each other, particularly for superficial things like the colour of one’s skin, sexual tendencies, or indeed choice of partner. Naively I have chosen, whether consciously or otherwise, to believe the age old adage; ‘Do not judge others, lest you be judged yourself’. I would love to believe that by keeping an open mind and not casting judgment upon others, the favour would be returned unto me.
Sadly, in this far-from-perfect world, my reciprocal system with only two variables is wrong on both counts;

1. As the eminent and explosively funny musician, comedian and would-be Middle East peacekeeper Tim Minchin once said ‘If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out’. That is to say, it’s all very well to keep an open mind about things, but you would have a hard time arguing that people shouldn’t cast judgment on Adolph Hitler just because he didn’t really invite too many Jews to his Sunday afternoon tea parties. Unless of course his tea parties consisted of shoveling said Jews into mass graves.
2. Just because I try not to judge people doesn’t mean they won’t judge me; that’s just absurd. Rather I should really concern myself with the question; ‘Why should I give a fuck what people think?’

So there you go; the secret’s out. Except that it isn’t…