Me Being Conascending

 I keep turning up to my friend’s gigs in Balmain, where she sings jazz and the blues, hoping to catch up with her like the first gig I went to, when we were all like we were in high school again.  Instead I’m the only high school friend who still turns up, presumably because the others got jack of the same treatment I get, where I’m ignored and cut-off mid-sentence for a bunch of up-themselves wankers laughing at inside jokes that I suspect wouldn’t even be funny to me if I was in on it, and ordering over-priced pizzas with blue cheese on them to match the cab sauv they’re drinking.   Some of them are nice, and I do try to bridge the gap between me and the grown-ups, but damn, what happened to the Alex who used to sing along to the Offspring with me on train home from school?  Why is it all the people who seemed to be able to transcend the North Shore stereotype while we were growing up together always end up giving into it in their 20s?  

She always makes loud condescending remarks at how it is nice of me to make the long trek to Balmain, from Deepest Darkest Northern Sydney.  Fuck you, you grew up in St Ives, and your family isn’t even South African.  It used to take you longer to get to the city than it did for me.  Stop talking like I live in Blacktown.  You can’t pay me out for my mother making me change schools to a more expensive snobby private school while you went to a shitty Catholic one, then later on act like I’m your ghetto friend. Pick one, ffs.

Anyway, in trying to bridge the gap, I joined in on laughing at some chick in the pub wearing tiny little bright blue Daisy Duke cut-off shorts.  "My god, you can see the bottom of her arse cheeks.  She has bottom cleavage."  We were all scandalised by this woman in her short shorts.  Then she turned around and she had front cleavage too.  My goodness, I need to defog my monocle.  I started to get self-conscious and think about what we were really doing when the conversation got louder and the poor sap could possibly hear us bitching about her wardrobe choice.

Then I realised… why the fuck do I care about what she’s wearing?   Why am I joining in if I wouldn’t want that person to hear it to their face?  I have to actually turn around or sneak looks in a mirror to see this woman in her tiny pants, not to mention look down from this ridiculously high stool they made me sit on.  So Daisy Dukes are the new hot pants, great.  We were only talking about it because they’d exhausted all the jokes they could remember from the Dave Chappelle Show which the rest of the Western World got over 7 years ago (Seriously, Rick James?  You’re just laughing at this now?  Have you all been locked inside a wine cellar for the last decade?)  so they went looking for someone who wasn’t wearing the floral maxi dress + fedora uniform, other than me (because that would be awkward).  A uniform that I think looks fucking stupid, by the way, especially on all the chardonnay-wizened 35 year olds that infest that suburb.  

At first I thought, "Hey, at least she has a nice arse", but clearly that’s subjective considering all the "Ew, I just don’t want to see that" and anyway, why should I care if she didn’t?  Why should I care if she had cellulite and her butt folded into 3 flabs before reaching her thighs?  Maybe we should see more of that and get over it.   Maybe if we stared right into the eye of an unattractive butt now and again, we’d be better for it.  More fatties in bikinis, and more hairy bald old men in budgie smugglers.  Trust the people of the most over-gentrified suburb in Sydney to get so worked up about aesthetics.  They went on about it for most of an hour until I got fed up and left.  Yeah, yeah, you don’t want to see lots of things you’re going to have to see. Grow up.  

I thought it would interesting if someone in a burqa walked in the pub at that moment, stood right next to the woman wearing too little.  They’d probably cluck their tongues about how repressed that poor woman is for feeling like she has to cover up like that.  Perhaps there would be speculation that it was against her will, that she was probably bullied by her family and told "No one wants to see your exposed face like that. Look, your cheeks are hanging out! Disgusting!"