I think it’s safe to say that I was the only person at the recent school Quiz Night to have made my own team t-shirt.
Most certainly, if anyone else *had* made their own team t-shirt, they probably hadn’t made it for team with a name quite like ‘TEAM SPEEEDZ’ – a name born of a drunken conversation with my friend The White Lady some weeks beforehand (all I can say is thank god I didn’t name my children while under the influence).
And they wouldn’t have left making the t-shirt until the last minute and ended up using masking tape to write the words ‘TEAM SPEEEDZ’ on a black t-shirt.
And then they wouldn’t have had to reinforce the masking tape with sticky tape in the fear that the some of the letters might fall off and they’d be left wearing a ‘TEAM PEE’ t-shirt, which would just remind everyone about that time they pissed their pants on school grounds.
So yes, I made this t-shirt:
It’s fair to say that what I lack in brain power and ability to focus, I certainly make up for in enthusiasm. For weeks in the lead-up to the Quiz Night, I’d been pumping up my fellow team members by punctuating most sentences I uttered with “TEAMSPEEDZ!” (you have to say it as if it were one word, otherwise it just sounds stupid. Okay, so more stupid).
And then I drank just a little too much and it all fell apart. In my defence, this was the same day of my daughter’s birthday party and my husband’s rather ill-timed hangover. Let’s just say I had me some tension to release. And I was still recovering from the stress of organising two Quiz Night tables, which was not unlike doing a seating plan for a goddamn wedding with all the ‘who won’t sit with whos’ and ‘who doesn’t know anyone elses’.
By about the fifth round, I had completely taken my eye off the Quiz Night prize and set my sights on the people on the next table.
“Look at FatherOfCrankyPants looking at me. He’s soo hot for me right now,” I said to my friend The White Lady. FatherOfCrankyPants – it should be noted – was not looking at me. Not at all. In fact, I think he might have been trying to scrape something off the bottom of his shoe.
“Yes, yes,” said The White Lady, patting me on my arm like one might pat a small child on the head. “You’re a little bit bored now, aren’t you?”
Indeed I was. The other end of the table pretty much had the answering the questions bit of the Quiz Night under control. All that was left for our end of the table was to drink piss and talk shit.
“Look at that dad over there!” I continued, looking over at a table of people I didn’t know. “He’s checking me and my masking-tape t-shirt out. Again: Hot. For. Me. And that guy in the nylon tracksuit? Sohotformerightnow. ”
Yes, I had contracted a case of the ‘sohotrightnows’. This is when I make myself ‘sohotrightnow’ by telling everyone I see how hot I am at that very moment. It’s called “creating a buzz” by some PR types. By others, it might just be known as “being annoying and drunk”.
Sure enough, soon everybody was talking about how hot I was right then. By “everybody”, I mean ‘me’. Oh, and one other friend who went on to twitter to specifically mention that I was “sohotrightnow”- although he threw in the word “apparently”, which I thought showed how jealous he was that he wasn’t quite as hot as I was at that particular moment.
Anyway, the evening ended with a crushing third place defeat for ‘TEAM SPEEEDZ’ but with me being as hot as I ever was.
As we packed up, I made a point of going over to my friend McFee’s husband, whom I had discovered that evening was a complete hoot when playing lame-arse Quiz Night games.
“You are soooooo going to be my facebook friend,” I told him.
Indeed, I managed to befriend him on my iPhone while holding a full (plastic) glass of champagne as I walked home. My friend MM was witness to this amazing feat, although he had some reservations about it.
“Um, don’t you think it might be a bit ‘overwhelming’ to your new friend,” MM said to me. “I mean, we haven’t even left the school grounds yet.”
“He knows I’m sohotrightnow,” I told him, loftily. “He’ll be sohot for the friendship request.”
You have to understand that I’d manually converted my t-shirt to say ‘TEAM PEE’ by that stage and was spilling champagne on myself as I walked.
So hot right then.
And still right now.
Sohotrightnow.
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The NDM: available for hire as entertainment at quiz nights, bar mitzvahs and ute musters.
Not Drowning, Mothering. 