Personal Growth

This blog post started off  with the title ‘An Open Letter To My Cold Sore’ but honestly, that fucker doesn’t deserve its own open letter.

It’s been the Worst House Guest Ever. It arrived unannounced, trashed my face (and my reputation as a Great Beauty – yeah, yeah, don’t laugh) and it then proceeded to overstay its welcome by, like, FOREVER.

For a while there, my only hope was that it would eventually grow so large it would become the size of a small African nation and proclaim its independence from me.

As it was, it quite possibly became the first human lesion visible from outer space. Most certainly, it arrived in a room a good thirty seconds before the rest of my body did. Small children would burst into tears when I – or rather ‘it’ – approached them. Some adults thought I was an extra from the film ‘Alien’ being attacked by a face-hugger. And I thoroughly expected Wes Craven to contact me in the hope my cold sore could be the New Face of Freddy Kruger.

I found myself having to warn friends in advance of meeting them.

“I have a cold sore,” I told them. “Do not talk about the cold sore, do not look at the cold sore and, most certainly, do not address the cold sore directly.”

I was worried that if they gave the cold sore too much attention, it would develop a human-like personality and end up with its own reality TV show by the end of the week. Like the Kardashians.

And every time it looked like it was on the mend, it would make a sudden comeback. Like Aussie Rocker Legend™ Johnny Farnham (although nowhere near as embarrassing).

And when it finally DID  start to go away, it felt like the boyfriend that nobody ever liked but never told you they didn’t like him until after you’d broken up. Everyone who’d said things like ‘Oh, you can hardly see it!’ or “What cold sore?” at the height of my cold sore’s power, finally admitted, once it had slowly diminished into the west like some Elvin Queen on a boat, “Yeah, that was a big one” or “Man, that shit was like Cold Sore-zilla!”.

Listen, there is one good thing you can say about my cold sore and that is this:   it made me come in from the cold and write this blog post. Even if it was kinda hard to see past the cold sore while I wrote it.

Pass me the Zovirax, please.

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Roll Out The Darryls

The other day I went to a Ball with a headache and a cold sore – this season’s Must Have accessories. In my little lady purse, I packed myself some codeine and some Zovirax. Yes, I sure know how to party hard.

I was going as the date of my friend The Mild-Mannered Lawyer, who was attending the Ball for the second year in a row for work. The previous year, she’d gone with our friend Lady K and they’d drunk excessively and the details were all a bit hazy. This year, however, neither she nor I were really drinking – The MML was driving and I was trying not to extend the lives of my cold sore and my headache any more than I absolutely had to. Understandably, I was worried that I might appear to be a dud date in comparison.

“Now, I don’t want to hear about how last year you did such and such with Lady K and how much fun you had together,” I told her sternly as we drove there. “And I don’t want to see you crying when they play the song you danced together to because you miss her so much and you wish I was her. You’re with me now, okay?”

The MML nodded.

“Now let’s go make our own memories!” I said.

Luckily we had ‘The Darryl Cotton Band’ to help us make those memories on the dance floor. Which is just as well, as it turns out my old memories were growing faulty.

After the second song, I shouted to the MML: “I didn’t know Sherbert sung ‘Tainted Love’!”

“You’re thinking of the wrong Darryl!” The MML shouted back. “The lead singer of Sherbert was Darryl Braithwaite. This is Darryl Cotton.”

I was bitterly disappointed and I don’t think I was the only one. On the other side of the dance floor, one man had pulled out his iPhone.

“Look!” I shouted to the MML. “I think he’s googling ‘Who the fuck is Darryl Cotton if he’s not from Sherbert’!”

I did the same the minute we returned to our table. Wikipedia had something about him being in a band called ‘Zoot’ and a hit single in 1980 called ‘Same Old Girl’. And yet ‘Darryl Cotton’ was a name I’d known for at least 20 years of my life. Is this what it meant to get older? To know you know people but not to remember how or why?

ANYWAY, the MML and I had ourselves a fine time dancing to ‘The Darryl Cotton Band’, mostly because we were the only women under 50 without our husbands on the dance floor and that made us hot.

However, at one toilet stop, I realised the one thing I hadn’t packed in my lady purse was a Welcome Pack for the Silent Red Ninja – whose approach was the cause of both the headache and the cold sore, of course.

And so it came to pass that I spent the last band’s last set of the evening on the dance floor dancing to a Darryl I didn’t know and in the shadow of the MML’s previous wild date Lady K, one week off my 40th birthday, virtually sober, with a cold sore and a thumping headache AND with half a roll of toilet paper stuffed down my undies and I STILL managed to attract the attentions of a bearded youth (albeit an extremely drunken bearded youth).

Which is to say “I still got it”, right? RIGHT?

In saying that, of course, I thought I was quoting The Fonz from Happy Days but I’ve just googled it and it turns out I’m actually quoting Ralph The Mouth.

Which is to say, whatever the “it” is that I’ve got, let’s hope it’s not contagious.

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PS. ‘The Darryl Cotton Band’ got me thinking…  If there were ever a ‘The Darryl Cotton Band’ tribute band, they could call themselves ‘The Darryl Cotton Experience’ (part of which would no doubt involve the audience googling the name ‘Darryl Cotton’ and all of which would involve playing cover versions of cover versions) and if that didn’t work out for them, they could maybe throw some Buddy Holly numbers into the mix and call themselves ‘The Cotton Bud Experience’. Maybe not.

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The (Champagne) Bucket List

The other day, I rang my husband at work.

“Let’s pretend for a moment that one of my aims before I turned 40 was to get quoted in the Australian Women’s Weekly,” I said. “You know, instead of getting a book published or becoming a syndicated columnist for a major print and/or online publication…”

“Uh, ok-ay,” my husband said slowly.

“Well, guess what?!” I enthused. “I was quoted in this month’s Australian Women’s Weekly and I’m turning 40 next week! Yay, me!”

“Yay you!” my husband said. “That magazine has a circulation of about two million, you know.”

“Well then guess how many people have already searched for ‘Not Drowning, Mothering’ today probably as a direct result of that article?” I asked.

“How many?”

“Three!” I exclaimed. I think I might have punched the air as I said it.

“Quick, let’s monetize them before they read any more of your blog and and you lose them forever!” my husband replied, no doubt with dollar signs in his eyes.

I’m not sure if monetizing those three readers is going on my ‘bucket list’ for turning 40. And if you don’t know what a ‘bucket list’ you can either accept my definition of it as being a list of those things you hope to achieve before you drink champagne out of a bucket at your 40th birthday party or you can click here.

Somewhat predictably, my list is getting less and less ambitious the closer my fortieth birthday gets. Of course, quite a few have been ticked off  – e.g. convince someone to marry me, convince someone (preferably the same person) to have kids with me… But gone are all hopes of, say, a lucrative book deal, spending six months drinking wine in the south of France or even finding the perfect pair of red shoes to turn 40 in.

At the moment only three things on the list, with one week left to achieve them. They are:

1. AVOID GASTRO “LIKE THE PLAGUE”: Every time anyone mentions the word ‘gastro’ in my presence, I physically jump back a metre from them. One woman I saw at the shops, pointed at her son (who was wrestling with my Tiddles McGee at the time) and told me he’d been firing out both ends for nine days. Nine days. It was all I could do to pick Tiddles up, throw him over my shoulder and run from the building screaming. If I’m going to spend my fortieth dealing with vomit I want it to the be excessive-alcohol-induced variety. Just sayin’.

2. BE COLDSORE-FREE: Just two days ago, my top lip suddenly exploded into song, that song having something to do with the fact that the lip had herpes.

I rang my dear friend KT, a fellow HVP-1 sufferer, and she helped me do the maths.

“You have ten sleeps until your party,” she said. “You’ll be fine. Your coldsore couldn’t have come at a better time.”

Uh, my coldsore might have thought about coming after my party. Nobody wants to go to a party with the birthday girl looking like this:3. MOUSTACHE-BE-GONE: The volume of dark hairs on my upper lip has been causing strangers on the street some gender confusion lately. Getting rid of it is easier said than done, of course, because it’s currently sharing the same real estate as the cold sore and I’m afraid the anti-moustache lotion that I bought might anger the cold sore unnecessarily and cause it to stage some kind of hostile invasion of my entire mouth and then I won’t even have my moustache to help conceal it. It’s a bad situation.

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Of course I realise that, now I’ve blogged about these things, I’ve totally jinxed myself. Which is why I’m now planning to wear a bucket on my head on my 40th birthday. Not only will it hid my coldsore and my moustache from the world, but it will come into its own when the gastro hits.

I may even decorate it with the pages from ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly’ article I was quoted in, just to show people I’m not a total loser.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I do so love it when a plan comes together…

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