The Missive: Newyposting #4
Putting down roots. Remembering how to drive. I guess this is growing up.
It’s been a while between Newyposts. A lot has happened that I’ll catch you up on, but the big news is that we bought a house! In Newcastle!
It’s the culmination of nearly two years worth of focus, work and good luck which began shortly after Melbourne’s second lockdown in 2020. I have a lot of complex feelings about it1, but at the end of the day I love our little house and the (illusion of) security it provides us. We bought it off two older hippies who didn’t do any maintenance or cleaning in the four years they had it, so we’ve been busy dealing with the consequences of that. 2
It’s also a sign that we’re committed to Newcastle and to each other, which feels very serious and adult. In my mind, I’m still 22 years old and living in a mess of empty pizza boxes and tangled guitar cables.
Newcastle is a car city. I knew this intellectually, but I still held hope of us remaining a one-car household once we bought due to me working from home and our proximity to public transport and shops. This kind of worked when we lived in the city, but we’re out in the burbs now and the one-car dream is officially dead. This is financially very annoying, but even worse — it’s exposed just how shit I am at driving.
I got my drivers licence two years after my friends, and I learned to drive in a three-month period before Queensland’s driving laws were due to tighten up. My age-inappropriate boyfriend3 who’d already lost his licence once taught me how to drive — he lost his licence for a second time not long after I successfully got my Ps, and I had to drive his sorry ass around for six months.
I used to love driving. I’d crank the music and burn up the Bruce Highway in my little hatchback from Brisbane to Rockhampton twice a month without a care in the world. However, thirteen years of every passenger I’ve ever had telling me I’m shit at driving combined with nine years of living in Melbourne where I barely had to drive has resulted in a massive loss of driving confidence and skill.
L is a fantastic and aggressive driver. When we first met, she drove a manual Subaru SUV with a bright orange paint job4 which she handled in her usual calm manner no matter the driving conditions. I drove it once, sweated through three layers of clothes, and then L decided to sell it to fund our house deposit rather than suffer through teaching me how to drive it properly.
She hasn’t escaped the suffering altogether — she now has to sit, gritting her teeth, as I tackle driving like I tackle everything that scares me: feeling the fear and doing it anyway while swearing profusely. I was behind the wheel when we did our first house inspection in the suburb we bought in. This required going through two of Newy’s biggest roundabouts. After two panicked loops of the first roundabout, I was screaming about how we couldn’t buy this house because I COULDN’T! FUCKING! DRIVE! OUT! HERE! FUCK! while L tried to balance her own fear of impending death with trying to get me calm enough to exit the roundabout.
I’ve always scoffed at mantras, but I repeat to myself “you’re a competent driver, you can do this” every time I get in the car now. It makes me feel like a huge loser, but now I breeze through those same roundabouts multiple times a week without a care in the world. Personal growth!
Housing affordability in this country is a disgrace. Rental laws in this country are a disgrace.
The smoke residue on the ceiling above the sofa next to the Jimi Hendrix records, the oven reeking of marijuana and the lounge room carpet being so stained with dog piss it needed to be replaced really paints a picture of the previous owner’s day-to-day activities.
A 22-year-old dating a 17-year-old is suss and yet nobody said anything? I guess it was the style of the time.
She was blissfully unaware of the stereotype of queer women driving Subarus, which made this even funnier.
"In my mind, I’m still 22 years old and living in a mess of empty pizza boxes and tangled guitar cables." God damn, I feel called out. Maybe it's because I skipped a few of the usual 'life milestones' (co-habitating, getting married, having kids...) or maybe it's just because time is an arbitrary construct and we're living in the End of Days, but sometimes I feel like I'm still in my 20s and sometimes I feel I've lived 1000 years.
(Also I was 19 and dating a 36 year old. Nobody said boo. It totally was The Style Of The Times.)