YES YES YES.

I have been all about jonquils for the last little while. They have steadily edged Mayflower out of the ‘favourite flower’ AND ‘favourite historic boat’ race, and if this was a baseball metaphor: they are bringing it HOME.

Let me go back to the beginning. One day I walked out my front door to notice that pretty much OVERNIGHT, a whole new joyful crop of cold-weather narcissus had sprung up in our front garden. They were jolly and gay and bright, but you know what else? They. Smelt. Fricking. Amazing.

Jonquils smell like happiness. A big slug of happiness, seasoned with a sprig of self-confidence and oiled with a greasy cloth of ‘YELLOW!’. I am surrounded by them right now – I have two separate vases of jonquils in my study – and the smell just makes everything better. It makes it okay that I am writing a play with character names like ‘Bikini’ and ‘Tulip’. It makes it ok that it’s so cold in this room that even my nose is cold. They smell beautiful and they look like little snub-nosed golden pig faces, and they’re a much subtler and more modest version of the daffodil and yknow what, I THINK YOU GEDDIT.

It’s also really fun to purse your lips in a big ‘O’ with hands out around your face like a mane, and impersonate them:

So if you’re part of the inner circle of Jess’n’friends, feel free to come by for a big gusty nosing of our garden. Otherwise get yourself to your nearest florist or IGA because seriously they are pretty cheap and THEY MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING.

They also trump this bitch, despite the fact that she’s stood by me all year:

NOT.

Ok, whoa, calm down. Ok, read this BEFORE you blow up and go all chimpancrazy on my comments page. Let me start by saying something really important:

I love bananas.

Bananas are delicious. They’re great on their own, they’re fabulous in a buttery loaf/sweet bread and DONNA get me started on what sort of tastesation they are in a berry or mango smoothie. (Seriously Donna). It’s undisputed, in this particular forum and in this particular blog post, that bananas are the shiznay. But that is not what I am getting at here.

What I am getting at is:

Bananas are dangerous.

Bananas are little steaming sulphurised time bombs. Bananas are potent. Bananas just need to sit NEXT to something in your fruit bowl to eff up its shiz. A mandarin that’s in primo ripe-town? Mouldy. An $7.00 apricot imported from Venezuela with magical love-doctor properties? Squishy and flavourless.

Bananas will take one look at anything surrounding them and will decide that they need to assert their primacy, big-time. Bananas do the equivalent of pissing on your carpet and rubbing their poo into its woolly fronds, but banana-style. They either make all your fruit go off, or they make EVERYTHING YOU OWN smell like bananas.

You know when you’d pack a school lunch and you’d be like “mm, peanut butter and banana crackers” and “mm vegemite and banana sandwich” before you realised THIS WAS NOT AN INTENTIONAL FLAVOUR CHOICE, that your banana had just snuck its way into your lunch and pooped its pungent nutty flavour sacs everywhere, and suddenly your whole life is just bananarama and YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR IT TO BE LIKE THIS.

So, here’s my advice:

• NEVER put bananas in a brown paper bag.
• ESPECIALLY never put them in a brown paper bag with ANYTHING ELSE unless you want that everything else to be held hostage by banana.
• Keep bananas in a separate area of the house, one that’s dark and lonely, like our house’s Scary Room.
• Otherwise go on with your day, cos if that’s your biggest problem, you’re doing pretty good, mate.

 

YES.

Ok, this one surprised me, cos as far as I’m concerned, everything is better online. You’re in a chair that you like, you have all your good luck plants around you, you can take your time in answering invasive questions about your personal life, you can be wearing the same mustard jumper you were wearing all of last week…

But I was wrong.

Life is much better offline. For example, when you’re sitting in a dog park, on a dog hill, surrounded by real and not tamagotchi dogs. When you go to Woolies and choose your OWN banana with your OWN hands and pay your OWN $3.50 for it. When you tell someone to their FACE, “that was stupid and insensitive” or “I find your social deficits really unattractive” or “I don’t want to be penpals” and you watch their head explode, because people just don’t SAY that sort of thing, honest and real stuff like that, to each other anymore.

So, grab a real dog and a real banana and start sassing out some strangers, face to face.

Just…don’t forget to keep reading this blog, I guess.

HOT.

Ok, so I don’t actually know what that means, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that Would Jess Like It is chomping at the bit, straining at the leash, flapping its poo-crusted feathers, nosing its way out of the butterfly net that is ‘a comfortable home on the internet and a recently acquired DOMAIN NAME’. Because Would Jess Like It is now reaching other platforms. Well, just one other platform.

The radio, my friends.

The lovely Emma and Hayley from 2SER’s breakfast radio have asked me to present a 5-minute spot each Monday at 7.30am, where I outline all the things I like and don’t like. Since there’s no lasting electronic copy of what I say (apart from in the intel-gramophone), I can bitch a LOT more about Westfield and my working life.

Tune in at 107.3FM, or stream it here.

I will post any highlights online for you chumps who don’t like waking up early.

NOT.

Yeah, I know, right? What are you saying, Jess? Everyone knows that home-cooked meals are the bees knees; they’re full of family love and old-school ingredients, and your favourite Swiss herb salt.

But, can I just say something? No, they’re not that good. And I’m going to explain this to you by telling you The Wok Story.

Last night, I dreamt about eating a stir-fry. It was a powerful and delicious dream, and I woke up thinking “MAN I need to get a bit of that crunchy snowpea, that flowery broccoli, that floppy choy sum, inna my grill right now”. The problem was, our house doesn’t have a wok right now, ever since I chucked out the old  wok that was flaking off pieces of non-stick teflon in amongst your food, so it looked like you were serving up a little toxic ant farm every time you decided to cook a sneaky bowl of Asian greens.

I decided there was one thing to do, and that was to BUY A WOK and to MAKE MY STIRFRY and then maybe have a well-deserved WEEK-DAY NAP. I took my housemate Edmund as a Culinary Advisor and Umbrella Carrier, and we found a homewares shop with a hopeful salesperson who directed his entire sales pitch at Edmund, and not me, which should have been the first warning signal.

I did, however, manage to glean that there are 3 main wok varieties doing the rounds right now in modern Australia:

1. Non-stick future-flakey toxic antfarm woks.
2. Stainless steel woks
3. Carbon steel woks

Carbon steel woks are the woks that you need to basically put through 12 years of intensive private schooling (also known as: preparation and seasoning) before they’re ready to finally graduate (also known as: cook you a fricken stir-fry). The wok I finally bought was a carbon steel wok; it needed about 50 minutes of solid emotional care-giving and ego-massage before it could even think about letting me fill it with my favourite tofu and gai lan.

First, you had to pretty much bake a plastic layer of coating off the wok. Then you had to scrub the softened plastic layer off the wok with a scourer. Then you had to heat up oil in the wok and let it smoke and then let it cool down, and then wipe off the oil and then do that again THREE MORE TIMES.

I’m sorry: NO. The stir-fry was not worth this. Mainly, because of the fear that I hadn’t properly baked off the invisible-plastic coating and was therefore eating a tasty bowl of Asian greens sautéed in a toxic broth of SMOKED PLASTIC, which is probably even more of a carcinogenic than teflon shavings.

And yes, the stirfry was delicious, but you know what’s more delicious? Not being poisoned.

NOT.

No

No no no.

And don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if I’m one of those people who will glare you down when you meet me 15 minutes later than we planned, who will say amazing pearlers like “for every minute that you were late, we gossiped about you” and then kept mentioning your hunger pains throughout what became an 8.00pm-start dinner, which for people like me with Eastern-European style 4pm dinner leanings, is WAY TOO LATE to start dinner.

No, I  am not one of those people, as much as I’d like to be, because I value their take-no-nonsense-and/or-prisoners attitude, and their awareness of how important afternoon  dinners are, and also because one of those people actually asked me to write this particular entry, so I know she’s gonna read it.

No. The main reason I don’t like lateness is because it is NOT GOOD FOR YOU.

You know how stress can stream out of your pores? It can build up and release itself in acrid torrents, thick burny build-ups of tension and disappointment at your own lack of pre-planning, and the knowledge that, yes, for every minute you’re late you’re probably missing out on a pre-dinner cheese and quince paste platter.

Stressing out over being late is really poisonous. Driving while worrying about being late? Bad. Someone else holding you up when you’re already late? You find yourself mouthing hateful words at strangers.

So all I’ll say, friends, is don’t do it. For your own sake, for other peoples’ sake, and for the sake of things you will be missing out on. Leave early, from now on. A good thing about Sydney is that if you just assume it takes an hour to get anywhere, you’ll either be pleasantly 10-minutes early, or exactly on time. And then you can people-watch on the street. You can cram in a pre-dinner packet of Burger Rings. You can buy your secret medications or creams from the chemist.

When you’re on time, the world is your oyster. And you are going to suck that salty phlegm-ball right down.