Chapter One

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My Life & Other Catastrophes

Rowena Mohr

Tuesday 19 April 4.30 pm

Okay, let me get one thing straight. This is not going to turn into Bridget Jones’s Diary. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be
writing in this stupid thing but I can tell you right now you’re not going to get any personal stuff. Mrs Parisi – she’s my English teacher – said that this is simply supposed to be an exercise in self-expression and even though we have to hand these diaries in at the end of the year, no one is actually going to read them. Like I’m going to fall for that one!

Tuesday 19 April 4.37 pm

About Bridget Jones’s Diary. I didn’t read the books but I saw the movies. What a loser. As if anyone couldn’t tell that Hugh
Grant was the sleazebag and Mr Darcy was the nice guy even if he did have terrible taste in jumpers.

Tuesday 19 April 4.42 pm

Actually, the thing that I hated most about those movies – apart from the fact that we were supposed to believe a. that Renee whats-her-face was fat, and b. that men secretly like ginormous underwear on women – is they perpetuate the myth that for every sleazebag there is a nice guy hanging around just waiting to be noticed by the heroine. Yeah, right!

Tuesday 19 April 4.49 pm

Okay, just to prove a point here, let’s take a random sample of men in my life and see what happens.

1. Dad: Currently engaged in WWIII with ex-wife, my mother. Unemployed, unmotivated and unbelievably tragic. Sees his kids once a fortnight but can’t actually
afford to take us anywhere we want to go.

2. Chris the Creep, Creepazoid, the Creepster: Mum’s new boyfriend. The name says it all, really. Also teaches PE at Wilga Heights so not only do I have to watch him smooching my mother at home like a wrinkled old Romeo, I have to attend his seriously torturous PE classes as well. Honestly, it’s like being at boot camp or something!

3. Sucky Little Brother, Ben: Not enough room in this diary to explain what’s wrong with him. 4. Mr Dixon or ‘Dicko’ as he is known: Gay as. Coaches netball!! Also teaches music and directs the school musical every year.

5. Ivan the Smellable: Disgusting fart-machine. The reason they never found any Weapons of Mass Destruction is because they are still hidden up Ivan’s butt.

6. Vince Cuoccolo: School drug dealer and standover guy. Thinks he’s Marlon Brando in The Godfather and smokes sixty cigarettes a day trying to talk like him. Is developing a reassuringly fatal-sounding cough instead.

7. Matt Nguyen: Not called ‘Door Matt’ for nothing. Moons around after Marisa Mendoza (Big-haired teen queen! So stupid she actually thinks Mean Girls is a documentary!) like he actually finds her attractive or something!! Needless to say, she wouldn’t wipe her feet on him.

So you see what I mean. If my life was a multi-million-dollar box office blockbuster (Ha!) there is not the slightest possibility
that one of these prime specimens would turn out to be the nice guy.

Tuesday 19 April 4.53 pm

Whoops. Sorry, Mrs Parisi. Guess I shouldn’t have put in that stuff about Dicko – but you know it’s true.

Wednesday 20 April 4.23 pm

Haven’t got a clue what to write about today. Mrs Parisi said that we should try and write something every day even if it’s
only to say that you’ve got nothing to write about. So for today – nothing, nada, zip.

Thursday 21 April

See Wednesday.

Friday 22 April

Long weekend coming up. Yaayy!

Saturday 23 April 9.14 am

Chris the Creep showed up on the doorstep at about six o’clock this morning to ask if we wanted to go tenpin bowling!! As if! If Mum and SLB want to go and play happy families with Super-Jock they can do it without me. Besides, what if someone SAW me! And anyway, what is with this guy? It’s like he has just moved in and taken over my whole life. First he turns up at school in the middle of term to replace Mr Estrella, our old PE teacher, then two weeks later he and Mum are going out on a date. I can’t escape him. And there really is something creepy about him. He’s always taking private calls on his mobile and sneaking off into another room so no one can hear what he’s saying.

Saturday 23 April 9.27 am

Rami rang and we’re going op-shopping. Rami’s my best friend. She is an anti-globalist, socialist-feminist eco-warrior. And she plays the sitar! To be honest she’s not great to go shopping with because she always has to remind you about the evils of capitalist consumerism and Third World sweat shops. It kind of takes the fun out of it. But op-shopping is cool. Rami says that buying second-hand stuff is karmically brilliant because not only are we conserving the earth’s resources by recycling, we are also subverting the capitalistic conformity of the global fashion machine AND expressing our individuality. Me? I just love retro.

Saturday 23 April 4.54 pm

Op-shopping a bit of a disaster. Found this FABULOUS old fur swing jacket – totally divine – but Rami wouldn’t let me buy it because she says wearing fur is environmentally irresponsible! I mean, hellooo? The animal has been dead for about fifty years! Honestly, she is such a pain sometimes!
Anyway, after that we decided to go and see a movie. Rami wanted to see some depressing Russian movie called Winter Harvest about a family who, one-by-one, get sent to the gulags by Stalin but I made her go and see Johnny Depp’s new movie instead.
And do you know, I think she was even upset about that because she hardly spoke to me at all on the way home. Which is just really pathetic because what she doesn’t realise – because I haven’t actually told her yet, in fact I haven’t told anybody yet – is that I have decided that I am going to be a famous actress – like Kirsten Dunst or Lindsay Lohan – and it is therefore practically research for me to go and see the latest movies!
I have been thinking about becoming a famous actress for a while now – ever since Mrs Parisi told me that I have a real talent for drama! – but the only problem is, I don’t know how to go about it. I mean, it’s not like I live in Hollywood or London or somewhere. How do you go about becoming famous if you come from a dump like Wilga Heights? I’ve probably got a better chance of ending up in gaol.