Sven's life in Oz

We cannot always do what our heart desires; but if we always do what our head tells us then what is the point in having a heart at all?

When I was a boy I used to complain about doing things without any choice in them. Little did I know then that making choices means living with them. You can’t blame other people when you make the decision freely. You can talk to people and ask for opinions, but you must decide who listen to, and whether you think they are right. Sometimes you should listen to their advice. Other times not.

A choice is always a gamble: living with the right ones always easier than the wrong ones. Hardest of all are the ones where your heart was right, your brain was wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you can go back and change your mind. Other times not.

I need to remember to trust myself more: I am best when I lead with my heart. I’m lucky like that: my heart is usually right and my trust or love or caution is usually rewarded. But sometimes my brain takes the lead, and sometimes it agrees with my heart, and other times not. Regret comes after your brain betrays your heart, even for noble reasons; and you have no one to blame but yourself.

Over the past few months I have made some bad choices. I have to live with them now. That’s the deal you make when you listen to your head and not your heart. For better or worse, we’re in it together. I’m not dead, but I don’t feel stronger.

Maybe, after a while.

Things don’t stop happening to me simply because I’m old enough to know better. I may be 30 years old, but I still know how to have a good time. Crazy shit just seems to hunt me down. If all this happened to you in one weekend, you’d be unhinged like me too.

Bitten by a dog

My friend Nick came to stay over ANZAC weekend and I took him to a housewarming party on Sunday afternoon. The original plan was to arrive around 2pm, stay for a few hours and then leave and do some traditional ANZAC stuff like stand in a pub betting on coin-tossing with strangers until closing time. What actually happened was thirteen solid hours of drinking ending on the stage at Stonewall. Somewhere in there photos were taken of me holding a mannequin’s decapitated head, Nathan and I had a glitter fight with a pair of sparkly bowler hats, and in all the excitement the poor dog didn’t know what to do with himself and nipped me quite fiercely on the back of the leg. I still have the scabs to prove it. I’m not sure why people keep asking me if my tetanus is up to date – unless things have switched and you now catch rabies from a rusty nail – but I’m not foaming at the mouth or dead yet, so I think I’m in the clear.

Throwing up in the gutter

In my defence, I had barely had anything to drink on the public holiday Monday, so I don’t believe I deserved this, but having started drinking my own body weight in alcohol the Friday prior, I probably had it coming. Monday evening Nick and I decided that a quiet night was in order, and headed to Blockbuster for a DVD and some crisps. Nick got himself a Thai on the way; I couldn’t face a thing after going to lunch earlier in the day and forcing down some of the richest cuisine in Sydney, despite looking and feeling like a diarrhoetic turd.

The funny thing about being sick is that you know you are going to do it well in advance. There’s obviously some signal that tells your brain things are about to kick off, even though you can’t really feel it in your stomach just yet. I decided to turn around once I got that sign, but as we were at a crossing I had to wait for the traffic to stop before I could run home to vomit. An icy feeling set in as the blood drained out of my face, while hot shivers started across the rest of my body. I made it halfway home before I ran out of time and projectiles of half-digested barramundi, beef souffle, capsicum and courgette flowers came screaming out of my mouth and down the window of Lonsdale. If you work in the Crown Street store, I’m sorry. Poor Nick, on his birthday no less, had to leap three feet backwards to keep his flip-flops clear of the mess, and it was all in vain. What a champion friend I am: come to stay with me for your birthday and I’ll throw up all over your feet. Classy.

Getting locked out

This final treat wasn’t even my fault, though I had been expecting it for some time. Only having one set of door keys is just asking for trouble. My flat is tiny and there was no way anyone could stay here without catching whatever cold I had at the time. Nick, covered in my stomach juices, stood less chance than most. Tuesday I went off to work and he occupied himself with whatever he did that day, culminating in a flu-busting sleep all afternoon. When I got home I rang the bell and waited to be buzzed in. Nothing happened, and I was about to ring again when he appeared at the gate.
“This would have gone really well…if I had both keys.” he said.
It doesn’t take a maths whizz to work out that two locks + only one key = you’re fucked. The real estate agent had closed five minutes earlier so all we could do was call a locksmith and wait. What do Sydneysiders do at 6pm on a weeknight with an hour to kill? They drink, or they eat. Drinking was still off the cards after my ride on the chunderbus, so dinner it was. And that is how I ended up in a Vietnamese restaurant on a Tuesday night with a man in his pyjamas. Now, I don’t know about you, but if being a thirtysomething means more tales like this, then I’m looking forward to the next decade.

Let’s go have fun.

The other day I was in the pub with a friend getting a drink before going to watch Micmacs. We were talking about some night out or another and as frequently happens with younger people (Mat is only 21) there was a dig about my age. I didn’t really see it coming – something about it being an older crowd, “you know, late twenties” – and I tripped off my response with equal nonchalance: “that’s actually a younger crowd for me”. He laughed and for a moment I did too, before I realised that what I said wasn’t funny: it was true. I’ve been 30 for almost a year and it never really hit me until now.

For the past year I have been running around acting crazy, drinking and dancing and having a good time, little imagining that I was getting any older. In my mind I’m still mid-twenties, and for the past ten months I’ve been content to think of myself as 29 with more experience. This flames of this delusion were fanned by my co-workers who, without exception, were all genuinely convinced that I was 25 – an age even I had thought would be stretching the effectiveness of pretense. They cited not only my youthful appearance (in Australia, anyone without sun damage looks ten years younger than the rest of the population) but my general demeanour and energy, along with a certain bluntness and naïveté when dealing with things. Despite being born in the 70s, I am firmly Gen Y, it seems.

Despite all that, I’m living in a dream world. I’m not a late twentysomething any more: I am a young thirtysomething. Sitcoms about people like me do not feature care-free fun, waking up in dumpsters and still managing to build a career in an arty field full of eccentrics. They’re full of self-doubting no-marks, consequences and bosses in grey suits peering over their spectacles as though you should know better at your age. I’m satisfied to tick 25-35 on a questionnaire, but 30-39 guarantees you a shitty response to your poxy little survey. I don’t think I’m having a mid-life crisis, I just feel like I should be doing something different now that I’ve come to my senses and accepted my age. I still start my weekend on a Wednesday, dance like I’m backing for Beyoncé and look forward to having a proper career.

Am I missing something?

Imagine a gay bar where everyone stood around the edge of the room, no one spoke, and everyone judged you as you entered by how much skin you were showing. Then they would read your CV and only after that would the think about saying hello. If gaydar.com were a bar, this is what it would be like.

Like every self-respecting gay, I had a Gaydar profile. Since I became a single boy with an iPhone I also had the mandatory Grindr app, because it’s fun to see how far away the next gay man is in metres. As online presences go, mine was quite light: it’s not uncommon to have a gay.com, manhunt and dudesnude account as well. It’s the same guys on all these sites looking at the same photos of you, but it pays to advertise. Gaydar and Grindr were enough for me – I met a few nice people through them and made some friends – but after a while the novelty wore off and the return on my time invested began to wane. A few months ago I decided enough was enough, and ditched them forever. There were three main factors in this:

• Time-wasters. The whole point of online dating is that you will be taking it offline at some point. You’d be surprised how many people haven’t grasped this concept. I already empty my thoughts into the vacuum of the internet for people I rarely meet to read: it’s called a blog. I don’t need any more virtual friends. Online dating should be an introductory thing – if you can’t be bothered to get up and see someone in the flesh, your Gaydar membership is a just a digital ouroboros and you will die alone.
• Crazies. The opposite of the timewaster is the nutter. I can handle people who aren’t interested in me, and I expect you to do the same. I don’t want to log in and see yet another message from you when I’ve already politely said no. They’re never very original either: five messages on variants of “hello/hey/hi there” will not make me change my mind. I know I can block people but I shouldn’t really have to. However, the internet may be the safest place for this group of people – that kind of behaviour in public would probably get the shit kicked out of you.
• Do I know you? It’s fair to say that a lot of gay men sleep about. When you’re going home with someone different every weekend it’s hard to remember a face, especially since you spend a lot of the time looking everywhere else. Every now and again you’ll see someone out and get the “have I fucked you?” face, better known to the rest of the world as the “I know you from somewhere, but I’m not sure where” look. It’s awkward, but even more so when you know that you haven’t ever met them but you have seen them naked online, and you turned them down. Worse still is when they recognise you and think the same thing. It’s like rejection without the chase, and where’s the fun in that? (For the record, there are no photos of me naked anywhere online. I wouldn’t want to inflict that on anyone.)

It was this last one that really clinched it for me. Not so much the ego-crushing pain of being ignored in public by someone who is quite happy to chat to you via relay, but the realisation that it is all a total waste of time. The best times were not the ones where I sat waiting for a response from someone who would ignore me in the street. I’ve had far more fun when I was out and about seeing people in the flesh. What’s the point in sitting at home trying to meet people when you can just go out and do it for real?

Who have thought it? Sometimes the old ways are the best.

Oh, man, was I ever into him! “What happened?”, you may well ask. Well, he moved to China. There’s always something, isn’t there? After digging myself out of the iPhone debacle he went off and passed his exam, then decided to take a career break and travel around Asia for three months or so. I saw him once before he left. He told me in the first two minutes, and I spent the rest of the evening wondering why he hadn’t just told me over the phone and saved me $50 on dinner out. Naturally I was my charming, witty self throughout and by the end of the night I was satisfied that it was definitely his loss. Quite honestly, he was hard work.

How did I get so crazy over this guy? Yes, he’s hot with moments of fun and excitement, and yes, he had the most gorgeous fingers I have ever seen. However, I let all that go to my head: I put his timidity on our first date down to nerves, but really he just didn’t talk very much. He was a profound conversational recalcitrant; I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and ended up creating a complete fantasy personality. We had great dates because I didn’t actually go out with him – I was having dinner and drinks with my imaginary Dr Boyfriend-in-waiting. It was doomed from the start.

After the China revelation, I was working so hard on maintaining my enthusiasm for his trip that I couldn’t keep the make-believe personality going too – there’s only room for so much crazy in my brain. Without the pretend version, the real Dr Lego was exhausting. I’m not exactly verbose – I prefer to listen lots and speak when I have something to say – but next to him I was verbally incontinent. My efforts to keep the conversation going led me to more and more desperate topics. At one point I may actually have asked his preference of mattress manufacturer. Eventually I realised that my dignity was worth more than his comfort and I just gave up. I may never find out what material surgical scrubs are made from.

At the end of the night we went our separate ways and promised to stay in touch. Start submitting conversation topics now – I may end up needing them.