Living an average dream

There is at least one cockroach in my room.

I am not living with the abusive French lady. I am instead living with a very nice Sri Lankan lady. But one thing she didn't warn me about before I moved in a few days ago was that the suburb - Balmain - attracts cockroaches, and even though she keeps the house very clean, they have a tendency to get in and around the place. I know that cockroaches aren't dangerous, and I know that they, like most creepy crawlies, don't really bother people - but they are gross, and I don't really know what to do about them. There was a big one in my room earlier and I asked my landlady what to do, and she marched around with some spray before asking me "are you afraid of them?" I said I wasn't, because I didn't want to look like a wuss, but she just laughed and left the spray with me. "The big ones, they fly."

It is a nice house. And my landlady is nice, although she's one of those people who talks and talks and talks while somehow leaving nothing much to respond to. You're sitting there listening to her, nodding, feeling like you should add something, but there's really not much to add, so you end up saying inane rather than insightful things. "Yeah, you don't want to be like your parents, but then inevitably, you are!" I interject, nervously, and unnecessarily. The reason that came up is because the other tenant here is an alcoholic who is failing to deal with a recent breakup. He apparently blames his drinking in part on his mother, because she always drank a lot.

My landlady told me that this other tenant has been falling over a great deal because he always drinks to excess - and that a week or two ago he got clipped by a bus when he was trying to cross the road. Still, he went to Bali yesterday because it's his fiftieth birthday and it had been organised for months, despite the fact he is obviously quite bruised, and did I mention that he's going with a few friends as well as the ex-wife? Yeah, well, they'd organised it BEFORE the breakup, so of course she's still going. Sometimes he spends the night at her house and apparently she sometimes comes here, so it sounds more like one of those breakups that isn't really a breakup to me. I am assured that he is very nice - "harmless", even - and I'm sure he is. He seemed pleasant enough the one time I met him when he came back from a night of heavy drinking. He had, naturally, just fallen over, so I left him to "take some Valium and have an early night". (Landlady and I discussed the whole "mixing alcohol and Valium" thing and concluded it's not really something we can stop a fifty-year-old man we don't know especially well from doing.)

Rachael's flat is in Freshwater, which takes about an hour and a half for me to get to on various buses. I went there today, and we went to the beach, which is only a few minutes' walk from hers. I saw lifeguards shouting at swimmers, but Rachael said that when she saw them before they were just talking to sexy ladies in bikinis. Perhaps saving their lives by stopping them from going in the water in the first place.

Freshwater is close to the hilariously-named suburb of Manly. You may have seen a couple of Manly photos if you follow me on Instagram. Unfortunately, though, two of my favourite Manly things that I have read about - namely Manly Fun Pier and Manly Dance - have proved impossible to find. Still, whenever I trek to Rachael's flat I have to stop at "Manly Services" - small mercies.

As for what I'm doing with my time at the moment: I'm applying for jobs. It's even more soul-destroying than it would usually be at home because a lot of adverts stipulate "no working holiday visas" or "Australian locals only" or, in one case, "Asians preferred" - but I imagine something will come my way in the end. I really hope it does, not least because it will allow me to live on a diet that doesn't consist almost exclusively of Weet-Bix (yes, no "a" in Australia), fruit, and pasta. (I say "almost" exclusively because I did buy some Coke the other day.)

I could just stay in the house with the cockroaches and the drunk and the loquacious landlady, and watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch on YouTube.

...I'm already on season 2.

Harvey: Lots of famous people were editors of their school newspaper!
Sabrina: Really? Like who?
Harvey: I dunno... Charlemagne?