MEL BUTTLE
“I’d written out my revenge plan to get back at a girl who’d shoved me into a bush”
When’s the last time you heard someone refer to something as festy, or say peeps and mean it? I’m eternally grateful the vernacular of my high school days is dead and buried, to borrow a saying that used to be on high rotation back then, stick a fork in festy and peeps, they’re done.
As someone who’s just put a toe into the murky waters of Tiktok, I really feel for teenagers these days. Imagine if what you thought was cool when you were 14 was on the internet, for everyone to see, and if it went viral, impossible to erase.
If Tiktok was around when I was 14, my account would be chockers with videos of me dressed up as the deputy principal singing the Spice Girls, dedications to my softball team and fan videos made to honour Jesse Spencer from Neighbours. Jesse was fly as, and still is all that and a bag of chips, but I’m deeply relieved the only evidence of my teen years is in photo albums.
I found my old school diaries during a clean-up, and it was an eye opener, next to some of the school rules I’d written “whatever!” Calm your farm Mel. I’d also scribbled down a series of names in the back of my diary under a Post-it note, called “The Snog
List”. Not one of them was crossed off though. I guess my rudimentary vision board wasn’t that successful. Perhaps an indicator that this list was totally doomed man, was that none of the people on the list had last names, it read, “Joseph? Bus stop”. Hella embarrassing.
When I say diary here, I mean the one the school issues you, not a personal diary that ends each entry with “I’ll write more tomorrow”. I was in high school before phones, so my school diary was a portable form of entertainment that was permitted in class. I’d glued into my diary The Far Side comics, postcards, and a TV Week article about the cast of Heartbreak High. It was the hottest show on TV after school; it was da bomb.
Does every generation have this searing level of cringe looking back on themselves? Mine feels particularly strong, which is my bad I guess. In my old Year 9 drama notebook, I found a sketch I’d penned about homies robbing a bank, then all hiding in one guy’s very baggy pants to evade the police. As if. Remember homies? I think the current social group that’s replaced them is eshays. I don’t know though; I’m 40, I take a calcium supplement and love farmers’ markets. I couldn’t be more disconnected from whatever is phat these days. Playing Wordle is cool though? Not!
When you’re not keen on someone it’s all-consuming at 14. I’d written out my revenge plan to get back at a girl who’d shoved me into a bush. I think she called me giraffe-neck girl, then I said something equally mean to her, next thing I knew I was inside an azalea bush. Hectic.
The revenge plot was scribbled out hastily in fluoro pink pen and is very hard to read, but from what I can make out, it involved calling her home posing as someone from the Australian Institute of Sport or as a PE teacher, and telling her parents that she’d been selected into shotput at an elite level, as her arms were so strong from pushing people into bushes.
Thankfully, I never got around to putting this plan in place, and instead I obviously took a chill pill. However, for the rest of high school, I was all talk to the hand to that particular girl. One more to finish this off, I’m so much more chillaxed nowadays. Peace out.