The next morning Jess Eva, why wouldn’t ya?

the next mornIng...

On making it to the kitchen, I looked at Norm and said good morning, awaiting his response so I could analyse his tone like a Russian spy. Don’t you hate that? You only get two days in a weekend, so if you screw up on a Friday night, the thought of wasting a Saturday being in trouble is depressing. The thought that the entire universe hates you is only a bonus. He looked back at me with a smile. ‘Morning, Boozy! Coffee?’ Oh my god, had I hit the jackpot? Maybe Norm was BLIND last night and the gods above had granted me a wild card for the weekend by making him black out. That was my best bet here. Come on, Normy, tell me you drank until you blacked out. I went all in on it! ‘Do you remember anything from last night?’ ‘Yeah, you were feral,’ he sniggered. ‘Are you angry?’ I asked, confused.

‘Nup, I read a quote yesterday.’ Completely bewildered, I asked him what it was he had magically read. Because until that moment, the only way I’d thought I could get out of the crap basket was if he had met up with Stacey for a $40 glass BBQ breakfast and the buzz of an illicit drug was clouding his judgement. Now, when I tell you what he said, you should imagine a balding man wearing a pair of jocks with a hole in the left butt cheek, stirring Nescafé into two old stained cups, and pretend he’s talking to you. Especially if you’ve ever had anyone ever say something to you that’s ruined your day. You know, when your boss is mean to you at 10 am and when 7 pm hits, nine hours later, you’re still talking to your friends or partner about it, at home on your verandah with a wine, getting more and more worked up . . . plotting his or her death or demise etc. Okay, back to the visualisation of a jockwearing, balding Nescafé maker. ‘If you had $86,400 and you lost $10, would you throw the $86,390 away looking for the $10?’ ‘No.’

‘There are 86,400 seconds in a day, and if someone uses ten of those seconds to upset you, why would you lose the rest of those seconds focusing on the ten?’ I looked at Norm and his holey jocks, gobsmacked at the wisdom of a man who’s go-to quote is usually ‘Fuck ’em’ or, if not, something he read off the back of a bottle cap. But he’s right: if you lost the $10 you wouldn’t care because you’d still have $86,390! You’d still be rich and could do so much with that cash. If you met a random stranger and you asked how they were and they said, ‘I’m terrible! I dropped a tenner this morning so I spent 86 grand today hiring a search party to find the tenner, and we didn’t find it so now I have nothing,’ you’d think they were mad! Clinically INSANE. But that’s what we do to our mind! We focus on the ten seconds we lost and not the 86,000 plus that we still had. And chances are the person who stole those seconds doesn’t even know or care. So why give them more? If a robber took $10 off you, would you reward them by asking for their bank account details and saying, ‘Hey mate, I’ve got another $86,000 . . . here, have the rest . . . I insist!’ NO! You would protect the remaining cash you have. You would feel entitled to your own money and adamant that no one can steal that off you. So let’s try and take the same ownership of our time (which is a shit ton more valuable). This is an extract from Why Wouldn’t Ya? by Jess Eva, published by Pan Macmillan, RRP $34.99.