All my life I have been fascinated by the phenomenon of menfolk. So much so that I have dedicated my life to the study of these elusive creatures. Countless years have been spent sorting and classifying them into various categories in search of the ghost in the machine. Most intelligent men are very well guarded and one can only glimpse from time to time, a fragment of the code. If you are blessed enough to witness one of these revealing moments, don’t waste your time reaching out to grab it because it will escape you. All life is beautiful but beauty is relative to the beholder and an observer will affect the interpretation of the code, it is best to simply let it be. The magnificence that you are reaching out to grasp lives inside yourself and like the Higgs Boson the “man” particle is both there and not there the same time. My lifelong quest to isolate this particle by process of deduction has been tedious as one must first see something that might have been the “man” particle and then one must count the number of times one might have seen something that could have been the “man” particle and then if the difference is large enough then one probably has found it.

For years and years I have been carrying on in this manner, like the rubbish recycler on Grayston Drive I have been pushing my trolley uphill, in the rain, against the wind, trying to avoid collisions whilst carefully sifting through and recycling other women’s trash. (Ceaselessly searching for my polymer fix so that I could rush back and claim my 20c rebate from the recycling plant. Only joking. No, not really. Oh, you know what I mean.) It’s so easy to get lost in the process but if you become an expert at collecting and identifying plastics, if you are willing to slog your cart uphill all day long then you can make a decent living out of it, mostly because it’s a job that nobody else wants to do. Your competitive advantage is that there is not much competition because there are not many people out there who are crazy and fucked up enough to do what you are willing to do to earn a living unless they are desperate.

It would therefore come as a shock to me and anyone in my position after searching so hard to find even a grain of manliness that I would accidentally trip and fall on the codex. The divina perfectio in forma humana has found me. Hidden in plain sight, I almost walked straight past it. Like Hiram Bingham staring up at Machu Piccu, I have to pinch myself to believe my luck. How was it that I who am always late for everything, managed to discover this monolithic shrine? It’s that moment when your dry cleaned shirt comes back from the hotel laundry wrapped in tissue paper and with the removal of each layer of tissue paper the anticipation grows. You are receiving something that was once dull and boring to you but due to the long wait, the crispy layered packaging, that freshly starched smell, your love for it experiences a rebirth and you get a second chance to appreciate an old shirt that you almost took for granted.

I was beginning to think my luck had run out, even my lucky knickers had lost their magic. I have been wondering around broken hearted, torturing myself for not being good enough. I thought the world was coming to an end and now I am drowning my sorrows in the arms of a young, handsome, super intelligent Grecian God. It’s like drowning in methamphetamine, I know that this could be bad for me but I just can’t stop myself. Of course, it is yet another man that I cannot have but it is the best “man-cation” I have been on in my life. Like Alice spiraling down the rabbit hole, all I feel is weightlessness and abstraction from time and reality. I am quite literally living a dream. The courtesan finds her very own courtier who tells tales of foreign lands, expounds legends and metaphors, lectures in relativity and logic, deciphers language and the origins of words. A man who has made a study of me and seems to understand.

I realise now how many times I have come close to happiness and for whatever reason it always escapes me. I comprehend that there is something wrong with the way I measure happiness but I just don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, everyone else is missing out. I know that I have paid a very high price for these few treasured moments but I value my moments close to how many people value their lifetimes. I am the one who is rich. I contain what most will not possess in a lifetime and I have the wisdom to know it. That is why most of my detractors dislike me, because I have a built in sieve that weighs for character, quality and content. A billion dollars won’t buy you that. You could crawl out of a gutter, paint yourself in an Armani suit, drown yourself in Chanel, park your sports car outside Newscafe but the minute you open your mouth, I will already have sounded you out.