Rebecca Riots

I hate those “30 things to do before you’re 30″ lists. They imply that once you turn the third decade, it will no longer be possible to bungee jump, munch on a woman’s fanny, or scale Everest with only some runners and a tampon for company.

What happens? You reach three-oh and your legs fall off? You grow webbed toes? Can only breathe under water? Develop cock rot?

“I’d love to come rock climbing with you tomorrow, Jeremy, but unfortunately I turned 30 last week and have grown this tough bit of gristle which joins both my legs together. Climbing a rock would prove impossible without the necesseary joint movement.”

Writers who compile such lists do so because they are comforted by a sense of compiling lists and also they are lacking the imagination to put together a fucking original feature.

As someone who has been a journalist for a fair few fucking years, I can tell you the profession is flooded with these foreskins. Not only are their features unthreatening, uninspired and insipid, their lack of ability is inversely proportionate to their ego.

A writer who, for the sake of libel shall remain nameless, and with zero talent, climbed her way through the jungle of one major tabloid newspaper because she was enthusiastically fucking the old, married, tired and dried up chain-smoking deputy editor. The subs would bitch to high heaven about her retarded copy. “She couldn’t even string a sentence together,” they would snarl. “We had to write everything for her.”

And that is the problem with most of this OP-ED style. It’s tired, awash with retreads and completely uninteresting. Who gives a fuck about Roisin Ingle, for example (Irish Times) who loves to tell the country about her Northern Prodestant Boyfriend. What’s more shocking is that she managed to get a boyfriend in the first place, not the religious dichotomy. That same woman wrote an entire column on how she downloads music from iTunes. Piss off.

The Daily Mail is also filled with shite features concerning women whose wombs fell out when they went on a new detox plan, how more and more people are forced to eat sanitary towels because of the credit crunch and how Britain’s teenage girls are all fucked because they want to be just like Jodie Marsh and give blowjobs when they’re nine.

It’s all a load of shite.

Just to drive my point home, most insipid and wanky 30 under 30 list for this week which cropped up in the Sydney Morning Herald. Rock n Roll!

1. Buy a one way ticket overseas

2. Borrow your nephews and nieces or friends’ kids for a weekend and take them to the zoo

3. Blow a week’s wages on dinner for two at a restaurant where the prices aren’t even listed on the menu

4. Have a one night stand with an attractive stranger you met at a party

5. March for a cause you believe in

6. Move out of home and live in a share house

7. Run a marathon – or if that’s too daunting, do a fun run

8. Invent your own cocktail

9. Learn a language

10. Get a Brazilian wax

11. Have sex in the open air

12. Read the collected works of an author you love

13. Get a letter to the editor published in your local newspaper

14. See the Aurora Borealis.

15. Try base jumping or another extreme sport

16. Bluff your way into a glamorous job you’re totally unqualified for

17. Join a political party and hand out how to vote cards on election day

18. Get involved in a team sport

19. Do a road trip with a bunch of mates in a dodgy car

20. Survive a flight on a third world airline

21. Find the love of your life

22. Lose the love of your life

23. Skinny dip in the ocean at midnight under a full moon with a group of friends

24. See the sun rise after an all night rave

25. Go to a gay bar – if you’re straight

26. Go hiking in Bhutan

27. Do a ten day yoga retreat

28. Make a fool out of yourself at a karaoke bar

29. Plant a tree for the environment

30. Get fake ID saying you’re 21