Scummify: verb, to drastically lower one's standards. Lisa Scott invents a new word, then goes job hunting.
Once upon a time, I was a HMW (High Maintenance Woman) but love has scummified me.
Dressed in designer frou-frou, off I would trot, down Stuart St, past Roy Colbert squinting out from the window of Records Records, to go shoe shopping when work got dull or the Artistic Director looked like having a mental breakdown.
I didn't need a recession to retrench, I met the economist.
"You have a BA?" said my daughter's boyfriend incredulously a week or two ago.
It was at this moment I realised my working-from-home uniform of the economist's oversized mohair jersey, considerably nibbled on by our ex-pet rat, Mr Rat, and worn with a pair of saggy long johns, might be doing me a disservice. (A sad story: Mr Rat, left forgotten and unfed over a weekend, ate the hind legs of Mrs Rat and was released into the wild as boot camp/care in the community punishment.)
Now, I know for a fact that the economist wore this self-same ratty jersey to a luncheon with his university chums the other day, and boasted of its plague of holes.
I wear it and I'm subnormal.
That, my friends, is the difference between a BA and a PhD.
"It's not his fault," said daughter Sophia of her paramour's slur against my intelligence.
"It's because you don't wear any makeup. Makeup makes you look fancy."
"Scoot, you've let yourself go," said Tammy, the beer-drinking model.
Yes, hair-care professionals wince at the sight of me and small children think there is a monkey in my bikini bottoms, but I'm not alone in turning to the dark side that is comfort dressing.
My friend Jo inherited the Bag Lady gene from her mother.
She lives in jeans (stretch cotton) and cardigans, wears wide, leather shoes and does not possess a pair of heels.
Of her sartorial style, Jo says, "The few vaguely smart things I do own have acquired a patina over the ages of food stains, cat hairs and paint splashes."
(Jo also inherited the gene for compulsive touching up of paintwork.) Jo's daughter attends a posh school and is good at studies.
Last week, Jo decided it was time to lift her game and purchased a new jacket.
"I finally managed to attend a school service looking almost as smart as some of the other Highgate Hags," she reported.
"Cat hairs there were none. My sleeves were innocent of paint splashes. There were no wine stains on the lapel. My daughter walked right past me, failing utterly to recognise her own mother."
The only time I dress up is for job interviews, a nice change from writing the great New Zealand novel.
How's it going? It's grating.
I plunk out the words one by one, as easy as pebbles through a meat grinder.
Job interviews can be minefields.
Working from home as a freelance writer, I spend almost the entire day talking to the cats.
Given an opportunity to talk about myself to a captive audience, I share too much.
I once talked at length about cat sick.
For one interview, I scrubbed up looking a million dollars in the kind of currency the government can't take off you.
Flirting with the world, I wobbled in on high heels like a teenage girl at a formal.
The interview was progressing well until we began to talk about salary, at which point, my hand in the depths of my purse groping for something, I realised that our murderous cat, Geoffrey Dahmer, had stashed a dead rat within. (The really sad thing about this story is that I didn't make it up.)
Perhaps a good luck present, perhaps a warning similar to the Mafia's horse-head-in-the bed manoeuvre: "Buy a better brand of cat food. Or else."
Maybe Mr Rat had found his way home only to meet the unfriendliest of welcoming committees.
The shock on my face when I touched the cold, furry corpse implied that I found my prospective employer's idea of remuneration ridiculous.
There's just no recovery from the old rat-in-the-handbag, and, unsurprisingly, I didn't get the job.
However, as I strode out into the glorious sunshine, dressed to the nines, pulling a massive bush rat out of my designer handbag and nonchalantly tossing it into a rubbish bin, I thought, "Now, that's class."
Lisa Scott is a Dunedin writer.
