Why I Will ALWAYS Win 'Never Have I Ever'

In retrospect, my travels in the last 6 months (oh my god have I seriously been in Australia for 6 months already!?) of my life have been pretty unbelievable. Wait, who the hell am I kidding, they’re pretty unbelievable in…contemporaryspect…? [let’s let that word fabrication slide; my blog, my creative license.]Last year, I was just an aimless college graduate working at a café to allegedly ‘save up money to go travel the world and “find myself,”’ while still trying to squeeze out the last bits of my academic glory days and ride out another year on a lease at 611 East Seneca. Oo0o0o0, another 20-something with no idea of what they want to do with their life, how original! Since deviating from that well-worn path and coming to Australia (which I realize is also a pretty well-worn path as well…), my life in the last half-year has been an unstoppable whirlwind of adventure, activity, and awesomeness.

At this point in time allow me to take a moment to reflect and commend myself for doing some pretty badass things compared to what I was doing only 6 months prior to this point in time. As my inhibitions began to dwindle and I’ve become more comfortable and knowledgeable of myself and my abilities, I must say that the inventory of my life experiences has continually varied and evolved itself—therefore over time each chapter in my journey has become a more and more colorful and enchanting story to tell at cocktail parties when I’m old and fancy and rich. To name a few, I’ve learned to fire a shotgun AND make bullets for it, discovered my passion for gardening, can list more native Australian flowers and their scientific names than most Australians, have encountered some of the worlds deadliest snakes and spiders in my every day life, worked at a surf camp, learned and performed the basics of house construction (Stephen B. Hughes Contracting may come under new management someday), seen in person one of the most spectacular New Year’s Eve fireworks shows in the world, lived out of a car with 2 Swedish girls (a future doctor and a motocross champion, by the way), and experienced life as Ikea’s token and beloved homeless loiterer. Mercy! I, for one, am quite proud of that and think that I’ve added a lot of spice to my resume of life.

If I had read this list last year, I would’ve been pretty impressed with all of that and called it a day: “Man, am I an interesting person! I bet a lot of people can’t say stuff like this!”, said the theoretical me. HA! How naïve! If that conjecture of myself thought that all of that was impressive, it clearly was not informed of all the things that I’ve done in the last 5 weeks of my life. *Hold tight, the details are coming after this brief and hopefully alluring detour*

Are we all familiar with the game ‘Never Have I Ever’? If you’re not, you probably need to socially drink more. In the mean time, you can Google it or accept my abridged explanation: during a person’s turn, they say to their group for example “never have I ever played Dungeons and Dragons.” Anyone in the group who is clearly a nerd and have historically dabbled in D&D must therefore drink. This is an excellent game to either A) suss out the dirty details of your drinking mate’s lives, B) embarrass your friends who have ridiculous stories, C) get said friends with ridiculous stories drunk, or D) all of the above. Particularly considering B and C, I am now convinced that the last 5 weeks of my life will allow me to ALWAYS win at Never Have I Ever, especially if my opponents are Lina and Johanna. Again, if you’re not a social drinker, I should also explain that drinking=winning.

Ready to hear why? First off, I’ve got to start out by reminding everyone where we have been WWOOFing the last month: A NUDIST RESORT. Yes, we started off giving it a 1-week trial and have loved it so much that the last 5 weeks have flown by faster than I ever thought possible. Lights, camera, action:

1) Never Have I Ever… had a phone conversation with my father that went like this:

Me: Hi Dad. We made it safely to our next WWOOFing place. You know how I told you it was a resort?

            Dad: Yeah. It is a resort, isn’t it?

            Me: Yeah, it’s a resort. It’s just…I forgot to mention to you that it’s a…certain kind of resort…

            Dad: Uh huuuh…

            Me: Well, it’s kind of a…nudist resort.

            Dad: *doubles over in laughter on the other end of the phone*

            Me: So uh, you’re cool with it?

            Dad: Well, all I can say is this: you sound happy and if you’re safe, that’s good.          Just remember: don’t bend over in the cucumber patch when the men are      around.

Yes this is a verbatim transcript. Either I have the most supportive father in the world, or he disapproved of what I was doing and kept quite only in hopes of getting photographic evidence of my situation starring the Swedes. The floor is now open for debate…

2) Never Have I Ever… been picked up by a total stranger in a Rolls Royce to go work at a resort NAKED…and have said driver not be part of a prostitution ring or said resort be a euphemism for a brothel.

            That’s right, our host Rogin picked us up in his Rolls Royce. A couple weeks later, Johanna even got to do some mechanical work on one of the doors:

SWANKY.

3) Never Have I Ever… done construction work NAKED.

            On the nice sunny days when we weren’t doing the heavy duty or dangerous work (read: potential for any of our bits and pieces getting cut, caught, snagged, stuck, pinched, pulled, hacked off, etc), OSHA would not have approved of our work uniforms. Well, at least we wore sensible footwear. Imagine my initial shock on our first day of work when we arrived to the building site and my pristine eyes were greeted with the business end of a naked man I didn’t know bending down to pick up a hammer. That…took some getting used to…

 

4) Never Have I Ever… skinny-dipped in broad day light in the middle of a resort. With tons of other skinny-dippers. And been encouraged to do it. By people 2, 3, and 4 times my age.

            Although it lacks the excitement of potentially being caught that the normal skinny-dipping does, it’s been pretty awesome having it be socially acceptable to work on eradicating my tragically stark tan lines in public everyday. Unfortunately, ye olde ass is still blindingly white.

5) Never Have I Ever... flown an airplane by myself…NAKED.

            Ok, I wasn’t naked. BUT I did fly an airplane by myself! Rogin has a lightweight 2-seater plane that he so graciously took us flying in. Just when I thought that Monday couldn’t get any better, he trusted me enough to steer it, 100% by myself, with no experience whatsoever. Clearly he has never seen the back AND front bumpers of my car.

I HATE SNAKES JACQUES, I HATE 'EM!

If you can’t sense a general pattern that strings throughout most of these items, there are a lot of 'standard' activities that I have done. The only real difference between me doing them then and now are that I can structure my sentences this way: “today, I [insert mundane undertaking here]…NAKED!” 

6) Never Have I Ever… walked a 27 kilometers (16.7 miles) through dense tropical rainforest in 1 day when it was meant to be done in 3.

 The Whitsundays Great Walk. 27k completed: check. Number of deadly snakes seen: 4. [Legally] necessary permit: no. 

Yeah ok worth it.

Lost the path. Officially inducted into the Wherethefuckahwe tribe.

Oh muh GAWD we're almost done! Too bad the last kilometer is a straight shot uphill.

7) Never Have I Ever…done a concrete buttprint.

            Hand and footprints are for the movie stars. We decided to be cheeky (ha!) and immortalize ourselves at Taylorwood with our best assets (ha again!). After concreting a part of the driveway and putting our handprints in it, light bulbs went off everywhere we decided that it MUST be done! Rogin gave us all the materials needed, then we mixed the concrete ourselves and plopped on down. The finished product is remarkable, but I must say, it’s not the most pleasant experience…

Does this concrete make my butt look big?

In my 5-week stay there, we certainly accomplished a lot and did heaps of cool things. Yeah I’m sure that a lot of people have given a hand in building a house, fixed a car, and maybe have even flown a plane. But I’ll be damned if those other people can say that they did a lot of those things on the pretense of nudity!  And of course, whenever anything that would have once been viewed as ‘awkward’ comes up between Jo, Lina or I, we now just laugh it off and say “pshhh. I’ve seen you naked.”  Overall our entire experience at the resort was more than we would have ever thought it could be, and our hosts were absolutely amazing.  We can truly say that this has been one of the most fortuitous places that we ended up (not that our stay at Ikea wasn’t great), and one of the greatest experiences we’ve had to date. All I can say is that  it is so lucky that we took that initial plunge and mutually agreed on that 1 week [naked] trial.

So my biggest life lesson taken from this experience? Try lots of new things and learn lots of new things. And if you can, do it naked, because you just might find yourself the winner of a drinking game someday.