How I lost my protest virginity.
When I was sweet 16, due to an awful bunch of circumstances, I found myself starting uni while in a sharehouse where I was scared to fall asleep. Never mind the typical b3tan "they've shaved my eyebrows off lolz I'll kill the pricks", I was a young girl in a testosterone-fuelled nightmare from hell where the drinking game of choice of my housemates and their boofhead friends was to sit and rate my tits if I dared to venture into the loungeroom. It actually progressed beyond that at one point and I won't go into the details here.

So I found myself literally phobic of sleeping, crashing on friends couches for two or three hours at a time in a desperate bid to stay away from my house while I found somewhere new.

In the middle of this, I had the opportunity to go to my first protest ever, which was exciting as I had dewy-eyed visions of Vietnam-era hijinks and fun when I decided to go to uni in the first place. So off we toddled to make the government feel our wrath for locking up hundreds of refugees for years on end.

The downside was that it was in the middle of a desert in South Australia, a two-day bus trip away. With other smelly students, anarchic twats, and some idiotic movie starring 'THE ROCK' on repeat as it was sooooo ironic to rip the shit out of it.

I worked out on the trip that I had slept around 15 hours in two weeks at this point. I dozed off on the bus with my head between my knees, something which I had perfected while working the markets with my stepdad a few years previous. With a big pile of blonde hair at the time, everyone thought I looked hilarious and spent so much time ripping the piss that I kept waking up, thus defeating the purpose of my endeavour. At one point I woke up and started screaming at them, only to find that they *had* in fact moved on to something else now, and I had dreamed the ongoing mockery. Got some funny looks after that.

The big tamale was to come when we arrived there. As a properly-leftist kind of a set-up, I perused the 'massage tent', where you could rub sweaty hippies with oil in exchange for a backrub of your own, before wandering off to the 'autonomous wom*n's space' which was designed to be some kind of Gaia-loving, utero-centric peace enclave. Score, methinks. If I'm going to be able to relax anywhere after all this time, it'll be somewhere where any bloke who walks in will have to pay with the wrath of a hundred militant-lesbian harpies for desecrating their space. Bonus!

So I wander in, and despite the tent not having any furniture spare a couple of sad old cushions, found myself nodding off. When next I woke, the air felt different, as though it were charged and crackly. The sun was going down and the dust had been stirred, and through my sleep-caked eyes I could see a bit of bustling activity going on.

I flagged down some girl walking past, who seemed a bit out of it, and asked what was happening.

"Oh" quoth she "we stormed the fences and broke a bunch of refugees out. Now the police are searching tents".

Aha, I think, this mad bint has some choice drugs. I'll have to remember her face for later.

Nope. I wander out, the police are running through the camp in full riot gear, cracking scones and pulling tents apart. It took me over an hour to find my tent in the confusion, and my mates had put a refugee in there seeing as I couldn't be found to put it to a vote. Thanks guys!

Funnily enough, we didn't get caught, but that is one of the weirdest things I have ever woken up to.

Other highlights of that trip mostly came about from a hurried ingestion of all of the pot to hand (a weeks supply for a bunch of hippy uni students in the desert, you work it out) resulting in my mate nearly burning the tent down while refilling his Zippo inside the bloody thing (and burning his arm quite badly in the process), and me deciding that flashing my tits at all the police cars that came by in the evening would be a fabulously subversive way to overthrow the conservative regime. I even convinced some other idiots that it would work, and I have never seen that many U-turns in one small space before.
(Angie the Redneck Wonder, Sat 30 Dec 2006, 2:32, Reply)