Excerpt from a cover letter in application of employment.

Outline your experience with the media. How has your interaction with the media effected your life?

I am particularly lucky, as the media has had very little impact on me over the last decade. However, as a child I would frequently pace around the rockery in my backyard, imagining being elsewhere, usually in a situation in which I was the only human friend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The details would be extremely specific, down to which bunk in the sewer I would occupy to the exact content of my Mambo backpack - sunglasses, Roald Dahl book, Stussy tracksuit pants et. al. In my mind, the surroundings would not be animated, but live action in the style of the 1990 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Master Splinter, the large mutant rat would be present on certain occasions. During these times he would refer to me as "my son," treating me with utmost respect.

April O'Neill, the human female news reporter and Turtles' main contact on the surface was not involved in my dreams. I suspect that my brain may have blocked out the traumatic experience, but I probably killed her. It makes perfect sense, jealousy, lies, red hair. She needed to die.

Several years later I sat down to watching the Australian film The Sum Of Us, starring Jack Thompson and a young Russell Crowe. Crowe plays a knockabout Aussie bloke who happens to be gay, Thompson plays his father. I was late to school the following day, unable to sleep due to crippling paranoia that I was born gay. It was not that I found other males attractive, it was that I could not be certain that I would never find other males attractive. Unable to apply a better litmus test or rule of thumb I consulted my mother. She assured me that gay people were still allowed to play professional football, she may have even cited Ian Roberts as 1995 was a significant year for him. It was not long before my sleeping patterns returned to normal.

The final effect the media had on me occured the year following The Sum Of Us being aired as the Sunday Movie. As a well read child, I was no stranger to the work of the "young-adult" genre's own prize fighter, Paul Jennings. Jennings has released countless novels and volumes of short stories, all of which I managed to read at least a couple of times during my youth. One summer's evening I had been reading a particularly creepy story about a possum with a map of Australia birthmark on it's arm. There was also a dead child somehow weaved in, but I cannot recall details. It was whilst reading this story that I became dizzy, and later threw up.