An Anecdote. Or fever dream...

Well, since this is a blog about being in Australia, I suppose that this update should be about Easter, which I spent sailing around the Whitsunday Islands, or about last weekend, when my Rainforest Ecology class went to Paluma (and ate good old-fashioned Ozzie food, which was great). I should do these things soon, because I'm leaving for Boulia (about 15 hours inland) on Saturday and won't be back until Thursday (it's our mid-semester break), so that will be yet another thing to update you on.

But I'm feeling a little tired. Maybe it's that my schedule has been/will be travel, essay, travel, essay, travel, essay for a month, which gives me precious little time to just recover, let alone write blog updates.

So instead of writing about things that this blog Is Ostensibly About, I want to tell you about my Tuesday.

Tuesday is my shopping day, because I get out of class at 10:00, and since I bothered to wake up and walk 1/2 hour, I might as well buy food.

This Tuesday I was feeling a little under-the-weather. I was tired from my weekend, plus I'm coming down with a cold. Class was fine- we talked about extinct Australian megafauna... so really big marsupials. But it went over, and then they kept us to talk about the field trip...

So at 11:00 my two Ecology lab partners and I met with a woman who was supposed to help us with moss. So she had us seperating our moss samples (from the Paluma trip). My single sample took me 3 hours. THREE HOURS.

So now it's 1:00. I give up on the moss and decide to catch a bus to the grocery store. The bus schedule was completely changed this month, and the bus I was going to catch didn't show up. The one that did finally show as late, almost completely full, and broke down two blocks from the grocery store. So I walked... only to have the bus get back on its feet and pass me about a minute later.

Grocery store itself was average... better even, because two types of cookies and candy bars were all on sale.

Then it started raining. Torrential downpour. So I waited for 20 minutes for it to die down before walking to the bus stop (which is across a 4-lane road from the store). Got there right after my bus had left. Next bus was in 30 minutes.

I was waiting there, miserable and tired, when two guys in my Rainforest Ecology class stopped by, sat next to me, and started singing a Greenday song with the lyrics replaced with "Epiphyte."
If that wasn't bizarre enough, there was a guy waiting for the bus in a smiley-face ski mask. He came over to me and gestured that he wanted to know the time, and when I showed him my watch, he handed me a sticky note that said "Do something different. Smile."

So I smiled. And then my bus came (late). I'm keeping the sticky note... I'm going to tape it to my laptop.

Dear Smile Guy: You are the coolest person on earth. If I didn't hallucinate you...