Trials and Tribulations (And Gneil FTW)

[bliumchik]

I woke up at six thirty on Tuesday morning to practice for my Drama exam with Poppy. This proved to be a fortuitous move, as about half-way to school I fell out of my seat on the bus with the sudden realisation that we were supposed to do an essay as well as the performance. Well... shit!

So instead of practicing I spent forty minutes quickly mocking up some sort of heavily summarised essay which barely added up to over a page. The best I can say is I'm not getting zero. On the bright side, it's only a third of the examination mark, which itself is thirty percent of the final mark. I love drama so much. Also, I got to keep my jeans on instead of blacks. I came to school in jeans (and a trenchcoat) with my skirt in my bag because it was SIX IN THE MORNING AND FUCKING FREEZING and I was going to be coming home AFTER DARK AND FUCKING FREEZING (more on that later). What's a uniform note or two weighed against frostbite?

The performance went well - we had to teach the class a thirty-minute lesson on our choice out of four famous theatre dudes. We did Dario Fo, and man, this guy is so awesome. He did political satire in the fifties and sixties (well, and onwards, he's still alive), but not just any old political satire like The Chaser - he did political satire against Benito Mussolini, the guy who basically invented Fascism. I read Can't Pay? Won't Pay! and I loved it - the dialogue is snappy and "Who's on First?" style, and the situations are just hilarious. Highly reccommended, and I think we got a good mark for the actual lesson, too.

Then I spent an hour or two going over English with Zoe before our oral. Which was good because we hadn't actually done anything prior to that. I managed to get Zoe going "I have to read Sandman now"¹ and the actual exam went well. The teachers were really nice (and one of them also mentioned that she ought to start reading graphic novels...)² and while we didn't get the best question neither did we get the worst.

I stayed at school afterwards before going to the Neil Gaiman talk for Sydney writers Festival, although I had time to go home in between. Stan was going to come, but between uni things and getting soaked to the skin in our torrential Sydney autumn rain (very distinct from our torrential summer rain, our torrential winter rain and our torrential spring rain) he decided not to. Did I mention that said talk was at Macquarie University... ie Woop Woop?⁴ Yeah... so I maybe misjudged my travel time a little. Suffice to say I caught the train at ten to seven instead of six fifteen, and by the time I got to Epping I was already late and panicking, because trains are scary. Luckily the bus wasn't too problematic... but then I arrived at the uni.

Oh, Macquarie University. Why must your layout be so cryptic? What use are the pretty walkways in the dark and the rain? And WHY CAN'T YOU LABEL YOUR FREAKING BUILDINGS A LITTLE BIT?! After traipsing around in the cold for a while⁵ I found the library and asked them. Turned out I wasn't meant to go to the English Department at all, but rather some building called ABC42XpiWASSUP23$ B. I found the place alright. I opened the door to the packed lecture theatre. I walked in and was immediately confronted by a huge projection screen with the heading PYRAMID SCHEMES. Yeah, maybe not Neil Gaiman.

At that point I was utterly lost, and just sort of wandered around (it was eight now, so I was a full hour late for an hour-and-a-half long talk) until I stumbled upon some well-concealed posters with Gneil's face on them, directing me to the Price Theatre.

Well, bitchcakes.

I got half an hour of Q&A, so it's not like I went all the way out there for nothing, but I missed him reading a short story. On that topic, can I just say that Neil Gaiman's accent is the most SQUEE thing in the entire world. This week. But seriously, as if I wasn't enough of a rabid fangirl before, that accent is just adorable. It's British, obviously, and he does that thing with extending the final consonants, so he says "These two people mee-t".

Afterwards I got lost again. I'd wandered around so much before that I lost all sense of direction and forgot where the bus stop was. Luckily asking directions to the bus stop is a more profitable venture than asking directions to the English Department OF DETH. When I got there, though, I couldn't find a bus stop on the side of the road opposite the one I arrived at. This seemed coutner-intuitive. I asked a random, who confided in me that he, also, was having the same difficulty. His two friends arrived with a shrug and he explained that they'd moved from Perth six months ago⁶. They had been at the Gneil talk too.

I joined my Perth randoms in finally finding the bus stop (which turned out to be on the wrong side of the road, because the buses travel in infinite loops) and spent the bus stip discussing comics with Random 1. It struck me as I bid them goodbye in the city (breathing a sigh of relief when I caught sight of familiar territory [Elizabeth Street]) that I knew he had drawn a comic, and that people often thought he was Canadian⁷ and that he doesn't read science fiction much because his friends spent way too much time talking at him about it when he was a kid - but I don't know his name.

The busride home was uneventful, although my shoe had been soaked through at some point in the traipsing-through-puddles phase of the evening, and I eventually took it off and sat on my foot to prevent blueness of toes. I finally got home (fourteen hours after sleepwalking out of the house) to discover my dad sitting in the kitchen and inexplicably eating chocolate cheese and ham on turkish bread. Then I collapsed, deciding that on balance? Good day.⁸
__________________________________
¹Yess! Another convert!
²I for one welcome our new fantasy author overlords.^3
3WTF, footnotes? YA RLY.
⁴Well, Epping. Whatever.
⁵I asked many people for directions to the English department - they all went "Huh?" except for one guy, who was rapping on a bench - he went "I dunno" and then started rapping about people coming up and asking him where the English department was, yo. I guess it's not such a literary university?
⁶My excuse was... well, look, when was I supposed to have been to a University near EPPING before?
⁷Something we have in common.
⁸I wish I had a Mal icon.

Comments

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

...that I knew he had drawn a comic, and that people often thought he was Canadian7 and that he doesn't read science fiction much because his friends spent way too much time talking at him about it when he was a kid - but I don't know his name.

You have NO IDEA how often this happens to me. I SWEAR TO GOD. Asking people for their names just does not occur to me. I can't fathom why.

[thedilettante.livejournal.com]

Firstly, *dies of jealousy over Neil*

Secondly, I think we share a birthday.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

...hooray for random coincidences?