longpost is looooong and full of weird.

via drjon XD

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Yesterday was the Day of Randoms, it seems. Well, okay, there were two of them, not that coincidental. But it was more than usual.

I sat near the back of the bus on the way to uni. Just as I'd gotten settled in I became aware of a droning chant going on behind me. Soon I realised somebody was praying. "...the name of our lord, may it be sung, praised, laaahved, and adoooored and blessed for ever and always..."

"That's ...nice?" I thought. "She must have not had time in the morning, so she's catching up on her way to work. I wish she'd do it quieter... but it probably isn't long, so whatever."

Around the time when she got to "Lord Jesus bless each and ehhhvery single person on this bus," I realised this wasn't your regular tardy faithful. She was a large grey-haired Aussie woman with a noticeable lisp that involved many W's, and the occasional misplaced R. Her voice had a very particular rhythm in which the pitch and tone varied not a jot, the only variable was the pace and emphasis she placed on certain words. "Each and every" was a favourite, as was "adored."

In fact right about the time she started referring to us as her children and to herself as a Handmaiden of the Lord I realised that her voice had the exact proportions of the audio used in the kind of brainwashing one finds in fiction in conjunction with empty white cells and regular water torture - that monotone you can't quite filter out that drones on and on and on. And on. And on. Many politicians and televangelists use it to great effect, although obviously without the water torture. (I think.)

She would have made an effective priest, in fact, had life swung her that way - since it apparently did not (probably the woman thing) she was taking it upon herself to give her sermons away to anyone she could find. Thus she developed a cunning plan involving a moving vehicle and a congregation that really, really had to stay on this bus in order to get to work or uni on time. One woman came up to ask her to stop, but this effort was ignored with the exception of a brief aside asking God to forgive her for trying to interfere.

At first it was sort of interesting thinking about what her circumstances must be, but by the time we reached Kingsford I was bemoaning my lack of working headphones that prevented me from withdrawing into music the way the smug ipod people around me were. The ceaseless chant was really, incredibly, indescribably creepy. I texted Stan, who suggested I throw holy water at her (or regular water, whatever). As we neared the City I was briefly struck by a strong and entirely irrational fear that she was planning to blow up the bus and was merely marinating us in biblical verse before the main course, but obviously had she done so she would have lost her captive audience. I suspect that she just got off the bus and got onto another one to continue her homily upon a fresh batch of travellers. I honestly did not need to hear that many repetitions of the apostles vs. fishes story.

Thoroughly creeped out for the day I went off to my lecture, which was actually really interesting and contained basically everything I will ever need to know about Sati. Devleena Ghosh is a brilliant lecturer. I then had an hour and a half to kill before my tutorial, so I wandered down to Illustrated Man to check out tattoos. Mine will set me back a few hundred dollars, ouch. I plan to check out Inner Vision as well some time.

While I was hanging out looking at the stuff on the walls some guy started talking to me. My second random of the day was waiting for his session to start and thought I should get a tiger cub. Somewhat (much, MUCH) less creepy than random number one. He liked the Chinese character tattoos, but me, I'm like yeah. It says "vengeance." Or, you know, possibly "fried rice." Who knows! Why you would tattoo yourself with something you cannot read I don't know.

In Something Completely Different news today, I was late and accidentally walked into a math lecture. They were all like EQUATION and I was like "this is not contemporary cultures..."

I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THIS POST WAS MUCH SHORTER IN MY HEAD.