For those of you who came in late – old jungle saying – I’m going to be a student again. I left a trail of destruction at the Kmart back to school sale – totally owned a posse of eight year olds to get to those pens with four colours and the discount Spirax binders and the whiteout, but now I’m set. Mum has been busily labelling my pencils, shoe soles, Toy Story 3 lunchbox and pepper spray. (Abrams’ ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms’ should be safe.)
At 28 I figure I’ll be put out to pasture soon, and what better way to spend my sunset years than in the cocoon of academia – where practical skills count for nothing, tick, and fuzzy theoretical concepts and half-decent essay writing skills are king, tick. I’ll be a broken woman come the end of the year, but I’m loving this time right now before I start freaking out.
Shame about my age. Last time it was all sex drugs and rock and roll minus the sex and drugs – (I still cranked the Patsy Cline in my Corolla like nobody’s business) – but now the only parties I’ll be getting invited to are mature-age ones, where the parties start at the time they were meant to finish and everyone just sits around asking questions until someone falls asleep.
I’ve been pimping up my resume for a casual mystery shopper job that I saw yesterday – it should yield some interesting blog material and keep me in the good way – and I realised I hadn’t mentioned that I was a member of the “Golden Key Honour Society for Academic Excellence.” I’m not blowing my own French Horn here – they probably handed them out like lollipops at ECU, but the thing that gets me to this day is that I didn’t actually get a key.
My understanding when I paid $100 to join (and didn’t get a pair of free steak knives) was that I’d be given a golden key – preferably 24 carat – and there would be a revolving book case somewhere that this key would open to a room of post-grads slaughtering pigs, but in a classy, literary, fashion and I would be inducted into the society by spelling onomatopoeia backwards ten times while being beaten with a hardback edition of King Lear.
There were no doors and there were no keys – only a dubious certificate that I suspect had been printed in fast draft. What’s more, when I attended the ceremony, a girl from our high school who ran for parliament when she was ten was handing out the certificates. It was a bit like having Obama award you with a crappy figurative key that unlocks nothing but the janitor’s closet of the Kalgoorlie miner’s union loo you’ll be cleaning in ten year’s time. It was really awful – I felt like I did that time I saved up five Corn Flakes coupons and got sent a Daryl Braithwaite single in the mail.
Well, enough with the stories of my shadowy past, I’m off to Curtin to see my supervisor with a very weak thesis topic that we can hopefully tweak into submission. Me in three weeks:
megsjessie 
Love it Megs-
wish i could be a fly on the wall back at “school”. the mature-age student who’s experienced life first hand.