Mind Expanding Drug

I remember vividly how the Vice-Chancellor stood up at the welcome speech and told us what uni would do for us. He was a tall and gangly man with a pinched British accent and a very starchy grey suit. He spoke vehemently about how you would never look at anything the same way again, how you would learn how knowledge was made, what makes the world turn, meet your soul mates, find you muse, and learn more about yourself than you could imagine or even wanted to know… basically he made it sound like LSD. You wondered what exactly his university experience must have been like, seeing as ‘changing your whole perception of life’ was not something you expected university to do for you. But, judging by his age, you guess he must have been through uni in the 70s, so hey, why not?

He harped on a lot about the shaping, changing and forming of a person with a hint to thinly veiled indoctrination and psychological conditioning, all the while trying to make it sound like the huge adventure in discovery. Actually, he managed to make the whole thing sound rather scary, in a way I hadn’t even conceived. Especially the bit about how even if you didn’t want to, and no matter how much you resisted, you wouldn’t finish university as the same person you started. And I mean, on one level, I can understand that, these are very formative years; I departed high school a different person too, but that had more to do with the time and less to do with the fabulous establishment in which I was placed. But on another level I longed for some anarchist up the back to shout: “What if I’m perfectly happy with who I am now?!”. But that spirit seems already gone out of these kids. The spirit to yell it out anyway. The considered and existentialist graffiti in the toilets is nice, sometimes even thought provoking and entertaining.

There is some sort of repressed underground artist culture lurking around here somewhere. And I suspect the cupcake I purchased from their stall; which was highly tasty and speckled with tiny green flecks (that I assume could only have been hash); was most of the reason that I abandoned by bag of books in that café after becoming distracted by a wasp on the floor and the fact the uni has its own heath care agency branch.

I guess uni is intellectually stimulating; in a more general environmental sort of way.

I recently got a pizza with mushrooms on it. (For those of you who don’t know, I am vegetarian. This is because my system cannot handle animal fat. I do believe that the way animals are farmed and killed for meat is wrong, but I do not believe that by being vegetarian I am ever going to stop people doing this). So I noticed after the lady had put the mushrooms on the pizza, in the shop, that there was ham in the mushroom container. And I’ve been nervous about this pizza ever since.

There have been no incidents so far. So today, as I was finishing off slice number 5, I wondered about the probability of ingesting the ham. I’ve eaten 4 slices so far and not found nor suffered the effects of any meat. So does this decrease the chance of me finding any meat in the 5th slice? You might think yes. If the pizza had an 8% chance of having meat on it, the demystifying of each slice decreases that chance. Like trying to find the ball under the 3 cups at a magic show. If it’s not under the first cup you pick, and there are only two left then there’s a 50% chance it’s in the next one you choose, and after that a 100% chance it’s in the last cup. BUT, this supposes that there is a ball to be had! If you don’t know that it is a ball under one of those cups, or meat on one of your slices, then all parts of the pizza have the same chance. Every square millimetre has the same chance.

So the message in all of that is: university has hit me like a great FORCE of over-thinking, which I especially did not need.

There was this whole bit (that I later, and sensibly, took out of the blog) about the mathematical justification of walking to the next bus stop on the route while waiting for the bus as a way of shortening your journey time. It wasn’t something I could be arsed working out at the time, but I was absolutely sure in the knowledge that I was right. And when I got home I sat down and worked it out on graph paper, and it turns out that it does work in most situations.

Then, in my infinite boredom, whilst meditating on my used transport ticket (they call them Metcards). I started to ponder what an amazingly wasteful commodity they were. The common ones only last between 2 hours and about a week. Most of them only last a day. Then you just chuck it. What happens to them? Where do they go? There has to be something constructive that could be done with this abundance of unwanted printed card rectangles…? And so I began this list of ‘101 Uses For An Old Metcard’. I got to about 39 before I realised that this was even more stupid and wasteful than the tickets themselves, but here are a few choice ideas:

Make them into paper planes.

Use them to stop a door latches closing when breaking and entering.

Make a house of Metcards.

Throw a stack of them at a watermelon like you do for that card trick.

Fold them twice lengthwise then in half widthwise, and curve it around a stretched rubber band for a great classroom/office missile.

Cut them into bits to make filters for roll your own tobacco cigarettes.

Collect SHITLOADS and use them as household insulation.

Make a Metcard dress.

Use your Metcard dress to win some stupid wanky new-age fashion show.

Sell them to non-English speaking tourists as ‘authentic Melbourne public transport souvenirs’.