Worst Day Of The Rest Of My Life

The day started at 7:30 in the morning. I got up, put on my pre-planned outfit, shouldered my pre-packed satchel, walked into the kitchen, and added my pre-made food. Then I did my hair, ate breakfast and before you know it I was walking down to the other bus stop to meet my destiny.

“So!” says a bright and intrusive voice in my head, “Your first day of university!” the voice now taking shape, a reporter in her early twenties with Asian heritage dressed in a navy blue suit poking a microphone in my face, “How do you feel?”

Me: “Fine. Fiiine. A little neurotic, but good.”

I arrive at my stop nearly two hours before class starts, even though I only live a 15 minute car journey away from the uni. I sit there at the time the bus is supposed to be at the previous stop quite a way up the road. The bus does not come at the listed time. It does not come at the next listed time either. I conclude that now I will be too late to meet my desired connection. The bus finally comes careering down the road. Once I get on the bus driver just sits there for a few minutes and I feel like barking “I don’t know about you mate, but I’ve got somewhere I need to be!” – but I decide against it. The bus moves at a frustratingly slow pace, then, two kilometres from my connecting stop, the bus driver pulls over at the side of the road, not at a bus stop or anything; grabs the cash-box, and walks off to the nearby hotel. It takes me a while to realise what has gone on. I say to the lady opposite me “Am I right in thinking that the bus driver has just left?”

“Yeah,” she says, “He does that all the time.”

I stare at her. “What? What’s he doing?”

“Prob’ly gone to the toilet.” She says off hand.

I utter my long repressed line “I don’t know about him, but I’ve got somewhere I need to be! I’m going to miss my first day of university.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be back.” she says “Go with the flow, love.” the elderly here are so forthright it’s disconcerting.

But I’ve had enough of this, so I say “Bollocks to this.” leap off the bus and leg it to my stop. After 20 minutes that bus comes past the stop I’m now at. I resist the temptation to give it the finger.

Then at the time the connecting bus is supposed to come a bus pulls into the stop. I get on but after a few kilometres I realise that it’s not going the right way. I ask the driver and it turns out this bus is the same type as the one I just left. It has now taken me not only far away from my destination, but right away from all the bus routes that go to the university. I get off the bus anyway, in a place I haven’t even seen on a map. I go back in the direction I came. ‘There are a lot of taxis here’, I think. ‘What do the lights mean with regard to whether the taxi is in service? How much is a taxi to uni from here? Where is here?’

By now it is 20 minutes until my first class starts. Luckily I stumble upon a bus stop for a bus that goes to uni. Unluckily the bus doesn’t come until my first class is starting. I then decide to walk along the bus route to the next stop due to some complicated theoretical mathematics that I haven’t even worked out yet. So by now I had been up for two and a half hours, walked more than 5 kilometres and I was only just nearing my destination. Already 15 minutes late. I was in a state. I was having a day wasn’t I? And it hadn’t even begun.

I had sat there with the other nervous first years at orientation who had asked about the booklist and been told that we didn’t need books yet. We were in effect told, in not the same words “Naah, daan’ wurry ahbaad’t!” that’s Australian for “No, don’t worry about it.” We would be given the list if suggested readings in our first class and we had about three weeks to actually get the books.

So I arrive in cinema studies, 20 minutes late, open up the course outline to find that we are already supposed to have a book I would later find out cost $104, and that we are supposed to have read 20 pages of it. That day all my classes present me with textbooks I am already supposed to have, online workshops I’m supposed to be doing, things I need off the official website and 2000 word essays I need to hand in in 28 days.

No-one talked to anyone as we stood outside the lecture theatre that was misprinted on our timetables. They just fidgeted and tried not to make eye contact. No-one knew why anyone else was standing there and they couldn’t bring themselves to ask! It was such a soul crushing tableau of what modern society has become. And no-one can point the finger at me, call me a hypocrite and say ‘very well for talking about it but you did exactly the same thing’; because I broke the ice and found out why everyone was so confused; and I got the evil looks for it too.

I had forgotten how much hard work all of this was on all fronts. I was so tired and stressed. But I was grateful to learn that another misprint on the timetable meant that classes finished an hour earlier than I thought. So I called my grandmother to tell her that I was going to be early at the bus stop up the road where she was going to pick me up. But I had to leave a message on the answering machine so I assumed she was out and wouldn’t get the message before I was there anyway. So when I arrived at the bus stop and she wasn’t there, I decided to walk home. So I get home and the garage door is open and she isn’t there. I realise that she had got my message and is now waiting at the bus stop I have just come from worrying herself to death about why I haven’t arrived there yet. So I try to unlock the garden gate at the side of the house, but the lock is about 50 years old (literally) and has one of those keys that are so simple a monkey could pick the lock it fits into. The problem with this key is it is shaped like a castle’s ramparts on both edges, so when you put it in the lock it turns right around at each of the places it gets skinny. I finally get the lock undone, dump my bag in the entrance, together with my orange juice that I just bought (and is fast going off on this very hot day) – and I run all the way back up the road to the bus stop and my grandmother.

She’s in a state, she did get the message, she caned it all the way here, she blames me and she can’t understand what went on to begin with. I try to explain it to her and tell her that I’ve also had a terrible day at uni. Then, once we get home, as usual, she won’t leave me alone, she keeps prodding and poking and asking me things. I have just run a whole kilometre, up a hill, after my horrid day at uni in the heat of the day in pants and a long sleeved top. I am ruined and all I want to do is wash my face, get changed and have a nice glass of my now warm orange juice. But she follows me into the bathroom not allowing me space to breathe sharply asking me questions until I have to practically shout at her to “get out and let me wash my (felt like adding in an expletive) face!” She leaves, but after I emerge she follows me into my room where I had the hope I might get changed, but she’s still pestering me. I have to tell her to get out again and wedge the door shut to gain some privacy. I give up on the orange juice for now. When I’m changed I go straight into the kitchen and I tell her the whole story from start to finish, all in one breath. She says many things repeatedly about how awful, terrible, shocking and bad it all is, asks me to tell most of it again, and then refuses to hear any more because she has a headache. I’m the one who went though all of that!

A few days on more misfortune befalls me and I lose my $104 Cinema Studies book that I bought just earlier that day after debating for a week whether to buy it considering how expensive it is. I retrace my steps madly and leave my details everywhere I can think of, the café I last had it, Lost & Found and the bookshop I bought it. No-one could help me. Everyone gives me so much sympathy especially the poor guy at the bookshop. He would have only been 24 and I came up to him and I told him my whole sorry tale down to the end of my search tearing up pathetically as I did so (later when I told this to my mother she spat ‘Oh that’s a bit rich’ at me for getting emotional and I genuinely hung up on her for it). But the nice guy at the bookshop looked like he was on the verge of tears too, with his head between his hands pulling at his face and torturedly apologising that they couldn’t do anything.

My mother and I later had a huge conversation about how after this catastrophic upheaval (which I had quickly created for myself) I will have learnt my lesson and will never lose anything again. I didn’t believe her, and told her that there was nothing that could stop my incompetence. Earlier I had been pondering lines from Amanda’s blog, feeling a kind of kinship in our shared clumsiness. “at a certain point I realized that instead of adjusting my habits, which seemed impossible, I would simply adjust my sensitive attitude towards myself and my belongings and realize that they were simply fleeting, earthbased baubles, meant to be broken and lost ANYWAY in the great churning of cosmos movement (ohh and maybe I was just some cosmic helper, not only part of the universal puzzle but there to speed up the process of things!....oh!! special! special!! charming!) and fuck it let it break and let it get lost. I dun carrrre.”). I kept thinking those words over, again and again in my head all the way home. Maybe I need to adopt that attitude? I thought. I can’t seem to do anything about it, it’s not something that can be stopped; it is something that must be coped with. Unfortunately I am way too attached to my possessions for this to be an option. The only thing that made me feel better about losing things was being able to masochistically work my arse off at my job to get my money back. But alas I have no job.

But the good news is, before I had to think too much about that, I got my book back. One of my recent acquaintances from Drama also had a bookshop bag that looked exactly the same and we swapped in the back room where they make us leave our shoes, so the bag I left at the café which I later thought was not mine, was indeed the bag that I brought in there, just not the one I thought it was. So everyone got their books back eventually and the world resolved not to have it in for me too much…

No. Just hang on a damn minute… I changed my mind halfway through that and turned it into an ‘everything is alright in the end and that’s what matters’ kind of post, because after the event that’s how I felt it should be.

But that’s not how I felt about it at all!

It’s horrible. And I hate myself for it, I really do. It’s not that the world has it in for me at all; in fact the world has been uncommonly kind to me, giving me my things back after I idiotically and repeatedly lose them!

This oaf, this buffoon! I can’t keep a hold of any anything unless it is physically strapped to my body! The concept of two bags is too difficult for me to comprehend. I’m losing my mind as well as my possessions. I won’t accept this as normal in this environment, this apparently confronting and affrontingly new life; for if this is how normal, what hope do I have? I am a disgrace. I’m fucking up my life. I am a menace to my own cause. I can’t stand to be around this woman.

The stream of abuse is not stop, I delight in deriding her.

You should be put down. Now you’ve got lost in this place for the first time. How does that rest with your record? Weren’t you just boasting about your sense of direction? And now you’ve started tripping over you own feet. The umbrella, now the juice. You just keep getting progressively clumsier. First you couldn’t remember a few things, then the answers didn’t come quite as quickly as they used to. Lately you’ve been stumbling into tables and walls. Next you’ll be walking into doors! Oh, but hang on – you have! And crashing into parked cars. You’re degenerating sweetheart. Sitting on the floor of the train in your new clothes pretending to be anything more than the urchin you are… And a mirthless laugh follows.

I had fond memories of that umbrella. It was really tactile and reassuring, perfectly what I had been looking for. I’ll miss it, just as much as the money it cost. All those noble plans of giving away the SHITTY umbrella and I gave away the good one instead. Maybe the person who finds it will treat it better than I did. I hope it serves them well. I don’t deserve an umbrella.

Who am I to make the world think that I am a worthy person? Those lies, that make up.

I haven’t learnt my lesson at all. I have failed at life. I’ll be eating a can of corn for dinner. Can’t stop crying.

Now it’s raining.

I’ll get my period tomorrow.

The huge Goth in the coffee shop sneezed his whole face over me. Maybe I’ll get a disease. Maybe I’ll get hit by a car as I cross the street. That finite line on the horizon tells me nothing of what is coming. I’m only adding to the mound of shit. I have never been more aware of how easy it would be to liquidate my funds and catch the train in the other direction far away. One day I’ll hit delete on all of this instead of save…