… and I ended up back in Oz.
Well, United Airlines are the most officially shithouse airlines I have ever flown in all my travels. On the leg from Chicago to San Fran I had to buy some dinner. Plus they don’t have individual tv screens for each passenger.
Some good news… I may have lined up another high profile interview for my thesis. This one is totally killer… I hope it happens!!
Well the apartment is great and I am glad to be back. I need to go down to the car and get it organised. Maybe after a sleep. I haven’t driven in nearly three months so it is a bit scary…
OH! Speaking of driving, my animal XD Ford “BILT2HAMR” Falcon seems like it is going to be ready to show off come the CSAA Conference in Fremantle. It is not really showing off material, but it will at least give my academic mates a better understanding of where I come from… haha!
Anyway, a well meaning (or not) customs officer came up to me at Sydney Airport this morning when I was waiting for my luggage (like in the pre-customs x-ray check area) and asked me a few questions. Nothing serious probably just seeing how I reacted to attention from authorities. Pffft… As if someone who wanted to do something bad would choose someone looking like me to do it (severely jet-lagged humanities PhD student who stinks like total shit or at least like his clothes have not been changed for a solid 24 hours or which 19 were in the air)… Plus I am normally pretty cool with police/whatevers as I have learnt the best response is not to try to act totally cool, but to act with a mild bit of hesitation as if you are a regular schmuck who doesn’t normally get pulled over by the police for speeding, and were very sorry for even providing the necessary conditions for the precipiation of a “Hey You!” Althusserian interpellation-event, differ to the imagined higher authority as it were… Anyway, this customs officer asked me where I had been. I said Sweden on exchange. WHat am I doing. Phd, blah blah blah. Then she asked what had I been doing in the US, visiting friends? And I said, sort of, I had come back really early, because I was visiting my girlfriend and discovered that the end of our relationship had been finalised for me. That was just my overly convoluted way of saying I went to the US to discover I had been dumped. It took her a few seconds to get the drift of what I was saying, and in the meantime I had to hunt down and control my reactionary emotions who were plotting my breakdown via a huge lump in my throat. I tried to turn away from looking anywhere and I was grateful when the customs officer finally realised, after what seemed like an eternity, that I was in a very fragile and emotionally exhausted state of mind.
It made me realise that the possibility of me ever having to go through that exact moment in a totally bizaar situation again, explaining to some perfect stranger events in my life that are accutely sad/embarrassing/turmultuous, is close to zero. I was experiencing and caught up in some weird kind of singularity that was definitively unravelling who I was at that moment. Bedraggled and smelly, tired and barely functioning, and all the other things that result from the weird intersection of being dumped by someone you trully love, travelling for nearly a day straight without a smoke, and coming home from being overseas for almost 2 1/2 months. Like in that movie where all those storms intersect and overlap multiplying each other. It wasn’t ‘bare life’, it was ‘bare Glen’… caught in an emotional life-support raft in the calm eye of the perfect storm. It is hard to express how alive I felt at that exact moment.
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