– you can wear impractical shoes and the hugest trousers ever to uni.
– you can sit and read or sit and stare out the window at things going by at speeds greater than 30 k an hour!
– you can overhear conversations about immigration and bringing out beloved brothers between a stunningly beautiful blonde Ukranian girl and one of your favourite crinkly Italian bus drivers (the one who beeps the horn as he approaches the corner shop/deli in Nth Fitzroy so the shopkeeper can get his coffee to him, but then shares the accompanying free cake)
– you can arrive at your destination not covered in (admittedly euphoric) sweat
– you can run into students of Tutorials Past, who hail you at the front of the bus with a bellowed “Yo Sam!” from the back and then engage you in a round of catch up, much the interest of the intermediary students on the bus.
– you can discover said students* are half way through a CREATIVE WRITING HONOURS THESIS (!!!!!!)** and then share a wicked moment when he smirks “because I can’t write”.***
– you get to share a few blocks with school kids from the local middle school who an old friend would have described as ‘liquorice allsorts’ – all sorts of colours and shapes and seriously sweet, including a Japanese kid and a couple of North African Kids yelling out “good bye! good bye!” out the window to each other with great delight and that sort of after-a-goody-day merriment that makes passers-by grin
– you can fart as you leave a crowded bus full of high school students and smirk.
*The ones whose high school teachers (who, if you ever find them, will be totally bashed up) told them ‘couldn’t write’ and ‘never would be able to’, and who so impressed you with their insightful take on a fairly prosaic second assignment you were moved to a perhaps-overly-empassioned shredding of past high school teachers and comments such as ‘this is the type of work that we look for in postgraduate research – interesting, unique and well-researched takes on ordinary stuff’.
**I was so thrilled I would have squeezed this giant boy then and there, if it weren’t for half a bus and a dozen students between us. So I settled for much “I’m so HAPPY” and other mothery/aunty/nanna talk.
*** and at this point you realise why you teach, why it’s wonderful to meet students long after you’ve both moved on from the dullest subjects and are doing new things (whether that involves hitting on undergrads or reading good books**** on the bus), and why you catch the bus
****yeah right – like I’m going to pass up a good book on a warm bus on a chilly Autumn afternoon to chat up chundergrads? Psft.
