Pink Dragonfly Lady

My goals for today:

Keep calm. Keep breathing. Do not give into the urge to run around in a tizzy. Try to explain to others that you are actually remaining calm, because these people have never seen you in a real tizzy.

Smile when after 10 minutes of patiently explaining to the lady at the counter what you are there for, you are mistaken for the student's mother - not the student herself. Smile also when you're told that "you could do maths if you tried harder/if it was presented in a different way/even after 29 years of not using it/if "I" taught you how.. Because really what they are saying is -- even though I don't know you from Larry, I can tell at a glance that you could do maths because I can.

That last one really got me, I mean what sort of logic is that? It goes along the same lines as, "Hey if I can do a triple bypass operation, so can you - here's the scalpel." Seriously.

Smile when you're told that no one knows anything about anything. After all - why should they? They only work at the Senior** College! I think about the ironic fact that I could find out Port Kembla's postcode for someone filling out a form on the same side of the counter as me, but the people in charge on the other side have no idea I am an enrolled student; even after I've told them what I wanted to know five times, they still think I am my own mother -or maybe the lady from Centrelink who wants to get pregnant teens back to school. They even go through the Centrelink proposal with me, while I look for the hidden candid camera and tell them I'm a student. Seriously.

Calm blue oceans. Cloudless blue skies. Birds flying into a sunset. Gentle rain on mountain slopes.

'It'll be fine,' I tell myself. 'This is just all happening for some obscure and yet necessary reason that hasn't been made clear to me.'

And with that I drove home in the rain.  'Cloudless blue skies,' my arse.


** I have now come to understand that the term "Senior" is applied randomly and loosely. From what I can glean, a senior at this particular college is actually a person aged in their late teens. Old ladies like myself are automatically assumed to be the mothers of those "seniors" and not students themselves.