Coming back from the Hanging Rock races I had strange conversation with the person sitting next to me on the connecting bus. The bus ferried passengers from the race track to Woodend station and was packed. This woman sat down next to me with her young daughter on her lap. She struck up a conversation with me and asked who I was at the races with. I pointed to Ms Jade and Jason who were sitting in the seats across the aisle. She asked if I wanted to swap seats with her to be nearer to them, but I said that I was OK where I was. It was only a 10 min bus ride and it would have been a hassle anyway to change seats. I was quite happy to peer out the window and watch the world go by. She found this quite strange, and asked me a stack of other questions and tried to fit me into some kind of category such as a genX-er. Exacerbated by her inability to do so, she called me "strange", "not normal".
What is normal? It is impossible to define and I think that "a normal person" doesn't exist. You would think that an academic at a major university (which she was) would also agree. Is it normal to be a 40-50 year old male, showing off to your wife with your impressive ability to get drunk (like this is really hard to do) and then walk up to two people sitting at the races and slur "How good is it to be an Australian today?" This happened to me and Ms Jade. We looked at each other, then looked at this man. Ms Jade responded that it would be good if we were ahead on the punt. Not the response he was hoping for. He then looked at the cryptic crossword I was doing (obviously not an Australian thing to do), muttered some derogatory remark under his breath and walked off. To answer him, it's not good if you are representative of Australians.
I am not "normal", and I'm glad.
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