Off Topic With Ashley

I was a bit flustered early in the evening, because my train was going to take somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred years to get me to Keperra.

It really is an awkward place to get to from here. It’s going completely against the public transport grain, and I’d essentially have to take a train to the city and back out again with a twenty-five minute wait for a connection.

I concocted about three different plans to get me there, but in the end I ended up missing my trains and upon realising i was half an hour early, I sat around for an extra forty-five minutes and drove there instead.

Driving is a really interesting thing from a psychological perspective. It makes people really antisocial, and makes me in particular exceedingly and unjustifiably angry. It’s somewhat of a depressing struggle trying to keep myself from flinging obscenities at every slow driver, fast driver, inconvenience and traffic light that comes my way. It’s quite a difficult art being a considerate, socially competent driver.

I got there about ten minutes late because I stopped to write in the engagement card I’d bought earlier in the day. It’s also pretty difficult to come up with something that doesn’t sound snarky or overly ironic in circumstances like these. I usually aim for something informal and almost nonsensical, because you can’t go wrong if the recipient doesn’t understand what you’ve written, but considering I haven’t seen either Jess or Nath for the better part of an entire year I wasn’t sure how well that would go down, so I ended up writing some words that I hope didn’t sound too snarky or overly ironic.

When I walked in there was a distribution of hugs and I handed over the card with a twinge of anticipation. It went over well enough, and we did some cathartic standing around for a bit.

I spent equal portions of the evening sitting awkwardly near Rach, and sitting comfortably near everyone else. At the beginning of the evening there weren’t many people I knew and I guess I was a bit self-conscious, but toward the end when Scott and Tom and swarms of other people turned up it was nice.

The party was hosted out the front of the house under the shade canvas area. Jess had hired a table and some chairs, and had laid out quite an impressive assortment of nibbly bits. There were also candles which I painstakingly lit with safety matches, only for them to be blown out shortly afterward by the wind.

When I headed home, I was greeted by a massive spider dangling under the bougainvillea tree I needed to walk under. I’d gone out the front door since the back door has shifted and has a nasty tendency to jam up and lock you out, so I had to walk out of the yard and right around the damn arachnid. People across the road looked at me funny.