Date: 18 September.

Location: Persillade, the only decent cafe in all of East Melbourne.

Yesterday, while at a copywriting master class at the Centre for Adult Education (more on that later I’m sure, but the headnote is and I’ve started learning about copywriting. — I figure I love to write, so why not do it for someone who may even pay me? Though, of course, that would involve toning down my snark considerably so success is dubious prospect) I had a moment I need to share.

**

I step into the geriatric elevator at the CAE building. Behind me pile in two girls in their late teens, sporting matching bad dye jobs and battered iPhones, and a boy not much older, attractive in a puppyish kind of way. The girls are all atwitter.

A girl: “Ohmigod I know, you’d think after coming all this way she’d date an Australian. He looks, like, what? Indian?”

I put this painful close-mindedness down to the cloud of teenage idiocy that temporarily settles on a girl at about 15 years old and is particularity opaque when she’s with others similarly afflicted.

Our companion is not so complacent.

Boy, clear his throat and speaks up: “You know, he could still be Australian.”

Girls, shocked at this unexpected interruption, exchange glances, shift closer together and make their defence: “But she’s from — where’s Raiza from? Like, Afghanistan? So you’d think she’d want to date an actual Australian.”

The lift doors creak open and the girls make to bustle out, but not before our unexpected hero gets the last word in.

Boy: You girls are gross.

Behind everyone’s backs, I grin.

**

The entire interlude took no more than 30 seconds but it made me pause to reflect in a way a dozen The Age editorials never could. I hope the girls feel the same.

Precious little else to report from me. My mother is in town but she occasionally reads my blog so I have nothing to say here save ‘hi mum’. (After 27 years of being ‘mum’ she now styles herself ‘mom’, but I’m stubbornly refusing to observe a change that speaks volumes.)

Love

Alex

Posted with Blogsy