My life has always been characterized by an above average amount of what I like to call ‘candid-camera moments’. These are the moments where life screws with you so much that you are sure some TV person who had to give up his/her dream of being a reporter because he/she could not stand the gore of real life thrusts a microphone into your face and tells you you’re on camera and that you’ve just been made fun of. Then you are expected to pretend to find it all terribly funny and to stifle your wish to do away with the people behind the oh-so-funny scam. Afterwards, you hope that you’ll never have to live through this again. I suspected that going back to university was going to put my life upside down, but little did I know that it was going to increase my candid-camera moments about tenfold. All of a sudden, they were everywhere. And I should not have been surprised – after all, I had enrolled in the strangest university there ever was.
My greatest source of candid-camera moments was lectures. The one that’s going to stick with me until the day I die (and probably beyond that) was the lecture on public art, which I started with a relatively indifferent attitude towards public art and from which I came away with a deep loathing of public art that has stayed with me until this day. Caught in between a lecturer who kept mumbling, ‘What else can I tell you?’ and an increasingly fidgety classroom, my friend Charles got so distracted that he raised his hand and asked a professional of 15 years, ‘Excuse me, Teresa, but have you worked at this before?’. Teresa said yes. Another once-in-a-lifetime lecture was the one about music management, which I had to leave half-way through in order to keep my sanity. Such was my need for freedom from that bottomless pit of boredom that not only did I not care if I had signed the register, I also made half a dozen students get up in my attempt to flee from a nervous breakdown induced by a lecturer who had majored in telling the tragic story of his life.
Another source of constant entertainment were my classmates. The memory that stands out here is the day my friend Nan took me aside to share some very important news with me. I believed she was going to tell me that she was dating one of our colleagues, so I had my answer planned (‘That’s fabulous, honey!). Then, she looked at me and said, ‘Gabi, there’s something I need to share with you. Hong Kong is not a part of China.’ ‘That’s fabulous, honey’, I said, not knowing what she wanted to tell me with this. It only dawned on me later that she was alerting me to the fact that I was stuck in the middle of a culture war as I was part of a workgroup that was made up of people from China, people from Hong Kong and myself. It also meant that I would have to participate in a 7-hour meeting conducted entirely in Cantonese. The meeting was so long that I was able to fit in a Korean lesson in the middle. It also meant that we would be the only workgroup to take a trip to Chinatown and to give our presentation in two languages.
The library became a place I got strangely attached to over the months. I have never been a person to do much work in the library, but if you’re the proud occupant of a room that forces you to stay in bed all winter so as not to freeze to death, the library soon becomes your second home. The library really saw me through thick and thin. It welcomed me with open arms the day my thesis supervisor told me my thesis was missing its main part (how could I have overlooked this?), it cheered on me the day an article on classical music consumption informed me that I was a woman of distinction because I listened to both classical and pop music, and it put a comforting hand on a my shoulder the day I was especially proud of myself for showing up before 9:00am and then found out that my friend had come in at 6:00am. In an act of the utmost care, the library also made sure I got enough exercise by sending me round in circles thanks to a system of placing books that is completely beyond me, and then sent me a helping hand in form of a librarian who handed me the book I was looking for on the wrong shelf although I had not asked her.
As the months passed, I kind of got used to the candid camera moments and was getting more and more disappointed because no reporter who has lost at life ever thrust a microphone in my face and forced me to state how funny I had found all those jokes. It seems that I will never get my 15 minutes of fame on sad prime time television. However, I am hoping that I will get something of more value, namely a Master’s Degree. Although the judges are still out, I am assuming that it will all be fine and that the university will give me my much wished-for certificate – everything else would be unfair given the amount of weirdness I had to withstand in order to make it through the course. But until that glorious moment, I am happy to know that should I be on candid camera on day, the joke will be on the producers. You simply cannot shock a person who went back to university at age 34 and made it through a course in the strangest university there ever was.
