Melissa Down Undah!

blarghhhhh kill me I’m so tired of learning about coral.

it’s cold, rainy, the wind’s blowing about 30mph, overall just a very depressing day.

so until now i was too emotionally scarred to talk about Full Moon Party (which happened the weekend of March 9th), but the arrival of my shiny new Queensland ID today (it took 13 of the 14 days it was allowed to take to get here…so annoying.) put me in a much better mindset about the whole series of events and i think i’ve finally gotten to the point where i’m over it all and it’s just a funny story now. so to begin…

the weekend started out well enough, we were all super keen for the Full Moon Party which was hyped up so much that we all basically thought it would be the party of the semester (and for some people it was). so my night started out with me hanging out with Casey, Madeleine, Leon, and Debra at GR and making it out to the Magnetic Island ferry terminal a bit later than we’d expected (but we had the most epic bus driver ever on the way over…he let us listen to music on his iphone while he was chatting with me & Madeleine, so missing the ferry was okay). so after running to chase a ferry we weren’t going to make (and me dropping my weak-ass phone that decided to commit suicide after a drop from waist height), we decided to kill some time (about 2 hours) by wandering around the area. me and the girls decided to play in a fountain we found in a park while Leon went to the liquor store and had a jolly old time frolicking and talking to Aussie girls we met there that were very much more sober than us.

here’s the lovely fountain:

and here’s me standing on top of the fountain (the platform was about six feet tall, so the girls gave me a boost.)

so we finally caught the 9 o’clock ferry to Magnetic, made some new friends on the boat, and as we had been pregaming throughout this whole process, we were all very drunk by the time we made it to the actual party (this is not bragging about my drunkenness, this is a key component to the series of events that determined the outcome of my weekend.) i lost the others because i was the only one of the group staying the weekend at the hostel that the full moon party was being held at, but proceeded to put my stuff away in my room and pack my clutch with the necessities for the night (remember that it was drunken me who did the packing, as this will be crucial later). i headed back out to the main bar/dancefloor/party area and quickly found more of my American friends who wasted no time in insisting that i share a “pail” (literally a small bucket you would take to the beach to make sandcastles out of, only filled with booze) with each of them. for the first part of the night we were all having a good time dancing and socializing…

(me, Jen, Alex, & Taylor…i was so jealous that i didn’t get any face paint, because somehow i couldn’t manage to find any)

however, shortly after this picture was taken, my night took a turn for the worst as i entered the bad end of the drunk spectrum and started crying uncontrollably about missing alex and missing home (borderline hyperventilating and inconsolable at some points). my friends were so good to me and stuck with me the whole night, taking turns trying to calm me down and walking with me to anywhere i decided to wander. during the last few waking hours of that night i was walking around with Brittany, who was calmly talking me through everything and eventually got me to stop crying. she took me to down to the beach for a walk and it was at this point where i stopped being sad and was just angry for no apparent reason.

adapting a “f*** the world” mantra, i decided it would be an excellent decision to go swimming. mind you, as i was a. hammered, b. had a bathing suit top, but no bottoms, and c. IT WAS HIGH STINGER SEASON, this was not the smartest decision in the world. however, i stayed in the shallows and neither drowned nor was stung by a rogue jellyfish (ironic seeing as the next day Lulu got stung by an Irukandji on her foot, the only exposed part of her body in the stinger suit she was wearing while horseback riding on the beach), and came out of the water unscathed and put the rest of my non-bathing suit-esque clothes on. i was still pissed off at the world at that point, so when two guys talking to my friend Shrey asked me to go back into the water with them to skinny dip and one of them had the audacity to grab my hand, i flipped my shit, jerked my hand away and decided to storm down the beach (leaving my clutch lying defenselessly in the sand). This is where things went from bad to absolutely shit. Shrey chased me down the beach and calmed me down, but when we walked back to go get our stuff, both my clutch and his backpack were totally GONE. after looking literally everywhere they could’ve been moved and asking anyone who would’ve known where our stuff had gotten to, Shrey and I eventually gave up the search and went to bed. i woke up with the sun fully grasping the magnitude of my dire situation. on top of my phone being initially reduced to flashlight status (it was white-screening, a.k.a. useless except as a flashlight), in losing my clutch i had inadvertently and simultaneously lost my state and school IDs, my credit card, my debit card, all the cash i had on me (amounting to about $50 except $10 i’d randomly kept separate), countless other cards that held some sort of significance, the keys to my hostel room (which i had to put a $20 deposit down for), my free meal vouchers, my ferry and bus tickets home, and my iPod. MY IPOD. what the heck kind of drunk fool thinks it’s a good idea to bring her iPod out?! the good news was that by some miracle i’d decided to leave my passport, the $10, and my dorm room keys in the hostel room before going out, but that was about it other than the clothes i’d brought with me. stuck for two days on an island at a hostel i’d already paid for with no means of contacting the outside world and no means of getting money. in other words, grade A f***ed. i spent the entire morning borrowing people’s phones to call my parents, borrowing money to get by, and going for walks around this beautiful island that i couldn’t enjoy simply to keep myself from screaming and going crazy. i considered ditching the second night at the hostel and heading back to the mainland, but i stuck it out, even though i felt sick to my stomach with worry the whole time. but i got through it, and had a very enjoyable time just chilling out on the beach for two days in spite of it all, which i couldn’t have done without my amazing and understanding friends. i filed a police report (which, three weeks later i’ve still heard nothing back about), cancelled my credit cards when we got back to JCU, and went out and got a temp phone (a very pretty HTC Wildfire that I didn’t want to give back when it was time to) while they were fixing my suicidal phone. bit by bit, my life is slowly being put back together.

Taylor, me, & Jen on our last day at Magnetic Island (my best girls <3) 

but the kicker is that the final piece of the essential things i lost that night finally came back to me today…i got a Queensland ID to replace my MA one so i could use something other than (and less valuable than) my passport for going out…here it is in all its glory:

it makes me look like a stony-faced bitch taking a mug shot after she murdered someone, and i think that’s hilarious. all i can say is, lesson learned, and all you can do is live, learn, and laugh about it.

i swear, between the mosquito-bites-on-steroids and the random mishaps due to inherent clumsiness, it’s going to look like i barely escaped Oz with my life, haha.

and we’re totally walking across campus in this tempest for mexican fiesta birthday festivities. …this should probably be a sign seeing as there’s been widespread flooding in southern queensland and new south wales very recently…hmmm.

#end of times

much like i did 2 1/2 short years ago after a few weeks of living at PNob when i got to UMaine…it usually takes a little while, but i think i’m actually starting to feel comfortable here. i like that i can feel somewhat like i belong here, that this is starting to feel like home to me.

anyway, enough of the mushy stuff. i’m going to be soooo beat tonight. i ended up going out to a stoplight party last night and even though i came home really early, waking up for my 8am this morning was so hard and even worse because our coffee machines were out of order. it’s just been a long day in general and i don’t think i would be functioning right now if my prac hadn’t been cancelled this afternoon. as it was, i almost missed my afternoon lecture because i napped for too long. i don’t know how the aussies can do their school work during the day.

but i got to talk to alex just now, which made me very happy. he had a gig in portland last night that he rocked, but had me worried today because his phone died and he was incommunicado for the better part of a day. thankfully, though, he didn’t drive home in the blizzard and crashed a someone’s house in portland until he could drive home this afternoon (nighttime, EST). can’t wait to listen to his set! ^_^

but anyways, back to the packing, and here’s hoping that we have an amazing trip to brisbane for future music festival! pictures to come! ^_^

xxx

Mel