As I struggled to roll the ridiculously long, awkward black beast towards the bus I noticed the gaping gorge up to the step of the bus. I heaved the bag to stand up next to me and grabbed the handle in readiness to lift it onto the bus.

Once on I leant my friend, taller than me, on the baggage area, me standing tall adjacent to ensure the wheels didn’t propel it across the aisle, and fumbled in my pocket for the travelpass, people squeezing themselves past down into the seats.

Travelpass in, green machine digestive noise, Travelpass out.

Still keeping the bag tall I walked it into a wheelchair space, thankfully senior citizens had avoided me and kept this space for special needs travelers free.

Finally in a somewhat stable position, holding the bag hostage against the window, with an arm around it to hold onto the pole tightly, I hear a senior male voice.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes,” I answer, expecting to be berated for taking up the spot usually reserved for he and his bingo mates.

“It’s lucky you don’t play the piano.”

“Excuse me?”

I turned to the young woman sitting next to me. She was seated next to the window, on our shared seat, on the Eastern Suburbs line train. We were sitting at Edgecliff station, hesitating, the driver waiting that extra moment for somebody to scramble down the escalators and leap into the carriage. As I removed my earphones, I put on my approachable face and replied “yes?” ready to impart information about the next stop, how to get to Bondi Beach or where did I buy this cute top I was wearing.

“What kind of foods are high in fibre?”

Okay… Not what I was expecting. As I did a quick scan through the knowledge aisle marked nutrition, my brain struggled with the surprising question and offered up not answers, but some irrational motives behind it.

“Umm, well.”

The young woman was like a mystery shopper for the Nutrition Society of Australia, pouncing on unaware public transport citizens for the Australian Attitudes and Understanding of the Importance of Fibre in Everyday Diets report.

“Umm. I think fruit and vegetables are pretty high in fibre.”

She was a PhD student analysing spontaneous communication between strangers. I was a lab rat in her study entitled Quality of Information Gained from Unsuspecting Strangers. Her hypothesis was that the more surprising the question, the lesser the quality of the answer. I’d show her.

“Oh, and also breads and cereals. Yeah, grainy cereals. Especially, rough cereals. You know, the boring ones, like All Bran.”

Whilst sitting next to me since Central, she’d scanned my biometric data, found out I’d done a Bachelor of Science majoring in Anatomy and Physiology and wanted to test my memory of gastric physiology (Thursday 8am lecture, PHSI 2002, August 2002: Amylase, an enzyme found in saliva, breaks starch down to maltose in the mouth. The stomach secretes mucus to protect its epithelial walls from being digested by its own acids and enzymes. Pepsin, the digestive protease, formed by the autocatalytic cleaving of the amino acid chain pepsinogen, breaks down protein in the gut. Damn. Nothing about fibre.).

“Why?” I enquired, sure I was on the money with one of my predictions.

“Oh my doctor said I needed to have more fibre in my diet. It’s really important you know. I saw a thing about it on A Current Affair. You know, you have to start taking your health seriously when you get older. I’m twenty-one now. When I was younger I could eat anything I wanted. But I just can’t do it anymore. When I was younger my Mum used to buy those 3 large pizzas, a garlic bread and a Pepsi and we would eat it, there’s three of us, you know, siblings and I could probably eat a whole pizza to myself and then start on the next one and I would just be starving. But it’s different now. But thanks for telling me that. I was too embarrassed to ask the doctor. He would think ‘don’t you know?’ And I couldn’t ask my family, they would say ‘didn’t you go to school?’ or something like that. But so now I’ll have to have more fruit and vegies and breads and cereals. It’s important. You can’t just always eat McDonalds, but I have to say I’m thinking of having some now. A friend said the other day she was thinking of having McDonalds for breakfast and I said ‘gross’ but now I’m thinking of having some. You don’t know what’s in them though. There was another thing on A Current Affair did you see it?”

“Umm. No.” (I couldn’t bring myself to say that I wouldn’t watch that sensationalist, formulaic crap presented by that holier than thou Grimshaw princess if you paid me, but that’s another blog entry.)

“Well it was saying that lots of food don’ t have the right ingredients on the label and people don’t really know what they’re eating and it’s a big thing, you know. You could be eating anything and it’s so important. But people just don’t know. There’s all sorts of chemicals and stuff. And did you hear what happened at Bankstown station?”

“Umm. No. Today?”

“No. a couple of weeks ago. Suicide apparently. I’ve been trying to find out about it. You know, I watched World News on Foxtel but nothing came up about it. I watched you know that day and the next day but nothing. I really want to know what happened. I think it was a girl… … … …”

Etc Etc Etc Etc.

Finally we pulled into Bondi Junction and it was clear to me, she wasn’t a nutrition mystery shopper, linguistics studier, biometric data and mind-reader. She just wanted to talk.

And though it may be nice to end this with some comment on the fractured nature of modern society where a simple question of food leads to my questioning of her motives I prefer to say that it was bizarre.

Yet quite refreshing.

Three folders of handwritten notes. Complete with deliberately drawn pencil diagrams of your insides. Not sparing colour. Arrows pointing to osteoblasts, local differences in vertebrae, epithelium, cAMP, troponin, myelin. Evolution from ape to Australopithecus to modern homosapien. Flows representing intracellular signaling pathways, enzyme reactions in the gut, stages of development. A guide to cutting open a body, more or less. Assignments with cover-sheets. Most of them were a couple of days late. “Please adhere to guidelines on spacing.” “A good finish to a poor start.” “A very well written piece with excellent research. Well done.”

Three folders of handwritten notes. I can’t bear to throw them out. The complete course of Microbiology and Genetics, the majority of which I copied from Katie. The report completed with Scott after two weeks of feeling our way blind around the Children’s Medical Research Institute at Westmead. Not just knowing the names of the bones, but every tubercle, spine, groove or process. An entire STUVAC re-writing second-year physiology notes on fluoro yellow paper. The haematocrit. Obesity as cause or correlation with NIDDM. Electrophysiology of the nerve. Discussions on vitamin D resistant rickets, covered in notes for the GAMSAT exam that I was more worried about.

Three folders of handwritten notes. That doesn’t even include a thesis. But represents three and a half years of knowledge accrued. Not on a weekly basis, more often in a concentrated month block before exams. But not disliked. Actually enjoyed. Found interest in. But decided not to pursue. And will forever wonder if that was the right decision. I was happy to spout sentences I’d heard elsewhere. “Your undergrad is for learning to learn.” “Science communication is a niche market in demand.” “I might go back to it one day in the future.” I might, but it’s feeling less likely. It felt like the right desicion at the time. And really it probably still does now. Despite the three folders of handwritten notes.