A long time ago in a land far away...

...called Canberra, I went out with this guy for about 6 months. He was a German PhD student in inorganic chemistry that I met at a party at a share-house in O'Connor. My housemates used to unoriginally call him Ze German, so I will adopt that name here too.

Anyway, it was a fun time and we went on a nice jaunt to Cairns and the Daintree, and caught up with a Canadian guy who Ze German had met in Melbourne. This particular Canadian fellow had skipped his vast and pleasant homeland after being overpaid $10,000 by his employer - so he quit his job, and landed in Australia. (He wasn't quite sure what he was going to do when he got home and had to face the music - he seemed to think that they couldn't do anything to him if he had already spent the money.) The Canadian had two main hobbies. One was selling pot to backpackers, and the other was magic tricks - stuffing the lit cigarette into the t-shirt (SPOILER! fake thumb), card tricks, etc. Ze German became quite intrigued and slightly obsessed with learning about card tricks and magic tricks. Being the thoughtful person that I am, on our return to Sydney I went to a magic shop on Pitt St Mall and bought him a pack of trick cards as a farewell present, thinking it might give him something to do on the 20 hour flight back to Frankfurt.

After Ze German returned to Deutschland, we kept in touch sporadically, as you do, until it all dropped off as we moved on to other places and people. In one of those phone calls, he did tell me that he had been practicing his magic tricks and was actually starting to do some small corporate events as a magician, but I assumed it was just a small moonlighting gig to his day job as a research chemist. Recently, though, my friend Heather sent me a link to his latest website and it looks like the world of redox reactions and cations has given way to entertaining a lot of weirdly smiling Germans on a much bigger scale.

It's a funny world. To think, if things had been different, I could have been Claudia Schiffer to his David Copperfield. Or just hopefully not Siegfried to his Roy.