![]() ![]() The cost of the ticket used most of my stipend. Not yet a year out of college, I bought my plane ticket while on a fellowship in Human Ecology, a gig that paid a stipend of $2,000 for a semester of teaching and research assistance. To travel to New Zealand for an extended stay, like I did in 2011, you could get a “Working Holiday Visa”-that is, if you intended to both labor and sightsee in the country, and if you were under thirty. Usually, if people are laughing, at that point they stop. ![]() Instead, if I’ve had too many drinks, I add: “After I ate the mushroom, I lay down in the guest bedroom and waited to see if I would die.” That was partly why I ate the mushroom-why I went to New Zealand in the first place.īut I don’t tell them this. People usually laugh they look at me with narrowed eyes, perhaps concluding that I am more zany, carefree, and wild than they initially believed. “You really had no idea if the mushroom was poisonous?” they ask. It bursts out of me, unbidden, prompting listeners to make little noises of surprise, their expressions both amused and disturbed. “I picked it from a patch of grass and carried it to the guesthouse where I was staying. “The mushroom was big and white and fluffy, like a marshmallow,” I say. I tell the story at parties, or during banter with a love interest-and usually after a few drinks. It’s about how I once ate a mushroom I found in New Zealand, though I had no idea if it was edible. ![]()
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