displacement rant boogaloo

Honestly? I’m a little tense. I’ve done three job interviews in the past two days, and some school in Bolzano has summoned me over for an interview next week and booked my flights there and back without so much as a how’s your father. I’m sitting on the phone morning and night trying to sound chatty and yet independent, caring and yet professional, and all the while I’m straining every nerve trying to suss out the bodgy operators. Whatever I do, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m about to sign my soul over to a particularly nasty devil-I-don’t-know.

I feel a rave coming on. It's been that sort of week. Imagine that I’m drawling my words a little, lazily picking over the first couple of chords of my next tune while you lean forward in your seat, waiting to see if it’s one of the songs you like from the cd you do your washing up to, or if it’s one of those shapeless numbers from my ‘difficult’ second album (the one you booted off your iPod when it started getting full, and don’t deny it).

So when I’m not on the phone being charming (blik blik bling) I’m making my daily trip to the dvd store/netcaf on the corner (diddle ding), trawling the job sites and writing chatty yet independent, caring yet professional emails to yet more schools (diddly diddly dum). And you know what doesn’t make my day? The mandatory encounters with the staff of the place, whom I have dubbed Team Indie. Hey! Grandpa pants! I’m talking to you! (power chord)(oh good, it's one of the washing up ones. Sing along if you know the words)

I’m not impressed that you’ve got everything Michael Moore and Richard Linklater ever made, and not a single Fellini title.

I do not love you more when you make a tired office worker feel small because they are looking for a Kate Hudson comedy.

I am not tickled pink by the big TV screens in every corner playing yet another toilet-humour-shock animation series in which animated slackers sporting animated tattoos make jokes about Belle and Sebastian and animal sex.

Do not expect a wan smirk of recognition from me when you follow up an hour of tedious shoe-staring lo fi with an hour of ‘ironic’ and yet equally horrifying country and western. That thing you were playing last Thursday? With that guy keening tunelessly about oatmeal while twanging a rubber band against a shoe box? I know you went home that night and sat around drinking ‘real’ absinthe and talked about how you would be so disillusioned if he ever sold out. But he won’t. Because selling out would necessitate a willing buyer. Timbaland is not going to swoop down and add some catchy bass lines and splash his single over the closing credits of next summer’s action blockbuster. Because. he. sucks.

I know you dream of that raven-haired girl from your Philosophy of Mind tute drifting through the door and asking what you’re doing this Friday night. Give it up. I got stuck in a lift with her once and we passed the time with girl talk, and she told me she wouldn’t so much as flash her bra to anyone who hadn’t read A Thousand Plateaus at least twice. In the original French. Including the footnotes.

And when Lily went in there you were mean to her.

And you call yourselves a cyber café and you don’t even sell coffee.

And your goatees are sparse and unconvincing.

What do you want, some sort of hipper-than-thou medal? Why don’t you go knit one out of tofu and name it after your great-grandmother, you over-charging, under-nourished, condescending, lanky pieces of dick.

Except that guy who loaned me a pen and gave me ten minutes extra for free that time, you’re alright.

mind a very opal, age likewise

I’m holed up in Lily and Denise’s new flat. There’s a Rousseau poster up, and beneath it a zebra-print armchair and a spiny plant, as if the jungle were climbing through a chink in the wall, filling out and becoming realer as it spreads across the room. This new joint is in West Hampstead. When I got to London a year and a half ago Lily was living in Hackney. She used to have a crack den down the road from her house—now she has a gardening centre. If she continues this meteoric rise she’ll be installed in a Richmond mansion by my next visit. I’ve spent the morning reading The Edible Woman, which is pretty good but shows its seams—I can see how Atwood built it and why, and it gives me that twinge of mingled satisfaction and disappointment of discovering how a magic trick is done. Still, she captures something of being in your twenties, and I like to be reminded of that fraternity that spans the ages and makes all 27-year-olds a bit like all others, whatever decade or century they are being 27 in. I’m being it now, and I don’t mind a bit. If you’ll allow me to go a bit synesthetic for a moment, it’s peacock blue (the two) and bright yellow (the seven), with the factor three pulsing through, for some reason, in shades of grass green. It’s an appealling number, and it’s mine for a year.

I’ve been here over a week, but it doesn’t feel like it because I haven’t had to make my own fun—people have come to me instead, bearing hugs (thank youse orl). I went to the Heath with Nik one day, and we talked writing, and I went another day with Pete, and he made me drink too much, and I thought I was going to have to lie down in a ball on the train platform on the way home, but it turned out alright. We were talking about the time when I first got here as an epoch past. Returning to London is like getting back to Narnia. I feel like no time has passed and I expect everything to be the same, but I find everyone’s living in new digs and working new jobs and getting married. What a bustle. I like to make appointments and meet people and do things because when I sit around too long I swear I can feel my bank account depleting with that alarming London rapidity, and my body itself feels like it’s dissolving along with the cash.

It’s worth it, because Lillian is here. Maybe it’s the mountain air (she’s just back from an alpine holiday in a relative’s summer house) or maybe it’s love (she and Denise are smitten enough to voluntarily spend a Sunday in Ikea together, and that’s saying something)—but anyway, she’s just gob-smackingly beautiful. Her hair sort of floats around in great girly swathes, like she’s constantly underwater. We’ll be down the pub, all engrossed in serious discussion, and suddenly it’ll strike me again, and I’ll be like, gaaaaaah... that’s my fwend. I’m so so so so so soooooo so proud of her, of how she’s been living in London for two whole years without getting eaten by a rat or turning whiney and brittle or giving up on the things she wants. And I’m grateful for this: that we can always untangle the other’s thoughts and see them in their perfect completeness, just as if we weren’t mad, neurotic, patchwork-brained things. I was getting depressed for a bit there, what with having nothing to do and no settled work commitments ahead of me. It came as a surprise because I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it since I’ve been abroad. I’ve done incandescent rage, fist-gnawing boredom and lingering sadness, but not this. It rustles around in its dusty skirts, clicking closed all the doors in my mind. Lily nods thoughtfully, says the right thing, and sets about opening them all again. It’s a marvellous arrangement.

You’ll excuse me if I go and check my bank balance for my summer pay cheque. This work --> get paid thing is also a marvellous arrangement. If only one didn’t have to keep on re-arranging it all the time. I have a plan. I shall find a lovely school that offers a generous salary and paid holidays, and I’ll fit the premises with wings and a big propeller so I can just move it around the world as the mood takes me. See if I don’t.

the bournemouth club

The other night I woke up at 2 am to find that one of the French students had wrenched his bedroom door of its hinges in a fit of rage. The Russian kids in his apartment had posted an invitation to a pizza party under his door. When he was too snooty to reply, they took the initiative and posted through an entire ham and pineapple pizza. Next time I tell you I’m applying for a residential teaching job, will you beat me repeatedly around the head with a wet towel? I like teenagers—I like that they still know stuff we’ve forgotten, I like that they have an unerring radar for the transgressive (17-y-o Russian guys simulating fellatio with bananas on talent night… sooooo many kinds of wrong, and yet, you know, startling in its artistry), but I’m not so good with lifting their faces out of puddles of booze vomit and confiscating their bongs. It’s all very well to want to be their catcher in the rye, but you can’t actually expect them to like getting caught.

Big props to the people I've worked with who actually get teenagers. Like Russian Ivi* who explained the whole emo thing to me, who kept me up to date on all her students' love lives and who genuinely seems to like them more than she likes adults. Me, I feel kind of tongue-tied around them. They’re so worldly. They radiate all this personal power, and are given so damn little outlet for it. Thank god for cheesy music. I’ve been listening to their iTunes collections on the sly, because they’re all hooked up over the college internet. The perfect pop song is like a fire work: its only function is to detonate, release some energy and give way to the next one. It’s one thing about which they are surprisingly un-jaded. Take them to Stonehenge and they’ll complain that the gift shop is too small, but three hours in a sneaker-stank-filled gym with a karaoke machine is absolute gold. Tomorrow I leave this job and this town to laze around in London for a while, and I’m looking forward to getting out of this adolescent reality so that I can eulogise it in distant safety. I’m thinking microwave popcorn and a rented copy of Pump Up the Volume. Jesus, I feel old.