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.