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.