best of a bad city

Been a busy few weeks. The upshot is, we’ve now got a flat in Edinburgh and are moving up at the end of this month. Yay?

It’s more difficult that I expected, leaving London. I’m tired and claustrophobic in this city, more than ready to go somewhere it isn’t a major undertaking to pick up a pint of milk, but all the same…we’ve been here three years. It’s familiar. Like a long depression, after which smiling is scary.

Still, there’s bright spots I’ll miss.

The University
I’m back to working with the big arts university through the end of the semester (and serendipitously, my move date), where I’ve floated through a few contracts. There’s a few aspects that drop me into a vat of spicy boiling rage once or twice a week (primarily, the huge mess the last person left me to mop up, and my supervisors’ determined innocence of this fact), but the benefits far outweigh the hassle.

My coworkers are nice. This is simple, but huge. Most of them pitch in when there’s a big task or a crisis. And nearly all of them have some artistic hobbies, so their conversations are interesting and no one stares at you for scribbling in a sketchbook or reading over your lunch break. Also – lunch break! You’re expected to take one, instead of getting the skunk eye for eating away from your desk.

Also, there’s free publications of varied quality lying about. Most are displaying student work, but others include random how-to’s…what open-source software can be used and what still required professional stuff, the important laws regarding squatting and the local squat-arts scene, etc. I like leaving these on the bus when I’m done and watching people’s fascination when they pick them up, expecting a Metro or London Lite. The best was when I dropped the Student Union magazine, ‘Less Common, More Sense,’ with its bizarre cover of a sausage in a banana peel, on the seat in front of me, and a young guy picked it up, flipped through with a growing grin, and pulled out a Polish-English Dictionary to begin working through the first article.

It’s also, several times a week, a satisfying job. Most of my job involves scheduling and maintaining records of the advisors and counsellors, which as I’m partially an anal retentive picky pain, works for me. I spend a lot of the day on the phone with students, which is entertaining in itself, and sometimes they’re really in a bad way. It can be exhausting, on days you’ve heard too many sad stories and haven’t been able to help, but then in another day or two, you’ve gotten them a time to meet with a counsellor and they are happier. I haven’t done the hard work, but I have gotten A and B together, so I feel like I’ve had a positive effect on my corner of the world.

pursued by a bear

Yesterday I was fired.

Technically, I quit, twice, after which Prancer declared that it wasn’t working out for him and I would have to find another position. O noes, rly?

It’s typical that even this conversation immediately deteriorated into a sophomore break-up. No, you’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you! Just picture me working for a short, podgy version of Ross Geller.

But only for four more weeks! Or less, if I land another contract sooner. Whee!

I should not be this happy to be unemployed in a maneating city like London. And the fellow buttmonkeys I’ve told shouldn’t have been so happy for me. And yet.

never trust anything that insists it lives on sunbeams and happy thoughts

Now is the season that air becomes the enemy. For me, that’s all seasons (thanks, London, for your fug of car exhaust, friendly black mold and generational layers of dust), but the spring months are the ones in which everyone else get miserable, and I am smug. See, I want to gloat, I always feel this way, you weaklings!

Why I should gloat over that, I’m not sure. Chronic allergies must damage the satisfaction synapses (along with those responsible for recognising that english sausages are more like damp fibreglass insulation than edible goodness). Somehow, it feels like that afternoon six months into a new gym routine when you’ve doubled your weight load on every machine and notice the bunny next to you, gelatinous layers of make-up on a face like a slapped ass, struggling to lift five kilos. You know, that second of pride in your progress compared to another, before you choke on her cloud of “If You Like Giorgio, You’ll Love Eu Du Cat Piss” knock-off and the red rage begins...

There’s surely a word in German for this feeling.

USA Today has caught up this month with a 2002 study in Hypochondriac Monthly on ragweed sufferers. From the Blinding Obvious channel, it suggests that allergy sufferers may also feel malaise and even depression. Really, Captain Hero? Someone who’s struggling to breathe, not sleeping well, itchy in membranes that can’t be scratched, and generally under the weather for weeks or months on end might not be a perky polly?

No, I’m not still bitter that in two years, a practice of GPs didn’t connect asthma and breathing difficulties to ‘maybe we should test her for allergies?’, instead insisting Prozac and her bitter cousins were the only possible solution.

Really, I’m not.

It’s just one of the many reasons for trusting my own research in recent medical trials over what some last-in-her-class in a white coat trots out in a 2-minute consultation.

Digress. Possibly as a combination of daffodils and flowering trees popping out and the miserable weather, everyone I encounter is a cranky fucker.

(Except one woman I tangentially work with, the one who happily acts as product guinea pig for her lifestyle articles—how is she so cheerful all the time? It’s just awesome. Of course, people probably think I’m cheerful all the time, given that my job description could be more usefully condensed as ‘smile while executive wankers treat you like a combination babysitter/punching bag,’ so maybe she’s got an extensive graveyard of Sims resembling co-workers on her home computer, too.)

The last few years, I’ve heard again and again in the spring: I don’t usually get allergies, but this year the pollen’s making me want to fling myself in front of the next bendy bus to cross my path, and I’m taking you with me! It makes me wonder...are the plants forming ecoterrorist circles? Do they have secret chlorophyll labs (in rectangular cells, of course, not blobby circular ones) where they’re dicing and splicing their own DNA into airborne gametes of mass destruction? Insult our Mother Gaia with your blasphemous Terminal 5 and Hummer farts, will you?

Or, it could be the bees. Doesn’t that make sense—more pollen, fewer humans venturing outside with their tasty confusing sweat? Don’t underestimate the hive mind—it cured cancer back in 1952, but then little Billy Schwartz just had to thwack that wasp nest into his neighbour’s pool for the fun of watching them drown, didn’t he? The bees would never share after that assault on their freedom.

No matter what the cause of our long national nightmare, here’s some advice to the lightweights experiencing their first allergy season:

• Benadryl and Advil is a combination that guarantees a good night’s sleep, as well as wiping away your memory of the past few days.
• Don’t drink! An immune system already in revolt over a cupful of pollen hammering around its bloodstream will not take kindly to the addition of yeast, sulphides, hops and alcohol. It will make you pay. Pretend to like vegetable juices (a good starting point: carrot and apple juice) and lecture other drinkers to fill the gap.
• Keep exercising, if only gently and inside an air-conditioned gym. Any endorphins will help fight off the ennui, and it seems to suppress the autoimmune misery for hours afterward.
• Lower your expectations. Life will suck for the next few weeks. Be aware of upcoming stress points, cut corners, watch a lot of unchallenging tv (M*A*S*H and Columbo reruns, ideally).
• Remember: your immune system is tied up fighting harmless pollen, and will put all other requests in a queue. Pimples will become semi-permanent beauty marks, bruises will linger yellowly, cold or flu bugs will take longer to shake. Neosporin is your friend, as is Vitamin C, which is (according to many snake oil homeopathic healing sites) a natural antihistamine.