the mean reds

the strangest web pop-up ever?

long week no see, my dears. i've been busy, lots of rushing, interning (The Dubliner, lovesit), writing, hanging around halfpipes, party crashing, disco dancing, casual club-whore promotions work and eating other people's ricecakes.

in other words i've been keeping too busy to stop and think about it. and entirely on purpose. there is this underlying horror taking hold that i'm not in education anymore, that i'm expected, now, to educate myself. this might mean taking a little notebook everywhere i go (which i do anyhow, these days, in case of magazine Vox Pops and ideas for The Novel...). it might also mean i'll have the get up at 8am everyday for the rest of my life. there's a sense of the 'grind' about it all, right now. i want a slacker job, one that gives me time to make things and write and read purely for myself. unluckily no-one seems willing to pay for this kind of job, or at least, i've not tried hard enough one. if i want enough to move out, the aim within the next few months, then i am going to have to grind. Lil Wayne comes to mind, inevitably. hustle harder. yar.

Will wrote a really sad but lovely piece on his blog about something similar; if any of the errant Englings are reading this and haven't already clicked, CLICK IT. i'm not going to be anywhere near as eloquent; suffice to say i'm coming down. degrees are like ecstacy. they use up all your energy on a high you think is better than anything else out there, that draws you close to a group of like-minded people. you get so wound up in the circuit of it you lose track of everything outside. but really all you're getting is a kind of fruitless insanity (in our case, over Sophoclean tragedy rather than Deep House music...). you end up not chemically deficient, but lacking influences and 'real life' culture. you find yourself sapped-up and depressed, guilty over wasted time and how you have embarrassed yourself.

though thats kind of the point, right? Cambridge, and in particular English, exists essentially as a platform from which to be as poncy as you like, to pose and delude yourself, and essentially put off ever joining the real world. i tried my best to keep one foot in reality, with overpriced train trips to London and breaks in Ireland courtesy of Ryanair. but i'm as guilty of it as anyone. i miss the libraries, the shelter of old, beautiful buildings, the creepy handyman who always showed up to fix the radiator. next time i have that problem, i'll have to pay for said creepy handyman. i even miss Ramsey. not that i ever ate there, but the comfort that it was there if i ever needed deep-fried comfort, one day.

this would be an opportune point to post some cheesy graduation pictures. but my camera is upstairs and its 1.43am, and i'm too lazy. another time. it might be a bit too cheesy a move, anyhow (and i have a few ones of those late-night swimmers they might not forgive me for...). but for anyone from Cambridge- i should name all of you like Gayle Goh did, but i won't- i miss you all, and it feels like i'm missing a limb, or at least a medium-sized toe, not being there with you now.

no point hanging on to the past, though. if the come-down is one of resentment, that 'if we're so brilliant, why don't other people think it?', then we can blame only ourselves. getting in never really confirmed 'brilliance', any more than our savagely odd, arbitrary part 2 results did. it's up to us to prove it. and that's what makes the future so exciting.