Urban

Adam gave me a lift home from rehearsal yesterday. As several people remarked, it would actually have been quicker for me to walk, since he was parked more than halfway between my house and the rehearsal venue and it took us a while to get to the actual vehicle itself due to having a lift war with Izzy. But, it wasn't the (lack of) time saving in which I was interested: it was the car journey with friends. In Melbourne, I was in a car every second day, and sometimes, yes, we would drive places to which we could easily have walked (I remember several trips to the McDonalds in Clifton Hill; especially the one where Victoria snagged me the number of the Drive-Thru server). I know it's a ridiculous thing for which to be nostalgic, and that being in a car with my friends is more confining than walking with them, so there is no inherent gain to spending time in such a manner, but I can't help it: I remember the car ride to Michael's, where the CD player got stuck, and we listened to 'The Name of the Game' ten times in a row; I remember when Andrew took us driving out around the countryside, and then we parked right next to a couple dogging in a red bull vehicle, and they stopped; I remember Aspen and I considering running over pedestrians, just to see if we could get away with it. I remember all this, and the thing I take away is 'cars', not 'friendship', proving just how terrible a person I really am (because the pedestrians thing left if ambiguous).

I chased a fox around for a while last night, because that's just how exciting my life is. I don't often see foxes in Edinburgh, which surprises me, because they seem to be all over the shop in London. This particular vulpine was quite brazen- he was just sitting in my neighbour's garden, eating quite a large chunk of meat (I thought he was a dog at first), and he really only left when I was more than halfway towards him. And even then, he only went three houses up the road. He was obviously an urban fox, is what I'm saying, and what surprises me is how unafraid of foxes I am. I'm very nervous around animals usually, and this is a feral beast with both claws and teeth, but I followed him for a time, just to see where he was going. It seems a contradiction, when I will balk at a dog, which is supposed to be domesticated.

The time may be drawing near where I have to actually put my mouth where my money's already been spent and deploy my TEFL qualification: three separate interlocutors- my mother, Rik's sister and Lydia- have bought it up in the last week and I got an email the other day saying that now is the best time to look for jobs teaching the old English-as-a-second-language.
This terrifies me, much more than any fox ever will, because once I start applying for jobs post-uni, I am officially admitting there will BE a post-uni and that it is near. I know logically that my degree must end and that, were my tertiary education to be interminable, I would, in fact, not appreciate it. Uni's only good because it's evanescent- it's a time to experiment and do stupid things and sleep all-day and stay up all night and take on five shows at once because you can put the rest of your life on hold for a while. But the energy would dissipate if it had to be sustained for too long: I had much the same thoughts about Australia- I liked it because it was impermanent, and so I knew that I had to do all I wanted within the space of a year. In the end, I completed most of my Australia bucket list, but there were things left that I wanted to do, and I can see the same situation arising with Edinburgh. By which I don't mean the city of Edinburgh, but the university lifestyle I lead here; I know there will be classic student larks that I have not undertaken by the time I graduate. I'll probably never make it to Big Cheese or GHQ, or sled down the crags, or walk into a random lecture theatre, say 'your professor's ill and asked me to fill in' and then proceed to blag my way through a lecture (this might, in fact be for the best). And I doubt I'll make it to fifty shows. Oh well, better luck next degree.