Ever since I decided I would move to Scotland, I've been looking forward to writing to all my friends back home to tell them how fucking fabulous it is. I'll be sending that email within the next few days to tell them how beautiful it is here, how wonderful, how cultured, how this was the best decision for me, and so on.
I could have written a rough draft before I even arrived, and every word would have been true.
But
I still don't have a place to live. It's forcing me to ask a lot of questions about myself that I don't want to ask. For example, most flats are either for "professionals" or "students." There are lifestyle considerations, to be sure, but also tax reasons. Professionals pay council tax; students don't. So while, I think my lifestyle is more like a student's (and God knows, I don't want to grow up), most students don't want me to live with them because then their flats would be taxed. And all the professionals like to talk about how they enjoy "quiet weeknights inside."
And I don't have a job. I look at the classifieds and they just make we want to cry. I don't want to work in a call center. Or manage things. Or have clients. Or any other of a long list of buzzwords that mean nothing.
All that said, I feel I belong here more than anywhere else on the planet. I love this city. And it's so easy to forget how toxic American culture is.
Annabel and I have been talking about how Americans like to view their history in movements. Civil rights, for example, was a struggle, one that creates heroes and ideologies. The same changes occured in Europe around the same time but without the fanfare. It's a foreign concept to the American state of mind, but maybe social change just happens, with or without our interference. George Bush's policies simply aren't sound. They aren't sustainable, so they too will wither away eventually too—and from that perspective, the election really doesn't matter does it?
Even if the worst case scenario came to pass and environmental destruction wiped out half the planet's population in fifty years—so what? Half the population would survive and continue doing things, building civilizations, and so on.
To an American mindset, that thought sounds like shameful apathy; to mine, it sounds like blissful reassurance.
1 comment:
there's this james thurber story about world war 12 you should read along those lines, the end of the world and all and you should read it because he's brilliant and aside from this serious essay, and a serious one about a poodle, he mostly writes really clever off the wall stuff (he used to work at the new yorker with eb white back in the day). wow that was one sentence how awful.
i'm not sure what i think about what you think :) but i read in time once that even if we all nucleur bombed ourselves to death, and all the people died, the rest of the earth would most likely regenerate and re-evolve, so that was, in a way, comforting also.
i think rather than comparing civil rights "struggles" in england and america, that had different population groups at the time of the legislation and different historical contexts, it might be more helpful to compare it to somewhere like south africa (where there was a "struggle" against apartheid with heroes and ideals etc). i'm not sure what you mean when you say social change happens without our interference, since the people passing legislation in europe even if there was no struggle per se were interfering, yah?
good luck finding a job and a flat! have you tried looking on post boards in cool coffee shops, pubs etc, or posting one yourself? surely there are a bunch of swinging young pre-proffessionals that need an extra flatmate.
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