Dogs.

I met this dude last week, he was a student, I had to teach him English. He could already speak it well, but my guess is he's one of these go-getters, wants to be the best. I know I'm not really supposed to discuss this, but for all you know I could be making it up. Anyway, it relates to other things in a way. He was 22, drives a BMW, and already has his shit sorted out, nearly finished his traineeship with KPMG, so soon he'll be a cranking accountant, my guess is that he already earns twice what I earn, which isn't hard, I think most people do. But talking to him gave me a minor freak out, suddenly the alarms start ringing in my mind, telling me I have to get my shit sorted out. He told me some more things, about new years, and about his safari trip to Kenya, even though he's here learning English, he wants to travel there with a Danish group, apparently in other countries it's easier to trust fellow Danes. This struck me sideways a bit, then his new years story, about hanging out with his girlfriend, and various other couples, watching some obligatory new years television programming, which everyone watches, then doing some fireworks and whatnot. I realised then that this guys life is pretty dull, and in 10 years, sure, he'll be rich as, but what will he have done? Straight out of school, working, driving a car around, and a few crappy trips to Africa so you can look at lions from the safety of a glass army tank. Fuck it. I think if I had all the money in the world I would still live relatively modestly, that's the test though, everyone claims to be down to Earth or whatever it is, never sell out, but then when the money is flashed will they eat their words? I wonder how I would be. I'd like to think I wouldn't become any different, no, I couldn't, I would feel like a mong driving round in a BMW, it'd be like wearing white pants to me, it's just not on. Maybe some old classic car, ideally a VW Westfalia, with the barn doors, reconditioned with a new engine, and all that stylish stuff, two-part windscreen also. Maybe a boat would be cool, nothing too extravagant though, just big enough to sail anywhere I wanna go. But who cares about cars and shit anyway, guess the thing that is weirdest for me is that he knew what he wanted to do before he finished school.
Here I am in 2007 still trying to work out what I wanna do when I grow up, and the pressure to grow up is getting stronger. I don't really care that much, I'm happy hanging around being childish. Not having any money doesn't bother me that much, a little wouldn't go astray though, but I do feel with teaching English that I'm on a dead end street. There are others who have worked in the same school for over 10 years, some over 20, and this is it, this is all you'll do for eternity if you stay here, the same conversation, trying to get people to understand the difference between present continuous and simple present, which they either refuse to, or cannot understand. That's what scares me a bit when I meet these younger folks that already know it all. How did they work it all out? Maybe it relates to my perception of work, most jobs I've had in my life have been painful, so I guess I seemed to lump the 2 together, work is pain, pain is work. My first ever job when I was 12 years old was delivering Newspapers, I did this for about 6 months until I realised work wasn't for me, but I was the king, I had all this money. I collected it in a pencil case, one of those ones with the different compartments for erasers and sharpeners and pencils and gonks. Since most of my money came as coins, I put all the different denominations in different compartments, and counted it all daily. I had enough money to buy a skateboard, and some shoes, and I drank a bottle of coke everyday after work, and stopped at the video arcade to play a game. But it was the job that sucked, and the boss, an ugly wretched witch of a woman that would just yell at us all the time. Everyday I got my 20 newspapers, for which I was paid 5c for everyone I sold, and I had to walk about 5 blocks to different offices to sell them. The neighbourhood was near the beach, where I lived a few years later, but it was all uphill, when I was 12 walking a hundred metres felt like 100 miles, so the hills didn't make it any easier. There was one place, at the very top of the hill, all alone, where I had to deliver one paper everyday, I had no other customers up there, so there's the question, would you walk up the hill for 5c? But I did it everyday, sold my papers, made my $1 plus tips, it seemed that I earned less the longer I worked there. It was kind of strange for me, going into all these offices, meeting these same people, who said the same thing to me everyday as they got their paper, I never knew what to say back to them. I was just a mong kid with the same crusty hat that came in, they probably thought I was homeless or something, I think most of the other kids came from housing estates or wherever, dysfunctional families, guess mine wouldn't really be called functional. Yet the worst bit was that when I had done it all, the witch would make us stand out on the street and try to sell more papers until 5.15, this meant hanging around for 20 minutes, which like the walking felt like 100 years. I knew all the faces of the people who walked past, it was the same everyday, and they never wanted a paper, so I just sat there and waited, sometimes I read bits of the paper, they had the page 3 girls back then, so it was pretty exciting, then finally the witch let us in, and we counted the money and took our tips. So after a few months of this I knew it wasn't for me, and I avoided work for the next 10 years. But that's not entirely true, I started thinking about working again at 16, but of course living in Newcastle there was only one job, and someone had already taken that, but that's another story. It's easy to understand my excitement when having just turned 26, I moved to Norway with my ex girlfriend, and yes, got another job delivering newspapers, my life had come full circle.