Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll

[j4]

Sex:
Like I said, I've decided that I prefer salad. And the closest I got to salad was a spinach and mushroom quiche from the health food shop where I have to go to buy the toothpaste I like. I should eat more salad.

At lunchtime, the town centre is full of freshers, nervous and acne-sprinkled and radiating desperate self-identification, broadcasting their image in signs so simple that even the opposite sex could understand. Some of them are tentatively holding hands -- perhaps first-night flings, or perhaps the high-school sweethearts who will soon be jettisoned in the first burst of self-destructive self-discovery. They've all changed; for the first time they are men and women rather than the boys and girls who left the classrooms only a few months ago. The air between them crackles, and it's not just the static as velvet jackets brush against each other.

Drugs:
Or lack of. I've not been drinking coffee at work, and that's probably at least a partial explanation for how incredibly grouchy I've been the last couple of days. I did allow myself to have one can of coke, on the grounds that:

- coke a) costs money, and b) can only be acquired by going out of the office and round the corner to Nadia's, so I won't be tempted to just keep drinking more and more of the stuff.
- coke tastes nicer than the coffee at work, so it's a treat rather than a drug
- I needed some caffeine to stop the shaking and weird visual disturbances, okay? Cold turkey at work is not great.

They're clutching cups of coffee, cans of coke, cigarettes, anything to keep the hands busy, and they're talking fast and nervously about what they believe, what things mean, who they are, who they are, who they are. The self, the newly-awakening self, is the most dangerous drug of all; it's like having acid tabs pasted to your eyeballs, your face splitting in a grimly chemical smile as you try to make yourself heard, your self, yourself, over the white noise of a thousand bodies stuttering into existence.

Rock 'n' Roll:
Richard Thompson, "Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years" -- only a fiver from Fopp. Okay, so it duplicates stuff I've already got, but it also covers the good bits of the albums I don't have, and features two "previously unavailable on CD" tracks. And besides, the stuff I've already got is so good it's worth having twice.

It doesn't even matter what they're buying, I can feel the agony of decision over even where they choose to stand, what they choose to browse. This could change the course of their lives. They're picking the soundtrack -- the music that will loop on their stereo through the grey hours of the essay-shadowed night, the music that will be obliterated by intense conversation in the small hours, the music that will comfort them and remind them of home, the music they'll dance around the room to, the music they'll fuck to, the music that will always remind them, the songs they won't be able to hear without crying.

I feel like I've lived a lifetime in my lunchtime. Somebody else's lifetime, and rain on the streets of Cambridge.

This year's freshers were born in 1986.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ah, we had a computer in the house from about 1980 onwards, so the contemporaries of that ol' Apple // will have already graduated. The next officially-scared point I'm looking forward to is in three years' time, when the freshers will have been born in the year I started high school.

[acronym.livejournal.com]

I'm one of them, and I'm a year to eighteen months (with a following wind) of submitting a thesis.

The 1986 thing scared me a bit: I can *remember* 1986 clearly. There's now genuinely a generation gap...

- A

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

I can remember 1980 dimly, and 1981 clearly in places.  My sister was born in 1980, my brother in 1981.

1982 is where memory really starts to kick in, for me.  However, by 1986 I was starting to have original ideas and program.

[claerwen.livejournal.com]

There's now genuinely a generation gap...

... in the wrong direction.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

I know someone who has a PET 2001 series (the original 1977 model), and my Dad programmed on a PDP-8, so the idea of old computers is not scary.

What is scary is thinking about a generation of adults who were born after Back To The Future was made, and when eight-bit computing was, in many senses, over.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Aye, I know what you were saying, I was just getting sidetracked into tech-nostalgia. 8-)

Back to the Future is a good example, though. Scary thought.

Gives me a great idea, though -- I'm going to convert my 1992 Renault 5 into a time-machine (well, it already is in a way; it only contains tapes of music which would have been available in 1992) and go back and see my undergraduate self. Not sure what I'd tell her... "Don't be so bloody stupid", probably. Or perhaps just "Down, not across."

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

I doubt I'd be able to help my undergraduate self, in the sense that people actually did tell me the things I'd tell myself, and I believed them, but didn't act on them quite enough.

Perhaps I'd tell myself to write more stuff down, or even just to read back the stuff I did write down.  I had a sort-out a few weeks back, and some of my ideas were actually dead on, if I'd only remembered them ....

For what it's worth, I think the scariest thing about being older is that there are now people aged twenty or so whom I legitimately fancy, they being unequivocal adults, but whom I could, nevertheless, have known when they were babies (and thought "ahh, how sweet").

Additional scary thought:  I don't think I was as together aged eighteen as some of the freshers here.  I don't think I'm as together now as some of the freshers here.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you would have the advantage of being able to say to your undergraduate self "Look, I'm you, and I know that we will end up in a crappy situation/shit job/less-than-optimum way if you don't do something about <foo>". I think I'd trust my future self to tell me the truth about that kind of thing, and be more inclined to do something about it. :)

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

But I trusted the people who gave me the advice in the first place, and thought it was good advice.

In fact, what I lacked was not so much the knowledge about what was the best plan as the strength of will, or possibly the confidence or energy, to carry it out.

Now, if I could travel back in time and take a girlfriend for my former self, I'd be laughing.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Well, trusting and believing someone else is one thing, but I would think specific warnings of explicit doom from my future self would give me the required KUTA to actually take heed. I can think of at least four examples where I could give my younger self a very explicit warning not to do something, or to do something else, because of the known-to-my-older-self repercussions. I imagine I'd act on those, although I might ignore ones of lesser seriousness.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

My problem has never been lack of information.  In this case, it's lack of confidence, and I myself -- even my future self -- would be the very last person I'd trust.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

> What is scary is thinking about a generation of adults
> who were born after Back To The Future was made

Reminds me of that great line; "Ronald Reagan? Who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?"

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

If we'd only known ....

The funny thing is, Ronald Reagan was probably a worse actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I took my GCSE options in 1986 and left school in 1988. Erk!

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

I was half way through my masters in '86.
Or I was an RA in Oxford; not sure...

[j4.livejournal.com]

Same age as sion_a, then?

It's a funny old thing, age, isn't it... It felt like sion_a was quite a lot older than me when we started going out, but I guess it's more to do with experience than age (and while there's a correlation it's not a strict correspondance) -- he'd already been working for years, I was only just out of university. I feel as though I've got a lot older in the last few years. The last guy I went out with was practically old enough to be my dad -- he'd've been already happily married with sprogs while I was still learning to tie my shoelaces. But then, I feel that I can get on with my parents as adults and equals now, so why shouldn't I get on with people of their age likewise?

And the great thing is that my parents are still learning new things and doing new stuff and generally having a more fun and interesting life than I am. So maybe there's hope for me yet.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Ah, now, just wait till you start hearing yourself say "Good grief, I'm old enough to be their mother!".