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

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

That makes them as old as our first home computer.

I'm now officially scared.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

They're younger than the Reeboks I wear when I want to pretend I'm vaguely athletic. Eeek!

(And about 4 years younger than my first home computer, but that was a ZX81.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

This is flat-out beautiful writing. You've caught the essence of a particular life experience perfectly. *hug* Thank you.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Amazing writing. I love walking round Cambridge in early October, watching the freshers and reminiscing. I remember *so well* what it felt like, and you've really summed it up there.

*deep sigh*

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

It's that time of year, isn't it?
Oxford's just the same.

sigh

[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.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Uzi 9mm?

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

7 years younger than my first, which was a Commodore Pet. How I wish I still had it, a lovely bit of retrofuturistic design. Anyone for *wartrek*?
And as regards the fact that today's freshers were born in 1986, it made oi larf to see a poster in Leeds yesterday for "80s night at the Phono". I spent large chunks of 1986 in the Phono drinking Newcastle Brown and listening to dodgy old goff music, neither of which I suspect will be on the menu for the "80s nights" of today (and who on earth would really want to remember much of that decade of untrammelled greed, High Thatcherism and Duran Duran?)

[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 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.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily want to kill them all, I just want them to stop milling around like lost sheep in front of the bars in the pubs.

[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.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Phased plasma rifle in the 40Mw range? [grin]

[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."

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Beautiful mood-capturing writing. Although I might have felt better without the date at the bottom - and I'm not even old yet!

[acronym.livejournal.com]

Love the writing. There's another class of fresher, though, and please
excuse me writing here, but this is what Freshers' Week always reminds
me of:


locking themselves into old new rooms with the books and notes and binders and memories of home, not sure who or where they are but so determined, so comically overserious, uptight; a parody of the adulthood you got on 1970s sitcoms, neatly-pressed and antiseptic...

children still, insecure and paranoid (but at least they're smart, else they wouldn't be here, right? Right?), twitching at the background noise of the new neighbours moving in (and is that a knock at the door don't be a knock at the door please, please be a knock at the door), and you don't care because if you don't care it can't hurt you, but

maybe

tomorrow...

[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?"

[j4.livejournal.com]

*blush*

I always find it hard to believe that somebody who writes properly should actually rate my ramblings. But I'm very flattered.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I suppose "80s Night" for today's Freshers is the equivalent of a "60s Hippy", "70s Glam" or "Original Punk" night for me (allowing 5 years either side, that would be 67-77). Somehow I'm not sure anything from the charts in the 1980s strikes me in quite the same nostalgic way as Metal Guru or Ziggy Stardust does. (There's a good case for 1980s Indie but I doubt most "80s Nights" DJs will be playing The Smiths all night long.)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

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

[j4.livejournal.com]

Surely they can't even find Kidlington? Though if you really want to drink closer to the town centre, I'd be surprised if they'd managed to find the Wharf House, either.

[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.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

If we'd only known ....

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

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

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

[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. :)