Pale Green Things.

(This blog goes out to Mogwai Baxter Sweetman-Robinson, who passed away suddenly in the weekend. That cat was like a brother to me: we went through some times, had some troubles, but he always came through. I’ll pour some out for you Mogwai, I hope the mice are easy to catch in cat-heaven, and the rugs are super soft. Say hello to Jimi Hendrix for me.

Gone too soon Mogwai. R.I.P.

Cue the Puff Daddy… )

The other night, I was in a laundromat. I almost put my clothes bag in to be washed. Which would have been silly. I was surveying the scene. I was not used to doing my laundry in public, away from my home.

It seems that the traditional North American apartment does not include a laundry. Which recalls to me the American sitcom convention of the laundry episode, where some tired show centers an entire episode around something to do with the laundry, and pretty, young American twenty somethings cavort in laundromats and make it look like it’s just about the hippest thing in the world as they talk “deep” about how hard they have it.

Well, to put it bluntly, I felt like I was in a dole queue. And I’d brought my laptop with me, so I was that guy, the guy in the corner with a laptop in a slightly rundown crowded laundromat (foolishly I thought I may be able to pick up some rogue wireless). A homeless woman approached me, asking me if I wanted to come next door and politely buy her some fries. It could be a small. I didn’t have to buy her a large she insisted, generously. And all I could think about is that it was nothing like that episode of Friends in season one where fresh out of the high life Rachel needs to be taught how to use the laundromat.

And all of a sudden, Eddie Argos is singing in my ear that “popular culture no longer applies to me”.

We’re all in our own movie I guess.

Someone really needed to do something about the decor in that place, the juxtaposition of dead plants and cartoon animals on the wall made me feel like I’d walked into some twisted dream world.

Everyone needs clean clothes I guess. All part of that straight and narrow I’ve been lusting for after all.

We’re in our place. Which is nice. The other night, I rolled over and put my dog-eared copy of Catch-22 (I’m a bit behind in my literature choices I guess) on my bed stand, and slept a straight nine hours. Which I had forgotten that I could do, without the distraction of party-boy Italians pacing around my abode or a French man who makes such weird noises in his sleep that he could make a good living in the circus.

The apartment is warm, which is a huge relief. I guess as a student in Wellington you don’t really need to live elsewhere to realise that you get the rough end of the stick heating wise. But it’s sort of been emphasised to me in the few days. We don’t control our heating, it is paid for by our landlord, and set a pre-existing level – so you could forgive a little scrimping on the temperature. But no, we step out of the Canadian cold (it feels like a pretty standard New Zealand winter at the moment, except it’s autumn, and we’ve got about three months of slowly feeling the temperature fall well below zero degrees) into a toasty warm apartment. It’s cosy. A frequent topic of conversation seems to revolve around how cold the winter may be, and how we’ll cope. To be honest, I have no reference point for it all. Minus ten as an average low will be a little testing, no matter how I phrase it to myself. Lauren’s Lonely Planet has some terrifying facts about the cold. The streets running north to south reputedly act as horrifying wind tunnels. Radio stations reportedly give out warning times for how long a large patch of skin can be exposed to the cold without getting frostbite. It’s like the whole burn time thing in New Zealand. But nastier.

We’re nesting. Jon turned his small room into an roomy fun-house with the purchase of a loft bed. My bed arrives this afternoon. We’ve been to Wal-Mart a heap. Cutlery, toasters, toilet paper, pots and pans, food, towel-racks, a jug, dish-cloths, bath-mats and tea-towels. We’ve got them.

People have been really nice, our landlord feels the need to apologise for supposed inadequacies in our apartment that we have not even come close to noticing. His wife even baked us some tasty sugar-coated pastry treats. Jon’s relatives came to the party with a whole raft of house-hold items, and also bought around a tin of tasty baked goods.

It’s like we’re in an episode of Desperate Houswives, except no-one in our neighbourhood is trying to kill each other, or trying to look twenty years younger with the aid of poorly applied plastic surgery. And I’m pretty sure that no one is hiding a retarded black child in their basement. But, there’s a woman across that gardens just a little too much for my liking.

I just don’t trust it.

Mostly Jon and I job-hunt. I was turned down by a suspicious restaurant owner when I went seeking for temporary waiting work. He liked to hire smart people he said, so I fit the bill, but with many years of professional experience and an honours degree to my name, he just didn’t get why I was looking to work in a restaurant. Figured I would’ve been out the door as soon as a better job came along.

Fair call.

So I was at a whopping one from thirty in responses from job ads I’d applied to. But these things take time. Yesterday I had some interest. An interview for an entry-level job at a marketing/ public-relations firm. An interview at a recruitment company.

Well as I write now, I’m between interviews. The entry-level marketing position was not the slightly meanial corporate job I had picked it to be (and was surprisingly okay with) but a door-to-door commission based sales job selling spa packages for a client. “Not for me,” I said. “Sorry, but I don’t want to waste your time. I’m just after a steady income.”

“Why?” Was the reply I got.

(My interviewer was a highly unattractive, rather stocky man. He never introduced himself to me. And when going to shake my hand would pull away and say, “I’d shake your hand, but I can’t.” At first I thought it was a polite way of saying that he’d been handling poo. Or maybe just that he’d sneezed. But after he did it again on the way out, and then I heard him do it to the person he was about to interview after to me, I smartened up to the fact that he was just a dickhead.)

The speech that followed involved me having no confidence, and no desire to rise up and be a champion like he was.

“I don’t mean to blow my own horn. But I’ve done well here. And I started where you are right now.” He shifted cockily in his seat and looked at me knowingly. “I make a lot of money. And I’m not alone.”

Erm. Sorry bud. But I’ll put my chips behind someone who’ll pay by the hour. I don’t care how boring the work is. And as long as they pay me enough to feed myself and buy a beer on the weekend.

(Incidently, alcohol sales are regulated by the Ontario provincial government and booze can only be bought from government run stores, which seem to be spread sparsely. Harsh for alcoholics I guess. Rather be a beer-drinker than a polluter though, you can be prosecuted for idling your car for more than three minutes.)

Last night, with interviews to prepare for, I shaved. And anyone who knows the James Robinson shaving ritual knows that it happens every few months, and requires electronic assistance to cut through the wider forest, before using a smaller razor to really sculpt it down to nothing. Much the way if you wanted to turn a hillside full of two metre high weeds into a fine garden, you’d use a weed eater, and then employ the lawn-mower. I only had scissors and a razor, so I was not looking forward to shaving. But after purchasing a razor, and heading home nervously, afterwards I was pleased to see that the fur was only spread as far as usual, and I was really only bleeding as much as I usually do.

So, in hopes that I get a shaving endorsement that brings in millions and means that I no longer have to work (or maybe even a guest spot in the next issue of Beard Enthusiast), the Shick Quattro razor was the best I’ve used. It was the meaty sheath I’ve been waiting for my whole life. Within minutes I had turned from “Petrol Station Hijacker” James into “9-to-5 Office Worker” James. (Stay tuned for two new releases in my range of James dolls, “Scuba Diving” James, and “Barbershop Quartet” James.)

I don’t shave a lot, but when I do, I like to wince my face into a Zoolander pose, look at myself in the mirror and run my hands over my new baby-face, and pretend I’m James Bond in the awful Lee Tamahori directed Die Another Day, when he’s just been freed from the prison camp and gets to shave for the first time.

Yeah. We’re all in our own little movie.

Tags: job-hunting, laundry, Shaving