Threnody for Chill, or [NP[NP][PP[P][NP]]]

I had decided to travel back to Scotland in mid-August already this year, even if only because it would have been foolish to let the first month’s rent go entirely to waste.

But I was certainly also attracted by the opportunity of finally experiencing Edinburgh’s very own Festival Fringe, the largest arts event in the whole wide world. Despite being infamous for crowding the city with visitors and pushing prices of practically everything through the roof, I can now confirm from personal experience that the Fringe is immensely inspiring and simply unforgettable. I can’t think where else some of the experimental, innovative or outright controversial works I have managed to see would have access to such a massive and diverse audience. Where else could a comedian source an hour-long set exclusively from his memories of a childhood destroyed by repeated sexual abuse, recounting these horrific incidents as anecdotes? Nothing but shock value? Hardly: to turn the tables on his own abusers by making them the butt of his jokes, thus painting them not as the mythical demons we know from tabloid newspapers but rather real people who, as sick as they may be, are indistinguishable from the rest of us clearly constitutes an endeavour that is cathartic for the artist and extremely enriching for the public debate. The Fringe is brimming with such works.

Before I had managed to finally settle in when all that was over, the school year began. I stood behind the stall of one of my societies at a fair, answering freshers’ questions, not being able to believe that I’ve already been here a year. I felt very mature all of a sudden, and not entirely unreasonably, after all: I am renting a flat, buying and cooking my own food, and now even paying gas and electricity bills! There is just one thing that stands between me and responsible adulthood: I lack gainful employment. Originally, I had thought I would be able to find a job soon after my arrival, but not only was I immediately swept off my feet by the aforementioned festival madness, but I also realised that despite not needing a work permit as an EU citizen, I did not possess the required National Insurance Number, which is allocated to all British citizens at the age of 16. Off I went to my local Job Centre hoping that I would simply fill out an application and be done with the whole matter. Unfortunately, bureaucracy works in mysterious ways, and I was told that I needed to make an appointment at the central Edinburgh branch by calling a (paid!) phone line. I unwillingly obliged, waited for a week and got up an hour early for my appointment, which ended up taking no more than 10 minutes. From that moment, I was legally allowed to enter into employment, although the magic number itself would take three more weeks to arrive.  

Full of optimism, I started browsing through part-time job offers online; entirely drained of all of it, I closed them one after another, not finding anything that I could even marginally enjoy and that wouldn’t include working with children, flyering or calling people: the worst case scenarios. Drunk on the desire to earn some money of my own I even filed an application for one of the many Christmas jobs with the Royal Mail. Only the following morning did I realise that spending my evenings and nights during the exam period in a warehouse outside of Edinburgh slaving away and quite possibly lugging heavy objects around would not be the best of ideas. My motivation sunk somewhat and school became more demanding, and so I put my “career” to rest for a while. Until, of course, I discovered a few weeks ago that an art house cinema I am often a patron of was seeking front of house staff. I submitted an application demonstrating as strongly as possible my interest in film and experience with arts events organisation; but I was far from being the only one. In a mass email, the cinema’s manager asked for patience as they had to process forms from over two hundred applicants. Long story short, more than a half of them had, unlike me, previous experience with working in a similar position, and even out of those just a few would have been invited for an interview. I remembered the way I described the mass psychosis that is flat-hunting in Edinburgh in one of my previous blog entries – it turns out job-hunting might not be much different.

At any rate, I am quite unsure how I would have been able to work and study at the same time. Second year is proving to be significantly more demanding than the first. I’m taking four single-semester courses (two each semester), some of which are not assessed on the basis of a final exam, meaning that I’m having to complete projects and write essays instead. In addition to that there are weekly translation exercises for Gaelic (into Gaelic) and poetry classes, which are by far the most frustrating, as reading the 18th century literary version of a language one’s only been learning for a year is quite the baptism of fire. I’ve not even found time to commit to a volunteering activity. Fortunately enough the above also means that I am sitting just one exam in December, on the 8th. I will therefore have to be very intensely active in this regard between then and the day I leave home for Christmas. I’m going by coach: air tickets were already in excess of £200 for the one way at the beginning of October. It’s clear to me that this endeavour will require a lot of mental concentration on grandma’s Christmas baking and the spirit of the season.

Still, even though all this is just a month away, I still have a lot of writing and studying to do before then. The state of relative calm I was experiencing around this time last year has disappeared somewhere in the murky depths of the past. Would I change it, though? Not in a million years. I still very much feel that I am in the right place at the right time and incredibly fortunate to be able to study in a field that I enjoy. That makes any hardship seem trivial.
 

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