More nonsense. And a job!

Woo! It's blog time. My café irlandes (coffee with whiskey) was huge. It was served in a milkshake glass. I don't know why, but I'm certainly not complaining. My brunch of booze and coffee has energized me for the day.
After running around all fucking day yesterday to go to three interviews and take retarded tests that allegedly reveal my teaching style and skills, I have been offered 10-12 hours at €15/hour. HUZZAH! This is enough money to cover my living expenses, food, monthly metro pass, and some drinking. With the dogs and this, I'll be making plenty of money. There's also another school that said they were going to offer me hours, but they haven't gotten back to me.
Apparently March is a good time to look for jobs. The English-language paper, "In Madrid" had a whole page of adverts for native English teachers this month. The people I was interviewing with told me that, for various reasons, they need a lot of people this time of year. This may explain our troubles finding work before. I heard that Jan/Feb was a good time, but maybe we just arrived a little late and were lazy about it through the prime hiring time.
It is ludicrously simple to get a job here. No one checks credentials. I plan on openly lying in all future interviews. But even when Max and I came in and said we had no experience, we still managed to get jobs. Max is working with a guy who was a grocery bagger in the US and had a semester or two of community college. Now he's making at least €17/hour.
I think this all relates to the '80s-ness of Madrid. After the introduction of the euro, their economy has been on an relative upswing. Who knows if it will last, but people are partying while they can. And every time I watch Spanish TV, it's like I'm in the '80s. This weekend, I was dog-sitting at a guy's place and Dirty Dancing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were on. Then there were Japanese '80s cartoons dubbed into Spanish. Plus re-runs of Mexican television, which could be from the '80s or could have been made yesterday. You can never tell with the Mexicans.
Max has a theory that Spanish society, or at least Madrid, is divided into Fraggles and Doozers. The section of the population that parties all the time, trashes things, and litters are the Fraggles. Then there's the limpieza, which are apparently combination garbagemen/street cleaners. They are the Doozers. They clean up the rubble in the wake of the drunken, insane Fraggle-partying. The Doozers are also responsible for tearing down and re-building half of Madrid. Everything is under construction here. The joke goes, "How do you like Madrid?" "It'll be nice when it's finished."
Max has also convinced me to read "Anti-Oedipus," bastard that he is. I'm really enjoying it despite its mind-boggling denseness. Allegedly the authors were aiming at 15-20 year old young men. Shyeah right. I have trouble with all the details of it, and Max admits that he doesn't get a lot of it either. I get the general ideas, but some of the details are unclear. Despite this hideous complexity, I think it would do a lot of people a lot of good if they read it. I just don't know if they'd be able to. I don't know if I'll be able to. But now that I'm 100 or so pages in, it's becoming slightly easier. So we'll see.
Also, I have discovered a better way to see Madrid, though it is even more dangerous than riding around with Mario. My dog-walking boss gave me a ride home the other night on his moped, speeding down the streets and telling me to watch my knees in traffic as I held on for dear life and watched my face grimacing in fearful delight, surrounded by hundreds of lights reflected in the back of his black helmet.
That's all for now. Time is out at the cafe. Adios!

The cast of characters

Max is off "teaching" private lessons to a painfully boring software engineer. This "teaching" involves listening to him talk about whatever and occasionally grunting some sort of assertion. And he's making €12/hr to do so. Of course, no one has responded to my offers for private lessons yet. I´m still walking dogs. I´ve had two teaching interviews thus far, though. Another place sent me an email offering me a job, and there's one other place that I haven´t called back yet. So hopefully something will work out.
I do enjoy walking the dogs, but teaching pays a lot better. Plus, the bulk of my income comes from one set of dogs that involves an hour commute each way. And 20 minutes of that is walking from the metro stop to the house. They´re the retrievers, Puskas and Ekita, that live in the ultra-rich neighborhood.
I was walking them last night, and it was incredibly nice out, though it was a bit cold and windy. There were clouds going by over head and I was out in the middle of the park I mentioned, which is really just a piece of land with some paths, but it's big enough that there are parts where you can't see any buildings. I was just listening to Four Tet and looking up at these clouds racing by the moon. Very calm. Very peaceful.
On the other hand, I'd only had about 4-5 hours of sleep for the last two nights due to having to get up early and run to an interview and look at an apartment (which was not very promising, though it was in Quevedo, a nice area close to downtown). So I was exhausted by the end of the day.
Another reason that I was exhausted is that we'd been out until 3 or 4 am with Mario. He took us to a jam session at "Beethoven Blues Bar." The first people up there were playing old-style, my-woman-gone-n'-done-me-wrong blues, and it just seemed so... white. I wish I could play guitar like the singer, but he just didn´t thrill me. Then this young guy got up there and played a song in some language I didn´t recognize. He was amazing, both his guitar and his voice. I talked to him later to tell him that I liked his stuff. I thought he´d been singing in French, but it turns out that it was Arabic, though he also spoke French. And English. And Spanish. Possibly more, but I didn't ask, because I was jealous enough. He was from Algiers and he even bore a certain resemblance to a young Camus.
Mario then drove us home, even drunker than when he picked us up, along with being addled from hash and god knows what else. He kept cackling and saying, "Don´t worry. You're with Uncle Mario!" as he careened around corners in his oversized shoebox of a car. I have to say, there's really no better way to see Madrid than zooming down the late-night streets with a crazy little drunk man driving and the radio blaring flamenco music from the '20s. To paint a better picture, Mario looks like the Mario of Nintendo fame. Or, in his words, like he's trying out for a role as a '70s detective. It was a blast.
We've also met a bunch of interesting people at the intercambios. You may think an Algerian who speaks four languages is impressive, but we'd already met a guy named Guillermo that works as a translator and speaks five languages. But he doesn't seem as cool now that we've met a flaming homosexual Dutchman that lived in Manhattan for a while and speaks upwards of 11 languages, including, but not limited to, Dutch, German, Russian, French, English, Spanish, Chinese, Romanian, and Japanese. Did I mention that he works writing, shooting, and editing documentaries? Yes, everyone in Europe is cooler than you could ever hope to be. It's annoying sometimes. But we're going to hang out with this Dutchman anyway. Not only because he has an apartment in Amsterdam that he lets his friends stay at, but because he's just so damned interesting.
I'm going to meet our friend Juan in a little while at J&J's, which has become our new hangout. That's also where Max is at the moment. And it's also where I will get completely trashed because tonight is all you can drink beer for €9. I'm going to attempt to be less of a drunken ass tonight. Anyway. Juan is our pseudo-communist friend. He was a member of the Communist Youth League when he was younger, but never a member of the party. He now considers himself more of a socialist, but still has various friends in the Communist party, which he always refers to as "the CP." Because, y'know, there are fascists lurking everywhere. We met him because of a sign he put up looking for people to hike in the mountains. He sells chemical supplies to high schools. He also took us to "Marx Madera," a bar owned by the Communist Party. He's definitely a weirdo, but he's been very nice to us and helped us find an apartment, though it unfortunately got rented before we could confirm it.
I have no time to write about our other acquaintances at the moment, because Juan and a bottomless glass of Mahou Clasica calls my name. Adios.

Quasi-recent updates

I updated more recently than I remembered, which is still not all that recently. A lot has happened. My computer´s hard drive died, to my immense frustration. My grandmother also died. Still waiting for my brontosaurus-like emotion on that one. I was fired as a children's magician due to gross incompetence, both on my part and the boss's. I am now a professional dog-walker. I actually enjoy it quite a bit. I walk about four hours a day, which does wonders for my insomnia and energy levels. One set of dogs that I walk are some sort of purebred lab retrievers. The neighborhood that I walk them through contains several embassies, Iraqi, Cuban, Jordanian, Ukranian, etc. The people who own the dogs have an enormous house, with multiple security cameras and infrared motion detectors, not to mention 24-hour armed security. I had to bring my passport to prove my identity. Just to walk dogs. But the park that I walk them in is incredibly nice, except for the dog shit everywhere. It's on a hill in the northeast of Madrid and on a clear day (which is most days in Madrid) you can see the Guadarrama mountain range that's on the northwest side of Madrid. My time runs out in 22 seconds. Adios, y'all.