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!