This is what happens at work

1. Arrive at work at 3pm. There is some sort of social gaggle between shifts. They call this a "meeting".

2. Begin my duties. These involve standing in front of a printer, feeding paper into it and taking note of how many papers I've put into it. I do this for the next 8 hours of my life.

That is all.

Love to Los Campesinos!

Easter was awesome. How awesome was it? Oh, well hey, this stuff all happened:

Pancakes.
Awkward flirtations.
Sky Larkin birthday cape.
Dananananaykroyd moment.
Los Campesinos!
Dancing.
Cheese fries.
Freaks and Geeks.

I write a lot about missing the UK and all, and for a few hours at the Wonder Ballroom last night I felt about as truly happy as I could have possibly felt at that very moment. An avid supporter of Los Campesinos! for the past couple of years, a band whose albums topped my best of the year list and whose Glasgow gig at King Tuts in 2007 was one of the very best gigs I had been to in my whole time in the UK. So to see them in Portland made me terribly homesick, I had actually been suffering anxiety and stomach pains all day leading up to the gig; feeling a bit like seeing an old lover one last time.

Though the room was only 25% full at best, I was still so happy to be up front, like a teenager getting to the gig early to stake out his post. Whilst having a chat about bomb drills during Desert Storm, a lovely, Scandanavian looking blonde girl in a pink dress interjected and we struck up a chat. My friends who know me well enough would laugh, knowing how flustered I get when a pretty girl talks to me, with my NO game and 190 mile per hour nervous pace of nonsensical banter. I sort of black out...it's freaking ridiculous to still be this way at age 30. I somehow kept it together and managed to get onto international travel, something she was about to do and one of my rare areas of pseudo-expertise. Whether or not I was doing well on this little social adventure went out the window, because at some point whilst Los Camp were soundchecking I noticed a really familiar guitar lick...I thought it was just my juke-brain-box for a minute, but once I realized that it was the guitar players actually playing a Dananananaykroyd song I had a mini-freak out. I tried to explain why I was so excited about their soundchecking but I got that dumb-founded look that one gives you when you say "OH MY GOD THIS IS A DANANANANAYKROYD* SONG!" to someone in America who now thinks you're a crazy person. So yeah, that happened.

* Dananananaykroyd are friends from Glasgow, and they're one of my favorite bands on the planet. They excite me.

Los Campesinos! were at the top of their game, even in front of a small, but very enthusiastic crowd. With all the sing-alongs, dancing, finger pointing, and shouting I felt like I was at a hardcore show circa 1998. That's the kind of energy that I live for at gigs. I felt like a teenager again, a very smart, semi-literate, dorky teenager with a heart bursting full of love and a fire in my hips. It was the single happiest hour of my life since arriving in Portland.

Oh, and there's this ridiculous notion amongst Portlanders that there's no dancing in Portland. Well fuck that, we were dancing to Los Camp. I don't know if it's because it was an all-ages show or whatever, but we danced our arses off. It was magic.

Lessons learned, and other topics not adequately covered in this blog post:

-I'm possibly maybe getting slightly better at chat with pretty girls, though still need to keep it together when something reminds me of Glasgow.
-That's probably why I never dated girls I actually fancied in Glasgow - too scared!
-I've still got it in me to exhaust myself at a gig.
-Portlanders DO dance. I saw it with my own eyes.
-I need to watch more Freaks and Geeks. Like, all of it.
-My friend Naomi has the patience of a saint for dealing with me this much.
-I should really pay attention to how much coffee I consume. It's way stronger in Portland than what I've been used to.
-Sky Larkin's fab and all, but Los Camp really need to bring Danananananaykroyd to the US next time 'round.
-How does one say goodbye to someone with whom they've met at a gig? Do you exchange info? Possibly a topic for another post...

It would have been lovely, but there's this thing

At 3am on the west coast the only person in America that I'm following on twitter is one girl in Portland who is out at karaoke getting wasted and horny. As she drunkenly tweets about hot guys and bad music, the mid-morning clouds are shining over Britain. And last night my worlds lightly collided: when drunken Portland karaoke girl was sadly heading home alone, poking out between clever Graham Linehan tweets was an update from a girl in London who also sent a tweet about finally heading home. It gave me pause, since she's one of those girls that I've not known nearly enough but if I had continued living in London am pretty sure I'd have - for better or worse - fallen in love with her by now. It made me think of London and how I was really starting to hit my stride there after a rough start.

Then I looked at the date - April 10th. Fuck...the 10th...January 10th...visa expired...had to leave everything behind. It's been three months since I left the UK, and I'm starting to think of London more fondly/tragically, like it was a late-term miscarriage - something that was uncomfortable at first but after I let it into my heart I fell in love and eagerly working toward a better future for us. Today would have been 9 months in London. I would still be working at the BBC, I'd have made more awesome friends, I'd have finally gotten my shot as a guest DJ at HDIF, the guys at the falafal place around from the Buffalo Bar would know just how I like my order without even asking, I'd have had three more beautiful Bottle Rocket adventures in Glasgow, and I would have summoned the courage to make a move on that girl before getting suck in the friend zone. I'd be shopping for a wedding present for my friends Connie and Jamie who are getting married in June; they're beautiful and fun and I have such great memories of them and it kills me to think that I can't go to the wedding. There would be ATP in May, which I would be much better prepared for than last year, which caught me at a strange time in my life. I would have been able to sing and dance and clap and hug along to Dananananaykroyd's album launch show. I'd be dreaming up European adventures to Hungary and Greece, and checking Ryanair's website every day for incredible deals.

As it is, I'm in Portland and trying so hard to come to terms with the shape of things. I've already had some adventures here, but I'm really, truly concerned that I checked my heart at the security gate at Heathrow. Something just doesn't feel right.

But I'm powering on in a complicated haze of awful job, online dating, flathunting, great coffee, bad clubs, overpriced martinis, good gigs, and a handful of really odd social interactions.