dom.blog

“Could I live in America?” – well, I’m about to find out…

I was looking through my ‘little paper journal‘ from my Boston / California trip back in 2011, and found this scrap on the prospect of living in America. It’s a little reserved: by “I probably could” you should really read “hell, yeah!” – which is good news, because I am indeed moving to Chicago very soon to start a new role within Groupon.

This won’t be news to any of you, because ever since February I’ve been in the process of applying for the job, interviewing for the job, sorting out contracts, preparing to move out of our flat, finding somewhere to live, applying for a visa and organising a farewell party. (In case any Facebook refuseniks are reading this – it’ll be on Sunday, 8th June. Come along!) And although I’ve been holding off blogging about any of it – based on a superstitious fear that the whole enterprise would immediately unravel – I’m going to bite the bullet and say it. Assuming the US government doesn’t hold any great objection to me, I really will be moving to America 😀

And I’m impatient to get going.

Cat’s final Recklings gig

I’m procrastinating to avoid going shopping for clothes, even though this shopping will be in a good holiday-enabling cause.

So instead I will mention Cat’s final Recklings gig, last Saturday, at a darker-than-the-deepest-night venue in Brixton. It was a good crowd, at least for the 90% of us who were there for them and immediately decamped to the pub afterwards for beer and giant plates of German sausage.

I’ve also managed to catch up with a good number of people these past few weeks including Abbi, Maryam and – on Thursday night – Robert dropped round on one of his surprise visits to see me and Josh and collectively stalk our old classmates on Facebook. (“Everyone in that photo went to school together! What kind of people still do that?”)

I also saw Calvary last Sunday at the Lexi. Where to start with this? It’s obviously not a bad film in the way that Eat Pray Love is a bad film – you can’t just slate it wholeheartedly – and it was a lot more fun to watch than the last ‘good’ film I failed to get, The Master.

But I still didn’t get it. Is it so clever to have characters talk about “easy roles to play” because – WINK WINK – they’re in a film? Do we really need to have a character pick up an improbably austere payphone on a windblown cliff-top just so we can inter-cut the shot with his daughter chilling out on a luxury roof terrace overlooking the Thames? Perhaps as a DVD extra the words JUXTAPOSITION could flash on the screen at this point. If the aim is self-referential comedy, it would have been funnier. I don’t mind film clichés themselves, I just think this was taking itself far too seriously.