I Am A Wonderful Human Being
Being out of work for the past 5 months there is a void opening on my C.V, and a wear mark on my bedroom carpet where I pace up and down all day wishing I had something to do. So I decided this week to do volunteer work. I am a selfless, gorgeous, caring young man, and you are welcome to me, England. I applied for a few positions on do-it.org and got a call from a nice guy over at Gateshead Volunteer services telling me that since I am under 26 my ‘case’ will be handled by him and the Youth team. This is fair enough and I go and meet him and we chat for a while and we part ways with him agreeing to find me jobs based in admin, journalism or advocacy. However he also invites me to become active in the Youth Action Team, a sort of scheme designed to encourage young people to volunteer their time to bolster their chances with UCAS and job applications. They are holding a picnic in Saltwell park on Friday, there’ll be lots of volunteer organisations I can chat to and I can help out passing leaflets around and chatting to potential volunteers. Fine Fine.
So I wake up this morning and it is pissing down, torrential rain and I have to be at Saltwell park in 20 minutes. Every bone in my body screams ‘fuck the needy’ and demands I go back to sleep but I force myself out of bed and into clothes and up the hill to the park gates. I get there and there are only a few people waiting around, standing under umbrellas watching some men from the coucil slip about on the grass trying to erect a gazebo. I am introduced to a few young girls from the volunteer service and they chat with the guy from the volunteer service while I stand and smile aimlessly, desperately trying to remember the names of these people I was introduced to only three minutes ago. So the difficulty erecting the gazebos in the downpour has forced the event to be moved to the little community centre for the bowls players further down the park, which is all fine and dandy, but now we have this one solitary gazebo in the middle of a field and we’re cowering under it. The guy from the youth service announces he needs to head down to the centre and get things ready for the visitors arriving at 12 and asks us to wait and direct anyone down that way, as many of the people coming to set up stalls dont know the event has moved. This leaves me stood under a tiny gazebo in the middle of a field with three seventeen year old girls that I have never met.
There follows an excrutiating twenty minutes where the girls neither speak to nor make contact with me as they chat amongst themselves and I busy myself pretending to check my phone and rolling a few cigarettes. The fact I was there with the young girls was creepy enough to begin with, but as the minutes flew by I began to feel creepier and creepier and started to realise it had been a long while since I’d spoken. I started trying to find an ‘in’ into the conversation, something that would reinstate me into proceedings, verify me as safe or sensible, and at best make me seem slightly cool or funny. I was just toying with the idea of taking a friend-of-your-parents-like interest in their A Level courses when one of the girls brought up David Carradine (‘that actor that hung himself’) and the other girl piped up asking how ‘hanging yourself could be sexual’.
Brilliant, I thought, finally a way into the converstion. having not spoken for such a long time made my voice crack as I butted in with ‘auto erotic asphixiation’. They looked at me for a moment and I started talking about how it works. As my mouth rambled on I retreated into my head and heard myself saying ‘inject a tangerine with amyl nitrate’ and began screaming at myself internally ‘SHUT UP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’ but before I knew it the girls were staring at me dumbfounded and I was worried I might end up on some sort of register.
Luckily they forgave this misjudgement and allowed me into the Youth Action gang and we chatted merrily until 12 and headed down to the centre for the festivities. When we got there it was more of a shed but everyone was in high spirits. I set about talking to the orgainisations I wanted to work for and collecting leaflets while the girls conducted questionaires. Then we all had free non-alcoholic cocktails and cakes and I went to get my picnic out of my satchel but had accidentally skewered a pear onto the end of my umbrella. I was very sad about this, and desperate for any topic to spark a conversation, proceeded to show a bruised pear to everyone who came near me. A little later on i was given my own Youth Action Team hoodie, a big red thing with a logo on the back which is the snuggliest thing I’ve ever worn.
Around this point the event was winding down, the community project samba band for the elderly, ‘silver Samba’, was packing up its drums, a few of the stalls were leaving and I decided I fancied grabbing a cigarette. I had thrown my satchel under the table with disgust after the pear incident and so had to weave through the crowded room to get to it, then duck down to grab it. On my way up I accidentally elbowed a man in the small of the back, pushing him into the two women he was talking to, in turn pushing them into their display table making a little screechy noise. I quickly mumbled an apology and the man turned around. It was the fucking Mayor of Gateshead. He looked me up and down with bemusement, a bit like the sassiest cheerleader in ‘Bring It On’ would do, smiled and said it was okay. But I could tell he hated me. His ceremonial necklace thing is amazing though if you’ve never seen it.
I escape, roll my cigarette and try and find an out of the way spot. Being part of a youth project, I’m guessing, means setting somewhat of a decent example so I thought it best to smoke away from everybody. I go around the corner and hide behind one of the big hedges that surround the bowls green and light up. Some people begin to leave the centre and I realise I was not as hidden as I thought I was. I take a step back, trip a little and end up sort of inside the hedge, Not quite entangled, but no real exit strategy either. The group of people walk within a foot of me and all see me. I don’t bother trying to make an excuse, I just smile and nod at the team of volunteers from Mencap, the mental health charity, from inside a bush in the pouring rain. Luckily I hadnt spoken to them about volunteering because I’d stated that I wasn’t interested in any ‘roles that involved care work’. This was my round about way of admitting that people with learning difficulties unnerve me ever since a girl with Downs Syndrome spat on me.
Having said that, the organisation I am most interested in working with is a group that are ‘advocates’ for people with disabilities or who have trouble communicating their needs or requirements. Kind of like a trainee social worker. The other organisation I am applying to is to become a volunteer journalist for a Youth services newsletter thing, and I have an interview about that next week, along with a lunch meeting with all of the Youth Action Team to discuss a mini festival. All in all a good day, and everyone I met was really nice, but today made me realise that I’m lucky to have any friends at all, I have a knack for making the worst first impression. I will probably start blogging more if I can keep up this ratio of makingacockofmyself to socialevents ratio.
