London Calling…

As planned we were on the road by 8. However we were surprised to discover upon getting into the car, that the GPS did not have a location for LAX international airport. After some minor pissing around we found Airport Boulevard on the map, which we reasoned was highly likely to contain the airport. So we got on the freeway and started carefully following all stated directions. After about 15 minutes of a complete absence of signs to the airport we realised we could not be going the right direction, at least partly because we would have been there by now. At this juncture PhD boy had the ingenious idea to set the GPS to the Hertz return point at LAX, which had the GPS immediately send us in the opposite direction than the one we had been driving in.

Not only have we not gone to the right way, we now have to get all the way back from having gone the wrong way. So at 8.20, we are farther from our destination than where we started, and PhD boy is beginning to get pretty anxious, as being the driver he has somehow internally assumed responsibility for the screw-up. At this point I am still fairly calm, possibly because the “shit, will we get to the airport on time??” feeling is such a commonplace one by now that I can’t be bothered fully embracing it, or maybe just because when someone else is panicking I always feel like that part is being handled and so I don’t need to do it.

I admit that I did notice PhD boy was speeding. Or rather, as we were on a freeway and seemed to be going substantially faster than the other cars, I assumed this was what he was doing. And we were pretty late. So while I wouldn’t have asked him to do it I certainly didn’t ask him to slow down. What I did not know was how fast he was actually going, because one of the side effects of not being a driver is not really being aware of distances and speeds in the same way, as you are merely a passive observer. So when there were suddenly some pretty loud sirens I was not entirely mentally prepared. That’s right kids, we were getting pulled over by the cops. We had to drive off the freeway onto a side road, at which point PhD boy has gone from anxious to pretty distressed, as he is not exactly used to being pulled over, and is in a foreign country, in a rental car, and we are already very late. So naturally the cop looks in, combines obvious nervousness with speeding, and concludes that we are pissed drunk. It takes a good 10 minutes to convince him that this is not the case, after which he tells us to sit tight for a minute, gets in his car, waves, and drives off. After sitting there for a minute or two confounded by the conflicting actions of telling us to stay and then driving away, we concluded that we just had to go, and got back on the move.

Some more frantic (but below the speed limit) driving finally gets us to LAX which is, surprise surprise, on Airport Boulevard. It’s just that Airport Boulevard happens to be 10 miles long, and our beloved GPS was sending us to the wrong end. I spotted a Virgin sign for Terminal 2, and we pulled up there at about 8.50. There was a reasonable chance that I was fucked at this point, but after bidding a brief farewell to PhD boy I grabbed my stuff and ran into the terminal. To discover that in fact, I should have been in terminal 6 for Virgin America, this was Virgin Atlantic. I briefly contemplated calling the boy and asking him to drive back, but dismissed this as unproductive, and went looking for a way to terminal 6.

Apparently no-one ever does such a thing as walk anywhere in LA, so the only way anyone could direct me to said terminal was via the bus. At this stage my overall likelihood of being royally screwed was exceedingly high, but decided I’d make a break for the flight anyway. Got the excruciatingly slow bus and eventually arrived at terminal 6 at about 9.05 (remember, flight at 9.25), then frantically ran around wondering why all the signs said “Arrivals” on them. I think I was shouting swearwords at the air and mentally writing off a thousand bucks worth of emergency plane fair home by the time I spotted a Virgin employee walking around and accosted him with multiple frantic questions.

When he realised I was incredibly late for my flight he was unbelievably cool. He just said “right, run this way”, and sprinted up to the ticket desk (which turned out to be a floor up, in my frantic state I was apparently oblivious to relevant signage). I asked if I could still check in and his response was “with me you can”. He had the girl check me in and said that we would try our best, that there was no guarantee I would make the plane but we would give it a shot. We then proceeded to literally run through the airport, throwing people out of elevators, cutting in line, pausing briefly at the security desk to throw away all the liquids I had over 3 ounces, then getting through the check. He couldn’t go through that way but told me to run the last 300 yards to the gate and I might make it.

If I had not gone back to training a month ago I might have dropped dead at this point, but I managed to find the energy to run it, and made it to the gate before the queue for the plane had disappeared. By this time I was breathless, sweating, and incredibly relieved, at which point Steve (the incredibly cool dude who saved my ass) re-appeared from somewhere grinning, and gave me a big hug and a voucher for a free drink on the plane. I officially declared my undying love for Virgin America, and then proceeded to collapse into my seat.

New additions to the rules for happiness

- Never believe you can get anywhere in LA in a reasonable amount of time

- Never trust a small talking box to know where the airport is if you don’t

- Whenever possible, fly Virgin America :)

So a couple of weeks ago I flew over to the west coast to join PhD boy on part of his intrepid road trip adventure. This involved flying to Vegas to meet him, going on a day trip to the Grand Canyon, hanging out in Vegas for a night, then driving to LA and meeting up with akawaka and then chronos for food, drinks, and floor mooching.

Overall, this was a pretty rockin’ holiday. Vegas is indeed pretty tacky, but in such an extreme unapologetic way that is has its own bright shiny ridiculous charm. I have to admit that I loved it, though I don’t know if it would be worth spending longer than a couple of days there. Our trip to the Grand Canyon was also pretty fantastic, in large part because it involved helicopters. Everyone loves helicopters.

We left Vegas after a couple of days and headed to LA, stopping along the road at a former copper mine’s ghost town, and a spectacularly redneck gas station with a huge “Ron Paul Revolution” sign 50 feet high. That plus a water fountain outside was pretty much all there was for miles around, they also sold bottled water, various foodstuffs, and saddles. Yes, saddles. Your guess is as good as mine.

We eventually made it to where we were going in LA despite multiple GPS fails. By which I do not mean that the GPS broke in any way, I mean either it failed at telling us exactly where to go, or we failed at asking it. The latter because we were occasionally uncertain about addresses, the former because GPS is only accurate to a range of 10 metres. In Ireland this not a problem, because the concept of having another nearby road when a perfectly good one already exists (and sure we could just stick a roundabout in if there was a traffic problem) would be viewed with skepticism and general distrust, but LA is a finely meshed network of interlaced freeways. Soaring concrete flyovers and bypasses and the dozen looping exits to get from one to another are pretty frequent, and if the GPS is incorrect in identifying which one you are currently on then quite frankly my friend, you be fucked.

This was understandably a source of some frustration for PhD boy, as he was doing all the driving. That’s right, I can’t drive. Yes, I know it’s ridiculous, but you know what else is? Owning a car you don’t fucking need to drive places you should walk or get the train to, and then complaining that the price of petrol is too high and there is nowhere to park. Granted I should learn to drive anyway, believe me, it’s on the list. But so far I have never had even the slightest desire to own a car, or live anywhere where this would be a necessity. So it’s a little far down said list.

In summary, driving in LA could suck a tennis ball through 15 feet of gardenhose, so we tried to do as little of it as possible. After a couple of days of impossibly perfect weather and extremely fun mooching about, it was time for me to go back to new york and PhD boy to continue his journey up to Yosemite, which I was of course deeply jealous of. Being the experienced travel junkie that I am, I did not leave very much of a margin for error in planning our trip to the airport, as it appeared on google maps to be approximately 5 miles away. Flight was at 9.25pm, so I figured if we were driving by 8pm it could not possibly leave me with less than an hour of actually being at the airport time. Now, anyone who knows me has probably experienced my somewhat cavalier attitude toward air travel. For me this actually was a substantial margin. To try and place this in context, ludicrous things I have done at airports in the last 3 years include – but are not limited to, the following:

• Showed up at Gatwick with a boarding pass printed online and no luggage 11 minutes before my flight left.
• Accidentally brought a flick knife to customs at Stansted
• Lost the passport of the person travelling with me in the taxi on the way to the airport
• Lost my own passport the previous day and picked up a new one from Cork the same day I was flying from Shannon
• Forgotten to reset my clock to local time, overslept by an hour, and paid a fortune to get a cab to a ryanair airport an hour and a half outside the city.

On each one of these occasions, I have still gotten the flight in question. As a friend of mine said the other day “I will stop doing things at the last minute just as soon as the universe demonstrates to me that they will not work out”. I have to admit though, that even by my standards my trip back to NY was pretty spectacular.

To be continued….

Just kidding, I have not really eaten a hot dog. Though I am told that to be an authentic new yorker you must have eaten at least one “dirty water hot dog”, which means a tube of glistening meatlike stuff extracted from a container of possibly never changed new york water purchased from a vendor with a cart on the side of the street. If this is a dealbreaker, then I am pretty certain I will never attain new yorker status.

After a couple of weeks of firstly having a houseguest (read: moocher) on my floor, then being on holiday, then having my brother down for a visit, I am finally alone in my tiny apartment once again. Tyrion has further compounded his mooching by publicly calling me a lovely person who merely has a hard exterior. He is a born optimist, and has yet to learn the universal truths that things do not always work out ok, I am not a nice person and that some people really are just stupid. Give him time.

I am growing more accustomed to NY, settling in somewhat, and starting to get to know people. It takes more getting used to than I would have expected, but then I suppose moving from ireland to england doesn’t exactly impose culture shock, whereas europe to the US is slightly more dramatic. It’s hard to say what I think of the states or new york specifically. I see many excellent qualities, but unfortunately the men here tend to remind me of jerkboy (formerly known as the yank) and the women of the more annoying Sex and The City characters. Not that this holds for everyone, but it does seem to be fairly commonplace.

To correct one common misconception however, new yorkers are not rude. They are only rude compared to people from other parts of america. Compared to the english they are the very model of charm and decorum.

Recent thrilling adventure include my participation in a small part of PhD boy’s road trip, and my journey home from said. Since the journey home story is almost too ridiculous for words I am giving these an entry of their own. Stay tuned for yet another tale of intrepid airport adventure and basic idiocy.

“Everybody has their own path”

“And some of them are wrong. I want to be right”

“Wouldn’t you rather be happy?”

“But how could anyone be happy without being right?”

“You might not know you were wrong”

“So I could be happy, and be wrong, but happy because I didn’t know I was wrong?”

“Exactly”

“Then I’d rather be right.”

“You don’t mean that”

“Yes I do. You are just not capable of believing I mean it”

I do not mind paying for things. I am not particularly rich, certainly by NY standards, but I am also distinctly not poor. I am not (in my opinion) particularly cheap. I do not resent paying for things that I want unless I genuinely feel like I am being ripped off, in normal circumstances if I feel something is not worth what I would have to pay for it I simply don’t buy it. Ditto for the many things that are more than worth it but which I clearly cannot afford.

So I find it annoying when people bitch and moan about say, the price of popcorn. Yes, it is blatantly ridiculous to have to pay $8 for a carton of dry disgusting lumps of food with the texture and taste of polystyrene foam. Absolutely agreed. (As you may be able to tell, I hate popcorn anyway). But the exercise of disagreeing with the price of an unnecessary commodity, and I cannot emphasise this enough, intrinsically involves not buying any.

By all means complain about income tax. You have no control over how much you are obliged to pay, what it is spent on once you’ve paid it, and not only do you not have a say but you don’t even necessarily know. But do people not understand how ridiculous it is to stand there and bitch about how it can’t possibly be a dollar fifty for a can of coke while paying for the beverage in question?

Allow me to introduce the concept of worth in economics. What something is worth, is what someone else is willing to pay for it. Is a one dollar umbrella worth $4 in a rainstorm? The answer is probably yes. You are paying a dollar for the umbrella, and $3 for the umbrella _now_. You could have bought it for a dollar yesterday when it was sunny and carried it around. You didn’t, and so you pay $3 for the privilege of not looking like a pillock wandering around the park in the blazing sunshine with an umbrella. The vendor is making $1 for the umbrella, and $3 for standing out in the bloody rain. Don’t want to pay $4? Then there is a very simple solution - get wet. Is this approach morally justifiable? I don’t know, but I have had more than one job that involved standing out in the elements and I would dearly have loved the ability to charge my employer extra when it pissed rain.

Granted, there are certain types of socio-economic unfairness that only apply to people who are of very limited means. Wealthy individuals can afford to say, buy a house and pay the mortgage, as opposed to paying rent. On a smaller scale they could also afford things like health insurance, so if something does happen they will not be stuck with insane medical expenses. I freely admit that generally, it is easier for someone with large amounts of money not to spend that money if they don’t want to. Tragic injustice? Probably. It still doesn’t explain why poor people buy more fucking lottery tickets though. Because lets face it, thats just dumb.

Essentially though, this just makes it all the more irritating when someone with a good income writes letters to the Times about the exorbitant price of salted snacks, cinema tickets, or trips to the seaside.

In summary, if you have money, do whatever the hell you want with it. Save the whales, buy a dirtbike, see Star Wars 167 times in the cinema, I could not care less. Just remember that you fucking spent it, not the whales or the bike salesman or George Lucas (may he rot in the specially conceived hell for people who resurrect rejected scripts). So if you don’t like where it went, next time you get your paycheque have it inserted rectally so that you can have something legitimate to whine about.

If there is anything I have learned about New York since arriving here 2 and a half months ago, it is that of all places in america, this city must be the most accurately portrayed on tv. Seinfeld, Sex and the City, you name it and if its about New York then there are people and places and situations exactly like the ones you are seeing every Tuesday at 8 on Fox. With the possible exception of anything about vampires. But I can’t rule it out.

Consider then for a moment, how often women in these shows are approached by random guys, how casually people are asked out on dates, and how the dating scene in general is intrisically connected to lets face it, motherfucking _everything_. Then consider how goddamn annoying this must be, if you are female and under the age of 50.

Perhaps I am being biased, perhaps I have just had ridiculous experiences, or perhaps its just manhattan. I am fully prepared to believe any and all of those things. But so far, my understanding of the process of dating in New York is as follows.

If you are male:

Go to a bar. Any bar.

Check for women sitting alone at the bar. If there aren’t any, go to a different bar and repeat this step.

Pick a female at the bar and order a drink beside her Ask if there is anyone sitting there, or if she is waiting for someone. If she says no, sit down, and commence politely asking questions.

Once you have established her name, the next step is to ask what she does for a living. If you are a penniless bum this establishes whether she is a good catch, if you are an investment banker this is to establish that she is not after your money. Or if you a particularly repellent and weird investment banker, that she is after your money and so might remain interested even when you turn out to be a sleazy asshole.

Anticipate the reciprocal question and answer in as impressive a fashion as possible. For example, if you fix the air-conditioning for the offices of the hedge fund across the street, you can say you work at Lehmann Brothers as an engineer. This is all entirely acceptable and routine exaggeration that no woman could blame you for.

Show off your knowledge of everything as much as possible. Feel free to wax lyrical about rennaissance art, experimental blues, tuscan cooking, how much you enjoy long term relationships and like to cuddle, how wonderful it would be to find your soulmate. Or if you are intellectually challenged, just allude to your sexual prowess. Women love it when men advertise in this blatant, embarassing and pretentious fashion.

If you are black, from Brooklyn, and have a dead-end job and no college education then you are probaby hitting on a white girl in manhattan (in fact its probably me, since 90% of the guys who hit on me match this description), so hint about how your penis is almost certainly superior to your target’s previous experiences. White girls are always impressed by that. Make sure to drop ‘you know what they say…’ into the conversation. It’s so subtle it is practically subconscious.

Offer to buy her a drink if you think there may be a return on your investment. Remember, you may need to try this with quite a few women before hitting the jackpot, buying all of them a drink might cut the evening short due to lack of funds.

Flatter her as much as you can manage, use any excuse to tell her how wonderful and intelligent she is, despite the fact that you know nothing about her whatsoever. Use the word “sexy” prolifically. Explain how she is everything in the list of incredibly vague and shallow things you look for in a woman.

When you have managed to converse in this fashion with a woman without being ignored or slapped for a full 45 minutes, you can try asking for her number, or a date. However the longer the conversation continues, the more chance you have of obtaining these, so hold off for as long as you can.

Regardless of the outcome, do not devote the entire evening to one chick unless you think you are going to score right now! Calmly and politely take your leave before the end of the evening, with or without her contact details. If you do not have them by now then clearly she has been too foolish to know what she is missing.

Repeat the procedure with the next girl you find, everyone knows two dates are better than one. You are hedging, all clever people do that. If you want to protect your initial investment, you might even take the precaution of conducting the second sortie in another bar, but this is usually considered overcautious.

If you are female:

Go to a bar. Any bar.

Sit at the bar, and order something. a drink, food, whatever.

Wait for approximately 180 seconds

‘The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.’

Albert Einstein (Washington DC, Einstein’s monument)

Every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty‘

JD Rockefeller (Rockefeller Centre)

I don’t care about politics. Really. I don’t care about them at home because very few irish politicians seem to me to be any different from any other irish politicians, and I don’t care about them in other countries because there is nothing I can do about them. Most of all I don’t care about them because I don’t really understand them except on the most basic level, and I have never cared to try. I vote when it is in my power to do so, based upon the knowledge and understanding I have, because I believe one should exercise an opinion when called upon to do so. But I would never be involved in a campaign unless it was for a cause, not a politician, and the effort I would put into making my decision would be less then an hour’s background reading in the vast majority of circumstances

But if you live in a city in america it is almost impossible not to have an opinion on the election. If you don’t have one, you need to make one up, because you will be asked about it anyway. And for the first time, I find myself giving a shit. Not a massive stinky floater of a shit or anything, but certainly a medium sized turd. I actually think it might make a difference to the US and the world who gets elected this time.

So though it is entirely irrelevent, my non-existent vote goes to Barack Hussein Obama. May he somehow find a use for it.

Punk. Rock. Karoake.

Oh yes, this actually exists. I have not yet participated, but it is only a matter of time. And the fact that it does exist encompasses the essence of what I love about really big cities. When the number of inhabitants reaches a certain point, beautiful social anomalies start to appear, catering to niches so odd that only in densely populated areas could they possibly have the chance to flourish.

In London my favourite example of this was Bröderna Olsson, the swedish gothic metal pub that only served food containing garlic. Another classic was the Absolut Ice bar, where you could only go for 45 minutes, they kept the temperature at minus 5 celsius because everything was made of ice, and served only cocktails made from vodka in hollowed ice shot glasses.

So what have I learned since I got here? Well, americans are distinctly against centrally lit rooms, and most apartments no longer contain a light fixture, necessitating the purchase of multiple lamps. However they still have light-switches, which control the upper socket of an arbitrarily selected power outlet. As far as I can tell these can be found only through the process of trial and error, initially I found them somewhat perplexing.

For every financial transaction that takes place in the states, someone is waiting in the wings to leech off it. To get an apartment you pay a massive brokerage fee ($3k is not abnormal), to withdraw money from an atm not owned by your own bank is $3, and to transfer money to another person’s bank account is almost $19.

If you ask an american how much their government taxes earnings, the answer will seem very low. This is because they are talking about federal tax , and have neglected to mention state tax, local tax, social security tax, porcupine tax, and pretty much any other kind of tax you can imagine.

Every major department store has its own credit card, and every time you purchase something you will be asked to sign up for it. You will be asked for a postal address in shops with alarming frequency, and as a routine part of selling you something. This also goes for your phone number and email address. Actually giving these out will result in varying quantities of junk mail.

These and many other lessons have been gradually accumulating. In other news, I have decided to get a driving license. This should be interesting.

An excerpt from my conversation with Time Warner cable today:

General admin stuff……

Me: So I would like to switch the cable and internet over to my name

Cable Guy: this account only has high-speed internet

*mentally envisions the cable splitter supplying the tv with cable in my flat*

Me: oookaaay, forget cable. Just internet. Ahem.

CG: So you just need to bring the form in to change over, with proof or residence

Me: and how much will the internet cost?

CG We have a special package for $119 a month which gives you high-speed internet, 300 cable channels, and unlimited calling to anywhere in the states

Me: I don’t watch tv and I have no friends, just the internet please. How much was Mary paying?

CG: $44.99

Me: So is it the same charge?

CG: well, there is an offer on for $39.99

Me: so I could get that?

CG: Yeah

Me: Ok, and how much would a basic cable package be?

CG: $44.99, but you could get both together in a package for $101 per month

*Re-checks mental arithmetic in case of malfunction. clean*

Me: so it costs more to get the package? Seriously?

CG: What?

*Talk cable guy through the complex mathematics involved*

Me: and so you see, it actually costs 16 extra bucks per month to get your package than to get the two separate items.

CG: Gee, I guess you’re right

…… and so on

So I went to Ikea for the first time yesterday. Oh yes. You see, I had this marvellous theory on buying furniture. I thought that it would be, if not easy, then at least a relatively straightforward exercise. One goes to a furniture store, one looks at the furniture on display, measures it, debates a little with any accompanying parties, and then orders it to be delivered on a particular date to a particular address. Hah.

Like many huge and glaring misconceptions it all began with a single completely inaccurate assumption. This assumption was that Ikea was based on the same principle as for example Argos, just on a much larger scale, and would therefore work approximately the same way. Obtain catalogue number of item, order item for collection or delivery, pay, and receive item. To be entirely honest, I presumed I could have just done it all on the internet, the only reason I intended to go to the store at all was because with such a major purchase as a couch or bed I wanted to physically see the thing I was buying. Essentially I assumed I was being overly cautious by not just ordering online. Oh the slightly manic laughter as I look at this thought retrospectively.

The Ikea display store is like what a giant warehouse would look like if you converted it into a labyrinth whose walls and passageways were constructed entirely of household furnishings. Essentially that’s exactly what it is, in fact. In a way this is ingenious, it forces you to look at every piece of crap in the entire place before getting to the end. In another, more relevant way, it is frustrating, annoying, and engenders a passionate hatred of slow-walking people with giant carts that I find it hard to describe in words. When we finally reached the end of the labyrinth (which geographically is about 2 minutes from the start, we just didn’t figure that out until later) we were dehydrated, irritated, and generally just glad the experience was over. On our travels we had seen a couch, bed and mattress that I was happy to purchase. I queued for the information desk, thankful that the ordeal must be almost at an end.

Alas, it was not to be. Upon making some enquiries I discovered you cannot order online, because they do not deliver online orders. (What?!?) Which meant that I would have to order right then. Ok, not ideal, but acceptable, where can I find a catalogue to get the numbers from? There aren’t any. Because as we walked through the giant furniture maze we were supposed to have noted down the article numbers of the items in question so that we could pay for them at the checkout. Back to the labyrinth, where we spend about 10 minutes actually locating the article numbers of anything, as for some reason instead of being printed in a bold font and labelled “Article Number, pay attention to this!” they are printed on the reverse of the price tag, in a font small enough as to be almost unreadable, and without a descriptor of any kind.

We subsequently discovered that this is probably due to the following fact. What they _tell_ you to do is write down the numbers and then pay. What you are _actually_ supposed to do, is find one of the rare and elusive employees on the display floor, tell them what you want, confirm when they show you the image on-screen that yes, you are not a moron, that is the thing, then specify what colour, size etc you would like it in, because the all-important article number written on the display item merely signifies precisely that item, ie. colour and size also. So to order say, a full-size bed frame in black, when the display item is a queen size version in pine is impossible to do without the assistance of a furniture monkey, or as they prefer to be called, ikea employee.

One part of the exchange went thusly:

Me: …and I would like this couch.

FM: That item is self-serve

Me: Wait, I can’t get it delivered?

FM: Oh no, you can get it delivered, you just have to bring it down to the checkout.

Me: You mean physically bring it? But… it’s a couch…

FM: Yeah, you need to load it onto a cart and bring it down to the checkout, and pay for it, then they can deliver it.

Me: There is no other way of doing this? Can’t I pay someone to bring it down?

FM: No, sorry. So you don’t want the couch ma’am?

Me: Oh no, I want it. I’m just horrified.

FM: Oh, we’re actually pulling that item ourselves at the moment.

Me: So I don’t have to bring it down?

FM: No.

Me: Great.

The last part obviously rendering that entire minute of shock and awe entirely pointless, but on the plus side, I didn’t have to carry a couch. When I finally managed to get my official “already talked to a monkey” form, and queue and pay for all this, there was then an entirely separate queue for organising and paying for the delivery of all my crap. By the time we left I felt like Persephone escaping Hades, and was afraid to look behind me lest I somehow be sucked back in, black hole style.

I have never been so drained of life energy by a retail experience.