London Calling…

My favourite quote of this week goes to my roommate the cuban for the following email, the subject line of which was “Ok…”:

“All morning my vision is blurry, and it’s brothering me. I can’t read my cpu, etc. Go to CVS, buy drops, etc. Looking online about the impact of alcohol consumption on vision long term, etc.

Then it occurs to me that maybe I have put the wrong lens in the wrong eye…”

We are now having an argument about whether he can call looking at his screen reading his cpu.  He posits that “cpu” means computer to 95% of human beings and that therefore I am being overly anal. It is my conjecture that 95% of the world being inaccurate is nothing to do with me.

New York - it really grows on you. Like a fungus. Seriously though, I am really starting to like it here. New York will never be London, but its character is starting to appeal to me the same way London’s does, though for entirely different reasons.  I also have to admit that now that I actually have one, life is pretty amazing here. Downtown Brooklyn still feels like you are living in one of the greatest cities in the world, but it also has the space and the community that just doesn’t exist on the island.

Within one block of my house there is a gym, a wine shop, a supermarket, a subway station, a pub, a tattoo parlour, and a rather odd local theatre type building that occasionally has markets and juggling classes and whatnot. Not to mention that living with E is like having your own soap opera, or (as one of his friends put it) sharing a flat with a cartoon character.

I’m glad I didn’t leave when I first wanted to. I needed to give this place a chance, and now that I can do whatever I want without worrying about how much it would cost me to get  out of my contract or when I could move or whether the economy is a total disaster anywhere I want to move to, I find myself considering a longer sojourn here than I originally planned.  It’s not as easy and perfect as London was. But its not as hard as I thought it was.

Things I have learned this week:

• I can drink a truly amazing amount of horrible white wine
• I am a very inconsiderate host, particularly after said white wine.
• It is possible to get bitten on the fucking cheek by a mosquito. The cheek. Twice.
• Not all trains to New Jersey stop in Hoboken.
• Jerkboy (aka the yank, aka my dreadful ex-boyfriend) is getting married in a few months.
• My roommate the Cuban is even more awesome than I had previously noticed.
• My roommate the Cuban is also batshit crazy. But claiming not to have noticed this previously may be slightly stretching it.
• Barbecues are fantastic, and happen approximately every 15 minutes in this country.
• The walk from Chelsea to Park Slopes is motherfucking long.
• Never take a taxi from Jersey to Manhattan.
• I am going to a pagan handfasting, in CT, as the date of a female friend. Time to dig out the tux and top hat.

“I saw you this morning, you were moving so fast…
can’t seem to loosen my grip on the past

and i miss you so much, there’s no one in sight
and we’re still making love…

…in my secret life

I smile when I’m angry… I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do to get by

but I know what is wrong, and I know what is right
and I’d die for the truth…

…in my secret life

I bite my lip, I buy when I’m told
From the latest hit to the wisdom of old.

But I’m always alone, and my heart is like ice,
and its crowded and cold…

…in my secret life”

Leonard Cohen

On Sunday night I went to see Leonard Cohen in Radio City Music Hall. There are two very awesome aspects to this, one of which is Leonard Cohen, and the other of which is Radio City Music Hall itself, which is pretty goddamn impressive. I have mentioned my tendency to judge establishments on the calibre of their toilet facilities. Well, RCMH doesn’t just have a bathroom, it has a ladies lounge, complete with couches, mirrors and a lot of open space to just hang out in before you even get to the actual toilet stalls. In fact to find the toilets I had to walk through three rather large rooms, and was starting to wonder if I was supposed to piss on a suede-upholstered sofa.

However, RCMH milk their awesomeness to the absolute max, at a stunning cost of $250 to get a ticket in the stalls. Now it was a great seat, and an amazing venue, but in the normal course of things I would never ever pay this amount of money for anything short of a concert headlined by Led Zeppelin and opened by the Beatles, complete with all original band members (including those who would need to rise from the grave for the occasion) which took place on the fucking moon.

The obvious contradiction here is that I did have a ticket and did go. I can explain this with the following short tangent: my parents are awesome. Really. Obviously I did not think this as a 15 year old psycho held together by un-directed rage and death metal, but since reaching an age where I enjoyed discernable lyrics and obtained a modicum of self-control I realized I quite possibly have the best parents ever. In a complete surprise move then, when my father noticed that Leonard Cohen was playing Radio City, he decided to buy me a ticket as a belated 26^th birthday present (even though my father believes any birthday after you are legally allowed to drive and buy beer is not an event).

Naturally I gratefully accepted said ticket, particularly since Leonard Cohen is certainly getting on in years, and chances to see him might have been running out. Now, I have never been a massive fan, though I’ve always liked his music. But the man is fucking amazing. He is 75, and he dances onto the stage. He has a voice like honey drizzling over dark chocolate, it somehow sounds even better live than it does recorded, despite the fact that today we could make a screaming child sound like Tina Turner with the vast powers of studio sound manipulation. Though I suppose that particular example is not all that much of a stretch. I guess just because you can make shit smell kind of like roses it doesn’t mean you can improve what roses themselves smell like.

In any case, it was an exceptional show. The talent of just the female back-up vocalists would have put professional choirs to shame. Leonard himself is an incredible performer, and better than that he clearly enjoys every minute of the performance. He is one of those artists that puts everything into what they are doing, watching him sing live he makes you feel as if he’s singing better for your show than for any other one he’s played, like what he’s doing just that night is special to him. The fact that he has sung these songs a thousand times does not make him one iota less expressive or emotional.  It was a beautiful experience to be lost in that.

Resolution: go to more concerts. Even if they are not held on the moon.

This month I have mostly been learning to cook food. This sounds ludicrous, mainly because cooking food is extremely easy, but rest assured I started from a position of total and complete ignorance, and with good reason. Allow me to detail my previous culinary experience.

When I was 9 I was home from school sick, and decided I wanted a boiled egg. I took two eggs from the fridge, filled a saucepan full of water, put the eggs in, turned on the heat, and then went and read a book. For an hour. I realized my error when the pages of the book become a little hard to see and I realized that the room I was in was full of smoke. The smoke alarm went off, a saucepan was completely ruined, the eggs were blackened husks of death, and in a slight panic I pulled the saucepan off the cooker and plonked it down on the countertop, which it proceeded to brand with a large black circle.

My mother was naturally not delighted by this episode, and extracted from me a promise that I would never try to bloody well cook anything ever again because I was a scatterbrained idiot who would end up setting the house on fire. I really cannot fault her logic on any point. Since it cost me very little to remain faithful to this particular guarantee it never gave me any trouble, and since my mother was a sucker for making people food and then I discovered Chinese and pizza, I remained disinclined to cook anything for pretty much the rest of time, that is until a month ago.

For reasons I will not go into I decided that I would finally have to learn to make a meal that did not consist mainly of either pasta or toast (my two most prevalent staples). This has been a marvelous, delicious, and expensive adventure. Not everything has gone brilliantly, but I can truthfully say that I have not made anything that I could not subsequently eat. Though I suppose after the occasional experiment with penne and mayonnaise one could say I am not fussy.

Things I have learned:

• Sautee just means fry in butter
• Steaming does not require a steamer. Americans are wrong.
• Basic cookery can be summarised by “sure fuck it all into a frying pan and see how it goes”
• The above seems to work approximately 85% of the time
• Though rib-eye and filet mignon look very similar raw, blue filet mignon barely requires chewing, and blue rib-eye requires a fucking hacksaw.
• If you look up how long it takes to hard boil an egg on the internet, you will find pages of detailed instructions on the perfect boiled-egg preparation techniques, all of which will be entirely unnecessary.
• Chicken tastes a lot better than I remember.
• The hard part is always the bloody sauce
• 17 years later, I am still capable of forgetting about the goddamn eggs

This evening a man claiming the rather dubious moniker of “Neon Sandwich” stopped me on the street in soho in order to take a photograph of my shoes. Now, my shoes are pretty amazing, but such an event is nonetheless, fairly rare. In fact I think I might go far as to call it entirely unique.

He claimed to be doing a photographic study of topography, though exactly what relevance this had to my shoes is as yet unclear. He did however offer a chinese palm reading for my trouble, which I declined on the grounds that it sounded like utter wank.

I am generally a tad skeptical about things I believe to be the art world’s equivalent of chronic masturbation, but I always enjoy a bizarre diversion in an otherwise statistically unremarkable evening.

You gotta love New York, if only for the weird-ass shit.

Recently I heard a radio DJ talking about Jade Goody’s death. I have to admit that my usual attitude toward any story involving anyone who has made themselves famous through either a) banal stupidity, b) being on reality tv, or c) being fat and getting thin (or vice versa) is one of blissful ignorance, and I am fairly certain she has done all three. So forgive me if I write something blatantly inaccurate about her, because it will be entirely besides the point I’m trying to make, I swear. As I understand it though, she died rather suddenly of cancer.

The point of the radio discussion was not so much her death itself as the reaction of various people to it. The radio guy in question was incredulously picking on a woman who claimed to feel absolutely devastated for her, “and it wasn’t it terrible what was happening to her, and her leaving two kids behind”, and other extremely irish ways of saying “isn’t this sad”. Radio guy was trying to hammer it into this lady that perhaps instead of crying over a complete stranger she’d read about in the paper wouldn’t it be a better idea to turn her attention to something closer to home. All the woman could say was that she was just very upset by it, and was crying her eyes out over it, and couldn’t think anything else about it only that it was a tragedy.

I sat there listening to this, quite characteristically thinking “That woman is a fucking idiot.”, when suddenly I realised that thought this was probably true, radio guy was wrong. He was trying to persuade this woman that something that she found tragic didn’t matter because it was happening to someone she didn’t know. That she should be ignoring it, and saving her feelings for when they were for the people around her.

I think this brings home how fucking retarded our ludicrous psycho-analysis-obsessed culture is. We spend half our time telling people to express their feelings, and the other half telling them they are being expressed the wrong direction. Who cares if the woman is dehydrating herself daily over a tv personality? If it so happens that something about the situation evokes empathy in her, so fucking what?

 Movies and books do it all the time, that’s the entire bloody point. To create something that touches people. What the hell is the difference between that woman crying over Jade Goody, and me crying when I read Jane Eyre? (yes, I did actually do this. Really, really deep down I’m a romantic). Frankly, the difference was that she was feeling something for a real person, albeit a person she’s never met. I’ve felt more real emotion for people that don’t even exist than for a shocking quantity of those I’ve known.

Humans constantly love things that aren’t real. People name their cars, their musical instruments, I know a girl who has a pair of garden shears named Lorraine (though granted that was less affection and more striking fear into the hearts of young men).  Hell, I challenge you to find a kid who didn’t anthropomorphise a stuffed toy and love it as much as their own siblings, I certainly did. Why is that more socially acceptable?  We should be fucking delighted that people have proper goddamn feelings at all, because if they had none they’d be even more awful than they already are.

If someone is moved by art or poetry we think they are cultured, if they are moved by a human being they don’t know contracting a fatal disease we think they are impractical and foolish. Do we have a limited supply of emotional reactions? Should I be saving mine up for an appropriate time? I guess there is a chance that woman would be finding joy in the beauty of poetry if she wasn’t busy crying over famous people, but frankly I doubt it.

You can’t save up emotions and spend them in a way you consciously choose, the human subconscious is a lot more subtle than that. If you can’t react to something beautiful then you might as well react to something stupid, it’s better than not reacting.

If we don’t want people having dumbass emotional outbursts then we should just put valium in the drinking water, because those are pretty much the only kind.

There are some things that I don’t write about. Not because I believe I shouldn’t, but because I believe they are too goddamn difficult. I do not discuss personal religious beliefs (organized religion is not something I consider included in this), I do not discuss abortion, and the other major, glaring, neon elephant in the room that I don’t really discuss (anymore, that is) is Northern Ireland. I am aware that many people do not share my reticence on the subject, many people are also fucking ignorant idiots. The two sets are not entirely identical, but there is a remarkable overlap

But just this once, I’m going to make a motherfucking exception.

My entire family is from Northern Ireland. My parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and every last bloody one of my cousins-and believe me, that’s a lot of cousins, my parents have 18 siblings between them-are from Northern Ireland. And not just anywhere in Northern Ireland, South Armagh, historically one of the most violent pits of vigilante and paramilitary activity available on both sides of the fence.

While I did not grow up where my parents did (for which I sincerely thank them) I was somewhat uniquely placed to form an opinion of the situation. I looked at Northern Ireland largely from the outside, but I was brought up by a mother who could tell the difference between types of submachine guns from a distance by the colour of the muzzle flash, and a father who was once beaten almost to death with a chain as a teenager for attending the wrong school. I spent hours hearing the stories my mother told about living somewhere that sounded almost surreal to a child growing up in the 1980’s in a small town in Kerry.

A random selection of these might include say, the fact that my mother never had a college graduation because there was a huge bomb threat in Belfast that week and the ceremony was canceled. Or the one in which the father of one of her school friends died from a grenade thrown through the window of a bus he was on. That on her way back from Belfast one day she saw a police station blow up. Or my dad’s family losing half their farm because the british government decided they’d like to have an artificial lake there for their golf course. The tale of my grandfather and a half-dozen other farmers getting arrested for protesting it. Or the one about how every time it looked like there might be sufficient catholics in one area to win a local election they redrew the jurisdictions.

Then there is the orange order, an organisation formed to prevent more catholics from owning land, regarding themselves as a proud tradition. When the orange day parades went through a housing estate at Garvaghy in the nineties, 200 catholics peacefully protesting in the form of a sit-in were dragged off or shot with rubber bullets by the riot police. When the orange order were finally asked in 1998 not to needlessly march through a catholic area which couldn’t possible be a historical route because it used to be a fucking field, the protest by 10,000 orangemen was allowed to escalate to insane levels. It wasn’t the IRA who blocked every road out of Northern Ireland that week, it was the fucking UVF, and believe me this one is burnt into my memory because I was fucking there and we were trying to get fucking home that day and without going into detail I will never forget it if I live to be a hundred.

My aim here is not to whine about oppression, the point is that I don’t need to dredge up 800 years of irish history to come up with atrocities, injustice, or pointless violence. They are all within living memory, and not just my parent’s generation, but my generation. It’s much more than English versus Irish, or protestant versus catholic. It is them versus us, no matter who we define as “them” or as “us”. It is the attitude that you have a side, and that your name, your home, the colour you paint your pavement and where you go on Sunday mornings are all declarations of loyalty to an arbitrary flag. Not because it’s good, or right, or fair, but because it’s yours and not theirs.

This is a pile of shit a mile fucking high, for a start because the situation was blatantly untenable, but not helped by the attitude of people from the south of Ireland, which tended to come from one of two directions. Either retarded RA bravado by people who had no fucking idea what they were taking about; or total and complete indifference coupled with a vague confusion about why we couldn’t just cut the damn 6 counties off and let them drift into the sea. 

Northern Ireland was never going to be solved with a country sized bandsaw (mostly because we don’t have one, but also because the EU would probably consider it littering), and it was never going to be solved by dumping it back in a republic that no longer even wants it except for a vague sense of self-righteousness. It’s clear that neither of those things would ever have worked. So for an interminable length of time, over and over again there have been possible compromises, and over and over again they have failed because someone has been a stubborn intractable bastard. And finally about 6 years ago it started to look like things really might someday work. Maybe not in 10 years, or 20, but on the relative scale of 800 years pretty soon. And then a pack of absolute fucking moronic bastards try to start the whole fucking thing right up again.

The Real IRA? You stupid fucks, it stands for Irish Republican Army, and the last real one of those has been gone for quite some time. What possible justification can anyone have for trying to start all this again? What possible fucking excuse? That it all isn’t perfect straight away? That it doesn’t have the name or the label you want on it? Or did you just miss shooting people? I bet life’s a lot less thrilling when it doesn’t involve explosives. I guess the employment rate for former paramilitary operatives isn’t so great either, not a whole lot of freelance rifle ranges in the north. Were you just sitting at home being fucking bored? Why don’t you go contract as private security guards in fucking Iraq, I hear its very lucrative for the average gun-obsessed psychopath.

Northern Ireland wasn’t fixed by a treaty, or parliament, or the dáil. It wasn’t fixed by a re-worded irish constitution or a unified police force, though those things certainly made it possible for it to someday be fixed. It will be fixed by the gradual passage of time, because eventually, someday, there won’t be a kid left who grows up knowing his dad was shot by those IRA bastards, or that he can’t use that taxi agency or go to that pub, or that the british army took his uncle and he never came back. There won’t be anyone who remembers soldiers pointing a gun at their father at the border while they search the boot of the car, or watching armed men in black masks turn over a lorry to make a roadblock in front of them.

I’m all for justice, really I am. But in this situation there is no justice. There is no-one to answer for everything that has happened, there is no vengeance to be had and there is no evening of the score. If there was ever a cause that justified this there is none left now. No score, and no cause, just generations of bullshit and pointlessness and misery. All anyone still inciting riots or shooting cops or smuggling in bombs is doing now is guaranteeing another generation before that can fade away.

I am Jack’s severely bruised everything… As I type this I can still feel the aching uselessness in my right arm even days after what I hereby refer to as The Amazing Snow Adventure. That’s right kids, I made my first tentative foray into winter sports. Actually that’s a lie, firstly because I once went ice-skating, and secondly because the word “tentative” should never be applied to any activity that intrinsically involves hurling oneself repeatedly down a hill.

An important point to note before I continue is as follows: Snowboarding is awesome. I feel I should establish this in advance in the hope that the following litany of drawbacks will be viewed in the correct manner, ie. as gratuitous whining. That being said, here follows my account of TASA…

As someone who enjoys going very fast and has pretty much no sense of self-preservation if there is a chance of doing something interesting involved, I was naturally delighted when L and her german proposed a day of snowboarding last weekend. Not only would I have transportation to the mountain and the loan of a jacket and gloves, I was also offered the benefit of the german’s experienced tutelage (which turned out to be most excellent). I also have to admit that I was certain I must have previous relevant experience. I had some kind of vague idea that the combined years of martial arts and longboarding would somehow merge to form automatic snowboarding skills. Hah! I’d fall off my chair in manic laughter at this point but it would hurt too much to get back up again.

The really funny part is that I was actually right. Skateboarding and martial arts _do_ give you wonderful experience that is of great use while snowboarding. But mainly because the most significant aspect of one’s first snowboarding experience by about a factor of 10 is falling over, and if nothing else, martial arts and longboarding prepare one marvellously for repeatedly falling on one’s ass, face, and pretty much everything else. So it was due to this that at the end of the day instead of being a bitter, grouchy, mean, sore, bruised, exhausted, freezing cold and sporadically damp individual, I was a relatively upbeat, sore, bruised, exhausted, freezing cold and sporadically damp individual

As stated previously, I had an excellent teacher, who spent the first hour or so being a crutch as well as an instructor while I got the feel of the board. Boy is it a weird sensation. The last refuge of the skater is the time-honoured tradition of jumping off the damn thing, which as long as you haven’t gotten beyond a fast running pace is rarely all that painful. So the complete lack of options inherent in having both feet strapped to something the size of a fucking ironing board can be somewhat disconcerting. Options for not dying consist of a list of two. Option 1 – fall over backward, and option 2 – fall over forward. Which I guess explains the current state of every bruise-able part of my body. You might believe that there is a third option called “stopping in an orderly and controlled fashion”, I assure you it is a mythical stage of enlightenment only available to people who have spent, well, more than a day at this.

I cannot count the times I fell on my ass. What I _can_ do is count the times it really fucking hurt in a “shite, maybe I’ve broken my coccyx” sort of way, which was about 3. By the time we finished up I was edging toward the graceful end of complete incompetence, and was able to accomplish a turn in each direction before unceremoniously falling on my butt. I even managed to slide to a gradual stop once, though this may have been aided by a conveniently located skier. I am immensely proud of these achievements, as would you be if you knew how goddamn fucking difficult it is. Truth be told I felt I could have done slightly better had I persevered, but after about 3 hours I was feeling sufficiently battered to call it a day.

Rule for Happiness (first-time snowboarding section):

1. Acknowledge that it will hurt. A lot. Live with it.
2. Get a helmet, skull fractures detract from the enjoyment
3. Be aware that if you are several inches taller than the friend who has loaned you their not-all-that-long-to-begin-with snowboarding jacket, it is quite likely that when falling over your bare back may in fact hit snow. This is an interestingly horrible realisation.
4. Do NOT take your gloves off, and then touch snow. This is a terrible terrible idea.
5. Do not imagine for a moment that you will do anything but lurch off the ski-lift like a drunk hippo
6. By all means however spend some time watching other snow boarders exit the ski-lift, in order to feel better about yourself and life in general
7. Bring spare clothing with you. This is vital for not freezing to death on your way home, particularly if you’ve experienced 3.
8. Do not plan to do anything or go anywhere after arriving home. You will be utterly exhausted, and will want to do nothing but jack up the heating to ludicrous settings and sleep.
9. Resist the urge to develop an instant contempt for skiers, with their detachable implements. It’s probably even harder to ski.
10. Invite me to come with you, so that I can show off my amazing 10-seconds-before-falling-over trick.

Yeah yeah, women in technology, its all great. I was going to have a little rant about this, but then I realised that I would only be doing it because I am grouchy and bitter about the above-mentioned birthday theft. The truth is though I dont give a damn about what other women have done in technology (as opposed to what _people_ have done, gender irrelevent, which I do give a damn about), it is in fact useful to have well-known examples of women who have achieved excellence in a technical field.

Less for role models and more as a proof of concept, for while men dominate the fields of science and engineering, it’s nice to be able to point to exceptions to this generality and say that yes, fair enough, statistically there are far fewer women who are suited to this type of work than men, but look, it is eminently possible for women to be great at this.

Having said all this however, screw Ada Lovelace day, the 24th of March is my fucking birthday. It’s all about me people.