Singapore was once described to me as being a bit like a small version of London, but really fucking hot. I can now with some actual basis state that this is absolute and total bollocks. Singapore is what you would get if you reduced the size and population of Hong Kong by factors of respectively 4 and 40, taught everyone slightly better English, and did a really really thorough cleaning job. And by cleaning job I mean also getting rid of most of the more crammed in and unsightly buildings filled with live chickens and frogs, and somehow making the streets stop smelling like fried rice soaked in soy sauce. Into this new city you would drop a load more white people, 80% of whom work in banks, and a bunch of spacious apartment buildings with pools in order to accommodate said white people, whom you would then proceed to pay too much. And there, aside from the occasional monsoon and drug-trafficking related execution, you have Singapore.

Things to do in Singapore include sweating profusely and developing acute paranoia. Most of the cops are plain clothes, and instantly converge on law breakers with the fiery righteousness of a thousand suns, so you really don’t want to jaywalk, accidentally litter, or illegally import chewing gum. You cannot bring duty free cigarettes into Singapore, and should you by caught smoking said cigarettes the Singapore police can fine you not by the carton or packet, but by the individual stick. They can tell too, by the fact that every stick is stamped as duty free individually. Common sentences for a legal infraction in Singapore read like “30 days in jail and 10 lashes of the whip”. Which I am guessing at least intimidates the natives and puts the slightly incredulous fear of God into the westerners.

The city Is spotlessly clean, presumably due to fear. The crime rate is apparently very low, presumably due to abject terror. From what I have heard from the inhabitants though, the Singaporean government (in case this was not already glaringly obvious) are a rather scary bunch of sociopathic opportunists who have no qualms about obstructing the freedom of the press. So anything reported on to indicate Singapore might not be an oasis of harmonious crime-free living does not get reported on for long.

Of any Asian city, Singapore is the most westernized and the easiest, as it is quite evidently designed to be. The standard of living is very high if you can afford it, for the amount I pay to live in my apartment in NY you could share a bigger newer apartment complete with washer/dryer and outdoor pool. But you would be living in bloody Singapore, a city the size of an enthusiastic fart. Don’t even get me started on the weather. From what I can tell, Singapore has two settings for climate: extremely hot and humid, or extremely hot and humid in the pouring torrential rain.

Poor people exist here, but you can’t really tell from the outside.  Local wages are a fraction of expat wages, but there are so many expats that the downtown areas cater to them almost exclusively. Personally I find any country where a wage like mine enables you to afford a live-in maid mildly worrying, and this is definitely one of them. Not that I can even imagine creating enough personal domestic mess to ever justify a maid.

I definitely don’t hate it here, in fact its rather an interesting place. But I can’t imagine living here for more than a few months. I think on the whole while I like Asia in general as a holiday destination I can’t imagine it as a home. Then again, you never know until you try.

Walking outside of Singapore airport was like walking into a New York august afternoon. With respect to heat and humidity anyway, I can’t say with any degree of accuracy that Singapore looks anything like NY except in the standard way that all airports look like all other airports. This is a problem. Because I still after 2 years have not acclimatized to being baked alive during the summer? No, actually I have gradually been working my way to finding it almost pleasant most of the time. It is a problem because this New York summer afternoon temperature is in fact a cool Singapore 2am. Oh how I fear the dawn.

Things I have observed about Singapore since my arrival about an hour ago include a complete lack of any buildings under 30 stories high, and an absolutely astonishing caliber of hotels. I am staying in the Hilton Conrad Centennial, and good god it is fantastic. I think perhaps the fact that people rarely travel to Singapore on anything but business has definitely had an effect. The logic runs something like this: All of the people who stay at our hotels are staying there on the company dime. Therefore, we will make the room exorbitantly expensive (because they are not paying and don’t care) and just provide lots of complimentary perks so that they will stay at our ludicrously expensive hotel instead of one of the other ludicrously expensive hotels available. It is a giant conspiracy to get big companies to spend a fortune, but it is from my perspective totally ok because it means I get free stuff. I may not have particularly elevated moral ground here, but I do have complimentary dry cleaning and a fruit basket. It’s the little things.

Things that have impressed me about this hotel include:

1. When you walk in the sound system is playing classical music at a pleasant but unobtrusive volume, it kind of makes you feel like you just walked into a state room in the Titanic.
2. Free food – Not just a mint, but a box of Godiva chocolates and selection of fruit
3. Doorbells. Yes, when the dude came to pick up clothes for my free dry cleaning, he rang the pleasantly melodic doorbell. Brilliant
4. All of the light switches are labeled. Why the hell does no-one else do this?
5. Toothbrushes! Hotels tend to provide absolutely everything necessary to clean oneself in small pre-packaged form except fucking toothbrushes, the one thing I will almost certainly forget if I am to forget any toiletry.
6. A fucking laser printer. How incredibly useful.
7. Universal sockets. No bullshit fiddling around with adaptors, the sockets themselves actually accept a variety of plugs.

And of course there are a couple of features that just made me laugh a bit. They provide you a knife, fork and napkin for consuming fruit (we are talking apples here, not sliced grapefruit or anything). The remote control comes in a leather case which you do not even have to extract it from to use it through the protective layer of plastic. I am not certain if they are protecting me or the remote. There is a small leaflet offering me my selection of 16 different types of pillow, delivered to my room with compliments should I desire one (when I was a kid I used to think “with compliments” meant that when they gave it to you they would tell you your hair looked great).  And finally my absolute favourite thing in any hotel ever – The Conrad Centennial provide their guests with that most essential of bathroom amenities, a small yellow rubber duck. It squeaks.

It is astonishing how much joy an adult human can derive from the presence of a squeaky bath toy.

My company, for various reasons which presumably seemed like good ideas at the time, decided to send me to a client in Singapore this week. Now, it is my general policy when presented with the option of going somewhere I have never been to immediately accept and possibly jump up and down a bit depending on the destination. This one was slightly controversial however, because there was a bit of back and forth on how long I could stay, what kind of flights I could get etc. The trip being on very short notice, even when this was all decided finding a flight and accommodation proved slightly challenging. Upshot – no direct flights, and I have to change hotels once and rooms once in the second hotel. My life is a cornucopia of mild inconvenience.

I have just finished the epic 23 hour journey required to arrive here from NY, and my sleep pattern is how shall I put this… royally buggered? It is 3am and I am catching up on my blog entries because I am apparently wide awake. So I guess I may as well try to make some relevant observations while I am at it. Business class travel rocks. Ok, that was fairly obvious and probably did not require stating. However I am currently evaluating in terms of the relative shittiness of flying economy, because I am going to be doing pretty much the same trip to get my butt to Thailand for Christmas this year and you can bet your left leg I didn’t fork out for a business class seat.

I am pretty good at planes. By which I mean I am pretty good at suspending my consciousness for long stretches enabling me to sleep/fall into a trance-like state, ignore everyone around me, read a book etc, for time periods of anything up to 12 hours or more. However it’s a hell of a lot easier to do this when your personal space consists of a surface you can stretch full length on rather than 2 square feet of noisy cramped horribleness. So my 14 hour flight to Tokyo followed by a 7 hour flight to Singapore was from my point of view a fucking dream. The food was good, the booze was free, the blankets were warm, overall in comparison to my standard flying experience it was approximately king size bed compared to hammock which breaks occasionally. What I am trying to convey here is that it was really fucking easy. I hope I don’t get used to this or I will go soft. Anyway, here follows my list of recommendations for long haul flight survival, none of which I have had to use today:

1. Do not drink excessively in order to fall asleep. Classic rookie mistake. There are worse things than being exhausted after a flight and one of them is being exhausted and dehydrated with a headache after a flight. You’ll sleep eventually. Or you won’t, live with it.
2. If you can’t sleep, stop trying. You will just get annoyed. If you are tired and find it restful to lie back with your eyes closed then do that, sometimes you drift off without realizing and actually pack in some shut-eye without even being aware.
3. Sleep if you are tired. People sometimes try to adjust their sleep patterns en route to maximize enjoyment of their destination. This just leads to excessive grouchiness and misery, you re-adjust a lot better when sunrises and sunsets are involved again.
4. You do not have to use the inflight entertainment system. Sometimes its really great, sometimes its absolutely shit. Sometimes the unit for your seat breaks inexplicably, evoking zero sympathy from anyone. Do not rely on the plane to entertain you. Bring books, bring a DS, bring music. Try to bring things which have a battery life beyond the flight.
5. You do not have to be doing anything. I have spent 4 hour flights just thinking, processing. Its not a waste of time, plane time is dead time.
6. Do not plan to do anything on the flight. Whether its planning the trip or some work, you will probably not feel like it. Its important to just do what you feel like doing. Read when you feel like reading, sleep when you feel like sleeping.
7. Do not eat the food. Seriously. Bring your own. I have brought boiled eggs, chopped mushrooms and peppers, sliced cheese and prosciutto onto planes. Or gotten quesadillas in the airport just prior to boarding. Strictly speaking you are not meant to do this but no-one has ever complained.  This only applies to economy, business class food is great.
8. Wear comfortable clothing, wear your hair down. It really does not matter at all what you look like when you get on or off the plane, everyone will be a damn zombie anyway. Anything that hinders sleeping at all is a bad thing.
9. I assume everyone in the universe knows this, but take off your shoes
10. Do not encroach on another person’s personal space, wear headphones that enable everyone around you to hear your horrible RnB music, bring a baby, have a loud conversation, or smell bad.  All of these deserve the death penalty.
11. You do not have to be buddies with your neighbor. If they are disinclined to talk, shut the hell up. Not everyone wants a single serving friend.
12. It is ok to hate flying, it is not ok to whine about it. If its so goddamn awful don’t go, or take a boat/train/car/mule to wherever the fuck you are going. Don’t bitch about the food, the price of drinks, or the lack of available legroom. You have gotten what you bloody well paid for.

Air travel is conceptually an amazing, excellent thing. The implementation of air travel is a tad painful for those of us too cheap to fly anything but livestock class, but this does not make the speed and ease of flying any less amazing. 24 hours will get you round the damn world when one hour of walking only gets you a few miles. Marvel at it, appreciate it, and maybe it will see you through the agonizing ordeal that is long-haul flying.

Or hell, just take the sleeping pills. Let me know how that goes.

At the end of the road trip of incredible length and foolish decisions (well one foolish decision, namely Shreveport. All other decisions were of practically genius level excellence) we finally arrived in Austin. Austin is like San Francisco, but in Texas. So its filled with hippies and vegan ice cream parlours, but also with people in cowboy hats wearing blue jeans and covered in tattoos. Personally, I find the combination most refreshing. Perhaps as a result of living in the wanky part of Brooklyn, which is filled with the kind of hippies that spend an hour on their hair to make it look suitably messy and live in dread of breaking a nail, and that’s just the men.

I have been informed by pretty much everyone who has spent time in Texas that Austin is the cool bit, and by all accounts resembles the rest of Texas about as much as Milton Keynes resembles a real city. I don’t know how true this is, as so far that is the limit of my Texas experience. But though I was in hippy central Texas-wise I still felt a very strong vibe, Texans are very proud of their state and definitely have their own idea about affiliation. As I was informed by multiple people, Texas used to be a country, and while in Austin there might be a lot more liberals that is still a popular statement.

I found people here absolutely amazing. Adjectives that come to mind include polite, hospitable, helpful and just generally incredibly friendly and considerate. These appear to be generally southern traits in any case, but frankly I just found everyone on the whole damn trip so charming I nearly puked. Contented charmed puke made of rainbows, naturally.

Mostly the GG and I just chilled here. We hung out, we ate, we went to bars, we ate more, went to more bars. The weather was mild but warm, the city was awesome, and personally I did not want to go home. We got the dueling piano dudes to play Bohemian Rhapsody, the German got hit on by a multitude of people she found unattractive (though I think this happens every day – why do I have so many attractive female friends?  Couldn’t just one of them be less attractive than me?? Alas, my tastes in women are too discriminating for my own good), and we had great Mexican food and amazing Brazilian barbecue.

On my last night my traveling companion had already departed, and so I decided to venture out alone. My general policy of finding the dirtiest bar available and talking to random people until I get bored paid off handsomely, and I ended up drinking with a metal band, their girlfriends, and the Austin 6^th street sex shop employees. I also ended up with a rather compromised liver, as it was one of those nights when you just forget there is a tomorrow, that hangovers exist, or that you have a plane to catch. Some hours later these 3 forgotten pieces of data combined in a crashing symphony of suffering and despair – never have I been so close to fainting while standing in line to check my bag in. I vowed never to drink again, which lasted the 5 hours til I arrived back at home and found a branch of the Cuban’s extended family partying in my living room, which is not a recipe for abstinence.

Someday I will take a holiday from which I do not feel like I need to recover using another holiday.

I should mention first of all, that the adventure I and the German girl had in the south was overall pretty damn excellent. Many beautiful and fascinating things were seen and done, much excellent alcohol was consumed, many foolish and amusing conversations were had, and it was generally an experience most certainly worth repeating. However, there was one possible exception, and that is driving. Which since it was a road trip might well have been considered problematic.

Road trips in theory hold a huge fascination for me. The idea of just setting out and driving wherever you feel like going, travelling where the wind takes you etc sounds romantic, adventurous and intrepid. The actual execution of the driving part however is less romantic and exciting and more along the lines of mind-numbingly dull. Then you add to this the fact that I can’t actually drive and have a tendency to fall asleep in warm cars, thus effectively making me the worst travel companion imaginable – a set of facts I had not really considered beforehand due to my head being filled with images of singing Journey in a convertible for the approximately 5 minutes I mentally allotted to the process of driving from Louisiana to Texas. Yeah. It’s been said before, but I should probably reiterate it – I’m a fucking idiot.

Because of course the drive, even spaced out over two days of stopping off at a couple of potentially interesting places along the way, took approximately 8 million years. It should be noted for future reference that despite much of the American south consisting of stunning scenery, said scenery is best viewed from not-the-interstate. Agonizing stints in the car notwithstanding we had a pretty cool adventure which I am way too fucking lazy to recount at this point. So here are the highlights, which I hereby dub the Road Trip Awards for 2010. Enjoy.

Longest stretch of drive – Shreveport to Austin

Hottest day – 95 F

Most boring place – Shreveport

Stupidest part of plan – Shreveport

Most foolish assumption – There will surely be something to do in Shreveport

Most atrociously rendered musical number – That Prince song that goes “You don’t have be rich to be my girl” *shudder* No one can sing Prince, we are not an exception.

Most pointless detour – Driving 30 mins back to the plantation to retrieve the german’s smelly running gear.

Largest insect slaughtered – Some sort of giant flying thing on the porch in Fairfield. I courageously squished it with my foot.

Largest alligator seen – 8 feet (apparently they like marshmallows and speak French.  Skepticism)

Largest alligator prodded – 4 feet (I am foolish, not suicidal)

Most ludicrously phallic hotel sign – Austin Motel (Check it out)

Most addictive food – Fresh chocolate fudge. Food of the gods.

Most ludicrous food – Deep fried corn on the cob.

Most physical effort exerted – Running 2 miles at 7am in southern Louisiana in a vain attempt not to feel like the disgusting slobs we had become after 4 days of dedicated eating.

Most clearly insane individual – Brian the bus driver. Best friends with Mike Bloomberg and a list of other celebrities I cannot recall. This man drove a bus like he was playing Grand Theft Auto and laughed like a hyena on cocaine. On the whole, I kind of liked him.

Highest concentration of corpses in immediate vicinity – New Orleans. It is apparently impossible to be more specific, this is merely based on the sheer volume of dead people buried absolutely everywhere there over the last 400 years. If there is a single New Orleans story or historical account of _anything_ that does not involve a dead body or twenty I have yet to hear it.

Oldest building – Some French thing.

Oldest interesting building – Haunted pirate bar.

Loudest air-conditioning – Austin Motel, aircon would have sounded like a plane taking off if planes continuously took off for 5 fucking hours.

Stupidest flight delay – Parking brake stuck on plane. Really.

Silliest item purchased – Giant Ascot worthy hat. It is 22 inches wide and has ribbons. It rocks.

Silliest service purchased – Having my fortune told in a bowl of water. Details upon request but at least one unrealistic prediction turned out to be correct.

Best meal – Brazilian barbecue place in Austin. One of the ones where they walk around with meat on skewers, fantastic.

On the whole, I have to come down in favour of road trips. But perhaps next time I can somehow eliminate the driving part.

About a month ago I went on a trip to New Orleans and Austin with the German girl, and managed not to get around to posting about it until now. I suck, but we all knew that. Anyhow, Austin entry to follow, but this is pretty much what I wrote as my impressions after our 3 days in NOLA. What a city.

First and foremost – new and wondrous things I have eaten this week (note: all new, varying degrees of wonderful):

• Grits
• Eggs Dauphine
• Fried Green Tomatoes
• A Po’boy
• Deep Fried Corn
• Fresh Fudge (oh, the wonderful)
• Gumbo
• Jumbalaya
• Charbroiled oysters
• Hurricanes
• Mint Julep
• Beignets

As you might imagine from this list, in the course of 3 days I have become roughly spherical. Ok not quite, but it feels that way.  If I do not do some significant exercise soon I will probably perish of some sort of caloric overdose. Or my intestines will explode, whichever.

New Orleans is made of magic. That’s really the best way I can say it. Maybe hundreds of years of voodoo queens and plagues and death and the fear of death has permeated the very ground, and can be felt. Or maybe it’s just the people that create the atmosphere. Admittedly we spent most of our time in the French Quarter, which is without question the most beautiful place I have found in urban America. But it’s not just the architecture. There is something about this place that engenders wonder.

Part of the reason cities in the US feel wrong to me is that nothing is old. Before I moved here I never knew that mattered, but apparently feeling the force of a thousand years behind a city is important for my ability to feel happy. It’s odd that I value the permanence of other things so much more than my own. Or maybe that’s the reason. If other things are static and permanent then I feel free to change, to leave knowing it will all be there when I come back. Whereas if something is fluid you feel compelled to stay and watch it change in case it somehow becomes perfect, or in case you can stop it from going a direction you don’t like.

I fell in love with London the first weekend I ever spent there, and since then have never really felt that same crashing instant passion for a place until I came to New Orleans. It is so rare to find a place so incredibly vibrant and alive, and somehow they are always the places that have faced the most destruction and hardship. New Orleans combines the intensity of an urban centre with beauty and antiquity, and somehow instead of seeming incongruous it blends together seamlessly. Plus a half hour’s travel outside the city centre will get you to the wetlands – a tour of which will make you feel like you’re in a movie, or maybe a Steve Irwin documentary. The combination of being extremely dangerous and weirdly beautiful is a compelling one, and the swamps are fascinating.

So far in my diatribe on how awesome this place is I have left out a major component – the people. I tend to like southerners anyway, they are a pleasant break from New Yorkers. Then again hiding under a rock would probably serve as a pleasant break from New Yorkers sometimes. But people in NO just seem to have an amazing attitude. Maybe they are more welcoming than in previous years due to the desperate need for tourism to rebuild parts of the city still wrecked after Katrina, but even so I found the level of friendliness and hospitality genuinely impressive.

As is probably evident by now, I loved New Orleans, possibly to an entirely irrational extent. But it has made me think differently about the states. I use New York as a barometer far too often, and I shouldn’t. There is more to America then New York and San Francisco, and I am just as guilty of willful cultural ignorance for not acknowledging that as Americans are when they tell me Ireland is in the UK.

Also, the bars don’t close, ever. I think I have made my point.

I try not to write about things I don’t understand. It vexes me when idiots write about Northern Ireland and the associated conflicts without a firm grounding in its history and a healthy sprinkling of objectivity. Make that an entire bowl of objectivity. So I am not passing judgment here on whether Israel has a moral right to certain parts of the planet or not. Because frankly, I don’t feel qualified to make that judgment, and even more frankly I am not sure Israel is either.

However, this restraint does not mean I feel myself disqualified from having an opinion on any action Israel or any other country/government/gang of weirdos takes in defense or execution of whatever moral imperative it believes itself to be upholding. So for next few paragraphs I am going on a rant inhibited only by the laws of grammar and spelling which concerns this motherfucking convoy attack bullshit.

First of all, this rant is not anti-Semitic. I am not saying this because I particularly like or dislike jews, as an irish person who has only lived in the states for 2 years my main exposure to stupid Jew jokes was as a child on snippets of American TV, and it’s not like I even understood most of them. I have pretty much no opinion on Jews, they are people, they have a religion about as stupid as all other organized religions, and they mean more bacon for everyone else.  The question however of my anti-Semitism or lack thereof is – and I feel I should emphasise this – nothing to do with my opinion of Israel.

Israel is a country. Judaism is a religion. Yes, the faith is heavily identified with its homeland etc. So fucking what? If I said I disapproved of the Italian mob, would I be accused of being anti-Catholic as a result? I somehow doubt it, but it’s an identical concept. Throughout history, religions have taken previous persecution (mass crucifixions, or being fed to the lions for all followers of Christ in the time of Rome for example) as a reason for holy wars and other such belligerent and determined idiocy (the Crusades and the witch hunts to name only the most widely known of Christian-perpetrated atrocities. See? Impartial).

The Jews had the worst and most effectively executed atrocity of all time perpetrated against them, no-one is denying that. But even leaving aside the fact that this mostly happened to people long gone from their native land or descended from converted Polish or German gentiles and therefore not exactly under the remit of Israel the country, why in the name of anyone at all would that make anything Israel does now acceptable? When did vengeance and petulance become justice? Two wrongs never have made or will make a right, but Israel have somehow gotten it into their heads that 2 million and one wrongs will somehow manage it.

Israel just attacked a convoy of ships bringing aid to the Gaza strip. Not armies, not weapons, but food and building materials. They boarded the ships and hijacked them, and now have the gall to claim they will send the contents by land? If that were the case they could have saved some time and their much be-laboured  army budget by just leaving them the hell alone. Justifications I have seen include “There were materials aboard that could be used as weapons or to make weapons.” Yes, probably. Personally I am pretty confident I could kill someone with a pen, but that doesn’t mean they should be wrestled from my grasp at every meeting. “The soldiers were attacked when they boarded”. Riiight. Because if you were stopped at a traffic light and someone smashed your car window and climbed into the back seat it would never occur to you to slap the shit out of them, instead you would keep driving and ask if there was anywhere they’d like a ride to, and while they are here would they like to have a look through your groceries for a snack.

The Israeli army have published video footage of soldiers being beaten by lead pipes when they boarded the convoy. Em, yes? You expect sympathy for this? If I climbed a fence with a giant “Keep Out” to get into my neighbour’s yard I would feel pretty damn silly complaining to him about the bites I got from his dog. Particularly if I had climbed in there with a fucking gun. The Israelis claim their soldiers boarded with paintball guns and had no intention of killing anyone. So let’s review that statement. The soldiers have guns. The guns do not shoot real bullets. Presumably they also do not advertise that fact, who the fuck is intimidated by a soldier with a paintball gun. So they look like real guns, and In fact they are real guns because the same statement claims that when the violence escalated they swopped out the paint for live ammo.

News for you Israel – when faced with what appear to be armed soldiers attacking them with guns, people generally assume that armed soldiers are attacking them with guns. Overall, it’s an assumption you are safer making than not. Civil actions do not generally involve automatic weapons. They involve riot shields, they involve batons, they involve mace and pepper spray and tasers. If the Israeli army had given two tugs of a dead dogs cock whether they killed anyone or not there would not have been any goddamn guns on the boat. To the claim that shots were fired upon the soldiers I would say that the army’s own video evidence appears to contradict that. Maybe one or two of those aboard ship had guns, but clearly the majority didn’t, or surely believing themselves to be under deadly attack they would have used them before resorting to whatever was lying on the deck.

Should they have thrown down their lead pipes and surrendered to the scary-looking but actually secretly (temporarily) harmless and people-friendly guns? Perhaps. But Israel is not exactly known for its kindly treatment of those it decides are Palestinian sympathizers, so what kind of fate awaited these people if they gave themselves up? Had I been in their situation I hope I would have had the courage to defend myself. Not just to fight to stay out of an Israeli prison, but because they had no right.

Israel may have their self-proclaimed magic pass to heaven, and they are welcome to it. But they do not have one for this earth and for the life of me I cannot understand why they think that they do. They have no right whatsoever to that cargo, they have no right whatsoever to hold those people. They have been edging their toe over and back across the line for years and now they have firmly leaped across it. This was an act of piracy at best and war at worst. So enough with the get out of jail free cards. The Israeli government are acting like fucking assholes, and they should be held accountable for their actions. I don’t give a damn whose land they used to live on or who exterminated their ancestors.

As everyone in the entire world is probably aware by now (and if you are not aware, then you are on the wrong side of the internet – google “unpronouncable icelandic volcano” immediately please), western europe is grounded.  Eyjafjallajokul – the smaller of two rather large volcanoes – has erupted, spewing tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere and basically creating a massive cloud of thick volcanic ash in the air over the west of europe.

This has prompted the blanket shut down of all flights within the affected areas, basically eliminating air travel throughout Europe. Definitely a setback, definitely inconvenient for many people, what an unfortunate incident. That was my first reaction. My second reaction was slightly more paranoid, and was prompted by the realization that the damn volcano is still fucking erupting, and that no-one has any idea when it will stop. Right now everything seems to be pretty speculative, previous eruptions have lasted over a year, and weather conditions make the dust cloud unpredictable.

I cannot help but notice a tiny part of me that is squeaking “wow, thats actually a little bit fucking cool in a very medieval way, huh?” Practically I think this is a disaster, for Europe in general, for the world as a whole, and for me specifically. I can’t go home, my camp can’t come to Burning Man, airlines will choke to a fiscally horrendous death, the economy of europe will leap into the nearest toilet. I am perfectly aware of these things. Yet still some bit of my brain (presumably the bit that imagines post-apocalyptic earth scenarios and occasionally prods me to go backpacking in the wilderness) thinks this is an essentially romantic notion – no more planes means travel by trains, buses, boats. Real adventures, on which you might actually have to talk to people to stay sane, on which you might actually see the places you are passing through.

If getting places were a real effort, how much more worthwhile would it seem to make it around the world? One of the most fascinating evenings I had last year was when friends of friends showed us footage of their amazing travels all over the world – which they did almost entirely by bicycle or kayak. They’d been moving for 6 whole years, spending minuscule amounts, and having the adventure of a lifetime.

I think about that with some sort of extreme reverence and awe. I don’t know if I could handle that sort of total freedom despite it being the ultimate goal of my whole existence. There are drawbacks to a 6 year adventure – the most obvious being that we have to live after the adventure has ended, and that will be harder in a million ways. But do any of those really matter? Is there any real excuse for not launching yourself into the ether and seeing what happens? Or is aimless travel as bad as no travel at all? Maybe my excitement is prompted by the idea that there will be no other way to get home again, that it could be need and not frivolity that would send me on that adventure the long way round the world.

As I finish this, I realize that since I began writing it air travel restrictions have started to lift, Europe is mobile again. I am relieved and happy, but I have to admit I am also a tiny, minuscule, fractional bit well, disappointed.

For someone who values choice so highly, I amaze myself with how I react when it is restored to me.

Last month, an experienced whale trainer at SeaWorld was killed when the orca she was working with dragged her into its tank. Wait no, it was a killer whale. Hang on, those are exactly the same thing, its just that when the media are reviewing Free Willy they use “orca” and when they are creating unnecessary hysteria they use “killer whale”.

Naturally some charming christian fundamentalist groups are calling for the whale to be executed. Oh wait, only a person can be executed, animals are slaughtered. In some ways, I can understand this perspective. The whale in question has “attacked” 2 previous trainers in the last 20 years, so it could be considered a threat to human life. But here is where we insert a great big “however”.

However.

First – It’s a fucking whale. It’s not a dog, or a cat, or a domesticated creature. how the bloody hell were you expecting it to behave? The fact that there have been only three incidents so far is the truly surprising part. Humans have taken this creature out of the wild, held it as captive entertainment for 20 years, and taught it to do tricks for its supper, a situation which in itself raises many moral questions. But its a damn whale, the things weigh up to ten tons and their natural habitat is sea water. How the hell could anyone expect a ten ton water dwelling animal to understand or care that it is hurting a human?

Second – That someone has died through accident or chance is always a sad thing. But that trainer not only knew she was dealing with a huge dangerous wild animal, she knew it was one that had been aggressive or dangerous to individuals on 2 previous occasions. she knew the risks, and she did the job anyway. If it was for the fame or the cash then she took a gamble and lost. If it was for the love of the job (which by all media accounts it probably was), then I very much doubt she’d want her pet condemned to death.

One tabloid has actually quoted a christian group as claiming they want the whale stoned to death. Em, what? Am I the only one who wants to know how they actually intend to go about this? Seriously, if that request were granted right now, how exactly would they implement it? Stand beside his tank and roll boulders in? somehow drag the whale out of said tank and throw rocks at it? I won’t even go into the part about the biblical quote condemning the owners of the whale to death too for not having it killed the first time. Frankly, this sounds like blatant journalist bullshit to me, because I do not think even rabid christian fundamentalist groups are stupid enough to propose this, and I think they are pretty damn stupid.

Only self-aware conscious life forms can bear responsibility. If the whale is one, then keeping it in captivity has been a serious crime. If it is not one, then the death was not its fault, and furthermore there is no reason to believe that any whale would not repeat these actions – in fact to the contrary, many whales have. Waiting until it happens to say “oh, this whale must be dangerous” is like waiting until someone falls into the tiger enclosure to conclude that this particular tiger is dangerous. Either this is accepted as a peril of the showing of wild creatures, or organisations like Seaworld are simply no longer allowed to operate. Frankly, I think I am in favour of the latter.

Never buy anything because it is cheap, never buy anything because it is expensive. Obvious? In theory yes, in practice, we use these as subconscious metrics far too often.

Everyone has heard “A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs, a woman will pay $1 for a $2 item she doesn’t need” – A neat little phrase which nonetheless fails to include my roommate’s mother, who will spend $30 on 100 x $1 items that we will eventually use up at some point, because they were on sale at Costco. Too often imagined value is a real problem, the hunt for a bargain is sufficiently compelling to encourage us to buy things we wouldn’t bother owning otherwise, and we end up with a three foot stack of paper cups. No really, we do. There is one beside my fridge. I have bought items of clothing I have thrown out a year later having never worn, simply because I could get three of them for a fiver. But as I become a grown-up and continue doing my real job in the big bad world I have slowly kicked this habit, and discovered a whole new way of being fiscally stupid.

Cartographer once asked me why people buy designer handbags. The cause of the question was a particular designer handbag which aside from its maker being Chanel entirely failed to be in any way noteworthy, and was being sold secondhand by someone in her place of employ. The only answer I could give her as to why anyone would want this unremarkable piece of leather was that it was – to anyone who cares to know about these things – Chanel couture. Theoretically meaning it is a classic and timeless accessory, suitable for use at all occasions and times of life, actually meaning it cannot have cost less than a thousand dollars as couture items never go on sale. Grasping this with her usual intelligence, candour and utter disregard for things that make no sense, she posed the question of whether this was then only a slightly more subtle way of pinning hundred dollar bills to your hat, and I had to admit she was irrefutably correct.

I have no objection to paying large quantities of money for beautiful things. I myself have something of a weakness for designer shoes*. I can see the value in a rare or difficult design, or in a perfectly cut suit, or a distinctive dress. As I gradually earn more I find my objection to paying a lot for something I want dissipating somewhat, but thats not a reason to assume something that costs less is inferior.

There is an innate tendency in the human mind to conform to an accepted concept of value. The aphorism that something is worth what people are willing to pay for it is not entirely accurate when thus phrased, what we should be saying is that something is worth to you what you would be willing to pay for it. To me, some things are just not worth it no matter what the rest of the world thinks. Which is why I will never own a Dior handbag, an antique desk, or a house in Dublin city, though I certainly wouldn’t mind owning all 3. Unless of course I become a millionaire, at which point I imagine my interpretation of value will change.

The real problem arises when you let other people’s judgments of value become your own. That handbag is worth two thousand dollars, this house is worth six hundred thousand, or the most ludicrous of all – that diamond is worth five grand (I could rant about the stupidity of diamonds for days). Know what you really want, and never let anyone else tell you the value of anything.

*It has been my considered decision that spending $500 on something because I really like it is perfectly justifiable as long as it is my $500. In fact I can imagine few better reasons.