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 was recently given an excellent book by Ben Goldacre called “Bad Science” (by cheese, who is consistently awesome and sometimes gives me things just because I might like them). I am only about 100 pages through it so far, and I already wish to give the man some sort of award for universal competence. Perhaps my opinion will change when I reach the end of the book, but he has already touched on several of my favourite things to despise and mock, so even if the remainder of the book is a let-down I suspect my overall impression will still be favourable.

“Bad Science” does not seek to champion reforms in scientific methods so much as attempt to give the layperson an understanding of what makes a method or a study scientifically good or bad (good or bad meaning reliable and relevant results versus meaningless noise). People accept a shocking amount of tripe purely on the basis of  “a study” without understanding anything about that study or how it was conducted. A close friend of mine pursuing a career in medical lab science is constantly ranting about the complete ludicrousness of journalistic spins on studies, complete lack of background, and an immediate adherence to the most dramatic possible interpretation of results.

I have ranted before on this blog about the astonishing willingness of individuals to accept blatantly ridiculous facts as gospel (“we eat spiders in our sleep” being my favourite example). Sometimes I think we accept these things because they are so damn stupid, not in spite of it. The logic runs something like: “Science proves amazing and unbelievable things all the time, like that the earth revolves around the sun or we are all made of tiny atoms or that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Therefore, amazing and unbelievable facts which I hear must have been scientifically proven by someone, or no-one would ever believe them. Yey, spiders!”. Yeah. Right.

What Bad Science attempts to disclose is not what to think, but how to think. How to logically evaluate the conclusions that have been drawn from a given set of facts, and to reach not only your own independent conclusion, but an understanding of why another conclusion might be lacking or indeed superior. While I am all for expressing my opinion and hammering it home with a blunt instrument if necessary, this book definitely goes one better.

One of the most worrying trends in the modern world is the easy acceptance of unsubstantiated conclusions as scientific facts because of buzzwords on a par with the flux capacitor, and the assumption that all studies are done with the same level of professionalism and rational thought.  So please,  don’t be one of the people who think somebody once conducted a scientific study on nocturnal spider consumption. Display some motherfucking ability to reason. Read this book if you are not sure how.

I used to have a rule about never owning anything I couldn’t carry. Ostensibly this was to do with my immense portability, love of freedom, ability to pick up and move on short notice as the whim takes me, etc. In reality it was a little more to do with the fact that not only do I want to be able to do these things, I want to be able to do them by myself. However moving to NY necessitated the purchase of furniture, which I justify by assuming if I really needed to I could just take it apart and lift it myself, because you know, flatpacks can be carried. Hah.

Which goes part of the way to explaining why I ended up stuck at the bottom of the approximately 7 steps up to my apartment, completely incapable of transporting the large flat-packed bookcase I had in my possession as far as the apartment door. You could get the rest of the way toward said explanation by taking into account the fact that I have quite probably never in my life looked at anything that fits indoors and thought “nah, I can’t lift that”.

Now, I know I am not Batman, but I have always been able to figure out a way of moving heavy things. Whether by shuffling them along the ground, dragging them,  rolling them, lifting them a few inches at a time, or whatever else presents itself as a potential solution. I have flown with 3 suitcases and a bag despite having only 2 hands, I have re-arranged large items of furniture like beds and wardrobes many times. So I assumed, despite barely being able to maneuver this thing onto the trolley at IKEA, that I would figure it out somehow.

Em, no.

First off, the damn thing was 7’ long and fucking heavy. I tried lifting and dragging, no dice. So I managed to get it upright, and then laid it horizontally on the stairs, where the top came about one and a half  steps short of the highest point. So with a mighty effort and looking ridiculous, I crouched down and pushed from the bottom and it gradually crawled upwards. Theoretically, this would have been a perfectly rational if rather foolish looking method of getting it up the stairs. Except that just as I thought I had it, everything stuck. There was a lip on the top of the stairs over which it would not go. Letting go to run up and pull it that fateful inch over was unthinkable because it would slide back down, pushing it from below was impossible. I collapsed in a mildly amused but desperately frustrated heap, and wondered what the fuck I was going to do if I could not get the damn thing out of the hall.

I would like at this point to say that desperation is the mother of invention, and that I devised an ingenious and McGuyver-worthy way of getting the damn thing into my flat. But that would be a giant lie, because what actually happened was that I realized my neighbor was at home, and feeling rather silly I enlisted his assistance in the moving of said heavy thing.

I may have set back the feminist movement by 20 years.

Someone described me like that today and I found it physically impossible to go a whole day without repeating it somehow, because its brilliant.

The theme of today’s post is essentially “bugger this for a game of soldiers”. Today I found out how long a green card takes to get. No wait, sorry, I should clarify that. Today I found how long a green card takes to get if you are not married to an american, related to an american or winning the green card lottery. In other words today I found out how long it takes to get permission to work long-term in america based solely on what you would actually be working at in america. Just so you know, it takes considerably longer this way than any of the above, which appears to me to fly in the face of all logic and good sense.

I asked for this from my employer about 8 months ago. I wanted them to start the green card process, because I wanted to have some sort of fallback should the arse fall out of the job market again and I find myself not only without employment but without a right to reside at my address anymore. It is one thing to abruptly lose your job and another to abruptly lose residence of a country 3000 miles from your native one. It would be not only disgustingly inconvenient but frightfully expensive to rectify. So the request seemed like a sensible one.

At the time the process was described to me it seemed a tad lengthy but potentially very worthwhile. 6 months of PERM (aka: the can-we-replace-you-with-a-citizen test), a year of waiting for PERM certification, another year to process the application for a green card along with an adjustment of status in order to extend my visa. So at best, this process takes 2-3 years. What escaped me at the time is that this is merely the timescale involved in _applying_. The backlog of people waiting for the aforementioned verdant immigration card is a minimum of FIVE FUCKING YEARS. So that means, as of right now, it will take a good 7 years for me to actually get one of these. If during that time I am let go or change jobs, the whole process crashes and burns and has to start all over again.

My current state of mind can be summarised in 3 words. Fuck. That . Shit.

I have a few personal rules about New Years Eve. Some of them are obvious, and based on logistics, like “never go somewhere you can’t get back from on foot unless you are in a country with real public transport”, “never go to a niteclub”, “make sure you have bought enough to drink and give away” and so on and so forth. I find it requires more careful planning than your average night out, mostly due to the fact that everyone is an exuberantly drunk moron. Not that this is necessarily a problem until one throws up on your shoes.

But my most rigidly adhered to rule in recent years is to never make a New Year’s resolution. Firstly, it’s a completely arbitrary day, and so I refuse to conform to such a ludicrous convention, mostly out of sheer contrariness. Secondly, any resolution not important enough to be made as soon as you thought of it is clearly not going to be adhered to and is a damn waste of time and effort by definition.

So I hereby declare some January 19^th resolutions which I have just thought of and decided were important. Ahem.

• I will save some fucking money. I have a habit of spending everything I earn in a great big happy flow of joy and whatever-I-feel-like-ness. This is not a long term plan.
• I will fly less than I did last year. This would be really easy for most people. But I think even I can keep it under  50,000 miles in 12 months

Not exactly lofty aspirations, and admittedly rather vague, but the more specific versions that contain actual numbers are in my head. Of course these are just the new ones, there are perpetually ongoing resolutions like “try to drink a little less”, “go to the gym more” and the ever popular “stop being so chubby”. But essentially, these are the plan.

I will be interested to see how this progresses. Oh, and happy fucking new year everyone. Ain’t life just grand?