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.

Thats a lie, it’s one unfortunate event really. Namely that there is piss in my kitchen.

Oh how I wish I was joking. And before anyone asks, no I did not have a late-night accident while sleep-walking. As people may or may not be aware, about 3 months ago I moved to Brooklyn to live with a friend of mine (E/the Cuban). The cuban owns a nice 2-bed in Park Slopes, and is a raving loony, so you can see how this was an ideal situation. My recent affection for the US and NY in particular are, I must admit, largely due to a combination of Brooklyn and my roommate.

The apartment is about half a storey above street level, and has the awesome feature of an outside deck at the back overlooking a garden. I have a big room, the living area is spacious, and the whole apartment is filled with natural light. In other words, its great. With one minor issue, namely that due to the way the building was originally designed its not the same layout as the other apartments. So our kitchen, instead of being below a kitchen, is in fact below a bathroom.

This should, in theory, not really pose a problem. However it transpires that the apartment above us has some bathroom plumbing issues. A year ago E was nearly deluged with a pile of bath water when the kitchen light fixture basically burst from the soggy plaster revealing some rather substantial leak problems from above, and the aforementioned light was only replaced a few weeks ago when we had a handyman round to do a variety of small jobs.

The new kitchen light fixture basically resembles a large glass bowl which is stuck to the ceiling. On monday night we were sitting in the living room when we suddenly heard the sound of water gurgling loudly. With a soon to be justified sense of foreboding we inspected the kitchen and saw the steady stream of liquid falling from above and gradually both filling the ceiling bowl that is our fucking light and trickling happily onto the floor. E sprinted up the stairs to yell at our rather slow upstairs neighbours and I started damage control using a trash can and some paper towels.

When E reappeared we inspected the situation and at about the time I was noticing the rather odd hue of the “water” that had almost completely filled the bubble that is our kitchen light he remarked that the idiots upstairs were trying to reduce the overflow from their toilet using a saucepan.

Yes, a fucking saucepan. More to the point yes, the overflow from their bloody toilet. So yes, our kitchen was, as we stood there, gradually filling with urine. When we got up the next morning, we had a trash can full of piss, a floor spattered with piss and a kitchen light fixture still half filled with piss. If anyone doubts the veracity of this I have photographic evidence, which I may edit this post to add later.

Even better than this, for our threat to sue the landlord of the upstairs flat to be at all potent, E has decided that he has to see the fucking piss. And he comes round either today or tomorrow. So right at this moment I can say with a reasonably high degree of certainty that at the very least our kitchen light fixture is still filled with fucking piss.

I have always been against living with a landlord. Not that I think of E as a landlord, more like an eccentric older brother with a life like something out of a soap opera and the attention span of an epileptic goldfish. But one of the most crucial benefits to living with the owner of your dwelling is one that had not previously occurred to me:

It’s his job to empty the bin full of wee.

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.

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

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.

(This is actually something I wrote months ago and completely forgot to publish. In the interest of documenting more of my intrepid airport adventures, I figured I’d not waste it)

I fly a lot. Really, a lot. The logical result of this, is that I fucking hate airports. As may have been evidenced by previous posts, I go to quite spectacular lengths to avoid spending undue amounts of time in airports. I, quite frankly, scoff at airports. I laugh in the face of impossible plane-getting odds, I time my journey down to an error margin of minutes. In short, I fuck with airports. And as is let’s face it, statistically likely, airports fuck with me right back.

Today has been a cunning and deviously structured attempt to prevent me getting back to New York. Harken to my tale of basic irritation… My company have some sort of contract deal with Air Canada of a satanically binding nature, so we always use them to fly any route they cover. Having brought only carry-on luggage with me outbound to Canada I decided to check in on-line for my return journey. This took me ten fucking minutes, 8 of which were finding the button that would allow me to print a boarding pass. So either this website is deeply unintuitive, or my brain has dissolved and is oozing slowly out my ears as I type. *wipes up excess goo*

On my journey to the departures lounge, I managed to leave my glasses in a taxi, leave my passport on top of a trash can, and incorrectly fill in part of a customs form I have already filled in at least 7 times before. Ok, so that stuff was all me, perhaps the melting brain theory has more credence than I expected. But there was airport stuff too, I swear. Like the fact that I walked all the way to my gate, having looked up the map and seen there was a restaurant right beside it, only to discover there was a massive undocumented security door preventing the 5 metre walk from one to the other. So I walked all the way back to the restaurant beside security, wolfed down a sandwich, and abandoned half my beer to walk briskly all the way back down, only to hear an announcement as I arrived that my flight was suddenly at final call, and my gate had changed to one beside the restaurant I had fucking well eaten in 10 minutes before, necessitating a brisk dash all the way back, filled with cheeseburger sloshing around in Heineken.

I walked onto the plane, and realised it was one of those little planes that you better not be carrying more than a notebook onto, because they have the overhead storage space of a small child’s lunchbox. Naturally my attempt to bring only hand luggage for a weeks stay had resulted in the largest allowable luggage, which then had to be checked in anyway, and so I resigned myself to not having a speedy departure from LaGuardia. And a good fucking thing too.

As I write this, I sit in a pokey airport strewn with the occasional clearly non-functioning plane, and surrounded by fields. What happened? Well, LaGuardia was busy when we arrived, and because this plane is only slightly bigger than one I got in trouble for firing at someone’s head when I was 7, we could only circle for 20 minutes before running out of fucking fuel. Apparently the solution to this is not to actually land us, but to send us to Stuart International Airport, Newberg, New York state. Where we have been for two and a half fucking hours, re-fueling, marvelling that a runway can have so much grass on it, and generally pissing about.

I am also sitting beside a small phillippina lady, who is quite possibly the most dreadful person I have ever met and believe me, this is a competitive title. She laughs like Fran Drescher and endlessly moans about every step of our ludicrously arduous journey. If there were anything that would make me sympathise with the pilot and crew, it is this woman. Her sole redeeming quality has been the inspired decision to ask for free booze, which has worked admirably. But if I do not get off this plane soon, I may end up strangling her with her own large intestine.

I think this is what they mean by “karmic realignment”. Bastards.

I hate being ill. Of course I do, everyone hates being ill. I have yet to meet a single individual who when faced with a bout of the common cold grins with anticipation and remarks that they love a good snivel. However it has been pointed out to me that I tend to not only dislike being ill, but to take it as a personal affront.

Currently, I am sick. No longer in a not-being-able-to-stand-up sort of way, but definitely in a rather annoying way. This, as you can imagine, has done very little for the sweetness of my disposition. I try not to bitch about specific personal issues here, ie. exactly what is currently wrong with my job, why a particular friend or situation is pissing me off, or what the hell that green stuff is on the sink. In lieu of suddenly starting now, here is a short list of things that irritate me.

• Other people
• Unnecessary precipitation
• Coughs that stop me from sleeping
• Fast food delivery personnel
• Psychotic stalker ex-boyfriends
• Chewing gum
  
• Television

That will be all.