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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Alright, I have to ask. Why is everyone so fucking shocked that the pope has decided that eliminating homosexuality is up there with saving the rainforest? Last time I checked the pope was catholic, and unless the catholic church has made some radical and fundamental changes to their philosophy over the last few years they believe homosexual acts to be inherently sinful.

Of course the pope thinks it’s important to eradicate homosexuality. The man truly and honestly believes it to be something that damns a human being to eternal torment and suffering. When offered the option to work for saving trees against that of working to protect millions of human souls I am, quite frankly, only shocked by how mild his response was. People can argue all they like about the church’s interpretation of the bible, but I guarantee you that the bible specifically states that homosexual acts are against god, I’ve checked. Anyone demanding I quote chapter and verse will be both obliged and simultaneously torn a new arsehole for making me trawl through the bible _again_, as I am sure there are millions of sites that will tell you the exact passages.

People whine about the pope’s responsibility as a world spiritual leader. My fucking arse. The pope’s responsibility is to his god. He knows it, why doesn’t anyone else seem to get it? Ok, it’s better for everyone if he can be on reasonably good terms with the world, he has a whole lot of influence over a whole lot of people. But from his perspective, the important thing is ensuring the eternal salvation of mankind, political correctness shouldn’t really enter into it.

At this point I should probably clarify something, I completely and totally disagree with the pope on the subject of homosexuality and indeed sexuality in general. In fact, the number of things I disagree with the catholic church on is rather substantial. What a cause of consternation for me, as an irish catholic by birth and upbringing. Oh what a wailing and gnashing of teeth there was for the approximately 5 seconds it took me at the age of 14 to realise that in fact there was a very, very simple solution, which I will now share with the world.

Stop. Being. Catholic.

Yes kids, that’s right, it’s a simple as that. You can if you like go the whole hog and get yourself excommunicated, but personally I am saving that for a special occasion. Frankly, if the sacraments of the catholic church mean nothing to you then a formal ejection is blatantly unnecessary anyway. The really cool part of this solution is that if you disagree with the pope and don’t think all gay people go to hell, you’ve actually stopped being a catholic already. It’s a religion, not a fucking social club.

The point of organised religion is to create a community of people with the same core beliefs. And guess what, the core beliefs of the catholic church are not in fact “let’s be nice to everyone”. Whatever about some other happy-go-lucky Christian faiths (none of which incidentally believe it’s possible not to be damned if you’re not a christian) the catholic church through the ages has been a byword for corruption and intolerance of epic proportion.

People complain about the pope, people complain about the church’s attitude toward sex of any description, people complain about the church’s long history of abhorrent political policies. But then they receive the census form and next to religion write down “Roman Catholic”. The church has power because we give it to them. It is insinuated into the structure of our lives, births deaths and marriages are unimaginable without a priest. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Screw organised religion. Most people are doing this already, I don’t know all that many Catholics or indeed Christians whose faith is much more than a convenient label and set of conventions for them to ignore at will. The only thing that can and is damaging massive global religious organisations like the catholic church is the attrition of membership.

Yes, that would mean giving up some traditional ceremonial aspects of life. But when those rituals become the whole point then the meaning they were supposed to convey in the first place is lost. All they mean to most people now is the ability to get married in a church by a priest with their mum watching.

If you can’t give up the conventional social trappings of a religion, then the excuse that the ridiculous intolerant speeches of your spiritual leader don’t represent you is pathetic, because you don’t even represent yourself.

In the approach to Christmas I’ve been reading an awful lot of articles and blog entries about the evils (or lack thereof) of booze, a common topic in Ireland in particular as we are somewhat prone to over-indulgence. So lets get a couple of things straight. There is a reason alcohol makes us feel woozy, there is a reason it lowers our inhibitions and makes us a bit merry, and there is a reason that large quantities of it make us extremely ill, it’s motherfucking poisonous kids.

Alcohol, like all hallucinogens and intoxicants, is poison. I find it endlessly entertaining that we manage to cultivate an attitude of cheerful ignorance about this. Does this mean I am soberly perched on my high horse looking at the scummy intoxicated people with disdain? Not in the slightest. I enjoy drinking, occasionally I even like the taste of it, and though I rarely drink in order to get drunk anymore I have done so in the past. But I don’t argue that its ok, I don’t argue that everyone enjoys a pint at christmas, and I don’t cite the “red wine and guinness can be good for you” argument.

Because I don’t give a rat’s ass whether its good for me or not. I drink for the same reasons I eat pizza and chocolate, I want to. Moderate amounts of pizza won’t kill me, and if I eat so much of it that I end up unable to wipe my own arse without a rag on a stick thats my own goddamn fault. By the same token, if I drink so much beer I end up falling asleep in my own sick then thats my own fault too. Anyone lecturing me on the harm it does my body will get a short sharp “go fuck yourself, you pompous wankfest”. It’s my body, so whether I want to poison it, paint it blue or throw it under a train is my own business.

With that established, I still think recommended units of alcohol are bullshit. For the simple reason that everyone’s physiology is different, and so everyone’s ability to absorb the aforementioned toxins will vary also. This does not mean it is healthy for me to drink 4 pints because I am pretty tall for a girl. It just means I won’t fall over until pint 5.

The real problem arises when people not only risk their own health but the health and safety of others. People who drink too much and fall asleep in a gutter are idiots, people who drink too much and then drive themselves home are unforgiveably retarded. This sort of thing is rampant in america and really pisses me off, because people just dismiss it as a fact of life. It’s not an unavoidable aspect of drinking, it’s disgustingly irresponsible.

The irish seem to have cultivated an amazingly diverse attitude toward drinking that encompasses bravado, embarassment, social obligation and mutual reinforcement that borders on the irritating as hell. Unlike the americans, we feel weird going out for a drink alone, and therefore if we feel like a trip to the pub it is necessary for to recruit/bully/cajole/bribe someone else into accompanying us. Likewise leaving the pub before the majority of your group can be a very difficult maneouver as everyone simultaneously tries to guilt you into just one more.

So if you feel like drinking, go right the fuck ahead. I promise not to argue how much of it is bad for you if you promise not to argue how much of it is good for you.

Today, has been a bad day. In fact, that could be considered an understatement. Up until now the worst day of my life was officially the 23rd of May 2003, a day in which I got stood up twice, found out I couldn’t go to an Iron Maiden concert, broke up with my boyfriend, and spilled bubble mixture all over my keyboard while complaining about the above. However I think Dec 2nd 08 will now be giving it a run for it’s money.

This morning I woke up lazily thinking I had a few extra minutes to get into work since my first meeting wasn’t until 9.30. So I was mildly surprised to receive a phone call from one of my colleagues at 9am on the dot. I was substantially more surprised at the subject of the phone call, namely that our boss had just been laid off, and was in the process of vacating the office.

It should be noted at this point that I work in finance. Not directly for a financial institution, but in the current global recession the crappy economy affects everyone. So I was expecting for something to throw a spanner in the works of my merry glide through life sooner or later. I suppose no-one ever thinks its going to be sooner. As we were all still reeling from shock of this news in the office, naturally the instant reaction was “what happens now?”, or to put it more accurately; “What happens to _us_?”. Lets just say answers were less than reassuring. In fact, on a scale of reassuring from 1-10, the answers we got could be reasonably considered to be a minus 17.

My concentration shot, I spent most of the day thinking through worst case scenarios, and what I was going to do in the event of losing my job. For anyone this is a pain in the ass, for me its more like a case of chronic piles. For you see, I am in the states on a transfer visa, which is the quickest cheapest way of getting someone permission to work in the US. It is also, rather ironically, non-transferrable. Should I lose my current employment, I have 9 days to leave the country. (Yes, I could just come back after on a visa waiver for 3 months, but the previous sentence has better dramative narrative quality, don’t ruin it for me)

I decided at about 5 that it was time to enjoy a relaxing beverage whilst bemoaning my fate to a sympathetic friend. Unfortunately, sympathetic friends are not actually something I tend to cultivate. This is almost never a problem, but today all 3 of my potentially sympathetic friends were busy or far away. All the blatantly unsympathetic ones were mostly just far away. In lieu of dramatically proclaiming doom to all who would listen I went home to brood while watching House.

After wasting most of my evening I decided to tidy some of the pile of clothing that has been accumulating on my couch and so I ordered chinese food. This may not seem like a logical progression, but my cunning plan was to make the tidying a goal I had to achieve before eating said chinese food. I’m not sure whether its more worrying that I try to use positive reinforcement on myself, or that it works. Now, the folding and putting away of clothing is a relatively simple task, even if you are an anal retentive psycho like myself. Unfortunately the very first item I put in a drawer was apparently the last straw in a long-running game I was having with the cosmos of “when will my chest of drawers break”. Thus, naturally, my chest of drawers broke.

Not a massive crashing wood splinters all over the floor type of break. No, it was more of a long drawn out, sad and pathetic type of break, which began with me futilely trying to re-insert a drawer and ended with me crouching on the floor with a hammer, every item of clothing I own strewn across a bunch of empty detached drawers which had one by one refused to remain in place and were now stacked on my bed. In the middle of this, it suddenly occurs to me to wonder where the fuck my chinese food is, at which point the phone rings.

The delivery guy is confused. I live about 10 feet from the most famous street in goddamn america, and this only serves to confuse people, because the genius planners of my building gave it 2 addresses. The official address, which is 1 Wall St Court, and the back door, which is 82 Beaver St. (I’m fine with putting this on the internet for two reasons, one there are a zillion people living here, and 2 I’m moving out. ) the back door requires a keycard to get in, so I give delivery people the front address. However no matter what I fucking write on the extra delivery instructions, or the address field, every goddamn fucking time, they go to 1 Wall St, which of course is a bloody great office building 5 minutes down the road.

Since this is america, they are delivering chinese food due to barely speaking english, and so when they call me to self-righteously complain that I have given the wrong address it is a fucking frustrating experience. I spent 5 minutes trying to explain to this guy that the address was incomplete, and he spectacularly failed to understand everything I said. When I eventually persuaded him just to go to the back door on the theory that at least it was unambiguous, he called me back to say it didn’t exist, having not bothered to walk another 10 feet down the street from where he was standing at number 76.

I finally ate my crappy chinese food half an hour ago, in the middle of a huge mound of clothing which is still not put away in my newly repaired and wedged upright chest of drawers. It was absolutely shite, which I guess means it wasn’t quite as unhealthy as the really delicious MSG-tastic chinese food I usually eat. I was about to bung the leftovers in the fridge when I decided to eat the fortune cookie, read the message inside, and nearly fell off the couch laughing…

“Your enthusiasm towards work will soon pay off”

Its good to know the universe has a sense of fucking humour.