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.

The above is a quote from one of a series of ten minute plays I saw last week. All of which were odd, some of which were also very funny. One or two however, involved interpretive dance. And quite frankly, and I can’t emphasize this enough people, I fucking hate interpretive dance.

Anyone who has read Terry Pratchett’s discworld series will probably be familiar with the character of Lord Vetinari, a perfectly reasonable and just ruler of a major city with the single exception of his passionate hatred for mime artists. Anyone with white gloves and face-paint pretending to be trapped in an invisible box in this fictional city soon finds themselves upside down in a scorpion pit, on the side of which is helpfully hung a similiarly inverted sign reading “Learn The Words”

If I were an absolute dictator, a similiar level of intolerance would be applied to anyone who thinks that important messages can be effectively conveyed by the interplay of the swaying bodies of people with too little talent to get into ballet school. Interpretive dance is the visual equivalent of really bad poetry. Its painful to watch, its boring, and anyone can do it.

Yes, self-expression is commendable. But unless you’re pretty goddamn interesting its also boring as fuck. Why subject other people to it? Not to mention the fact that if you can’t fucking dance then the fact that its not really dancing is not going to help you all that much. I went to the ballet last year, and was shocked to learn that I loved it. It was graceful, beautiful and captivating. I think talented dancers are amazing, whether they perform the tango or a hiphop routine. But there is a reason interpretive dance is confined to small theatres filled with hippies, and that reason is that it fucking sucks.

I love weird-ass smale scale theatre productions, in fact my favourite ever live performance was probably done on a budget of about $23. I have a healthy appreciation of the utterly bizarre, in an otherwise fairly banal performance I can at least enjoy the absurdity of the appearance of a semi-naked angel in a white afro wig on rollerskates with a unicorn horn strapped to the crotch of her silver hotpants (yes, this did happen. New York is such a wonderful place). But I really wish people would stop trying to disguise this interpretive dance crap as entertainment.

It’s pretentious, self-indulgent wank. Go wank at home like everyone else.

Though I suppose you could throw one really hard. In fact, I guess if you have a .45 then it would be a reasonably effective bludgeon, because damn those things are big. But then I doubt anyone wants to restrict the sale of handguns because of their potential for braining someone. Presumably because if you tried to ban everything that could be used to damage another human being (a category which I have to say contains about 90% of all useful items) we would all walk to work, eat with our fingers and use those sponge telephones kids sometimes play with.

The classic defense of gun laws in the US is the good old “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. This statement is absolutely and completely true. Then the argument goes along the lines of “after all, how many people are killed in car accidents? We don’t ban cars!” (oh, the enviable power of human logic). Yes, people die in all sorts of spectacularly stupid ways, they get accidentally electrocuted, drown in their own swimming pools, and get run over by lawnmowers. Anyone who has ever read the Darwin awards webpage is doubtless grateful for the service performed by these noble individuals by removing themselves from the gene pool.

There are a thousand easily accessible ways to kill a human being. We can’t detect poison by smell, we are easily crushed by heavy objects, lack of oxygen to the brain can be achieved in a multitude of ways very quickly, relatively small cuts to any of a number of major arteries will send us into shock through loss of blood in less than 2 minutes, and that’s a very optimistic estimate. But we don’t outlaw or restrict the sale of arsenic, large bricks, piano wire or knives. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, we can’t. The reason people are so frequently killed by useful household items is that they _are_ useful household items.

Here of course, is where the analogy breaks down. Guns are designed for killing things. Having a gun in your home is an indication you are willing to kill something should the necessity arise, whereas having say, a hatchet in your home indicates you are willing to chop wood should the fire go out. “Ah yes,” half of america cries, “but what about hunting, wild animal attacks, etc? Lots of people live in rural areas, what if there is a bear in the woodshed?”. I freely acknowledge that there are indeed parts of the states in which one might occasionally find a bear in the woodshed. To the denizens of these areas I would probably say “right, but who the hell shoots a bear with a .357 Magnum?”

Hunters have _shotguns_ people. Hunters have rifles. Hunters do not carry handguns for the purposes of shooting game, or defending their territory from encroaching wild beasts. I assume there are a multitude of excellent technical reasons for this, some of which are obvious even to me. Long-range accuracy for one, no-one wants to get too close to the bear. But essentially one has to admit that shotguns, while eminently useful as bear deterrents, are not something you can shove in the waistband of your trousers to go cruisin’ the ‘hood, at least not without creative use of a hacksaw and an unhealthy disregard for your own genitalia. No, in the vast majority of cases, it will be a handgun, something that has no purpose in design except to shoot a human being.

Handguns are about power. I have never heard an argument that even implied this was not the case. A handgun is the most easily concealed, easily carried, lethal weapon available to anyone. It is the most powerful thing you can have in your possession. It is the power to take a life in a split-second, or to compel another person to do anything you wish under threat of that power. Guns are the last word in society, just as nuclear weapons are the last word in politics.

Louis XIV had every cannon made during his reign stamped with the message “Ultima Ratio Regum” – the last argument of kings. Kings, not men. The last argument of those who believe their choices apply to all, not just themselves. The last argument of men who believe their judgement so superior to that of other men that they will force it upon them. Or perhaps worse, the last argument of those who do not care, because people are not important.

Guns don’t kill people. Delusional fucked up assholes with guns kill people. But I don’t see us getting rid of delusional fucked up assholes anytime soon.

Today is the big day here in the US. Newsrooms are buzzing with excitement, workplaces are half-empty as people take a trip to the polls. Everyone is waiting for the outcome of this momentous democratic event. McCain symbolizes tradition, social stability, a comfortable devil-you-know in the guise of an honourable war veteran. Obama represents change and potential economic recovery, but is in many ways an unknown quantity. Yes, finally tonight we find out what truly motivates the American public, greed or racism. Personally my money is on greed.

Describe it how you will, democracy boils down to majority rule. In a society of one million people, if 500,001 are for something, and 499,999 are against, then the vote passes. That is if the ballots are counted properly, none are mysteriously lost, and no-one’s brother is the governor of Florida.

But if the majority of people are ignorant, foolish, thoughtless sheep, then why should the majority rule? Do 999,999 other people have the right to decide what rules I should obey? The decisions of the multitude, whatever reasons they may have for making them, become the law. The person who most closely reflects the mindset of the masses becomes the ruler. Which I guess indicates that for the past 8 years the American people have been unable to find their own arses with both hands.and an atlas.

People are so apathetic about democracy these days that many believe their individual votes don’t actually matter. Bill Vaughan once wrote that a citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election. He would doubtless have been delighted to hear that this is not true. The words “unless there is a black guy running for President” should clearly have been added.

One could possibly be forgiven in the states for claiming their vote does not count, because technically this is true. The electoral college and the super-delegates make it possible for the popular vote not to reflect the actual vote. However this is something of a unique situation. To hear someone in a European country claim that their vote doesn’t matter because it will not be the deciding one boggles the mind. At best that’s a rationalisation of laziness, but mainly its just utter nonsense.

The reality is that democracy sucks, because people continue to be fools. Sometimes they get lucky, and vote for a JFK, or an Abraham Lincoln. But most of the time their reasons aren’t logical, the candidate just has superior charisma or a good spin. Sometimes they get unlucky, and end up accidentally endorsing dictatorships. The only thing worse than not casting a vote at all, is casting a vote randomly just because you have one. Abstaining from voting can be a valid decision, but being too lazy to go to the polls on your lunchbreak isn’t abstaining, it’s copping out.

There is no right that exists without a corresponding responsibility. The right to life comes with the obligation to respect the life of others, the right to a fair trial comes with the responsibility to judge fairly in the trial of another should you ever be called upon to do so, and the right to vote comes with the responsibility of understanding what your vote means. Democracy is designed with a world of intelligent, unbiased and benevolent individuals in mind. Currently we make do with occasionally enlightened self-interest.

Because what’s the alternative? I have heard “benevolent dictatorship” mentioned, usually as a joke, but it appeals in some ways. A modern day King Solomon to arbitrate the “McDonalds coffee is too hot and it burned me” lawsuits, to tell the media to cover things that happen outside of the damn country, to force out biased laws. To say “people are stupid, but let’s make them act smart anyway, and maybe eventually they’ll figure out that its better”.

But a well-intentioned dictator is still a dictator, and I am a firm believer in the idea that human choices are important. At least I know that when people vote for a law to be put in place, that they are also voting for that law to be applied to _them_. They are voting for their own president as well as mine, their own restriction as well mine. And there is always the possibility, the outside chance that they will be right.

The truth is that people must be allowed to be fools. Because otherwise it will mean nothing when some of them choose not to be.

It’s all about politics and money. Or so everyone tells me. Personally I’m pretty sure at least some of it is about bagels. So today’s rant was going to be about bagels. Except that then I remembered there isn’t a whole lot to say about bagels aside from how great they are. So I resorted to politics and money as a way to pass the time.

Let’s start with some slightly more familiar ground, money. What do I know about high finance? Not an awful lot. But apparently more than a large chunk of the American public, because I cunningly realised that nothing does not equal something. For months I have been reading articles decrying predatory lending practices, and bemoaning the evils of persuasive mortgage brokers and careless underwriters. The housing bubble burst and immediately everyone wanted to construct a large sign that read “blame” and point it somewhere in the other direction.

So what happened? Well, as far as I’m aware, this happened…

The US government wanted to avoid propagating the post depression mentality of the mid-twentieth century, a mentality in which people hid their money under the mattress in times of uncertainty. So they actively encouraged public spending and the easy extension of personal credit. They wanted to make it as easy as possible for Americans to buy things, whether or not they could immediately afford those things. Was this wise? Fuck no. But hiding your money under a mattress isn’t very clever either in a global economy.

Level of credit became a form of prestige in America, and still is. People play tricks in order to raise their credit rating, even occasionally checking it themselves to see how they are doing. Actually having the money to pay for something became less important than someone _thinking_ you had the money to pay for it. So began the housing boom.

As more credit was extended more people could now afford more houses, and the price of housing began to rise with the demand. People began not only to buy homes but to invest in housing. This trend remained steady long enough for mortgage brokers to come up with a wonderful new idea. People with insufficient credit to buy the house they wanted should buy it anyway, and be given a mortgage with a disproportionately low rate for the first x years. After x years, the value of the house will have increased sufficiently for you to re-finance and use the difference to lever yourself out of the hole you calmly placed yourself in x years previously. These were sub-prime mortgages. Essentially, they are a gamble that your house will increase in value.

For the ignorant or merely the stupid, this was almost like magic. The key seemed to be having a house. Once you had actually secured a mortgage and gotten a house everything would somehow work out ok whether you could afford the house or not. So some people who were particularly desperate began to lie on their applications. As if the margin for bankruptcy the brokers were using wasn’t slim enough, they were now unknowingly participating in certain financial doom. The underwriters, who were supposed to be verifying facts like “ability to repay” were taking the word of applicants on far too many points, they were encouraged to be lenient by the government and brokers alike and they indulged in this all too frequently.

These mortgages, termed as assets, were put into pools by financial institutions, and then carved up into small units called mortgage backed securities. A certain percentage of these were known to be sub-prime, and so a percentage of _those_ was assumed likely to default. Except that now we repeat the pooling and splicing exercise multiple times, with multiple sets of mortgages, and now we have no fucking idea what percentages we are looking at anymore without resorting to quantum physics equations. The bonds were valued by all accounts fairly optimistically, and made their way out into the financial world, which worked just fine as long as everyone thought they were worth something.

Then house prices stopped rising. Gradually sub-primers approaching the end of their easy low-payment term realised that they had no way out of the imminent crippling monthly payments. Their home was not worth enough to cover re-financing to a payment they could afford. People began to lose their homes to foreclosure, which further decreased the price of housing, thus exacerbating the crisis. Were the economy not so intertwined with everything the story would end here with a lot of distraught and bankrupt people who had hopefully learned that spending money you don’t have can be a really stupid idea.

However when a huge percentage of the mortgages in the securities started to reveal their worthlessness there was (to use a technical banking term) an unholy fucking shitstorm. Imagine if you found out that the money you had in your pocket was suddenly only worth a third of what you thought it was. This is pretty much what happened to several large banks. Institutions which relied heavily on trading in MBS like Bear Stearns and Northern Rock lost huge amount of liquidity in days, and were unable to support their own positions in the market for long enough to recover. When the market loses confidence in a bank it suddenly costs that bank far more to trade than it did the previous day, every transaction needs to be more heavily backed with collateral than before. So banks started to drop, first NR, then Bear, and the latest casualties have been Lehmann Brothers and Merrill.Lynch.

The US government just created $700 billion worth of “economic rescue” for some of the bigger institutions that were going under. Is that good? No, it’s mostly shit. But I don’t see a better course of action out there, and I am open to suggestions. For the institutions they are saving to go bankrupt would have economic repercussions far worse than what we’ve seen so far, but some schools of thought say that’s what’s needed. A proper recession, and a real recovery. Frankly, I’m not comparing this to the crash of ’29 until I see someone jump out a window. Though I hear they reinforce them nowadays.

So to every underwriter who didn’t bother doing his job, to every mortgage broker who made a quick commission persuading some idiot to buy a home he couldn’t afford, and to every dumbass fucking moron who can’t multiply sufficiently well to see that he will never be able to pay that much money per month if he lives to be a thousand, I leave this message:

You fucking worthless cunts are the reason my morning bagel costs 19 extra cents. Rot in hell.

A friend of mine once pointed out to me that no-one ever really wants two mutually exclusive things. At first this struck me as ridiculous, humans are foolish creatures who constantly want contradictory things to happen. They want to live at home in comfort but they want to move out and be independent, they want to stay with their girlfriend but they want to sleep with another woman, they want to change jobs but they don’t want upheaval, and so on. But when I actually thought about it, I realised that he was right.

There is always something you want more. The true conflict of two desires is very rare if it happens at all. Deep down everybody knows what they want most. The problem is that people have trouble figuring it out because they layer their own thoughts in so much horse shit. Because sometimes knowing what you really want involves acknowledging that you really are a lazy bastard/inconsiderate prick/fucking asshole. You don’t love your girlfriend and want to cheat on her anyway. What you love is the image of yourself as someone who wouldn’t dump a person you care about because of your driving need to do the nasty with her sister.

People invent incredibly elaborate excuses sometimes for doing the things they want to do. I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone in the past, probably more so than most, so I know what I’m talking about. One of the most precious things people have is their self-image, and the farther it is from reality the more vulnerable that person is to the moral dilemmas caused by conflicting desires. Important note people – “Because I want to” is a really good fucking reason to do anything as long as you can accept the consequences of your actions. If fewer people lied to themselves I am convinced the world would be a better and potentially far more interesting place.

Not that succumbing to every urge you have on a daily basis somehow makes you true to yourself. But admitting that you have them does, and knowing the reason is better again. In theory, if being a good person really matters to you, that will outweigh the shitty fancying-your-mate’s-girlfriend or setting-the-cat-on-fire urges, because you can acknowledge them, understand them and compare motives. The reason why so many people can’t make up their fucking minds is that they don’t really know what they think about most things. The mental disease of moral relativity is, amongst other things, deeply confusing.

Suppressing your dark horrible thoughts just leads either to future trips to a shrink or future loss of control, not acknowledging you even have an urge makes you more susceptible to it, not less. So have that fantasy about your significant other’s sibling/cousin/dog/bicycle. Coldly evaluate how long it takes a kitten to combust. Just know why you _can_ think it, and _don’t_ do it.

I’m not a vegetarian. I do not, nor have I ever had, the slightest qualm about eating meat. The idea that I am consuming a dead animal does not bother me. If I was hungry and there was a very cute baby lamb in front of me I would happily bash its head in with a rock so that I could eat its delicious innards, hampered only by the fact that my knowledge of sheep anatomy is too sketchy to guarantee I wouldn’t end up eating its small intestine or something equally distasteful.

I tend to treat moral vegetarians with suspicion. Essentially, I don’t care if you choose not to eat meat. Thats fine, it just means there are more delicious animals for me. However, if you are the squeamish type of vegetarian, please do not have dinner with me. I have no intention of ordering steak well done because you don’t like the sight of blood, well done steak is a flavourless travesty which should only be fed to children with weak immune sytems, and dogs. I happen to like my steak to taste like something that was recently alive, not something that was recently part of an old leather shoe.

Which brings me to my current problem, namely that this has resulted in years of being repeatedly served overcooked meat. Granted, my definition of overcooked is most people’s definition of dangerously raw. To be entirely honest its not limited to beef, I find it hard to eat chicken that has been in the frying pan long enough to be brown on the outside, and I like to make toast that can only be identified as different from untoasted bread by the slight crunchiness and not the colour. But hey, its a matter of personal taste, I don’t criticize all the crazy fuckers who eat butter made of peanuts (wtf? who even came up with that? “Oh look, small, slightly hard but chewable nuts of a mildly disgusting taste, I know! Lets grind them into paste so we can put them on more stuff! Yeah!” And they call the english weird for Marmite).

Irish and english waiting staff in particular have an odd deficiency. When you ask them for rare steak they assume you are just doing so because you heard it on tv, and that you don’t really mean it. So they give you something slightly pink in the middle, and expect this to be sufficient. American waiting staff assume you do want what you ask for, unfortunately, they don’t actually understand what it is if they haven’t already been asked for it several thousand times by people without a funny accent. So after years of having to send back overcooked meat due presumably to misinterpretation rather than actual incompetence, I have become rather explicit about what it is that I want them to do.

This in turn has led to an intriguing discovery, namely the fact that it is universally weird to be a certain degree of specific about food. So when they ask how I would like my steak and I respond with “well, how rare can you do it? Ok, then very rare. Blue. As rare as you can cook it in fact. Just kind of warm it” people look at me as if an extra arm has sprouted from my forehead and is waving a small knife menacingly. This may be partly to do with the fact that I like to eat raw cow flesh, but I think its mostly because they don’t expect me to give a damn.

So restaurant employees, please rest assured. I won’t scream at the sight of blood on my plate, I don’t care about freaking out the other diners, and I really do want what I just asked for. If you are not sure about it, ask me what I mean. If you are too nervous about serving raw food, tell me I can’t have it like that and I will order the fucking pasta instead. Because if I have to send back one more fucking meal because no-one bothers checking that “blue” actually means “almost entirely red”, I will…. make like an american and passive-aggressively tip only 12.5 percent, thats what I’ll do. Fear my wrath.

I do not mind paying for things. I am not particularly rich, certainly by NY standards, but I am also distinctly not poor. I am not (in my opinion) particularly cheap. I do not resent paying for things that I want unless I genuinely feel like I am being ripped off, in normal circumstances if I feel something is not worth what I would have to pay for it I simply don’t buy it. Ditto for the many things that are more than worth it but which I clearly cannot afford.

So I find it annoying when people bitch and moan about say, the price of popcorn. Yes, it is blatantly ridiculous to have to pay $8 for a carton of dry disgusting lumps of food with the texture and taste of polystyrene foam. Absolutely agreed. (As you may be able to tell, I hate popcorn anyway). But the exercise of disagreeing with the price of an unnecessary commodity, and I cannot emphasise this enough, intrinsically involves not buying any.

By all means complain about income tax. You have no control over how much you are obliged to pay, what it is spent on once you’ve paid it, and not only do you not have a say but you don’t even necessarily know. But do people not understand how ridiculous it is to stand there and bitch about how it can’t possibly be a dollar fifty for a can of coke while paying for the beverage in question?

Allow me to introduce the concept of worth in economics. What something is worth, is what someone else is willing to pay for it. Is a one dollar umbrella worth $4 in a rainstorm? The answer is probably yes. You are paying a dollar for the umbrella, and $3 for the umbrella _now_. You could have bought it for a dollar yesterday when it was sunny and carried it around. You didn’t, and so you pay $3 for the privilege of not looking like a pillock wandering around the park in the blazing sunshine with an umbrella. The vendor is making $1 for the umbrella, and $3 for standing out in the bloody rain. Don’t want to pay $4? Then there is a very simple solution – get wet. Is this approach morally justifiable? I don’t know, but I have had more than one job that involved standing out in the elements and I would dearly have loved the ability to charge my employer extra when it pissed rain.

Granted, there are certain types of socio-economic unfairness that only apply to people who are of very limited means. Wealthy individuals can afford to say, buy a house and pay the mortgage, as opposed to paying rent. On a smaller scale they could also afford things like health insurance, so if something does happen they will not be stuck with insane medical expenses. I freely admit that generally, it is easier for someone with large amounts of money not to spend that money if they don’t want to. Tragic injustice? Probably. It still doesn’t explain why poor people buy more fucking lottery tickets though. Because lets face it, thats just dumb.

Essentially though, this just makes it all the more irritating when someone with a good income writes letters to the Times about the exorbitant price of salted snacks, cinema tickets, or trips to the seaside.

In summary, if you have money, do whatever the hell you want with it. Save the whales, buy a dirtbike, see Star Wars 167 times in the cinema, I could not care less. Just remember that you fucking spent it, not the whales or the bike salesman or George Lucas (may he rot in the specially conceived hell for people who resurrect rejected scripts). So if you don’t like where it went, next time you get your paycheque have it inserted rectally so that you can have something legitimate to whine about.

‘The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.’

Albert Einstein (Washington DC, Einstein’s monument)

Every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty‘

JD Rockefeller (Rockefeller Centre)

I don’t care about politics. Really. I don’t care about them at home because very few irish politicians seem to me to be any different from any other irish politicians, and I don’t care about them in other countries because there is nothing I can do about them. Most of all I don’t care about them because I don’t really understand them except on the most basic level, and I have never cared to try. I vote when it is in my power to do so, based upon the knowledge and understanding I have, because I believe one should exercise an opinion when called upon to do so. But I would never be involved in a campaign unless it was for a cause, not a politician, and the effort I would put into making my decision would be less then an hour’s background reading in the vast majority of circumstances

But if you live in a city in america it is almost impossible not to have an opinion on the election. If you don’t have one, you need to make one up, because you will be asked about it anyway. And for the first time, I find myself giving a shit. Not a massive stinky floater of a shit or anything, but certainly a medium sized turd. I actually think it might make a difference to the US and the world who gets elected this time.

So though it is entirely irrelevent, my non-existent vote goes to Barack Hussein Obama. May he somehow find a use for it.

So I went to Ikea for the first time yesterday. Oh yes. You see, I had this marvellous theory on buying furniture. I thought that it would be, if not easy, then at least a relatively straightforward exercise. One goes to a furniture store, one looks at the furniture on display, measures it, debates a little with any accompanying parties, and then orders it to be delivered on a particular date to a particular address. Hah.

Like many huge and glaring misconceptions it all began with a single completely inaccurate assumption. This assumption was that Ikea was based on the same principle as for example Argos, just on a much larger scale, and would therefore work approximately the same way. Obtain catalogue number of item, order item for collection or delivery, pay, and receive item. To be entirely honest, I presumed I could have just done it all on the internet, the only reason I intended to go to the store at all was because with such a major purchase as a couch or bed I wanted to physically see the thing I was buying. Essentially I assumed I was being overly cautious by not just ordering online. Oh the slightly manic laughter as I look at this thought retrospectively.

The Ikea display store is like what a giant warehouse would look like if you converted it into a labyrinth whose walls and passageways were constructed entirely of household furnishings. Essentially that’s exactly what it is, in fact. In a way this is ingenious, it forces you to look at every piece of crap in the entire place before getting to the end. In another, more relevant way, it is frustrating, annoying, and engenders a passionate hatred of slow-walking people with giant carts that I find it hard to describe in words. When we finally reached the end of the labyrinth (which geographically is about 2 minutes from the start, we just didn’t figure that out until later) we were dehydrated, irritated, and generally just glad the experience was over. On our travels we had seen a couch, bed and mattress that I was happy to purchase. I queued for the information desk, thankful that the ordeal must be almost at an end.

Alas, it was not to be. Upon making some enquiries I discovered you cannot order online, because they do not deliver online orders. (What?!?) Which meant that I would have to order right then. Ok, not ideal, but acceptable, where can I find a catalogue to get the numbers from? There aren’t any. Because as we walked through the giant furniture maze we were supposed to have noted down the article numbers of the items in question so that we could pay for them at the checkout. Back to the labyrinth, where we spend about 10 minutes actually locating the article numbers of anything, as for some reason instead of being printed in a bold font and labelled “Article Number, pay attention to this!” they are printed on the reverse of the price tag, in a font small enough as to be almost unreadable, and without a descriptor of any kind.

We subsequently discovered that this is probably due to the following fact. What they _tell_ you to do is write down the numbers and then pay. What you are _actually_ supposed to do, is find one of the rare and elusive employees on the display floor, tell them what you want, confirm when they show you the image on-screen that yes, you are not a moron, that is the thing, then specify what colour, size etc you would like it in, because the all-important article number written on the display item merely signifies precisely that item, ie. colour and size also. So to order say, a full-size bed frame in black, when the display item is a queen size version in pine is impossible to do without the assistance of a furniture monkey, or as they prefer to be called, ikea employee.

One part of the exchange went thusly:

Me: …and I would like this couch.

FM: That item is self-serve

Me: Wait, I can’t get it delivered?

FM: Oh no, you can get it delivered, you just have to bring it down to the checkout.

Me: You mean physically bring it? But… it’s a couch…

FM: Yeah, you need to load it onto a cart and bring it down to the checkout, and pay for it, then they can deliver it.

Me: There is no other way of doing this? Can’t I pay someone to bring it down?

FM: No, sorry. So you don’t want the couch ma’am?

Me: Oh no, I want it. I’m just horrified.

FM: Oh, we’re actually pulling that item ourselves at the moment.

Me: So I don’t have to bring it down?

FM: No.

Me: Great.

The last part obviously rendering that entire minute of shock and awe entirely pointless, but on the plus side, I didn’t have to carry a couch. When I finally managed to get my official “already talked to a monkey” form, and queue and pay for all this, there was then an entirely separate queue for organising and paying for the delivery of all my crap. By the time we left I felt like Persephone escaping Hades, and was afraid to look behind me lest I somehow be sucked back in, black hole style.

I have never been so drained of life energy by a retail experience.