…has been a motto of mine for some time. When you fly as much as I do (and I assure you, that’s a lot) succumbing to the rigours or air travel and time zone switching seems an extensive waste of precious time that could otherwise be spent looking at cool things, or drinking.

However this month I am trying something I’ve never even come close to attempting before – I am flying around the world. Due presumably to some sort of odd masochism I chose to do so by going east, thereby losing hours of time each hop until eventually gaining it all back in one large chunk en route from Tokyo to Honolulu when I cross the IDL. I am pretty certain I will spend this entire flight filled with the thrill of time travel as I leave Tokyo Monday night and magically arrive in Hawaii bright and early Monday morning. I simply cannot think of this as anything but incredibly cool.

The upshot of all this however, is that I spent every flight valiantly trying to sleep for 4 or 5 hours to readjust myself to morning once again coming significantly earlier than my body expects. Today – my first day in HK, my body reacted to this by waking me at 6am, falling asleep again at 10am, and fighting me for supremacy as I dragged its ass out of bed around 3pm. Today has, as you might imagine, been a bit of a loss.

Right now I am on a train back from Lantau island, where I spectacularly failed to see anything cool whatsoever due to my extraordinary tardiness in arising. On the plus side, I managed to buy (amongst other things) some cheese. Cheese is important. It is incredibly difficult to buy any sort of street food that does not consist entirely of rice or pastry, yet no-one here appears to be fat. Form this I conclude that Chinese people eat practically nothing, and have excellent metabolisms.

I really like Hong Kong. I tend to judge places by imagining whether I would like living there for a while, and so far this place receives a somewhat fascinated yes vote. I doubt I could ever have a relationship of any kind here, but then that goes for America too, and in this case cultural differences are extreme enough to be interesting instead of merely being annoying most of the time.

Days  0 -1. So titled because it took me pretty much an entire day to get to HK from London via Beijing. Because this is cheaper.  The fantastical holiday of ultimate awesomeness costs a goddamn fortune as it is, I am not going to fork out for direct flights too. This is also by far the most miserable jump of the entire FHoUA, involving a 10 hour flight to PEK followed by 1 hour in the airport (which mostly consisted of queuing, but we’ll get to that) and then a 4 hour transfer to HK. Departing 1740 Wednesday, arriving 1655 Thursday. Ew.

Day 0 yielded some fascinating information about the Chinese people. Anyone who has spent much time in China is familiar with this, but for example it is not considered impolite there to make the most horrendous bodily noises imaginable. I don’t mean farting, I mean some truly dramatic and unbelievable hocking and hacking and throat clearing and nasal cavity vacuuming. I am hard to disgust unless you are playing with your chewing gum (this actually give me dry heaves. Not kidding. Wish I was) but I found this incredibly repulsive, I had to suppress the urge to look ill and threaten to smack people. This must be how the Japanese feel when we sneeze in public, I must try to be more tolerant of that idiosyncrasy in future.

Personal space is another interesting issue. I was fortunate enough to have a spare seat on my left on the flight to Beijing. Now this is fortunate on any flight, but particularly on this one, as the gentleman (and I use that term loosely) on my right decided to read his Chinese broadsheet by holding his left arm at approximately a 90 degree angle to his body, landing his elbow pretty much right in front of my face.  Had I not had the extra room on my other side it would have taken a lot more effort to refrain from ripping his arm off and beating him round the head with it. I despise the general group “people who sit next to me on planes” in any case, but a special hell is reserved for some of them, most notably  “people who sit next to me on planes and will not shut the fuck up”, “people who sit next to me on planes and attempt to use it as an opportunity for business networking” (these categories often overlap),  “people who sit next to me on planes and smell bad/snore loudly/have a really annoying voice” and right at the top of the list are “people who sit next to me on planes and encroach on the fucking 2 square feet of personal space I have been allocated”. The rest make me want to punch someone, the last item makes me want to actually set them on fire.

Day 0 blended sleepily into day 1 as I pretty much expected it to, and I landed in Beijing, filled out the I-do-not-have-swine-flu-no-really-I-swear form, went through about a dozen queues I was mildly confused by, some of which had temperature detectors and all of which had people in military uniforms, and walked straight onto my connection. I am pretty accustomed to airports in general, what I’m not quite as accustomed to is being in a country where I really, really can’t speak a word of the language and must rely entirely on other people to tell me if I am doing it wrong.  Besides which, its China, general paranoia makes me slightly nervous. They try to filter the internet for fuck sake, they are clearly at least partly evil. (Note: I am writing this in Taipei ie. Not China. Mostly because I didn’t have time in china, but tiny amounts of paranoia are a given)

In any case, I eventually arrived in Hong Kong (having of course filled in yet another form assuring the Chinese government it has been weeks since I last sneezed or petted a piglet), laden with baggage, exhausted and extremely hungry, having not eaten since the previous day. On my first evening in Hong Kong, I learned the following things:

• It is possible to do some truly horrendous things to a chicken burger. Possibly only by going back in time and ensuring the chicken in question spent its entirely life miserable, greasy and alone, but nonetheless. Well done Burger King Hong Kong. I never thought anything would out-ick that twinkie.

• If you ask for water in a Chinese restaurant they will bring you hot water. Not tea, not bottled water. Hot water.

• Napkins are not assumed necessary here. Something of a shock to the system after coming recently from incredible-waste-of-fucking-paper land. I have a pile of unused napkin on my desk that I will someday use to provide myself with a lifetime supply of toilet paper in post-apocalyptic earth. Or failing that I could probably construct a papier mache scale model of the Eiffel Tower or something.

• Everyone in Hong Kong speaks English. It might be shit English, but they speak it.

• Hong Kong is shockingly, incredibly efficient. The trains are amazing. On the train from the airport not only do you see a dot light up when you reach a stop, the distance between that dot and the next is in fact a progress bar, indicating how far along its journey from one to the other the train has travelled. Genius. Where else has this? I have never seen it before, but it seems shockingly obvious as a cool feature.

London is my favourite place in the world. It took me a long time and a lot of travel to figure out whether this statement is justified or not, but I finally believe I can say it without worrying that I don’t really know that for sure, or that I haven’t done/seen enough of the world to make such a broad assertion. Not that I’ve seen everything, but I have managed to stop caring, because I don’t think anywhere else is ever really going to feel as perfect to me.

I really miss London. I loved every minute of living there, and I have been concerned that maybe going back could never turn out to be as perfect or as happy as it is in my head, that maybe nowhere is as amazing as I think London is. After this week though, I am fairly certain I was worried about nothing. I was here for 9 days and every second of that 9 days was fun and amazing and felt great. Granted its always fun when you come back from faraway lands for a short time, everyone wants to see you and you get a lot of leeway for being late/stupid/generally careless. But its more than that, I really miss living there. A brief stopover is never enough, and I know I am definitely going to go back if not right now. I may not have been born there, but its home. It feels natural, and beautiful, and its where I want to live my life.

Highlights of this branch of the trip included:

• My ex-housemates, who are utterly brilliant in every way. I really miss living with them.

• J&D in Ealing Broadway, who made me bacon and invited me over for New Years Eve. God I love bacon

• Monty, who is the coolest person in the world. If you’d like to know how to be the coolest person in the world, a good start is to let me sleep in your flat, buy me an amazing dinner at a restaurant filled with meat, and give me an envelope full of money. A good follow up is just to be Monty though, really, so the above may not be that useful.

• QCCB, some of my favourite people ever, a good percentage of whom made it out for wine outside in the cold.

• Meg, who didn’t smoke because I gave her a pony, and with whom I have formed the Terrifying Plan. We will live together and have a pet pig and multiple cats. Hehehehe. And a pony. Obviously.

• Lunch at Frederick’s with Maria. Damn that was a good idea.

• Brunch at Ib and Katie’s. I <3 Ib and Katie. Bacon was also involved here. You really can’t lose with bacon.

• Indian food. So. Much. Indian food.

• Drinks with the ex-work crowd – including the german girl, the crazy Spanish lady, the Spanish boy, Frankie, the Hair, and our new American, not exactly an ex-colleague, but pretty cool nonetheless.

• Dinner and drinks with Frankie and his boy, an interesting foray into an actors private club in soho in the most excellent of company. I totally miss working with Frankie.
• Torture Garden with an assortment of strange individuals, including Gonzo in possibly the best drag I have ever seen. After which we got to crash at Scally’s house, the irish contingent feeling particularly welcome due to the small bag of potatoes in the living room. I <3 Scally.

Ireland is always a bit of an insane episode for me. I am always trying to see dozens of people simultaneously, I always manage to fail to see someone I care about, and I seldom have more than 5 minutes at any point in which to gather my wits before the next task. This is probably not helped by the fact that I am permanently either drinking, drunk, or hung over, because irish people do not consider it proper socialising unless you can barely stand by the end. If I ever manage to go more than 3 hours from setting foot on irish soil without being handed an alcoholic beverage by someone, I will be extremely impressed, or possibly mildly worried.

The weekend in question was no exception. Time was of the essence, and I had several tasks to fulfill – meeting my best friends from college (which is always, without question, an epic night), surprising my mom with my presence in Dublin when she wasn’t expecting it, having dinner with some of my favourite Dublin inhabitants, and meeting the irc brigade plus assorted others in the pub for large quantities of drinks.

Since I had two evenings in which to achieve all this, it was something of a challenge. I think I rose to it reasonably well though, and even managed not to die on the morning of my flight to London, but to spend time hanging out with ducky and dredg, two of the most frankly fantastic people it is my privilege to impose on occasionally.

I managed to see some of my favourite people in the world, and had an absolutely amazing time. I also remembered how bloody annoying it is to try and find a drink in Dublin after 1am, something I tend to occasionally forget. Perhaps this damn country would have less of a drinking problem if we were not desperately trying to cram all our drinking activity into the hours before. And while I am on the topic, quit it with the Good Friday bullshit. No-one cares anymore. No-one.

Thanks to everyone who came out, it was a fucking excellent weekend. Hopefully I will see you all again at Christmas, along with anyone who didn’t make it.

For some time I have been contemplating doing something a little nuts. Like quitting my job and joining the army, or living on a beach in Thailand for a while, or even just volunteering at BMOrg and helping to build next year’s Black Rock City. However, right now I work in the US on a visa, not to mention the fact that my job is currently a fairly decent one. So doing any of these things kind of screws me a little out of what seems to be a pretty good deal, and would be less looking a gift horse in the mouth and more like accepting it, riding it for a while, and then jumping off and spitting in its eye a bit.

So I decided instead to take the most ridiculously extravagant holiday ever. Originally this started as just a trip to Tokyo, which is a bit of an endeavour in and of itself. However it gradually evolved until eventually I was leaving the US for a month and hitting Ireland, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Hawaii. Which let me say, has been pretty damn awesome.

I’m not home quite yet, but I have been writing quite a bit of stream of consciousness wank on this trip that I haven’t managed to put up online yet, so the next few posts will be my attempt to post these as blog entries in a vaguely sensible and chronological order. So there may be a bit of overlap. If you don’t want to hear about my fucking bitchin’ holiday, I suggest you ignore the next 4 or 5 entries. Otherwise, enjoy. I sure as hell did.

I think I can safely say without fear of contradiction (because this is my blog and I can fiendishly delete comments that contradict me) that the irish government largely consists of corrupt, incompetent assholes. Now one could make an argument that this is to some extent true for all governments, and one would not be incredibly unreasonable to do so. However for some reason I have never quite figured out the consequences of corruption and incompetence seem to be practically non-existent in Ireland.They involve a few newspaper articles, maybe a slap on the wrist and some public censure, or perhaps in a severe case the odd custard pie. They rarely if ever appear to involve seizure of assets, jail time, or facing the motherfucking consequences of your actions.

The current hot topic in irish politics is the Lisbon treaty, an EU treaty basically designed to streamline the European parliamentary structure. Ireland has already rejected this treaty once, as far as I can tell just out of general assholery and slight panic. Basically, it appears the irish government was hoping to get away with quietly pushing this through and obtaining a yes vote without people really noticing. So there wasn’t really a whole lot of information going around aside from “Vote YES” in big red letters. Naturally the paranoid elements of the populace were perturbed, questions were asked, it turned out that several top tier irish politicians had not even managed to get through the summary document, and the majority of people voted against the treaty out of general frustration and confusion. Naturally our government then wrote to the EU saying “eh, sorry about that, how embarrassing, let’s take another shot at it” and we are now having the same referendum again, in a beautiful tribute to democracy. Yes we know you have a vote, but you voted wrong, try again.

The Lisbon treaty is a long. complicated boring legal document outlining the re-arranging of the EU in order to try to be a bit less monstrously complicated, and to streamline things like the voting process. I do not at this point claim to understand everything in it, but the part that people seem to be objecting to in our tiny island nation is the bit that says EU law takes primacy over the laws of an individual country. Of fucking course it does, you arseholes. It has since we joined the damn thing in the 80s, we bought into this idea quite some time ago, what the hell are you pissing around now for?

We appear to be terrified at the prospect that our constitution could be overruled by the EU. Well kids, I have to confess, what I really don’t get is why the hell we are so protective of our damn constitution. What is so amazingly great about how ireland works? Even if this treaty did make it possible for the EU to overrule more of irish law (which it doesn’t), we are talking about a constitution that contains the line “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.”, as well as another of my favourites “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. Don’t even get me started on the fucking preamble.

What exactly are we protecting here? Our outmoded links with religion? Our sexism? Our neutrality? We are neutral until America decides they need somewhere to re-fuel, then we are a fucking military air-base. What the hell are we afraid of? The primacy of European law is not news, and the specific concerns of the irish people, retarded and irrelevant as they were, have been consummately addressed not only within the treaty we helped to fucking write but in the form of further legal declarations on top of said treaty that were basically just put there to say “No really, we mean it, ireland can deal with abortion itself. It’s like, in the treaty already. Did you not read it?”.

The EU is an essentially good thing, that enables us to better organise everything, fight climate change, and ensure that essential human rights are equally enforced across a multitude of countries. Enlightened self-interest seems to be the most positive force available these days, so now that we have the self-interest part down pat perhaps we can try for some enlightenment, and realise that the EU is actually in our best interests, and that pointless nationalism is inherently fucking stupid. And while I’m at it, why is neutrality so goddamn important? because as far as I can see our reasoning goes along the lines of “we are a tiny island nation subject to easy potential annihilation” which would be rendered less potent as an argument by say, joining a large association of 27 countries.

I don’t give a flying fuck about neutrality,  and I’d vote to legalize abortion, and so I am desperately disappointed because these issue are both nothing whatsoever to do with the Lisbon treaty. The blatant scaremongering by the Vote No lobby is a disgusting travesty rivaled only by the utter bullcrap of the Vote Yes lobby.

The treaty has already been summarised extremely well by people who are not me, so instead of regurgitating I shall point you in the direction of this excellently written and particularly amusing and informative guide by Jason O’Mahony. Complete with Eval Kanieval references. I urge you in the spirit of democracy to consider your decision carefully and make up your own mind, in full posession of the pertinent facts. However, should this be too much effort or otherwise an unattainable achievement, there is one simple step you can take to resolve the whole issue:

Just fucking well vote yes.

I am not a software developer. It was drummed into my head when I started my current role, which is client facing with a load of coding work thrown in, that it is not a development job. People who hold the same position and job as I do sometimes do not code at all, I can, so I do. With the result that I only devote about 50% of my time to technical work, and that work itself is not hugely technical, being largely high-level and largely various flavours of .Net.

So if someone asked me if I was a coding expert of any kind, I could not in all honesty answer anything but a resounding “no”. I like coding work, I enjoy development, and problem solving, especially if it can be elegant. But too much of my job involves being a translation facility for business -> tech and vice versa, and too little of it involves intricate programming. So I don’t spend enough time at it or do enough complex work to be what I would consider all that good

So why the bloody fucking hell is everyone I interview so bad?? Do people write down on their CVs everything they have ever heard of? Besides which, it is .Net people – it’s not exactly hard.  If you have programmed in it for 3 years and you cannot tell me what a function is or  the difference between passing a variable by value and by reference then you are either lying, clinically retarded, or had a job that was so far removed from actually writing any code that you don’t know what it looks like. None of which would make me want to hire you.

Not only can people not answer basic, just-out-of-college type questions, but when they are given the answers they are frequently unable to extrapolate anything logically when asked a follow-up question.  I’m not asking for your opinion on the historical application of the Reimann-Zeta function here kids, I am asking fucking string manipulation questions. I am not trying to catch you out, I am trying to gauge precisely how much bullshit you think I will swallow.

And oh dear god, the bullshit. Streams of it, wells of it, great big flowing rivers of fucking bullshit. This is not an English literature course! Technical questions have correct answers, they are very rarely susceptible to bluffing. If you do not know the goddamn answer why not just save everyone the trouble and tell me that? I would respect that a lot more than 2 minutes of excruciating evasion. “I don’t know” is an efficient response that allows an interviewer to actually gauge your familiarity with something. Interviewers are generally looking (sometimes desperately) for competence, if it is there they will do their best to see it.

By the time someone comes along who actually does know what the fuck they are talking about, I have had my brain reset on “questioning idiots” for so long I nearly fall backwards out of my seat in shock. And then feel desperately embarrassed by the kind of retarded questions I have started off with. And you know the very worst, most  irredeemable and irritating part?

I keep having to get up at 7am for this shit.

Because frankly ostrich eggs are surprisingly good, and exceptionally large. Particularly when one is hung over in the middle of the desert after having spent a night at Ashram Galactica, one of the most ridiculously well stocked, decorated and maintained bars at Burning Man. How fortunate that our property was so mauled by a baboon in Reno that it was felt a couple of ostrich eggs would be good compensation. Incidentally anyone who thinks the previous sentence is gibberish is being far too optimistic about the level of sensibleness of the universe in general. Life really is this odd, and thank fuck for that.

I’ve now been going to Burning Man for 4 consecutive years. Every year I leave the desert dusty, filthy, exhausted, and deciding that next year I will take a break, next time I will skip it, next time I will ignore the ache that happens in my heart when I think about the city and contemplate somehow not being there, not feeling that free and intense and insane and connected and invincible. But every year I also come back to real life with a perspective that cannot be rivaled by anything in the civilized world. The knowledge that if my whole life goes to hell there are always other lives I could decide to live. The remembrance that even though a great many people are shortsighted and stupid and petty, many also aren’t, and even those that are aren’t like that all the time.

I believe humans to be capable of amazing things. I kind of need to, or else I couldn’t believe myself to be. But there are times when it feels like my life is surrounded by an ocean of mediocrity and boredom, when my job seems as meaningless as it would to a caveman who counts success in pelts of fur collected, and at those times people seem soulless and stupid and inaccessible and not worth even trying for. Generally these phases last about an hour, so maybe its just sugar withdrawal or something. But that week in the middle of nowhere with 40,000 other weirdos resets my faith in humanity, and not just because its filled with nudity, giant slides and flamethrowers.

I like the way people behave there. The sense of personal responsibility runs high, the sense of community probably almost as high. In the best individuals radical self reliance combines with a sense of being part of something to produce both independence and generosity in larger quantities than I would ever have expected. Naturally this is not the case with everyone – as a good friend of mine said when I stated that I had expected BM to be filled with silly hippies, “It is filled with silly hippies, you just don’t hang around with any of them”. Turns out that at the burn, much like at home, I am an intolerant fuck. Thank Christ.

People hide behind a lot of things in real life. Their job, their friends, their clothes, their lifestyle, the internet. Sometimes it can be very hard to tell what a person really is when life is as easy as it can be for a white-collar employee in a big city. Hard to tell when someone is a real friend or just hates going to the movies alone, or whether they give a damn about you or just get emotional while drunk. I generally don’t know whether people like me or not, though this may have something to do with not caring. But in the scorching desert in the middle of nowhere while trying to hold up one side of a carport so that someone can get the poles under it you see a little more of what people really are and really think. Even if those are (respectively) “sweaty and irritable” and “fuck this for a carry on”.

Sometimes, your friends turn out to be exactly as amazing as you thought they were.

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.