Daily Arse Kick

Two Nurofen and That'll be 50 Quid Please...

2012-01-29T03:23:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago my daughter had a bit of a dose on her. She decided she needed to see the doctor so I was left in an awkward situation. You see if I didn't bring her, I'd be a bad mother neglecting my daughter and in twenty years from now it would probably come up for her in therapy. So down we headed and let the doctor tell her what I could have told her myself 'Take two Nurofen and that'll be 50 quid please'. Well of course I never get to say the 'that'll be 50 quid please' piece, but then again, my daughter wouldn't see any of my advice as being worth tuppence. In a way, in this case, it did save me money though, because she was happy to take the tablets and head into school due to some pressing social engagements, as one does have at 13. But it wasn't all a waste, you see if she didn't go to the doctor I would have had to suggest she stay at home, and then I would have to stay at home to mind her, and that would mean taking an unpaid day from work. Well that's how I wrote off the 50 in my head to help me get over the pain of handing it across the reception desk.

There's something not very fair about doctors fees. Not long before that visit I'd been there with my son and his consultation was a long and difficult one. We were over an hour with the doctor, but it still cost the very same price. I was embarrassed leaving as I could see that the waiting room was now full of people whose appointments had all been delayed because of us, and possibly to recover that lost time the doc might now rush through people showing signs of heart attacks and just say 'two nurofen and that'll be 50 quid please'. There should be different rates, depending upon how long it takes, but this is Ireland, where our pride in not being bureaucratic leads to a system that is run on the basis of 'ah, whatever you can get away with'.

So here I am writing this blog in bed, down with a throat virus similar to the daughter's one and I have a dilemma. You see I've had this dose now for a whole week and it's just not going away. I suppose I have to hand it to the doctors really, I thought I knew the cure but I was wrong. You see I believed that if I just ignored it and kept going all week it would just go away, but now the cruel mirror on the wall and a little torch tell me that I'm doomed, white spots have found a home in my throat, I need an antibiotic. But maybe it will just go away on it's own, so I tried to cure it with whiskey and a day in bed, but it's stubborn. Unlike my daughter I don't have any pressing social engagements, but I do have a week at work coming up that I can't miss, and don't give me all that 'oh, we're all replaceable shit', because there really is stuff on, especially tomorrow, that I can't miss.Believe me, if I don't show up for work tomorrow, the whole corporation will collapse, it will have a domino effect on world recession and the Dow Jones index will turn into the abominable snowman. So even though it's easier to spend 60 quid (weekend rate) on 'take two Nurofen & an antibiotic', it annoys me that I have to be told by some doctor what I need when it's pretty obvious that I know. The chemist are happy to sell me medication that contains codeine over the counter but I have to pay 60 quid to get a note from someone to say its ok to give me an antibiotic.

The other problem is this, I can't afford the doctor to say that I can't go to work, because then you're getting into a legal thing. If you have a sick-note, you are obliged to stay at home. Whereas if I don't have a sick note, I can come in sick, do the important stuff and then go home sick. I've just had an idea though, I'll ring around a few friends and see if they have any old anti-biotics lying around that they never finished. That'll sort it.

Anyway, I need to save that 60 to make up for parking tickets and other unfair bills from our corrupt system. Last week this c*** of a traffic warden put a ticket on my car even though I didn't even park in the loading zone. I dropped off the kids and pulled in at it. Then jumped out of the car to give a kid money he forgot. The whole thing happened in about 3 minutes flat, and there was yer man putting the ticket on my wiper as I pulled out. But similarly to the guy who clamped me down at the long walk a few weeks ago, I managed to get through the whole ordeal biting my tongue and not calling either of them any of the names that I felt they were, nor did I shout 'I bet you're hung like a prawn', even if I did mumble it within earshot. The thing is, the punishment does not fit the crime, and it is only when I go to the doctor or get clamped or see them charge a fiver for a bunch of rosemary in tesco that's imported from Israel when most people don't realise they have a whopping big rosemary bush in their garden, only then do I miss the German bureaucracy, or let's say, only then do I understand it as being the price you have to pay if you want to do things right.
Even if it means that people become crashing bores, at least everything works properly. I suppose that's another dilemma though: go live with crashing bores and everything works, or stay in the land of the parochial hall where it's all great craic and sure don't I know your cousin Jane's husband so I'll look after you, so I will.
Oh God, I just feel another blog coming on about cronyism. Being bedridden is not good for the bitter and twisted mind.

The Lesbian Thang...

2012-01-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

Lindsay Lohan and Ellen de Generes, yes, we all know they're gay, but had I known that Cynthia Nixon from 'Sex and the City' was gay, I probably would have watched the show just to see a woman who I might have had a chance with if I were a celebrity lesbian and not a going-to-seed suburban lesbian.
You see when I was growing up, I lived in a lesbian free world, well at least that's the colour it was painted. At best, being gay was a deviation, one that meant your parents could have checked you into the asylum for, and mine would have been quite likely to do that.
So last night when I got asked the question that I always get asked, the one that is always preceded by 'would you mind if I ask you a personal question, and don't answer this if you don't want to... but what made you change from being married to being gay?'
Well, repetitive as it is, I'm always glad when people do actually ask me about it. Living in the west of Ireland isn't exactly San Francisco, and despite the fact that we are slowly coming out of the caves, it seems to me that rather than embrace diversity, we silence it. Despite all of our new laws and regulations and the whole gay marriage thing (I still don't know why gay people want to live like heterosexuals, but anyway), a lot of the people who I meet, have never met a gay woman before, so the reaction can be anything from ostracizing me, running a mile from me, considering me to be very strange indeed, and a host of other things that silences any mention of my gayness. And the silence hurts.

Cynthia Nixon &Rojo Caliente with their son Max

The answer, by the way, is that because of the lack of role models and all that, I wanted to be a heterosexual lady. I wanted to be 'like everyone else'. I waited until my early twenties before I ever ventured into a gay bar, and somewhere between then and now, I met a nice respectable man who I thought it was a great idea to get married to and be 'normal'. Well that was all twenty something years ago. Of course it didn't take long for the truth to come and hunt me out. Since then things have happened in the world that I never could have imagined: people are not allowed to smoke in pubs or hit kids anymore, and lesbians are all over the telly; attractive ones even.
But still, last night in a Galway club, that ingrained Irish guilt complex couldn't stop me from feeling so wrong for admiring the great legs and the flesh coloured tights of the three singers. There's just something very sexy about flesh coloured tights - I believe they are now called 'nude' rather than flesh coloured, but that doesn't make any difference. For me, flesh coloured tights are a mix between 1950's cocktail parties and school teachers. They scream for hands on them. They're like ice cream wrappers to a child, they make silk purses out of sow's ears. But still, I suppose clubs that are frequented by twenty-something year olds in search of a standard heterosexual adventure don't expect women pushing 50 to lust after the sheer satin flesh coloured tights of the singers. Not that I would have made a move on any of them or anything like that, I just felt wrong, guilty, almost a pervert. I felt lonely.
But then I thought: a guy wouldn't feel bad about it, and isn't that why they have dancers in the club in the first place, so I let myself off and spent the rest of this morning's hangover feeling bad about other painful banalities and also wondering why the hell I live in the west of Ireland where I'll always be something of an outcast. Well there is a reason, and that is because someone has to do it. I guess there needs to be a lesbian visibility, one that stretches from the Galway suburbs all the way up the N17 as far as Tuam. Not that I go around waving the rainbow flag or anything, I'm just here.
There are three things that really drive me mental though.

The assumption that because I'm a lesbian I fancy every woman on the planet
The assumption by straight women that if they decide they want to try it out with another woman, they only need to come to me and I'll take them on for a night
And this is my pet hate - the assumption that because I'm a lesbian, all I ever think about is sex with women (and true, there are times I can't deny that), and that the only thing I ever do with my partner is have sex. Believe me, there's a huge difference between wanting sex with a woman and falling in love with a woman or living with a woman.

So for that reason, now that I know Cynthia Nixon is gay, I've decided she's hot, because that means she's 'in the club'. Women who have sex with other women are ten a penny these days, but ones who actually have the balls, pardon the pun, to commit to another woman in a relationship, well they're in a league of their own, and more importantly, they make me feel like I'm not from Mars, just from the west of Ireland. When I see photos of Cynthia with her wife it looks like it might even be normal, and then I actually feel that maybe it's ok to be gay after all.
Guess I'll just have to wait another 40 years for it to come to Galway, by which time I'll be decrepit and disapproving of all that sort of carry on. Sigh...

How to Seriously Annoy People

2012-01-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

I just couldn’t help myself at work today. It all started out very serious. It was the kind of busy that you get lost in your head and forget there are other people in the room, so by about lunchtime everybody hates you already because they think you’re ignoring them when you don’t respond to any stimulation that doesn’t take place between your head and the screen.

Then, of course, when you get lost in what you’re doing, you also don’t notice that you probably have a number of irritating habits that are unbeknownst to yourself but very obvious to others. Given that I live with knuckle clickers and gum chewers I do try to monitor whatever it is I might be doing to tick people off, but I can never quite figure it. Today though, I managed to chew through the top of a pen, and without thinking about it, I then put the top of the pen in my mouth and started to blow through it (You do that kind of thing when you’re losing a battle with an excel spreadsheet). It was only after a few minutes that I realised I had unwittingly made myself a little whistle and that I was now whistling a non-tune around the office.

I guess because nobody was talking to me anymore, there was nobody to tell me, but I didn’t really care, after all, they were all sitting around clicking pens and making tapping noises and talking way too loudly on the phone, so I just stopped and silently felt a bit smug that I had inadvertently invented a utensil to get on peoples nerves. It reminded me of a list I once read on how to people off. For those of you interested in doing so, here’s my edited version of it:

HOW TO TICK PEOPLE OFF

1. Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.

2. Specify that your drive-through order is "TO-GO."

3. If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.

4. Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.

5.Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions "to keep them tuned up."

6. Reply to everything someone says with "that's what you think."

7. Practice making fax and modem noises.

8. Finish all your sentences with the words "in accordance with prophesy."

9. Signal that a conversation is over by clamping your hands over your ears and grimacing.

10. Adjust the tint on your TV so that all the people are green, and insist to others that you "like it that way."

11. Staple pages in the middle of the page.

12. Publicly investigate just how slowly you can make a croaking noise.

13. dont use any punctuation

14. Buy a large quantity of orange traffic cones and reroute whole streets.

15. Repeat the following conversation a dozen times.

"DO YOU HEAR THAT?"

"What?"

"Never mind, it's gone now."

16. Try playing the William Tell Overture by tapping on the bottom of your chin. When nearly done, announce "No, wait, I messed it up," and repeat.

17. Ask people what gender they are.

18. While making presentations, occasionally bob your head like a parakeet.

19. Sit in your front yard pointing a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down.

Daily Arse Kick: On This Famous Day

2012-01-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

Daily Arse Kick: On This Famous Day: Years ago, and I’d be talking donkeys years ago, on one of those horribly dark January mornings that everyone dreads; up in the m...

On This Famous Day

2012-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

Years ago, and I’d be talking donkeys years ago, on one of those horribly dark January mornings that everyone dreads; up in the maternity ward of St. Michael’s hospital, a shrill piercing scream competed with the fog horn on the Dun-Laoghaire pier. It was the 11^th morning of January, a Monday, and out I screamed, disappointing the world with my gender, my jaundice and a strong pair of lungs. The mother couldn’t handle any of this, so I was dispatched to the granny who looked after me until I could scowl properly, whence I was returned to the mother.

So every year, on the 11^th of January, I mark that day by eating cake and generally celebrating the fact that I was born on my birthday.

So this year I looked up Wikipedia to see what sort of famous things happened on my birthday other than me being born. Turns out, all they can come up with for my actual day and year of birth is some damn Dutch darts player who shares my birthday. How the hell could a Dutch darts player be more important than I am, so much more important that he’s up there in Wikipedia and I aint?

Roland Scholten, who the hell has ever heard of Roland Scholten? And to make it worse, the famous person a year before that on my birthday is some snooker player, Dean Reynolds. It’s not fair. Whenever I see those postcards in shops with famous things and people from the 11^th of January, they are always vague and boring.

Why didn’t my mother have me on the due date of 8^th of January, then I could have shared a birthday with David Bowie and Elvis Presley, and that would have inspired me so much that I’d now be a famous singer.

Etna Erupts - Nothing Spectacular?

Well at least something important did happen on the 11^th. In the year 630, Mohammad led an army of 10,000 to conquer Mecca. I suppose that’s more important than David Bowie being born in Brixton to an Irish mother called Peggy Burns, but not in my world of whose brilliant it’s not. And even though Bowie is 18 years older than me, given that I was christened Margaret, and am Irish, I sometimes wish that the mother hadn’t decided to take me back after the initial shock, because than I could fantasize that I’m actually Bowie’s half sister or even his daughter, and that they came over to Ireland to have the baby and then went back to Brixton to forget about the whole thing. So instead, I just imagine that famous adopted people are actually my other siblings who the mother couldn’t handle, like Steve Jobs and Debbie Harry. But what my mother was doing having babies in America from the age of 15 is beyond me. But you just never know…

Well there were other things going on on the 11^th of January. Mount Etna erupted in 1693 ( I vaguely remember that one) and more importantly, just a few hundred years later, Romania reincorporated Transylvania in 1919 and in 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California (women drivers and all that , she couldn’t get anyone to go with her, I suppose).

So the bottom line is this: I was born on a day that nothing amazing ever happened, so for that reason I need to become really famous and successful and well known so that the birthday card people will have something to write on their cards and key rings and other yokes that they sell in those gimmicky card shops.

I think I might take up darts, or snooker or go on a mission to Mecca on my own in an airplane…

The Office Xmas Bash...

2011-12-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

My latest article for the Galway Now Magazine... So go on out and buy the Mag as there is much better stuff in it than what I write...

While driving to work recently, I spotted something on the footpath that brought back memories. It was a crumpled up fast food bag spilling out the remains of a half eaten hamburger and about a dozen chips. The blackbirds were having it for breakfast. What evoked the memories though, was that beside these stale remnants of the night before was a stiletto-heeled shoe. Just one. Ah yes, it all came flooding back, that first office party I ever went to. It was the Christmas party and I was about 20, not long out of college and clueless as to what I should expect.

I played safe and borrowed a classic LBD (little black dress) from a friend. OK then, the dress wasn’t all that little, but back then I was, which meant that the cleavage gaped across my breast like an open handbag, and one of the straps kept slipping down my shoulder. My feet were squeezed so tightly into my high heel shoes that I could have given lessons to Cinderella’s stepsisters in the art of wearing shoes that are at least two sizes too small. And that’s about as much as I remember.

I do vaguely remember free drinks. There was champagne upon arrival, wine with dinner and after that either a free bar or a lot of generous people handing me whatever took my fancy – pints, shorts, cocktails and shots.

The way it should be - bring back the olden days!

Oh and singing. I remember singing along to one of the songs but as nobody was listening I decided it would be hilarious to climb onto a table and perform the song from there. It must have been the tight shoes that made me trip. After that all I remember is waking up the next morning to find a rip in the cleavage of the dress (yes, I was wearing it in bed), and one shoe missing. So somewhere between rolling off the table and waking up fully clothed in my own bed, I lost a shoe. And that’s why the other day when I saw that shoe beside the fast food bag, I couldn’t help but wonder if my shoe from all those years ago might have found the same fate?

I guess I’ll never know. There are gaps that I have not filled to this day. How did I get home? Where was my shoe? And why did I get funny looks from everyone in the office for the next six months?

There are some things you will never find out, so I decided not to beat myself up over it. Instead, I would learn from my mistakes and never let something that stupid happen ever again. Especially not when it came to the professional world where you have to work with the people who you have ridiculed yourself in front of.

I learned from these mistakes and never erred again. NOT. In fact, it got worse. Spilling drinks on colleagues and bosses, coming home without both shoes, without my glasses, my money, my phone, my coat, or worse, not coming home at all. My most cringeworthy Christmas party party-piece was removing my boss’s lovely white fur coat from the cloakroom and believing that it would be hysterically funny to put it on my lap and pretend it was a kitty cat. When she gave me the evil eye across the room I made a catlike claw sign with my hands, while hissing the word ‘meow’ in her direction – really funny! After that I danced around the dance floor pretending the coat was a polar bear. It was great fun but the rest of the work crowd didn’t join in and I knew it was only because they were afraid of the boss. All the same, I think she took in good sport. I never got a chance to chat to her about it because shortly after that night I was let go due to some unexpected changes in company strategy that meant my role was no longer viable. It seemed that the business of Christmas parties wasn’t as much fun as they were before, and that it probably isn’t a good idea to dance with coats or lose shoes.

So these days, as a Christmas Party veteran I would suggest the following advice to all those planning their Office night out.

1. Turn up. Despite the fact that I may have been a lot better off never showing up to the office party, and also might still have that shoe and the other lost items, as a rule, it is expected that you do actually turn up. From there it’s up to you to keep it sane.

2. Dress appropriately. Rule of thumb, if it’s too short, tight, see-through, or comes with flashing lights; don’t wear it.

3. Take a page out of Cinder’s book and leave the party before someone else suggests that it’s time for you to go home.

4. Limit what you drink. Easier said than done. But do you really want to arrive home with one shoe? You can plan your drinking by starting with soft drinks and having your first alcoholic drink later in the evening.

5. Promise nothing. I read an article recently about how an employee asked his manager for a pay rise at the Christmas party. The manager agreed that this would happen, and even though the promise was vague, when the pay rise never happened the employee left the company and sued on the grounds of constructive dismissal.

6. Plan how you will get home. Order a taxi in advance or have a lift arranged. You do want to get home, don’t you?

7. Careful about who you bring. Some office parties invite people to bring guests. I a friend of mine invited a guy along who she barely knew. As the night progressed her date got into a fistfight with another guy at the party. It was so bad that one of them broke his nose. Since then my friend is constantly reminded of the ‘nose incident’. You just never know what trouble other people will get you into.

Do remember to enjoy yourself. These parties are great if you get the balance right. So go on and have a great night, just not too great!

2011-11-26T16:18:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I was teaching

literacy skills to various adults who, for whatever reason, hadn’t gotten around to learning how to read or write. It didn’t take long for me to realize that you actually have to be extra clever as an adult if you need to navigate the world without literacy. One guy who I taught was a publican another worked in a factory. There was a dressmaker, a deliveryman, a taxi driver and various other occupations. They all had two things in common: they were experts in working around not having literacy, and they all kept their lack of literacy skills a secret.At first I had this naïve idea that actually they were managing fine and didn’t need to read and write seeing as they could manage perfectly well without it thank you. Of course, I soon found out otherwise. The taxi driver told me that although he knew all the streets of the city by memory, he was brought to utter embarrassment when the local school asked him to fill out a form for his son’s swimming lessons. In fact, when we started out, his goal was to learn how to spell the names of his four children. The dressmaker told me that although she loved health and fitness, she could never join a gym because she wouldn’t have the confidence to fill out the application form. But what really brought it home to me when the publican asked me what all the writing on a cereal box was about.

It made me think about how much writing hits you from the time you get up in the morning – is this one shampoo or shower gel? What kind of milk is it? What are these flyers about that come in the letterbox? Well for those of us who can read, we know that most of it is a lot of irrelevant advertising, but when you can’t, you’re left with a feeling that you’re missing out on what’s really going on in the world. And that’s when you begin to doubt yourself and from there you lose your confidence and then it’s all a big slippery slope.

The one thing that really got to me with all of my students was that they would consistently talk about ‘not having an education’.

I might be playing around with words, because I know what they meant, but I always went to lengths to point out that they had indeed received an education, most of them, no, all of them, a richer education than my own, but that they may have been missing out on ‘a schooling’. That said, most of them had been to school until about the age of 12, so they did in fact have enough schooling to learn how to read and write, hence one does have to wonder why school lets so many people down (but I’ll elaborate on that one later).

So what then, is education? Well the dictionary tells us that it’s ‘the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.’

And if you agree with that just make sure that you don’t ever send your children to school. School is a place where you get detention if you’re not wearing the right anorak with the school crest on it. It’s a place where you learn to jump through hoops like a little circus dog, and it’s a place where you pick your subjects not at all based on acquiring general knowledge or developing the powers of reasoning and judgment. You pick the subjects that will get you the most points for the least amount of effort. So even though one of my teenage sons is mad for history, he dropped it at school because ‘I have really bad hand writing and there’s so much writing in the test and they take away points if it’s messy.’ His six subjects are: English, Irish (because you have to), Maths, Physics, Accounting, Economics and German. So there goes acquiring ‘general’ knowledge for a start. But hang on a minute, what about the powers of reasoning and judgement and all that preparing for ‘mature’ life? Well you see, here’s the thing. Last week I asked my teenage daughter to share the joke when she was laughing out loud at some home video. It was one taken at lunchtime in school. Two boys from the class were having a rap competition. One, an African kid, shit hot and brilliant, rapping away with his own words, his own work, and a bunch of kids dancing to it. Then the other kid, a little small Irish guy who decided he was up for the challenge, and a whole pile of kids high on the word-off competition, jiving at the locker rooms. And even though I knew that the people I worked with who never went to school in their teens probably got a better education and became successful in what they did, I also had a moment of enlightenment, where I realized that sometimes school really does give people an education: an amazing, great experience of talent, teamwork, expression and creativity. In the end it really is all about reading, but only between the lines. School does educate people. But only at break time and in between the lessons.

The Infidelity of the Music Collection

2011-09-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

The first record I ever bought was 'Power to All our Friends' by Cliff Richard. Ah come on now, you can't blame me, I mean what else would you be spending your First Holy Communion money on? Well ok, there was also the pink nightdress case (that I still have) and a gold watch with a black face that I don't still have. My Mammy is still minding the rest of the money until I'm big.
It was a single, in a sleeve, and even if I can't remember what the song on the B side was, I do know that I played both sides over and over until it was too scratched to get any sound out of at all. But by then I had two records. The next one was Gary Glitter 'I love, you love.' And I did. I loved Gary Glitter so much that come Christmas I even got the Gary Glitter 1974 Annual. If I'd only known at that tender age that he might even have loved me back had I played my cards right...
Skip a few years to the Boomtown Rats, and the Moving Hearts. Blame the hormones for the Clash, the Sex Pistols, anything Punk or Bowie with a secret few bits of Abba and the Carpenters.
But my point is this - they were records, and as one of the obnoxious teenagers asked me when he was but a child: 'what are those black circle things in the thin covers?' Whatever they were, they are gone. Replaced by the cassette tapes that ended up tangled on trees. Followed by the CD collection that ended up as a collection of empty boxes with the CD's piled into the glove compartments of cars or stacked on top of sad domestic ghetto blasters that you could never turn higher than half it's potential because of neighbours or babies or just because it's loud.
So along came electronic media. It seemed like a good idea at the time. All your music on your laptop and you put it on to your ipod and you do a back up too, just in case, but you actually don't, and then the laptop gets stolen and the ipod falls down the toilet, so you start all over again. Then you plug in your ipod and the whole laptop goes into meltdown, or sometimes you don't do anything but you just lose all your music anyways and your kids smirk at you because you actually paid for music so it must be your own fault really.
Much worse though, is having about 64 of whatever those giga yokes are called, jam packed with every song in the universe that you ever listened to, but you still can't find a song you like and you spend most of your time clicking on to the next song. Then you hear a song on the radio that you think you can't live without having on your ipod but when you go to download it, it tells you that your ipod is full. So you delete some other song but a week later you miss that song and want it back. But you have to be cruel to be kind.
Music collections are just unfaithful. I could sing about it...

God Loves the Atheist

2011-09-08T14:16:00.000-07:00

One thing that annoys me about God is that he (and there's no point in even considering calling him she, or he/she or it, because let's face it, there is no religion with a lady God, is there?) Well, he seems to prefer atheists. I mean, I don't believe in him and he makes good things happen to me all the time. And he seems to pick good godfearing believers to make bad things happen to, maybe he wants to test them or something.

But in another way you can't blame him. Atheists solve their own problems without asking God to do it for them. They leave God alone and don't expect him to solve all of their problems like they were kids who need to ask a parent for everything. And atheists don't go to war with other atheists because they believe that their way of being an atheist is better than someone else's way of being an atheist.

And atheists don't go around to peoples houses when they're just about to sit down for dinner and start talking about the lion lying with the lamb or ringing bells and singing hare hare krishna. And because of that, God loves them.

I suppose God is being clever. He loves atheists so that they'll love him back for being so good to them. And we do. So remember, before you knock them: atheists do love God. And remember the thing about how it's easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle? Well Churches are rich and atheists are not. So guess who's going to heaven first? Thing is, I'll probably hate it, it'll be full of bible thumping do-gooders and tame lions.
Ah well....

Money

2011-09-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

I was on this training course there the past few days. It was hard to keep my mouth shut really, because I sometimes teach courses like the one I was on, and I just had so much to contradict and when I wasn't contradicting I was shouting up the answers before everyone else, because after all, I've heard all of this at least 100 times before. Well actually, I didn't keep my mouth shut, so I suppose I can't say that it was difficult as it didn't actually happen.
Well the old question came up on motivation: does money motivate people?
You had to write your answer on a post-it note and stick it on the wall, when it would later be revisited. I knew that the clever answer would be no, because the next part of the exercise would be writing down all the things that motivate and/or de-motivate you, and of course nobody was writing down money (except me of course, just to annoy the trainer as I knew that the next part of the exercise was going to be him pointing out that none of us had listed money as a motivator).
Well actually, I do think that money is a motivator. Even if you are loaded, what you get paid to do your job is symbolic of how you are valued. And even though it's the root of all evil and all that, it still is the axis upon which our world turns.
Money - the reason that people, countries, continents, can starve to death. The reason that a small bunch of arseholes can rule the world, the reason that I haven't gotten to see as much of the world as I'd like to, and the reason that we eat pancakes shortly before pay day.
I'd like to go into more detail, but because of money I'm doing a day job these days and am too tired to write much or do or say anything creative. Because of money I can't work full time as a writer, not even as a bad writer. But that said, working for the man is good writing material. Well it will be, eventually, when I get the gold watch and the pension, probably at age 75.
So what does motivate people? What makes you get out of bed in the morning? In my case its my bad hip. I need to stretch it. After that, I need to get out of the house before I have to speak to the bunch of teens who live here.
And the other things - recognition, thanks, success, teamwork and all the usual crap. Well they all end in money I suppose, somehow.
Even this blog, c'mon, I want your donations, want it to make money. And when it does, then I can sit back smoking a lady pipe and throwing wildly extravagant parties telling people how money don't mean nothing...

Understanding & Speaking Teenglish.

2011-08-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

They say the best way to learn a language is by having full immersion into the culture of the people who speak it, so given that my life rotates around half a dozen teenagers, it hasn’t been too difficult to start picking up the lingo. It’s a mixture between English phrases as I once knew them, only now they have a completely different interpretation to what I once understood, along with some new vocabulary. Of course, how you interpret it is also connected to the vitriol, whine, mutter or whisper with which the language is uttered.

So I’ve learnt that "I’m bored" really means "I need your help, I don’t have the confidence to do the things that would inspire me so now I don’t know what to do with myself". Of course, if you answer in English, it will not be understood, so if you have to answer in Teenglish by thinking of what you would like to suggest and then rewording it to make it understood. So let’s take another example such as "I hate you" which in fact means "I need you to tell me you love me”, you would think of the answer (for example: how could you say such a hurtful thing after all I do for you, you ungrateful little so and so?) Then you translate it back into Teenglish which will give you something like: “you might hate me, but come over here and give me a hug because I still love you, you brat.” Things like ‘I hate school" mean ''Something happened at school. Ask me what happened" and “I can do whatever I want" means "I feel helpless and out of control". Teenglish sounds so much like my native tongue, English, that at times if I were to take it as that it would well and truly push my buttons into believing that the correct response would be a clip across the ear. But no, I’ll probably be a native speaker by the time they’ve left home, reverted to English, had babies and start suggesting I learn Babglish.

Anything described as ‘gay’ has nothing to do with either homosexuality or homophobia, it’s just gay. Expect it, and most sentences to have the word ‘like’ pronounced ‘laak’ at the end of it. So something that’s ‘a bit gay laak’, is probably something old fashioned, respectable, uncool or all three.

“You never give me what I want" means "I need something from you and it is hard for me to convince you". Of course don’t take the word ‘you’ as meaning you, it in fact means that the teenager who is speaking is having a sudden hormone rush go through them so that the word ‘you’ means any thing or person outside themselves that is within pointing or shouting range. "No one loves me in this family" is the cue for "I am looking for some attention" while “I am going to run away" means "I am afraid of ever leaving this place, I’m stuck."

At times your teenager will speak to you in human language too, but listen to them converse with their peers and you may hear things like ‘yo sup homie?’ which means ‘how are you, my friend?’ or ‘you got mad skizzils’, meaning that they find the person in question to be very talented, while I recently discovered that ‘the lights are on’ means there is a parent within earshot.

"You don't care about me" means "I need you to tell me you care about me", but sometimes it just means “I know how to rile you and I have a few other things that will get you going if this one doesn’t work.” "All the other kids get to go and I don't" means "One kid is getting to go and I’m chancing my arm that I’ll be allowed go too". In this case I advise asking for a list of ‘all’ the kids so that you can confirm with their parents (in English) that this is the case. It may then change to “Well my friend is allowed go, and if I get to go so will so and so.”

"I don't have to listen to you" means "I wish I didn’t need to listen to you" and "You are cruel" means "Tell me you love me" (Although in my case it can be the exact same meaning as the English version, and not without good reason). "You never let me do anything I want" is Teenglish for "I wish I was already an adult and I’m going to take it out on you that I’m not".

And everything is fly. Not fly as in the pesky little insects; rather, it describes the cool, normally preceded by ‘pretty’. So if you are pretty fly, it’s the new cool. (And I thought cool was a cool word, but apparently not). Wicked has nothing to do with witches, wicked is brilliant. Abbreviations have turned into words, so it’s OMG and LOL laak…

When all the pretty fly friends have exited the house, your teen will revert to full sentences such as "I don't need you", said in a huffy voice and translated as "I need you so much I feel helpless". "I wish you would die" means "Get out of my way, I can’t see the telly”. I suggest you do get out of the way of the telly in this case. "Life sucks" means "I need your help in finding meaning in life" and “It is all your fault" means "I feel guilty" But remember that feeling guilty is part of the human condition and demonstrates that your child has almost become an adult. This the part where I find myself speaking Teenglish believing deep down that whatever is wrong really is my fault, and who cares if the damn teen feels guilty for belonging to the planet, because most of the time, so do I.

Bootcamp

2011-08-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

I saw an ad in the local newspaper there last week for a bootcamp. Now I know that I should be wary of anything that promises to make you thinner, healthier and fitter, is currently in fashion and costs money, because I normally end up just spending the money and not getting thinner, healthier, fitter or one bit happier. But I rang the guy anyways and told him about how I was an ageing unfit fat lady who still dreams of being young and beautiful, so he told me to come along, that it would be great and that I really wouldn't be the laughing stock. In fact, he told me, people of all fitness levels will be there and the strong would be supportive of the weak.
So I decided to go, I geared myself up, told myself that I would turn out to be one of the strong people on the course. I was going to get that kind of energy that mothers get when their child is trapped under a car that enables them to lift the car up with one hand.
Of course I didn't go. But I did go to the supermarket, and that was a struggle in itself. You use up a lot of energy going over to one isle and then all they way back to the far isle because you need garlic. Then you have to take everything out of the trolley and put it onto the counter to have it checked out. Then you have to pack it and get it back in the trolley. The guy from bootcamp said there'd be exercises using all muscles, but I bet he doesn't have one that simulates the muscles you use at the supermarket.
So I got to the checkout and realised that my laser card was still in the little purse that I put it into in Barcelona because everybody told me I was going to be robbed over there if I had a bag. And the purse with the laser card was in my anorak pocket which was hanging in hallway of my house. I sweated a bit but remembered I had my credit card. Then I remembered that I can't remember the pin number of said credit card, so I sweated a big bit, mumbling things such as 'I have money, really, I just don't have my card.' A manager was called and I then suggested that I pop home and get the card, it would only take five minutes, but the manager said that even though that was fine, I'd still have to check it all out over again, and at this stage supermarketcamp was getting a bit strenuous.

Artists Impression of me at Bootcamp

I then realised that I had eighty-something euro on me - my child's savings that I had agreed to put into the credit union, so I put back the unnecessary items such as bread and milk and got home with the wine, candles and pizza.
And don't forget this - bringing back the trolley is also work if the coin you have in it wont yank out of the slot.
Yesterday I took some visitors up diamond hill in Connemara, I was out of breath after about 100 metres, so I kept stopping and turning around saying 'wow, look at that view' just to pretend that I was struck with awe and not completely exhausted upon setting out on a piddly little tourist Sunday afternoon walk.
I'm not sure if the visitors were convinced. But I still believe in bootcamp, so next week, here I come...

Planning a Pet, or a Baby?

2011-08-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

If you ever find yourself under pressure to buy a pet for a child who you know won’t look after it, here are some good tips preparing for same:

A Budgie: Buy a smoke alarm and let the battery in it run down. It will make an unbearable chirping/beeping sound every two or three minutes. Put it into a cage and hang it far away enough that you won’t be able to get to it. Then buy some sandpaper and a pair of fake nails. Stand outside your child’s bedroom all night and scratch the nails up and down on the paper to imitate the nice sound of the budgie being playful. If this does not put your child off, remind him or her that on top of this there will also be a lot of gooey poo to clean and that eventually there will be an extremely traumatic day when they will find the dead budgie on the bottom of the cage. If they still want the budgie, buy one.

For a dog: Buy a bowl and pour some dog food into it. Then shake it so that bits of the food are all over the floor. Demand that your child clean it up, because ‘after all, it’s your dog!’ Eat their shoes. Then get balls of dog hair and randomly put them around the house. Put a big ball of dog hair in your child’s lunchbox and add two or three balls of dog hair to the wash so that it spreads out evenly among the clothes. Jump onto the child and paw them when they are feeling their most sensitive and tired. Leave big lumps of poo around the house and tell your child to clean it, because ‘after all, it’s your dog!’ If they still want the dog, buy one, but leave home yourself.

Preparing for a cat is easier. You just have to insist that every window in the house be left open in the middle of winter, in case the cat needs to get in. In the middle of the night you will wake up to find about three or four stray cats wandering around the house. Get your child out of bed and ask them to help you shoo the cats out of the house. You then realize that your own cat is not home yet. Get the kids back up again and start crying hysterically ‘the cat is missing’. Drive around and look for a dead cat.

If you do not plan a pet, but are planning a child, do all of the above except keep every window shut instead of open, walk around with a piece of vomit on your shoulder and then give away all of your money and get into debt. You are now ready for parenthood.

Daily Arse Kick: A Catholic Miracle

2011-08-10T03:04:00.000-07:00

Daily Arse Kick: A Catholic Miracle: " I was born into the world of Catholics. My parents weren't religious, but we were bred on guilt and the devil. Jesus was someone who was cr..."

A Catholic Miracle

2011-08-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

I was born into the world of Catholics. My parents weren't religious, but we were bred on guilt and the devil. Jesus was someone who was crucified because of me and after that some Irish Rebels died for my country, or more specificallly - for me personally. So it was a good start really. I learnt that if I ever did anything that felt good or right, it was probably wrong. And Jesus wasn't all that far away, he had managers on earth (a bit like school and work really), and they were the nuns and priests who you had to genuflect to because after all, they had given up all their wealth to go and live in palatial homes where they never got to experience fun things like paying bills or cooking or waiting for drunks to come home.
For a short while I liked the idea of it, but by the age of 7 I reckoned I was probably going to hell anyway because I got a chocolate stain ( it was a curly wurly) on my communion dress and I peed myself a few months later when walking in a May procession wearing that same communion dress.

By 11 or 12 I'd started to understand that the world was not actually flat and that it was probably unlikely that there was another layer of the world above the clouds. By 15 I'd confirmed that thought when I first went in an airplane. It was great being a rebel and not going to mass, even if it was difficult to explain to my parents how I got bitten by a horse when I should have been in church.
Years later it turned out that the whole thing was a farce - abuse, corruption, crime, the works. It turned out that the Catholic church was way up there with the mafia and the devils own tempation. But the miracle is this:
The badness of it all has made people even more supportive. As I always say, you can't underestimate the power of denial. The thing is though, that I didn't leave the church because of all the hypocrisy, evil and the works, I left it because I just don't believe that when you die you don't really die at all, you just get filtered into a good pile or a bad pile. Good - you go Butlins, bad you go to the Electric Picnic.
All the same though, the fact that they're still going strong is a miracle really, isn't it?

The Best Advice I've Never Had

2011-08-08T05:35:00.000-07:00

They were talking on the radio today about bad advice that people have been given. It was a bit too early for me to concentrate on listening to a grown up, but I do think that someone had been told to rub onions on their breasts in order to make them grow, and somebody else had been told that if they have hair on their legs they should wear the tightest skinny jeans possible and that the chafing of jeans on skin would remove hair.

But there's worse when you think about it. I was told to do things like: marry a nice man and don't give up your little jobeen, and make sure you get a mortgage, because there's nothing surer than this: house prices will never come down.

Luckily for me, I'm way too stubborn to take advice, so most of it was lost on me. I was wishing though, that I'd been told a few things that I had to learn on my own. It might have saved me years.

First of all, nobody told me that work is the very same as school - the managers are the teachers and the M.D. is the principal. The rest of the workforce are the students, and where there is a divide of operators and staff, well you could say the staff are the borders and the operators the day students.
You still sneak off for a cigarette, and not having your projects in on time is what used to be homework.
There will be random teachers/managers pets, rebels, people always out sick who might be at risk of getting expelled/fired and there will always be the know it all bright sparks, the tell tales and those who will cover for you so that you don't get caught at the back of the bikeshed.
Today is my first day back at the day job after a few weeks holiday and it feels a bit like that old feeling of going back to school. On the one hand you're dreading it, and on the other you have the nice new books and the clean desk and the feeling of a new start. And just like school, I was dying to get my teeth back into it but once I did I got back that age old feeling of worrying that maybe this year everything will be way too hard.

I never knew that no matter how bad you look in a photo, if you see it a few years later you'll think that you actually didn't look all that bad at all, and wish you were that skinny now, even though back then you thought you were fat.
Of course I do get advice too, mostly from my teenage kids without whom I never would have known that I am too grotesquely fat and ugly to be seen with them in public, that I know nothing, have terrible tastes in music, clothes, furniture and shoes (which is a good thing to know, seeing as I have no money left to buy anything for myself once feeding their needs at the Abercrombie & Fitch Store).
I wish someone had told me this, though: if you reach middle age and discover you have not fulfilled all of your dreams, hopes and aspirations, don't worry, because it also won't matter. If I'd known that I wouldn't even have tried.
Well on a totally different note, I'm thinking of starting up a Charasmatic Religion. It's supposed to be the most lucrative business to be in these days. Any good advice?

A Packet of Solpadeine and a Lecture Please

2011-08-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

Years ago I was a respectable lady married to a nice German doctor, and it was he who brought to my attention that in Germany you can only buy pain killers in a chemist and not in a petrol station, pub or supermarket and that there was not a chance in hell that you could ever buy a pain killer with codeine in it directly from a pharmacy, which in Ireland, you can - Solpadeine.
Then a friend of mine who is a pharmacist told me that Solpadeine was her best seller. So lucrative were the sales that she did not have enough room to store the stuff in her pharmacy. But that was also back in the time when I was respectable, and in the meantime the Solpadeine police seem to be out on patrol.
Now if you ask me, I think it's pure madness to sell substances with codeine in them over the counter at a pharmacy, and I'm also a bit iffy about buying paracetemol in the supermarket, given that any 13 year old can go in and stock up on a drug that is lethal in relatively small doses. But there are rules, I know that. Even back then my pharmacist friend did say that apparently you are only allowed to sell them one box at a time, which I've never seen enforced.
The Solpadeine issue is a bit different as you can only buy it at chemists, and for the past year or so, there is a new law - a very Oirish law - and it seems to be this: you can buy Solpadeine over the counter no problem, but only if you get a lecture first.
You get asked what you want it for, which is all a bit communist to me, and then they ask you if you've tried this that and the other non-solpadeine/codeine solutions. But more than that, they make you feel guilty, they make you feel like a druggy, they make you feel like you don't have a clue what you want but have randomly chosen this brand of pain killer, and they also make you feel like you're back at school and in trouble for something that you are not quite sure you have done.
It's true that Solpadeine is a dangerous thing and many people are addicted to it. It is true that many people are just as well off using paracetemol instead but are in the habit of asking for solpadeine, and it is also true that sometimes you just go for the solpadeine because hey, there's codeine in it, and it'll give you a bit of a lift.
But what the hell is this lecture lark all about? Either ban it as an over the counter drug or sell it over the counter, but this in between school teacher lecture is a joke. I bet that the pharmacists who give you the lecture are the very people who don't want it banned, because after all, if they did ban it, think about how their business would suffer. And they do not like to be reminded of that while giving you the lecture, as I was to find out recently.
I buy Solpadeines about once every two or three months, but I've started pharmacy hopping just to look good and I always lie about why I want it. Nothing to hide, but I feel it's an invasion to your privacy to tell some stranger why you are buying the stuff that pays their mortgage. If I have a toothache, I'll say leg injury and the time I had an abscess on my foot I said they were for bad period pains. I wonder what you'd have to say for them to refuse you. And would they refuse you? I'd love to say it's for a hangover, or that I don't have any pains but am just buying them specifically for the codeine hit. After all, the questions they ask are only to ensure that you know exactly what it is you are buying, not to stop you buying them.
So yesterday, when I walked into the pharmacy with a cold sore that has spread across my face making me look like the love child of Elephant man and a leper, with the Herpes virus sending little electric shocks to anyone who came within three feet of me, and hardly able to speak through my scabby lips, the pharmacist still rattled off her little lecture and asked me what it was exactly that I wanted the Solpadeine for. It would be nearly worth severing off a limb and carrying it into the chemist asking for Solpadeine just to see would she still ask? So I told her that I had bad stomach cramps and I thought I'd be smart, so I pulled out a pack of Solpadol which I'd been given as a prescription a few weeks back and said 'look, I know the lecture and all that, but I'm on these stronger pills and would prefer something less drowsy.' I then realised that this was a bad idea, because if these drugs are that dangerous, wouldn't it be lethal to top up someone's solpadol with solpadeine? But she only wanted to know one thing - did I want a pack of 12 or 24.
That's the best of all, once they 'allow' you to buy the things, they want you to buy two dozen. A bit disingenuous if you ask me. Surely if they are so goddamn concerned about your welfare taking these tablets would they not offer to sell you two, or four and to come back tomorrow?
You'll be glad to know I just bought the pack of 12. Then I went next door to the supermarket and bought a bottle of gin, a bottle of butane gas and a large pizza. No questions asked.

He Without Sin and All That Crap...

2011-08-05T02:48:00.000-07:00

The news about David Norris reached Barcelona. I sure don't read the news when on hols, in fact, I don't read it much at all, but being a cryptic crossword addict I did need to log into the Irish Times every day to feed my habit, and so it was that the whole thing caught my eye.
My first reaction to his standing down was that welling up of tears that you have to swallow because you're in a public place, and about a minute later I thought to myself 'wow, this must be how gutting it is for Catholics when they hear that their whole organization has let them down.' So I decided not to go easy on David. After all, I'd just read that he tried to get clemency for someone who raped a boy. I was gutted. My role model crumbled. The gay community looked seedy and it reinforced some peoples opinions that being gay is nothing but sex and immoral carry on.

But then I came home, and found out the facts. Here they are: Years ago, a gay guy slept with another gay guy who was a few months below the legal age but he wasn't going to let on that he was that young. Later, the fling goes sour and the older guy is up for rape. The guy involved was 15 remember, not 5. And if you scroll back to last year I did put up a link on my blog that goes through the legal age for sex in different countries after visiting Berlin where the 15 year old daughter had the boyfriend over for the night. If I remember rightly, Spain was the youngest, where you can do it at 14. And of course you do have to ask yourself how would people treat this case if it were a heterosexual one?
Ok, I don't know the circumstances - none of us do - we only know what the newspaper tells us, and that goes from the tabloid sensation to the highbrow analysis. And ultimately, it is not David Norris who was involved in any crime, he wrote a letter to support someone, and he had only heard one side of the story himself. Sounds very human really.
For me, the bottom line is this:
David Norris is gay and not a member of a political party, Ireland is a very homophobic country still twisted with cronyism and corruption. David Norris was leading the race, so can you imagine how many people must have been working around the clock to beat him down?
A gay man with the courage of his convictions and a track record in enforcing human rights may be a noble thing, but it may not be the thing that represents Ireland. And that's why I'm gutted now.
I don't agree with David Norris that writing that letter years ago was an error of judgement. I believe it was brave, because it was controversial, but let's face it, he was being honest, and that's something that 'the victim' possibly was not. But of course, the law is an ass, and we don't know the full story.
We lost Clinton because of an affair and got Bush instead. I sometimes wonder if Bush had been caught having a bit of extramarital sex would there be less soldiers dead? But that's it, an affair will bring you down but sending people off to war is fine. isn't it?
One thing I'm wondering about now though is this - if you can't campaign for the presidency because you once did something that was slightly controversial to some people, how the hell will we find any candidate at all? Then again, sometimes, some things are more controversial than others. I believe that if you investigate any of the potential candidates you will find buckets of dodgy carry on, but at the end of the day they are not Gay, and I have a feeling that it is not about 'doing right' that worries people, but more about 'what looks right'. After all, a Gay man in the Arus, what would the neighbours say?

Barcelona Beach: the Rat, the Nudists and the Megaphone

2011-08-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

Just to get one thing straight: we (meself and hersel´) are having a (metaphorical) ball in Barcelona. Note: I`m beginning to navigate the Spanish keyboard and have found the bracket symbols, along with things like the ñ,¿, and ç. Don´t know what they´re all meant to mean, but I do know that all those people who have bets on with Paddy Powers that we (see brackets above) would not last a day in Barcelona ( two queen bees and all that) were absolutely wrong. The absence of our 7 children for a whole week and the fact that two divas are sharing one room in a hotel has not yet led to catastrophe. Not even close. So as usual, Paddy wins.
Well we planned out our day today - we were to go up the viewing tower in the Christopher Columbus monument, followed by a bus tour to the Park Guell. So it panned out the usual way that planned days pan out: we went clothes shopping and ended up on the beach. I´d read somewhere that there was a nudist beach in Barcelona, and that it was beside a gay beach. Well being a fan of both nudists and gays I decided that seeing as we had gone the wrong way anyways - in relation to the park and monument, that we may as well keep walking along the beach until we saw a white ass and then settle there for the afternoon.
Hersel´shrugged, but bought some sandwiches and drinks and tagged along. It turned out that the gay beach and the nudist beach were one. And hang on, it wasn´t a gay beach at all, it was a homo nudist beach, all dangling dongle and no rubenesque ladies aesthetically rubbing oil along neck and nipple. And here´s what I hate: it was seedy. I don´t hate seedy, I just hate the fact that seedy and gay and nudist tend to get flung together into the same box, because come on, they are all so damn disconnected and yet...
I didn´t let it put me off even if I remembered the gorgeous nudist colonies I´ve frequented in France, all family friendly and that kinda thing, where couples were couples and it didn´t really matter if you were gay or straight or whatever. (Some of my best friends are heterosexuals by the way).
So we´re just about to sit down on this seedy beach and there it is. One big MASSIVE dead rat. I mean hello, I live with teenagers who exaggerate everything, but this was like (or as my teens would say: laak) huge laak, laak as big as a little dog laak. And I thought it was asleep beside the bins but hersel´ being a scientist and all that was able to confirm that the monster was dead, so I said that she could have my sandwich if she liked and suggested that it might be an idea to visit the next beach up; the one that the locals go to.
So that´s where the megaphone comes into it. We´re there after paying 17 euro (I still can´t find the euro symbol on the Spanish computer) for an umbrella and two deck chairs, and we have no bathing costumes because we had wandered here by mistake anyway and even if we were to go swimming we were thinking nudist ( as in nice French family friendly nudist and not all seedy nudist) but then the megaphone began. It was all about where not to swim and what not to do and to mind your belongings, but I couldn´t help thinking that this must be what it´s like in communist countries - and Spain, God forbid, is not one, but the shock of this megaphone blaring away made me feel so much like I was in Cuba - laak - that we had to have a few Mojitos on the beach, because that´s one thing you can get there, apart from seedy and rats.
Well that was about it for today. The top of my right leg is a bit red and sore but the rest of me is as Oirish white as ever.
Tomorrow we´re going to the Guell Park and up the Christopher Columbus yoke. I´ll keep you posted...

Things I Saw in Barcelona

2011-07-30T02:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, we've only been here not a wet day. The word not was meant to be in brackets but I can't find the bracket sign on the Spanish keyboard. Well it's Barcelona, what do you expect? The home of the throngs of Spanish students who hang around the suburbs of Galway in packs every summer and say 'th' for 's' and are much more touchy feely than Irish teens and prefer drinking Nestle Ice Tea to going bush drinking with hip flasks of vodka.
But seriously, I'd seen the postcards, I'd Googled it, and Galway does have a Tapas bar, so I did have some idea. I was thinking about my first ever awareness that there was a country called Spain. It was at about age 8 when I started collecting stamps. We got ones with Espana written on them, and a man's head. It was, of course, Franco. So disappointing. I liked the stamps with Magyar on them and wonderful pictures of all sorts of great things that seemed to be going on in Hungary.
Franco is dead now so to get back to Barcelona... it's the same anywhere really: no matter what you see in picture or movie form, it's different when you're there. Yes, I've seen a good few of the wow factor places so far, and I've had numerous platters of tapas, good Rioja and some fancy aperitif. But I saw things that make it a journey rather than a holiday. A woman hanging clothes over the balcony on some back street, a child getting slapped by a mother who was a slapper in more ways than one. An ancient couple holding hands on the dusty afternoon pavement, sat in a city park and ate water melon, that sort of thing.

Yesterday we went on the cable car over to Montjuic, if that's how you spell it. There were three people ahead of us in the queue, two men and a woman. One of the men smoked a pipe, let's say, more in an annoying leftover hippy way than in a very British Gentleman way. They were Spanish, not surprising considering I'm in Spain I suppose, and he started playing music out loud from his phone and singing along to it in a very annoying, cannot sing sort of way. But come on, I'm on holidays, who cares.
The couple he was with would have been your average ageing hippy kind of couple, what drew attention to them was that the bloke was on a wheelchair and was in a really bad way. No speech, skin and bones, muscular spasms - just about hanging on in there if you ask me. His head rolled, his legs tangled and his arms went everywhere. She seemed to be getting through to him though, and you could see she was pure mad about him - kissing him, holding his hand, the usual carry on of any couple I suppose.
Damn it was a journey getting on to that cable car. First the half hour queue, then the lift up to it, then another long wait and eventually in we all got - or at least attempted to get. Yer man's wheelchair wouldn't fit into the cablecar. In, out, front ways, side ways, not a hope. So his missus and the other guy, I decided the other guy was his brother, lifted him out of the chair and carried him on to the cable car. Then they held him up to the window and you gotta believe it, but when that man smiled and made noises that we all understood to be the same feeling of elation that we all got trundling across the bay on a cable car, you could have cut the air with the emotion on board.
When we got to the top the three of them said bye to all of us and waved as they went back down on the cable car. Myself and herself headed towards the nearest bar and we said nothing, because after all, we're two lesbians, and if one of us gets emotional the other will get even more emotional instead of just saying 'ah would ya ever get a grip on yerself'. So I said nothing, but I thought to myself 'and there I was this morning, the mother of sorrows because I don't have the figure of a model'. I have to say, I didn't feel sorry for the guy at all, I felt uplifted because he demonstrated that life is great no matter what shape you're in, as long as you go out there and live it.
So we drank white wine and walked through the cactus garden and I felt a connection with the guy on the cable car because if anyone had asked either of us at that moment why we were doing what we were doing, we could both quote the great Bill Clinton and say: 'I did it because I could!'

Blognapped!

2011-07-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Last year we were robbed – if you read the blog you’ll remember : a shower of shits rummaging through the house at 5am, until herself decided to take them on in her negligée. Then there was the bit with the cops coming to the house which was more like a live setting for a Father Ted goes Crime Scene, and later how even though I was the one who was robbed, I still get into trouble with said cops because one of my many dodge mates managed to get the laptops back from under a bush up the back roads. (Got my little Bobbi Brown make-up kit back too, and my driving license.)

Well this year’s burglary was more virtual, so to speak. I log in to my lovely little blog and there it is gone. I kept on typing and retyping all the variations to the word Arsekick that you can think of, just in case it was me, not them, but no, it had been taken over by some strange website with the word Spank in it.

Where do you go to find a stolen blog? I mean, it has to be somewhere, and who’d want it really? Well eventually the I.T. manager where I work ( I have a new job, I’ll come to that later) found it for me. Apparently, html has it’s own little lost and found office, and whatever he had to do to get the blog back I can only say: be nice to I.T. managers, for theirs is the kingdom of the internet and they shall inherit respect from every other department in the company.

But you haven’t missed much – I’m still not finished writing the definitive modern Irish novel, and I’ve kept off the streets which really deprives one of a good muse – although now that I’m back in the corporate world that may all change.

While I was offline I wrote the blogs in my head, and they are now gone to the place where some psychiatrist might find enough material for a PhD. One of them was going to be about dying my hair blonde and how the boxes of dye say stuff like ‘honey blonde’ or ‘platinum’ but in reality it’s ‘straw yellow’ which is better than the original ‘donkey’s ear grey’ so I won’t complain.

Then there were the two business trips to Germany where I wanted to write about how the trains are always late and that although I thought the Germans had become very cosmopolitan, they are actually getting worse but fair play to them for starting to sell proper cheese and onion crisps, you couldn’t get them back in the day when I lived there, and also, fair play to Lidl for bringing those little Nurnberg sausages to the rest of the world, because there was a time I only ever got to eat them on German trains.

And then we were up North to my beloved Belfast. It was a long weekend with the kids. Now that they’re teens we can do grown up things together, but the bottom line is that they cleaned me out and for a deluded moment I thought it was love and bonding when they smiled and hugged me for spending hundreds of pounds sterling on some designer label clothes that look the same as the ones in Penny’s to me, but how would I know, because as they soon reminded me – I know nothing.

But that in itself is a blessing really, because if I’d never had kids I’d never know that I know nothing, I’d only know that I’d have no kids and too much money. Shucks. On the way back we had a family chat in the car. I told them what my wishes were should I pass away, I told them how to get on with their lives, and to celebrate my life and not mourn me should I get run over by a ten-ton truck. I got emotional, and they were silent. They were so silent that I began to worry I’d upset them but then I noticed that they all had their headphones on and hadn’t heard a word I’d said. That’s probably got something to do with me knowing nothing though.

Took a spin around the Newtonards peninsula but was afraid to get out and walk on the beach because of all the flags. There was definitely a blog in me on that one. And the peace line – we saw the peaceline in Belfast. In my head I was thinking it would be a nicely painted line with peace written on it – ah no. Berlin eat your heart out.

So we’re off to Barcelona tomorrow – myself and herself that is. A week. Odd choice for two people who hate the heat and want a nice quiet break, but there you go, see, I’m just some imbecile who knows nothing…

Something About Tuam

2011-04-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Years ago, it might have been around the turn of the last century; I decided to return to Ireland having lived abroad for about 15 years. I had missed everything I’d left behind when I first left, and of course it never crossed my mind until my return that perhaps all of the things I missed no longer existed, including my former self considering that I left as a young and wild twenty something year old and returned as a middle aged struggling mother with kids who were at that age when it would have been easier to keep a herd of lambing sheep in the kitchen than three toddlers. So in short, it didn’t really work out. Dublin was in the middle of a crazy boom that meant overpriced accommodation, horrendous traffic jams and queues to pay a tenner for a cup of instant coffee.

In a desperate attempt to give it a last chance, I quit my job and headed to Galway with the husband who’d been offered a job there. We moved into a house on the outskirts of Tuam, which is about twenty miles from Galway, but being city slickers I foolishly assumed that we would be living in the suburbs of Galway. Nothing like it: we had to learn how to deal with bulling cows, bog land and a village that consisted of a petrol station cum shop, pub and whatever, with a church across the street. But there was Tuam.

On one of the more desperate days of asking myself why the hell I had exchanged the metropolis of Bavaria for a one-horse town with an annual duck race, I took a visit to the local town of Tuam. It was raining, and once I’d had a ramble around a few shops selling buckets, brushes, horse feed and gates, I made my way down to the supermarket. Realizing that I didn’t have any coins on me I turned away from the trolleys to go inside and get some change. As I did, I almost hit into an elderly man bringing back a trolley.

SuperValu Tuam - Where prayers mean more than money

‘Here’, he said, handing me the trolley, ‘take this one.’

‘Ah no, it’s ok, I told him, I don’t have any change on me to give you the euro.’

‘Yerra forget the euro’ he said, ‘just say a prayer for me instead.’

‘I will’ I said, ‘what’s your name and I’ll say a prayer for you.’

He gave me his name and I headed towards the supermarket while he headed to the car park. But then he turned back.

‘You know what’ he said, ‘if you really are going to say a prayer, would you say it for my friend Michael, he needs it more than I do.’

‘I will.’ I said, and we parted ways.

That day was one of those moments when I realized why I’d wanted to come back home. It was because I’d yearned to live in the world where small things matter. Or no actually, where small things are big things. I might be an atheist, but I did pray for both of them.

That was years ago and soon afterward I moved into the hippy nirvana of Galway so I’d almost forgotten about it until yesterday when I was back in Tuam and pulled in to get some petrol. There were two pumps but the one that was free was only for diesel, so I parked behind the petrol one where an elderly man using a walking stick was filling his car with petrol. I took out my novel realising there would be a long wait before this old guy came back out again. But before he went in to pay though, he moved his car over to the side so that I could move in and get my petrol. As he slowly made his way in to pay I asked him if he had purposely moved away to let me get my petrol

‘Indeed an’ I did’ he said. ‘Sure it’ll take me so long to shuffle around the shop I didn’t want to leave you waiting.’ And bing - there was that same old feeling that I remembered from Tuam.

‘Thanks’ I said, ‘you’ve just made my day.’

I didn’t know his name, but I decided he might like a prayer, maybe he was that very man who needed the prayer more than the other one, maybe I had cured him with my prayer. So I muttered a prayer as I drove past the High Cross of Tuam and decided that it was definitely no coincidence that Tuam produced the Saw Doctors along with all those nice hardware items and horse shoes.

Because there's something about Tuam...

Blood, Water and Other Thick Things...

2011-04-18T03:19:00.000-07:00

There should be a National Auntie Day, and I’m not talking Hallmark here. Now I should know about these things because I am an auntie, an ex-auntie and an auntie-to-be. The auntie bit is simple. My brother has two daughters and one of them is also my godchild. Considering that my brother is a mass going atheist and that I myself am a church boycotting religious deserter with a penchant for spirituality (who spent two hours last Saturday in a church watching my daughter being confirmed – kids choice and all that lark), well considering all that, you’d wonder why I was asked to be godmother, and that goes back to my point: it’s because I’m the auntie. Aunties are family and you don’t have to explain certain things to them, they just know. Aunties are people who are expected to have big ears, hearts and wallets. And even if they can manage two out of three, they’ll be doing alright.

The auntie-to-be part is the other brother. He’s in his mid or late thirties, I can’t remember, but because he’s the kid brother, the other brother and I still think it’s a scream that he’s getting all grown up and talking to girls, let alone marrying one and having a kid with her.

The ex-auntie bit is more complicated though. You see when I was married; I was an auntie to my husband’s nieces and nephews. Then you get divorced and you realise it’s not just the bastard you married who you leave behind, no, there’s a landslide. It’s awkward, and in fairness over the years some of them have kept in touch, including my ex-godchild who I met at an ex-niece’s wedding last summer. The ex-godchild reckons I owe her quite a tidy sum of money, a few teddy bears and a visit. The ex-niece told me to stop saying how much she’d grown, considering she is now almost thirty. (But like the brother, if kids don’t retain their snotty status they’ll pass you out and I’m having none of it.)

This weekend, as I mentioned earlier, my daughter made her confirmation. I sent my kids to a multi denominational school where they learn to embrace all faiths and none. I wanted to save them from what I consider to have been the most dangerous place for children for the past 200 years: the Catholic Church. Of course my daughter is a bit of a rebel, and in an attempt to be different from her mother she insists on hanging out with Catholics and has now been duly confirmed as being a member of the gang.

So we made a day of it.

And that’s where the aunties come back in. Not that either of her aunties or any of her ex aunties showed up for the day or anything, but one auntie did come: my auntie.

I’ve really only gotten to know my aunt in the past few years. Well that’s not quite true, because you remember who was nice to you and who told you to shut up and be quiet when you were a kid, and she’s on the good list from back then.

And as a rule, nice aunties don’t break their patterns. Even though I’m pushing 50, my auntie still brings me presents and gives me white envelopes. She is impartial, non-judgemental and being an aunt means that despite being family, she is that tiny bit detached enough not to get pulled into the usual family brawls that surround these occasions. That’s not why I like this auntie though. I like knowing an intelligent, thinking woman who is more physically active than I am despite being in her 90^th year. I like listening to someone talking about the past with a critical eye instead of saying how wonderful everything was back in the days of repression, poverty and abuse and that we all need to go back there. It’s refreshing. I love hearing things about the family from years back that I didn’t know. When I hear about my own godmother (rip) pushing people out of the way with her stick, I recognise my own behaviour and begin to ponder on the genetics of being a bully. And of course, I’m beginning to see my aunt as a role model: she gives me hope that I might be around for another whole lifetime’s worth of shenanigans and that I might manage to reinvent myself more than once.

But I could also see my future if I do get there. People tend to assume that because you’re old, you are still living old values and that you are a bit dithery, slightly deaf and mildly mentally handicapped.

If my aunt wanted to, she could have come to Galway on a motorbike, or hitch hiked, and yet I kept hearing people say things like ‘aren’t you great getting the train to Galway.’ Why is an active adult woman so great to get on a train? Is it because somewhere on a piece of paper it says that she’s almost 90? I realised that if I make it to 90 I’ll be treated like I’m 9. My aunt tells me that it can come in handy. She says she can ‘do feeble’ when it suits. Some of the time I got pissed off listening to people patronise her, but most of the time I felt smug and all of the time I wished she had a walking stick to belt them with. They say blood is thicker than water, but mud is also thicker than water and so is chocolate.

Funny thing is; we are not blood relatives. She was married to my father’s brother. It got me thinking. I never would have known her if she hadn’t married into the family, so on that score, it’s purely a family thing, or is it?

I think Aldous Huxley got it right in his ‘Ninth Philosopher’s Song:

'Blood, as all men know, than water's thicker

But water's wider, thank the Lord, than blood.'

Flirt School

2011-04-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

A while back a friend of mine was telling me that he’d been to a ‘Flirt Course’. I immediately thought that this was a great idea – not to learn flirting, but to run one. Most people I know are either single or due to be single shortly. So I decided to find out what the contents of the course were so that I could run one myself and clean up financially by getting a dozen or so desperately single people to pay money in the hopes of charming the opposite sex.

My friend told me that the first tip was never to talk about health or money on the first date, but that was all I found out about this particular course because on foot of it the guy started dating a girl who’d been on the course too (probably the real reason people go to these courses) and since then he hasn’t had time to do anything other than gaze lovingly into said girls eyes.

So I checked out some websites for online dating, put up a photo of myself as a young adult, pretended to be younger, thinner and basically an awful lot nicer than I really am, and off I went. The guy I met was handsome and in fairness, his face didn’t drop when he saw what I was really like. But then, within the first minute of meeting him, he took out a tissue, wiped his nose and began to go into detail about the terrible cold that he was getting over and would I like a drink. I decided that this information was only annoying because I’d now been trained into believing that a man should not speak about his health on the first date, so I gave him my sympathy and said that yes, thanks for offering, I’d have a glass of white. He came back with the glass of white and some horrific smelling herbal tea for himself, for his terrible cold that I knew all the details of at this stage. I thought to myself ‘I’ll let him off for slurping like a pig, cos after all, he has an awful cold’.

But then he started talking about money. And it wasn’t just about money in general, it was: ‘Now don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to buy a lady a drink, but don’t you think €6 is quite pricey for a glass of Pinot Grigio?’ I can’t remember what the exact answer was that I gave him, but I do remember that I didn’t stay for a second glass. Nor did I ever get around to opening a Flirting School.

But is there a rule? Not long after that date I met my beloved. I can’t say what the chat up lines or the flirting entailed, because we didn’t meet on a dating website, and we never asked one another out for a date. But I suppose you’re more likely to stay long term with somebody who you say things like ‘stick on the kettle’ to, or ‘get up them stairs’.

Going right off the topic though, have you seen the little tracker thingy up in the right hand corner where I track my weight loss? I’m down 15lbs at this stage, and the group leader is giving me a pain and I’m at the bit of the diet where it takes ages and ages to lose half a pound and I’m kind off gone off salad. On top of that, Lidl’s have opened a real German bakery on their premises, and they have my very favourite pumpkin seed bread. I think one bread roll is equal to the amount of points in a glass of wine, which means that a bottle of bread rolls is 22 points.

I’d say at that flirt course that they told the women never to talk about diets on the first date.

The Meaning of Life

2011-03-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading a bit of philosophy lately. I suppose we all have some interest in the questions of philosophers. In my case though, I just wanted to read up on the philosophers so that I’d sound intelligent down in the pub on a Friday night. If someone said something like ‘I can’t stand all this clerical abuse stuff’, I could turn around and say “a tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.” Then I’d murmur ‘Aristotle’ under my breath.

But it didn’t work. I’ve ended up bogged down in all these questions about the meaning of life that I just can’t get my head around. At the moment I’m on Spinoza. He’s the guy who asks these five questions:

Spinoza: a genius with popping
out eyes who ended up
as a lens grinder

Why does anything exist?

How is the world composed?

What are we in the scheme of things?

Are we free?

How should we live?

I know that the answers are all in the book, but I keep falling asleep when I read it because it’s one of those books that have all these little numbers in it that refer to some point or other that you have to look up in the back of the book so I tend to get a bit lost. If I understand him correctly though, the man is cool. He argues for freedom of thought and religion, and we’re talking the 1600’s here. Guess what he wanted to do? He wanted to take political power away from the clergy, and criticized organised religion. He was into a pantheistic view of God, and was all for the idea of a democratic and secular society. So it was kind of like what Ruairi Quinn wants to do with the primary schools, just 500 years earlier.

Then he wrote a book called ‘The Ethics’, and it only got published after he snuffed it. I don’t know much about that book because it was written in the form of definitions, propositions and axioms, and it’s all about metaphysical stuff and logics. Bottom line is this though: he believed that everything in the universe is one single substance that you can call ‘God’ or ‘Nature’. Everyone, according to Spinoza, is a localised concentration of the attributes of reality, because the only true individual is the universe as a whole. And with that in mind, to become free, you are supposed to understand that if you see how everything is one, then you are aware of the totality of the universe, which is to be free. Well I think that’s it.

Obviously, the same thing happened to Spinoza that happens to most thinking people. He was expelled from the synagogue and denounced by Christians as an atheist, so he gave up the aul’ philosophy and spent the rest of his days earning a living as a lens grinder.

All the same though, I’m still stuck on the first question. Why does anything exist?

I remember years back one of my kids was doing a course in philosophy for gifted 8 year olds. Before going to it he claimed that he shouldn’t really be giving up his Saturday for a subject that he already knew everything about. ‘What do you mean’ I asked him. ‘Philosophy asks the question as to what is the meaning of life’ he replied, ‘and I already know that.’ ‘Great’, I replied, ‘tell me, I’d love to know.’

‘Life doesn’t have a meaning’, he said, ‘if it did, there would be no need for evolution.’

Sounds plausible, but it still leaves you stuck on the first question ‘why does anything exist?’

I think I’ll talk about football down in the pub on Friday.