dervala.net

Slides

dervala — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:34:13 +0000

“It lets us travel the way a child travels…round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.” —Don Draper, pitching the Kodak Carousel on Mad Men. I remember playing with the yellow plastic boxes, and my father saying, “Don’t put your paws all over the slides.” I used to hold [...]

Start

dervala — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:58:15 +0000

Tomorrow Patrick comes to stay. My couch has missed him, and so have I. He’s one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, and though both our worlds are wide, we share a hometown. I grew up in Limerick in the 1980s, and he grew up there in the 2000s. Among many other things—student, [...]

Coconut

dervala — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:43:02 +0000

My cellphone ring is the sound of unmet obligations. At fourteen, I spent hours a night willingly tied to the family phone, dissecting the gossip from biology class. Now that I’m a so-called grown-up, I dread being dragged into cyberspace—that place between phones—and my subconscious isn’t subtle about acting out. Every month or two I shed [...]

Green Card

dervala — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:29:43 +0000

I’ve worked with my immigration lawyer for 12 years now, and no one knows more about me than Ken. He may not know what makes my heart beat faster (too much red wine and coffee, Ken), but he has the facts. He has an original copy of my Leaving Cert results, and he knows the exact [...]

Pact

dervala — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:56:59 +0000

On Saturday night, I made a pact with my friend Alana that we would post on our blogs at least once a week. I don’t remember whether I suggested this plan or just agreed to it, but my motives were self-serving. I love Alana’s stories, and I want her to write more for me. As [...]

A New Year

dervala — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:50:18 +0000

Short Pig (photo by Dan Jurafsky) Long Pig “In a pig dilemma. On the one hand, intelligent, sentient creatures. On the other hand, they’re made of bacon.”—Twitter from @rionam. Lera and Scott roasted a pig for New Year’s Eve. He joined us at the table with a piggy smirk, plump and burnished like a Marbella ex-pat. Roasted [...]

Life Incorporated

dervala — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:10:08 +0000

Douglas Rushkoff is working on a new book. Get Back in the Box is one of the few books on innovation that made sense to me, so I’m looking forward to this one. Rushkoff, like the fantastic Ronald Wright, knows his history, so he can explain not just where we are but how we got [...]

2008 Books & Music

dervala — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:47:29 +0000

By request, and late as usual, here’s the stuff I liked the best in 2008: My favorites of the 60-odd books I read, in no particular order: What is America?, Ronald Wright. This is my one must-read, along with his Brief History of Progress. How to Be an Adult, David Richo. Some of us are late bloomers. The Little Prince, [...]

The Inevitable Evolution of Love

dervala — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:03:32 +0000

“On election day itself, as the state of California determines whether to make one last-ditch effort to hold back the inevitable evolution of love in the 21st century, Julie and Amy decide to get hitched (again). It is an act of love but also of protest, an affirmation of commitment but also a land-grab [...]

“The Female of the Species…when the men aren’t watching!”

dervala — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:52:12 +0000

“There’s a word for you ladies…but it isn’t used in polite society outside a kennel.” —Joan Crawford, The Women Winter finally showed up in northern California this week. When the rain started I was on my motorbike 40 miles from San Francisco with a busted visor and no waterproof gear. Drops stung my face hard enough to [...]