A New Project

I have a confession. I’ve been seeing another blog. I didn’t mean to get drawn away, but I can’t help it. It just happened…

Actually, you know what? I’m going to stop the whole seeing someone else/seeing another blog thing right now before it gets tedious.

Here’s what’s up. I’ve decided to take on a new challenge. I got a book earlier this year called, “Dream It. List It. Do It!” It’s a spin-off from the life-list site, 43things.com. In the simplest terms, it’s a long list of things that people want to do in their lives. Some things are small, like “buy a new toothbrush” or “go disco dancing”. Some are big, like “run a marathon”. All in all there are probably around 2,000 – 3,000 of these goals in the book, covering a huge array of things that people want to do.

I’m planning to do them all.

If you’re interested in seeing me make a fool of myself along the way—and honestly who doesn’t love to see someone repeatedly fail?—you can follow along at the project’s dedicated blog, the unwieldily named dreamingitlistingitdoingit.com. I’ll see you there.

Surviving With Very Little Toothpaste

I’m in London for what I was shocked to figure out will actually be my longest ever visit to the UK. I’m staying here for a full seven days—practically an aeon when surrounded by funny-coloured buses and pastie shops. England for me occupies a dedicated spot in the uncanny valley, similar—but not similar enough—to home.

For example, at home I expect toothpaste to come in a tube that’s more than three centimeters long.

2009

Happy Still Relatively New Year! I know it’s a week in, and I realize that you may feel hurt by my neglecting you for this long, but as always I have a really good excuse.

I was pretty unwell for a few days spanning the ’08/’09 switch-a-roo. I was laid up in bed being attended to by my carefully appointed transition team. Special thanks to my nominee for Secretary for Buying Me Soup, whom I won’t name because it occurs to me that I haven’t actually asked her yet if I’m allowed to talk about her on the wild-wild-web. She’ll appreciate being called whom anyway.

So here we are, a week into the year, at the point where most people are already starting to give up on their overly-ambitious resolutions (“Exercise how often?”; “Spend how long with Grandpa?”; “Limit myself to how many class A’s?”) and I haven’t even written any. What’s more, I’m not meta enough to make that a resolution itself (though I’m meta enough to make that joke—go figure).

I’m usually a proponent of starting on changes as soon as you think of them instead of waiting for some arbitrary time to pass. Think of it as starting on November 4 instead of January 20. No sense in lazing about with three cigarettes in one hand and a glazed leg of ham in the other, staring at a calendar and waiting for permission to stick a patch on your arm and step on an Obese-B-Gone™ treadmill.

The trouble is that this year—or rather last year, sorry—I was holding off on making any big attempts at changing anything while I waited for the conclusion of some career wrangling I’m trying. The short version of that story is that I’m trying to move into a new job that I have described as, “Same company, same office, same desk, same team, similar work, and it’s taken over six months to get this far with the switch”. I wanted that whole rigmarole to be over before I picked up and moved on with my life from there. So the plan went.

I had expected that to be reasonably close to wrapping up at the end of the year, but it appears that it’s going to drag on for another bit. I now realize that there’s no reason for it to keep getting in the way of me making plans, so it happens that I find myself here at the start of the year thinking about what I’d like to do with myself in the near future.

Expect news of what transpires.

Catch You on the Flip Side

Wow, I’ve managed to have my life entirely overtake my blog for the last while. All sorts of fun and interesting things have been happening in work and life and, sadly, will likely remain undocumented. I just wanted to drop a short note here to mention that I’ll be disappearing to California early tomorrow (or, most likey, not tomorrow, since you’re probably not reading this on the day that I posted it) and I’ll be away for three weeks. I expect there’ll be some Twittering from me, but no blogging.

Michael Winslow

If you already know who Michael Winslow is then I’m very impressed and I think that we should be friends. You’re a cool person and I like you.

If you don’t know who Michael Winslow is, but you realise it when I say the name Larvell Jones, then we can still be friends, but I’m not so likely to call you to see if you want to come out to play.

If you’ve got this far and you’re still none the wiser, and if I say, “Jonesy from Police Academy,” and then I go on to say, “the guy who made all the delightfully amusing sound effects,” and you still sit there like a gormless idiot and mutter something about being, “not really that into Police Academy,” well then I think we have a ourselves a problem and it might be best if you just leave and go sit somewhere and think about what you’ve done.

Anyway, all that out of the way, I went to see Michael Winslow at the Tivoli last night. For a man who can impersonate an argument going on in another room with loud bass music in the background, or who can reproduce an entire scene of Star Wars with a convincing facsimile of what probably took tens of Skywalker Sound engineers a few days to make in the first place, he does a surprisingly terrible Irish accent.

That was the only drawback though, and it really isn’t a show about impersonations. Its about making familiar sounds, but sounds which you can’t properly imagine coming from a human being. It’s about thinking, “Hey, this guy’s as good as Hendrix, but that schmo Hendrix had to use a guitar,” or, “It’s true, waves crashing on the beach do sound like that. But shut up, because I drank a couple of pints and I want to last until the end of the show before needing to go to the bathroom.”

Of course there’s the drawback that I can’t now just steal some of his jokes to make myself seem funnier. I’d just sound like a retard making beeping noises. Oh well.

Apparently he’s got a new show with Bill “Jello pudding—eating mother-fucker” Cosby coming out soon, which may be worth a look, although it would make me quite concerned that it might open up a temporal wormhole between now and the 1980s, given that much 80s in one place.

Not Done

Bah! It turns out I was prematurely optimistic in this post. Dammit. The current plan is for my life to stop sucking by some time this Thursday. Fingers crossed.

California Dreaming

As of yesterday I have my flights and time off work booked for a holiday in California for three weeks starting at the end of September. Huzzah! I’ve taken the naïve and costly step of buying my own flights rather than trying to wrangle some work-related reason to be in Mountain View around that time, but no matter. I hear most people pay for their own holidays these days, so I might as well join in.

There are a few people going, but true to my usual form I’m not completely sure who those few people are. We haven’t (to my knowledge) got anything resembling itinerary yet, besides  a plan to spend some time in San Francisco initially. But then if we did have more of a plan I’m sure I wouldn’t know about it. I like to think of this as my ability to just wing it and go with things without sweating the details. Other people call it failing to pay attention.

While I’ve been there twice in recent years, there’s still an awful lot of California I haven’t seen. Some of that awful lot goes by the name LA, which I’m quite looking forward to visiting. Maybe I can find a minor celebrity to take home with me as what the ancient Egyptians referred to as a “souvenir”.

The Record of a Remarkable Period in my Life

I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life: according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In THAT hope it is that I have drawn it up; and THAT must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them

—Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Laughter Lounge

I like laughing and I’m also partial to some amount of lounging, so you might expect that I’d quite enjoy a venue named The Laughter Lounge. I always thought so too, so it’s surprising that I’ve lived in Dublin for over a year and last Friday was the first time I ventured into said establishment, accompanied by work friends B, C, J, and C’s two visiting friends. Everyone I work with has single-letter first names. It’s weird. I think they were all named after characters in a maths text book.

Sadly I can’t remember nor can I find online the names of most of the performers in the show I saw. It was headlined by a Kiwi (a person from New Zealand; not a fruit, nor a flightless bird. Though I assume he was flightless) named Al Pitcher. He had the virtues of being comprehensible, confident, and having original material, each a virtue lacked by one of the other performers.

The second performer, from Northern Ireland, was so difficult to understand I settled into a routine of doing a sort of offline translation of what seemed like the important bits. I was just trying to remember the sounds and then deciphering them in retrospect when he looked like he thought he’d said something funny. “Oh look, he’s preening. Time to figure out what the hell he just said.” I’d feel sorry for my non-Irish companions, but they didn’t miss much.

Pitcher himself was excellent. I’m not sure that I haven’t seen him before actually, though I can’t recall when. It would be bad form to relay his material here, even if my memory was capable of lasting four whole days, so I won’t try. I’d have been amused to see where he went with his ad lib‘d banter with J if J had mentioned the big G (i.e., Google—should I try to write the whole post in initials?) when Pitcher asked what he does for a living.

World Culchie Festival

The annual World Culture Festival (henceforth the Culchie Festival) was on in Dun Laoghaire (Yes, I spelled it correctly on the first attempt! Get in!) this weekend, giving me the chance to make fun of observe a number of cultures as portrayed largely by south Dublin hippies. I’m not actually sure where many of the costumed oddities originated, though it took me little time to place the guy who looked like the head priest from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Kali Ma!

There was a juggler. I had my usual reaction: “I can do that. I can do that. I can’t do that. Ooh, that’s cool. They’re not really that sharp. Yes, I’ll hold your giraffe. No, that’s not a euphemism. Here’s some money; go buy yourself something nice.”

Sadly there were no acrobats, an oversight only made up for by the abundance of crepes and ice-cream. That’s not to say that those things are interchangeable, just that a festival that lacked both acrobats and ice-cream would have little reason to call itself a festival. It would be about as much a festival as Picadillly Circus is a circus. Get your act together, London!

Interesting side-note (for ‘interesting’ read ‘tedious’) on getting home: The trains were quite crowded so we decided to walk one station south to get on before the crowds. For reasons entirely out of my control—and I’m not even saying that in an ironic sense that means it was entirely my fault; it really wasn’t—we missed two stops and kept walking until we found ourselves in Dalkey, my arch nemesis.