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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

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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.

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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.

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Clock Skew

Do you ever wish the day was a couple of hours longer? I’m pretty sure my natural tendency (if I was stuck in a cave with no natural light cues or TV channels to let me know what time it is) would be to live with about a 26 hour day. Unless I have things to do that kick me back into step with the rest of the world I tend to drift by getting up a little later each morning and going to bed a little later each night.

Given long enough, actually, this becomes getting up a little later each afternoon and going to bed a little later each morning. A few years ago during one of those magnificently long college summers we used to take for granted, I managed to lose an entire day from this drift. This exchange never happened, but it could have:

“You’re up early today.”

“No, I’m just up really late yesterday.”

This tendency is still with me, and in a job with as much flexibility as mine it can be tough to keep in check. Yesterday I worked a full working day, but one which started at nearly noon and went on into the less sociable hours of the evening. Well that’s fine; things still get done. If I get in late, I stay in late, and there’s no difference in the end.

Or so you might think. The problem comes on a Friday when this flexible window in which I work pushes up against something less flexible, like a leaving party for a colleague. Then you get days that run according to the compressed schedule of arrive, lunch, email, party, home.

After a day like that I usually have to make some effort over the weekend to resynch myself with the wider idea of what constitutes a working day.

On the plus side: party!

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Done

Well now that my (as yet) super-secret task is out of the way I can get back to living my life. I’m still not about to announce to the world at large what it was that’s been on my mind, though you’ll probably have guessed from the (lack of) news that it wasn’t anything to do with Paraguay or the presidency thereof. Said unnamed activity went well enough that I remain optimistic about my desired outcome, but I won’t know for sure for a month or so (at which point at the very least I’ll have a day when I won’t have to spend a few minutes wondering what to blog about).

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Traaaaiiins

I’d like to thank the Riverbank Park Plaza for their foresight in giving me a room about 20cm from seven train tracks. I’ll admit that the bone-rattling noise every half second was less than desirable, but at least it gave me an easy route to suicide if I was going to be driven to that.

Today is yet another travel day, much like yesterday but in reverse. Before that though, I have some important business to attend to.

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Londinium

Today is another travel day. I’m flying to London this afternoon for unspecified work reasons. Maybe I’m on a secret mission to kill the president of Paraguay with a fork; maybe I’m not. That’s all I’m going to say. I’ll return tomorrow evening, hopefully with good news.

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Some Day a Real Rain Will Come

Last year was one of the wettest ever on record in Ireland. For much of the year Dublin resembled the fabled lost underwater city of Atlanta (currently under attack by the Russians as I understand it—but I digress). In fact the day of my work summer party last year was the rainiest on record since the 1950s, when the hall of records was mysteriously washed away.

At the time I reassured my terrified workmates (most of whom are pansy southerners from places like South America and Canada) that it was an extreme of weather. I told them that we could be reasonably confident of a better summer this year. The principal of regression to the mean says that an outlying occurrence is more likely to be followed by a more usual occurrence than by another outlier. All I can say is that the principal of regression to the mean doesn’t seem to be doing its job.

Because nothing punches up the entertainment value of a blog post more than statistics, here’s the monthly rainfall data for last year and this year. The weather data here was gathered at Dublin Airport, which is pretty representative for me because that’s where I spend most of my time. Here’s something worth noticing though: we’ve had more rain so far this year (639.8mm) than we’d had by the end of August last year (588.5mm). This month’s stats are frightening. We’ve had 2.5 times the average August rainfall already, and we’re barely half way through.

I blame the immigrants.

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Take That, Blindness!

Quizzes are like buses. For one thing, it always takes me two tries to figure out how to spell the plural. Also they smell a bit funny; and it’s rare that they’re organised quite as well as you’d like; and you always try to sit at the back, even though that turns out to be much less convenient than sitting up close to the person in charge.

Oh, and you can wait ages for one and then a few arrive at once.

So it is that I was at another quiz yesterday so soon after the last one. This one was in aid of Fighting Blindness ‘Round the World with Russell Crowe (“We couldn’t find Blindness, so we’re going to fight some blind people. Take that, Blindness!”)

It was the most fun I can remember having while doing so badly at something. I mean, I’ve seen quiz teams suck before, but we were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked. We just plain sucked. It was like a re-run of the exam I once had in college when I’d forgotten to attend a course for the entire year. Only with less terror and more beer.

Still, I redeemed myself towards the end with a double whammy of full-points rounds. One of them was a six degrees–style movie association game, in which I managed to answer two of the questions before they were even asked (no bonus points for knowing the quizmaster that well, sadly).

The next was all about Irish history and geography, which is about as far from being my specialist subject as shoe care and maintenance, but with me as the only Irish person on the team we still got seven out of the ten answers right before we resorted to cheating thinking outside the box.

Maybe if quizzes come in threes like buses do then I’ll be able to drag myself back up to a more competitive place next time. Either that or I’ll just fully invest in the strategy of writing ‘Samuel L. Jackson’ as the answer to every single question.

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There is no examination

For my birthday this year my parents decided to try to bring out in me the alcoholism that lives in every true Irishman. They bought me a voucher for the Wine Board of Ireland’s Wine Appreciation Course. I’ve been waiting for a time where their running the course and my being in the country would coincide for a period of six weeks, so I haven’t actually started the course. In fact I’m unlikely to get my first drop of sweet, sweet booze until late October.

Still, in an uncharacteristic show of forward planning I decided to find out exactly when the courses run, so I visited the site (linked above). I was tickled by this snippet:

This course is all about the fun and enjoyment of wine in addition to learning the basics in a relaxed and sociable environment. 

There is no examination.

I suddenly wish there were an exam.

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