The good, the bad and the ugly
Three things occured today with morals in them somewhere:
The good.
The outside lane of the Arklow bypass was congested with four cars, led by a horsebox. I mooched into the ‘fast lane’ to overtake, thus exceeding the speed limit a bit. At 70mph, I was almost clear, when I spotted a boy racer approaching my rear at a fierce rate of knots. I could have pulled in behind the horsebox to let him pass, but I felt like pissing him off so I stayed put, forcing him to de-cellerate from his 120mph or whatever the hell he was doing. He climbed right up my exhaust pipe to make his stupid little point.
To put the willies up him, I left my right foot on the accelerator, and pressed my left foot gently on the brake pedal. Not enough to affect the revs of my engine, but enough to turn on my brake lights. He panicked, and got a nasty dose of the speed wobbles. Most 18 year olds haven’t a clue how to react in aquaplaning conditions. I watched with satisfaction as the pale driver of the souped-up civic got a nasty dose of reality and regained control. He pulled himself into the outside lane and drove very sensibly until I left him at my junction. The burnt hand learns quickest, they say.
The bad.
My next door neighbour is a bit of an oddball. Have you ever seen one of those documentaries where the focus is a man who keeps his excrement in jam jars because he’s afraid to flush it away? Well, this lady might be cut from the same cloth. She has a huge affinity for animals, and regularly appears with some new pet that is suffering from some affliction or other. This is all lovely, but she really isn’t doing them any favours. The authorities have been around a few times to ease our neighbourhood rat problem, and have solved it by asking this lady nicely to put her rubbish out for collection, instead of letting it pile up in her garden. Her children walk on carpets made of rabbit poo, and there is a very creepy collection of empty pet cages on her back doorstep. The lady has hoarding issues.
I’m getting off the point though. What is troubling me, is this lovely black labrador puppy in her back garden. It’s chained to a delapidated clothes-line, and howls a sad lament all day and all night. It’s been doing this for weeks, rain or shine. The constant chingling noise of the chain and the incessant whining means we can’t open our bedroom window on clammy nights. It just seems so cruel for this puppy with abundant energy to be tied up like that. I have been meaning to talk to my next door neighbour about him, but she seems to have taken herself a wee holiday, and hasn’t been seen for over a week, until today. As she pulled into her driveway in her banger, I lost my balls completely. Curse this inexplicable fear of confrontation. I don’t want to call the ISPCA and commit the poor dog to death-row. I don’t know what to do, bar deprive my own dog of kitchen scraps by flinging them over the fence.
The ugly.
My puppychild has a blanket from which she rarely parts. It is so germy, that lately it’s been growling when I approach it. Today I managed to smuggle it from puppychild’s bedroom to the kitchen un-noticed. I wrapped it in a sheet, but unfortunately it became untangled in the washing process, and to her horror, puppychild discovered that PoohBear was in peril, drowning in suds.
Her reaction was similar to that of some poor soul who has just woken to find that he’s been buried alive. She desperately clawed at the washing-machine door and howled a gut-wrenching cry that lasted for the entire wash-cycle. My nerves were in ribbons. I couldn’t repeat the whole process again with the tumble dryer, so I appeased her by handing her a clean, damp blanket which she is now clinging to for dear life. I am evil incarnate in her eyes. I know this because she is refusing to make eye-contact with me now. Another notch is marked against her childhood innocence, but at least her damn blanket is behaving itself for once.
A child with issues
The power of cynicism
I am a woman of two parts.
I’m not a fan of astrology. I don’t believe in coincidence. I think that fate is mapped out for us, and that accidents happen for a reason. I believe in evolution and science. I am cynical, and am fully aware of conspiracies. Probably too much. I have very little faith in modern living and the powers that be. I’m convinced that on one hand, we are lectured that things that we enjoy doing are bad for us, yet at the same time there are invisible poisons slowly destroying us in the background. I’m afraid to drink tapwater. I don’t like using cow’s milk. At one stage I was even afraid to brush my teeth with flouride toothpaste. I’ve turned into a hippie that uses all natural products when I can afford to, and that won’t take any form of medicine unless I’m severely sick.
I’ve been lectured before about my attitude to medicine. I won’t give my kids antibiotics contrary to doctor’s advice, unless they really need them. I won’t give them flu vaccinations, because I’m convinced that there’s a ‘big brown envelope’ being passed between the Pfizer chemical corporation and our healthboard. When anyone in my family gets sick, I dose them with Echinacea extract, vitamin C, zinc, and propolis honey, so that they may come through the illness with a stronger immune system than they had before. I know of other children who get one illness after another, each time being dosed with yet another antibiotic, yet parents don’t seem to get the connection.
The other half of me is like a little voice in my cynical ear. It’s the voice of faith. It gave me the idea a few years ago to begin a homoeopathy course with a view to being a practitioner. It told me that if I spent 200 euros on a Reiki level one course, it would be money well spent. It tells me all the time that not all fortune tellers are hacks, and that maybe, just maybe, there are forces at work that we can never understand.
I did the Reiki course. I did it because once, when Sean was going through a phase of crying for most of his waking hours and we were at our wit’s end trying to figure out what the problem was, I invited a Reiki-qualified lady over to try and heal him. The cynical side of me was speechless for the two hours she was here. She took Sean into her arms and he stopped crying immediately. She told me that he was frustrated that he couldn’t breathe properly, and that he had a bad earache. She told me that he had a great imagination, that he forms wonderful images in his head from the sound stimulation he recieves. That he loves music, and that he loves the way his daddy plays rough with him. She told me that he didn’t like the white teddybear on his bed, because it was boring, that he prefers orange and red colours.
This went on and on, intimate descriptions of Sean’s life that she couldn’t have known. She then went on to me. Moving her hands from my head to my midriff, she told me that I had very bad eyesight (I wear contacts pretty much all the time) and that I was prone to kidney infections, that I had had a pretty serious one as a child. She told me I had a healthy balance of male and female and that I had healing qualities. This sealed it for me. I went to a Reiki induction and got my level 1 qualification.
You have no idea how stupid I felt as I tried it out on my friends and family. They were enthusiastic about it, but the cynical me was laughing her socks off as I performed the healing. She taunted me and told me I was a tool to think that this crap actually works. As a result, it didn’t work. I couldn’t cure my mother in law’s headache. I couldn’t help my friend out with her sore knee. On the odd occasion, it feels like it might help Sean when he’s upset but it could be my imagination. I want to believe so much that it physically hurts.
It’s the same with homoeopathy. Skeptical me says that this is for money grabbing hacks who will sell you anything if you believe it works. The voice of faith tells me it’s been around for thousands of years and is worth investigating. I just don’t know which me to listen to. I’m at a crossroads. The choice of taking the path of least resistance, or the road less travelled.
I really do appreciate the fact that there are choices. In this modern age of secrets and hoodlums, it’s not all bad. We are given the choice to change the world, or just sit at home and watch telly until we are old and grey. Life is full of opposites and it is wonderful to be living it. I just hope that tomorrow doens’t come too soon. I’m having trouble keeping up with it.
14 ways to become a better you
There is an anticyclone of lack of imagination and apathy hovering around my coastal waters today. If I was gothic, I’d be gazing from a broken stained-glass window 20 storeys above the city with a big black crow sitting on my shoulder. I’m not though. So instead it’s endless cups of tea for me whilst sitting on the sofa trying to figure out what I have the energy or the interest in doing, which isn’t much. To cheer myself up I like to refer to a handy little self-help book, from which I would like to quote, in case anyone else out there is trying to shake off big black apathy crows and needs cheering up.
My self-help book is called ‘The Little Book of Complete Bollocks’, by Alistair Beaton.
REPETITIVE STRESS SYNDROME
Thinking of others can be very stressful. If you think of others all the time you may become a victim of repetitive stress syndrome.
Avoid this danger by thinking about yourself as much as possible.
NEW BEGINNINGS
Break through to a whole new life in less than a day.
Here’s how:
Buy ten self-help books.
Take them home.
Put them in a pile on the floor.
Sit on them.
Watch television.
THE CHILD WITHIN
Finding the child within yourself can be harder than you think. Buy a cuddly toy and take it to bed with you. Use it to rediscover the child-self you thought you had lost forever. Keep in touch with this child-self wherever you go. Throw tantrums with people who won’t let you have your way. Eat too much chocolate and be sick. Show your partner your anger by wetting the bed.
INNER PEACE
Find inner peace by clenching and unclenching your buttocks at least twenty times a day.
BEING YOU
It’s okay to be you. It’s not okay to be somebody else. Spare a thought for all those people who ae somebody else. It must be just awful for them!
SENSES
Deal with your inner stress by indulging your senses: look for a rainbow, stroke a piece of silk, listen to a cat purring, sniff a newly-cut rose.
If no one is around, do drugs.
BEYOND WORDS
Understand the importance of non-verbal messaging. Give people the sound cues which reveal your mood:
If you are happy, ululate in people’s ears
If you are anxious, make moaning noises
If you are depressed, fart loudly and persistantly.
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
You are the only person who loves you unconditionally.
You are the only person who accepts you absolutely.
You are the only person who wants to be with you twenty-four hours a day.
You are the only person who wants to look in your handkerchief after you’ve blown your nose.
Congratulations! You are probably the most tolerant person you will ever meet!
BLOCKS
Feeling tired and listless? Your energy is being blocked by energy blocks.
Find new energy by unblocking your energy blocks.
Once your energy blocks are unblocked, try to find out why you were experiencing energy blocks in the first place.
If you don’t have the energy to find out why you were experiencing energy blocks in the first place, it could be that your energy is being blocked by new energy blocks.
At this point it’s probably best to give up.
BELIEF IN YOURSELF
Never lose belief in yourself. Every morning, stand in front of your bathroom mirror and say to yourself, ‘I am talented and beautiful. People adore me. I am popular because I deserve to be popular.’ Repeat this ten times.
Don’t tell anyone you’re doing this – nobody wants to be friends with a sad bastard who talks to himself in mirrors.
ACHIEVING
Each morning, write down ten useful things that you would like to achieve that day. At the end of the day, look at the list. If you haven’t achieved any of your ten aims, throw the list away and write instead a list of ten completely useless things you did that day. Now put a tick opposite each of them Pin this list on your bedroom wall, and fall asleep secure in the knowledge that you are an achiever.
FAILURE
Failure is only success waiting to happen.
Next time you feel you’re a failure, just say to yourself, ‘I’m waiting to happen!’
SPRING CLEANING
Spring clean your mind. Brush away the cobwebs of guilt. Scrub out the stains of anxiety. Hoover up the dust of depression. Take your brain to the dry cleaners.
(Don’t lose the ticket.)
and finally:
IN TOUCH
Get in touch with yourself by touching yourself.
If somebody is watching, stop touching yourself.
Flower-Power
This post isn’t about flower-growing or gardening, it’s about patience and hope.
When me fella first started his window-cleaning business, I trawled around with him distributing business cards, and mucking in with a squeegie. It was hard work, but there were perks. We would celebrate our hard work with a pint of a sunny afternoon on occasion, for instance. There is something about the taste of a pint that is earned through hard work that can’t be matched. There were gifts from customers, too. We’ve picked up many customer rejects… toys, furniture and a multitude of unwanted gizmos. Elderly ladies figured me out as the gardening type, and would bestow plants and cuttings. One of which is the subject of this post.
I was shammying this one lady’s kitchen window, when she appeared with a potted plant. I’d never seen one like it before, it looked expensive. I thanked her very much as she explained it’s basic care instructions. I brought it home, and set it on a window-sill. I watered it regularly, but after a week or two it began to turn brown. I repotted it. It’s leaves started to fall off. I kept it barely alive, then one summer I threw it out into the back garden and forgot about it. It survived for almost a year in the raw irish elements, until we moved house. I gave it a new home in my bathroom.
For five years, this unidentified plant (I’ve googled it, and know it’s a Bromeliad of some sort) sat it it’s pot. It grew a leaf or two occasionally, but was otherwise kind of greeny-brown and boring. I still took great care of it. I showered it in warm water, and fed it. I just knew it had potential in there somewhere.
Then, suddenly I noticed it changing. It’s leaves grew greener, and a bud appeared. I got so excited about this, I couldn’t stop visiting it every day to see it’s progress.
A week later, this happened:
This plant is now my friend. It has thanked me for years of patience and faith by producing this gorgeous display which has a subtle smell, something between a sweet-pea flower and a rose. And it is my favourite colour. How did it know? Plants usually get very sick under my care, and rarely flower. I couldn’t really understand my dad’s enthusiasm for flowering cactii until now. I’m in awe of nature.
I read up on Bromeliads, and apparently a lot of these plants die after they flower. If anyone can recognise this plant, please let me know what it is so that I can rest easy and not let my buddy die?
Air-brushed election?!?
I have a bottle and a half of wine in me, so heaven help you.
I would like to indulge in a quick rant about election posters. I don’t usually rant, as I am the peace loving kind, but this year above others I feel pretty affected. I’m up for marketing, it’s sensible and gets the punter’s attention, but this is mind-bogglingly surreal. For every 50 metres of road, there are at least two posters. Some of them overlap each other. Some of them have their own scaffolding and I feel justified in pointing fingers, Mr. Cockroach Dick Roche.
All you motorists out there are well aware of that automatic awareness of road signs. Whether they be directional signs, yield signs or speed limits, we don’t deliberately look at them, our subconcious takes them into mind. Election posters fuck my mind up. My brain is trying to ignore them, yet has the difficult task of picking the needles from the haystack. Delerious cheesy grins distract my ability to judge what the road holds up ahead. What the hell are tourists thinking? Are French people thinking that we are unnaturally friendly? Do the British think we’re sad? These people must think we have no better way to spend our money as they jig along on our dangerously narrow winding acne-ridden roads.
I would love to get my hands on a paintball gun and a babysitter. I would spend a whole week trapesing around this island happily defacing this in-your-face visual air-brushed pollution. County to county, by bike or by foot. It’s not illegal. I’d even do it for charity.
What are they at, anyway?!?! Are we really gullible enough to have our minds changed by crappy catchphrases? Don’t we all know whom we are voting for by now?!?! Is the erection of posters just a means of employing foreigners who are looking for a quick buck? Am I going to wake any minute from a horrible nightmare and find myself gladly suffering a hangover? I hope so.
Somebody pinch me. PLEASE.
How to waste a half an hour of your life
If you are unfortunately stuck to your computer today, are feeling destructive and need cheering up, I have just the ticket.
Answers and Ramblings
Brian has come up with some questions for me, interview style. I had plenty of time to mull over them as I was cleaning windows yesterday in the hot sunshine. So, here I am, sitting on Leno’s couch wearing my ‘I shot Bono’ teeshirt.
Motorbike or scooter? (This could also be Rocker or Mod?)
There’s a lot to be said for wrapping your arms around a leather-clad bloke travelling at 80mph. I did this once when I was on holidays in Cork with my parents. I’d befriended a dude from Pensylvannia who owned one of those massive BMW bikes with side panniers. He brought me on a drive on country roads, and as we rounded a corner, we very narrowly missed my dad who had been driving to the local shop. I had to come home later and listen to him complain about motorcyclists destroying the peace of country roads. ‘I completely agree with you, daddy’ I said with a poker face.
Me and my fella rented a scooter once in Spain, the type that sounds like a hairdryer. The day we rented it was the day the storms came, so we spent our week touring the mountains in torrential rain, being splashed by cars throwing puddles around like whales in waterworld. It was so much fun.
I’m undecided. But I do know I’m a rocker. Definately a rocker.
Who is your favourite writer and why?
That’s a toughie. Tolkien knocks my socks off. Stephen King and Grisham are great at passing my time. I would probably have to choose Roald Dahl though. His humour and imagination have had a huge effect on me since I was just a puppy. I’m trying to collect all of his children’s books to pass on to my own, because no childhood is complete without him. If you think ‘Charlie and the Chocolate factory’ was good, read ‘Revolting rhymes’ for an insight into this genius’ twisted mind. I’m still a big child at heart.
What was the happiest day of your life?
My happiest moments would of course be those when my brand new pink wrinkly babies were presented to me on a hospital bed, but that followed a barrel load of pain, so wouldn’t qualify as my happiest entire day I suppose. That award would go to my 21st birthday. I went camping in Knockree with Jeff, whom I’d been seeing for a handful of months. We brought a rake of friends, and settled in an idyllic spot beside a river, framed with trees and friendly sheep. We lit a cosy fire, cooked sausages and drank cheap wine. Bob Marley’s ‘Kaya’ bopped in the background. Jeff was unnaturally quiet for about an hour, sitting halfway up a tree, concentrating hard on something. When he finally let me look at what he was doing, I found he’d carved ‘Happy 21st birthday, Kate. Love from Jeff’ in the bark. As night fell and our group got rosier, Jeff then tugged on my hand and urged me to take a walk with him along the river. It was a pitch-black moonless night, and I suspected he had an agenda, so I tried to refuse, but he seemed so earnestly intent on talking to me, so I agreed. As we walked in silence, listening to tree leaves rustling and the river happily babbling, I began to wonder what he was at. He suddenly dissapeared. I found him on his knees before me, nervously stuttering about how lovely I was, and would I consider growing old with him? When I realised what he was doing, I was so surprised that I said ‘yes!’ before even thinking about it. He had no engagement ring, instead he pulled the ring-pull off his can of Miller and stuck it to my Claddagh ring. I still have that ring-pull. That memory is carved as neatly in my mind as the message on that tree.
What is your comfort food and why?
Proper home-made pizza. The best moment is in the making, when the dough has risen and I take the clingfilm off the top of the bowl. I always plunge my fist into the dough to hear the satisfying ‘plopff’ sound it makes. I then find a large tray, and cover the dough in proper tomato sauce, with basil, garlic, lemon and chilli, then cover that in whatever leftovers are in the fridge. You can put anything on pizza. I made a liver pizza once that sounds horrid, but was pretty darn yummy. One large tray happily feeds the two of us, curled up on the couch in front of the tv of an evening, washed down with cold beer. De-bleedin’-licious.
If you could live in only one place, anywhere on our planet, where would you want to be?
I’m not very well travelled, but even if I was, I’d probably still tell you that my favourite place is right here in Ireland. ‘Every season brings a reason to be happy’ as Pooh Bear would say. Nobody takes the sun for granted. When it makes a rare appearance, it brings the best out of everyone. It’s all we can talk about. There is an atmosphere here that is totally unique, created by the smells of cut grass, turf-smoke, or wet tarmacadam. The people here are for the most part warm and entertaining, the blokes are chancers and always know what to say to cheer you up. As long as you stay away from the city centres and shopping malls, life is pretty sweet here. Our health system, roads and politicians are arse over elbow, but at least we have something funny to talk about.
Thanks Brian! Who doesn’t want a good excuse to talk about themselves!?! I’m going to send an interview to my ma now, because she’s being waffly quiet lately. Does anyone else want one? I’ll try not to ask warped questions :)
What dost the future spk like?
We don’t have cable tv. People are often shocked by this, they can’t understand how we can surive without ‘Celebrity Jigs and Reels’, or ‘Coronation Street’ or what have you. They are scared by the prospect of not having such reliable entertainment, and can’t understand how we’ve occupied our time in the last year. I tell them we read books, rent or buy box-sets, play the playstation, talk, etc… but this falls on expressions of blank amazement.
We have, however, recently run out of material to sit down to of an evening, so have had to resort to the dusty material on the top shelf. Last night, we started watching ‘Battlestar Galactica’. You won’t catch me watching this stuff ordinarily- I’m no trekky, but this was actually pretty entertaining, in a visual-bubble-gum kind of way. It had lots of aspects you could pick holes in, for example the exaggerated rocket and laser sounds of spaceships shooting the crap out of each other, even though you shouldn’t be able to hear that because of the vaccuum in space. Also every actor had an american accent, even though Earth was allegedly just a legend in their time. They had managed to create extremely high-tech robots that could assimilate humans, but were still using 21st century equipment and technology.
One thing that DID bug me though, was the syntax and language they used. It was exactly the same language we use today. If this programme is set in the distant future, thousands of years from now, wouldn’t the english language have changed dramatically? For example, this is the way we spoke recently, only one thousand years ago:
“Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, “Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon.”
(Roughly translated as):
“Again he [St. Gregory] asked what might be the name of the people from which they came. It was answered to him that they were named Angles. Then he said, “Rightly are they called Angles because they have the beauty of angels, and it is fitting that such as they should be angels’ companions in heaven.”
Language then was full of ‘Dost’, ‘Thou’, and ‘Oft’, in the manner of ‘I, the sandwich ate’… Anglo-Saxon style.
What will happen in the future? The internet, txt spk, and other forms of new communication should drastically change the face of our language. If there is a tendency for the language to progress towards simplicity, will a newt turn into an ewt? Will the three theres turn into one? Will punctuation be eradicated?
I think its amazing tat ppl in d nxt century mite study Stephen King and wonder hw we spok tat complicatd way in d same way we vew Chaucer nowdays
Or maybe I should stop thinking in such a meep and deaningful way, go drink some more coffee and get on with the present tents.
