Review: Love And Other Drugs

OMFG! Love Accidentally!

A predictable film about two arrogant people who have sex and accidentally fall in love. I liked it more than I meant to.

I Thought Maybe We Could Make Ginger Bread Houses, And Eat Cookie Dough, And Go Ice Skating, And Maybe Even Hold Hands!

Tonight, at the ripe old age of almost thirty, I'm spending my first Christmas eve away from my family home. Andrew and I are in a home of our own instead, and it smells of shortbread and sweet, dark cocoa. Nollaig shona, a chairde. Ba mhór liom bhur gcomhluadar agus cairdeas i rith na bliana.

Happy Cycling

For Conan

I'm not very good at goodbyes. Or hellos, for that matter. In all matters physical, I am awkward as fuck. I never know quite what's appropriate [hug/kiss/handshake] and my awkwardness is infectious. Andrew, by contrast, is a great man for the hugs. My brother, in his cups, once thanked him for "bringing hugs into the family". I usen't to hug him or my sister, but Andrew's physical affection for them has shamed me into sharing some love with my siblings. We hug like comically heterosexual men in buddy films; stiff-backed, with shoulder pats. I do it with friends now too, friends I'd probably never so much as shaken hands with in all the years I've known and loved them. Two pints and a hey-here's-me-husband introduction in the pub and Andrew's wrapping them up in his arms like a big hairy Amma. If it was left to me, I'd have snuck out the door without so much as a see-ya.

Because I'm bad at goodbyes. So this is a story about bidding a not-very-good goodbye to a boy on a bicycle. He was a college friend of mine, and I had no idea at all that he'd fallen hopelessly in love with me. In fact, I thought he was gay. I thought everyone was gay when I was a teenager. Mostly because nobody fancied me. I fancied him, but then I fancied everyone when I was a teenager. Mostly because nobody fancied me. Anyway, we'd gone for a drink so's I could tell him all about this fella I liked. Because that's what you do when you fancy someone; you tell them all about someone else you want to ride. He gave me a sympathetic ear and some sage advice and pursed his lips obediently when I went to put lipgloss on him (I'd gotten a new tube of the stuff that stings your lips to make them plump and sexy and was so wowed by it that I was only short of insisting passers-by on the street give it a go). By the end of the night, suffused with gin and self-confidence, I'd decided that I didn't mind at all that he wasn't ever going to fancy me back (what with the gayness and all) and that it was just nice to have someone so handsome to bend the ear off and put lipgloss on. "He'll probably make me much more attractive to other men" I thought, because I'm one of those ugly people who accessorise with good-looking friends.

At closing time we took to the street, me with my delusions and him with his bicycle. He didn't offer to walk me to the bus (gay) but we walked the first five minutes together, my high heels clacking and his spokes making that lovely clicky ticky sound. We reached the corner and stopped to say goodbye, the bicycle between us and his helmet perched comically on his head. I was mid my usual rock-paper-scissors-hug-kiss-handshake when suddenly he leaned a little closer and kissed me on the lips. Mwah. Goodnight. Then off he cycled.

Review: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tripod

I wrote a really deep, pretentious review, reviewed it, decided that it made me look like a wanker, translated it so that it would make me look clever and poetic, then realised that that made me even more of a pretentious dickhead.

The gig was really good.

You Can't Go Home Again

for Ellie

I was one of those late bloomers. What do you call twentysomethings who refuse to leave home? Leeches? I was one of those. I chose a college I could commute to and drank Benylin cough syrup in order to sleep on the 7am bus. I got a job in a local call centre that tied me to working evenings and weekends. I finished college, panicked, and took on an MA that I wasn't sufficiently interested in or academic for, but the 4 hour a week lecture schedule gave me the perfect excuse to stay put. I cooked, cleaned, codded myself into thinking that I was indispensable. My younger brother flew the coop, twice, and I hid my resentment as best I could by making friends with all of his new ones. I drank and dithered and missed my thesis deadline, put on weight and put off decisions and ended up going to a counsellor and crying because I didn't have a boyfriend. Halcyon days! I am not nostalgic for my early twenties.

The tipping point should have come when I got a proper job. So I didn't. I got a short-term teaching contract that had me crying myself to sleep every night, and then a part-time lecturing gig that I got so worked up about that the doctor prescribed tranquillisers for me. Just two of them, to get me through my first two lectures. "Are you sure he meant to prescribe just two?" asked the chemist, squinting at the 'script. "I have no idea" I said, feeling like even more of a panicky retard than I had when I'd started crying in the doctor's surgery.

I got through those first two lectures. And all the other ones. And then I got a full-time job with lots of social commitments that meant I couldn't always catch the last bus home. So I decided to move out. My new colleague offered to come flat hunting with me, and together we traipsed around every miserable kip in Dublin until one evening we met a landlady in Love Lane who liked the look of me. A week later, I moved in.

I thought I'd be lonely. And homesick. But I wasn't. My flatmates turned out to be warm, happy, funny people. I owe them a debt of gratitude for looking out for me during the three years we lived together. And since. I agreed with my mother that we wouldn't speak on the phone every night, that I wouldn't be home every week, that they should come visit me. My dad started referring to Love Lane as my home. And it became one. They knocked the wall of my old bedroom to expand their own one, and helped me to cement my independence. I took it hard, at first, but I got over it (in the comments).

I get over most everything I chronicle here, which is nice. Writing it down helps; putting plain words down on pretend paper instead of swelling inarticulately with self-pity. It's hard to be one hundred percent honest, of course, when you're laying it out for the world and your mammy to read, but then when your husband reads it too you'll at least keep your stories straight. He's home now, in our little two room flat by the canal. Home's here. And it's a three bed detached house in Kildare. And a hilltop rectory in Wicklow. And a little terraced house in Harold's Cross, a genteel residence in Lucan, a cosy cottage in Mayo, any number of couches in all manner of homes from home where we're made to feel welcome and loved.

Daithí Lacha

I was 14, I think. We were hanging around on the grounds of Coláiste Bhríde in Clondalkin, a big gang of us, slagging and messing and supping from a shared coke bottle of dolly mixture that one of the lads had made by siphoning off shots from every bottle in his parents' booze cabinet. One of his friends asked me if I'd "meet" him. I said I would, so his friend told me to go around the back of the school in five minutes. I did, and he followed me around a few minutes later. I stood with my back to the wall, unsure where to look, what to say, what to do with my hands. "Will you meet me?" he said and I nodded mutely, then he kissed me for 40 minutes straight. I breathed through my nose, hoping that my breath wasn't too loud, that my mouth wasn't too wet or my tongue too dry, that I was getting it right and that it would be over soon. He put his hands on my hips so I put mine on his shoulders. His tongue went round and round and round in my mouth and my face ached with the effort. I opened my eyes, just the once, just to check that this was happening, and then squeezed them shut again before he could open his and see me. "Thanks" he said when he was finished, and we walked back around the corner, hand-in-hand until we were within sight of our friends. He dropped my hand then and I walked back over to the girls, who were cold and impatient to get home. The skin around my mouth felt dry and when I rubbed it, little flecks of dried saliva came away on the back of my hand.

Inspired by Pierce and Kitey's Sunday Assignment: The particulars of your first kiss, though written (like so many of my assignments) in a hurry over lunch on a Monday. Suggestions for further assignments welcome - I need some direction.