Twenty Seconds On The Back Time

I was all set to write an obstreperous post full of rhetorical questions about some things disgraceful, but the other bloggers beat me to it. Anyway, I have difficulty spelling misogyny. Like excercise - sic! it's a word I've had trouble getting my head around.

And the only nudie pictures on this blog will be of me.

Freak Out Gnomics

I have an ostrich approach to economics and a dose of dyscalculia, I keep hearing that we're in a recession but I don't understand how or why. Where has all the money gone? Surely someone must have it. A gawk at my online banking (and a nod from the barman in Solas) tells me where mine has gone, but my fritterings have hardly caused a crash in the global economy.

I have a good job but I don't get paid much. Enough to cover the rent, enough to live a good life. I don't own a car but I pay insurance on two, I don't own a house but there are two I can call home. My dinner comes from Aldi, my dresses come from Penneys. I couldn't tell you how much a pint should cost but I wouldn't hesitate to buy you one. Even if I didn't like you very much.

So what does today's budget mean for me? This is not a rhetorical question. Make with the pithy, witty answers in the comments please.

The Daddy Or Chips Referendum

I've just voted no.

I'm now standing well back, arms folded, waiting for the apocalypse.

For The Day That Was

WANT!

So Long, Motherfucker

So the scoundrel and scourge of Dáil Éireann has finally resigned. Just in time for my morning teabreak too, which was nice, as it meant I could watch it on the big fuck-off telly in reception with all of my smiling colleagues. It'll be all anyone in Ireland blogs about today, I expect, so I plan to write a heartfelt post about boys instead.

Anyway, Shane says it better.

Sisters, Doing It For Themselves?

I eventually gave up on the study last night and switched on the telly for a while before bed. Channel 4's 100 Greatest Comedy Stand-Ups was on and it made for depressing viewing. Ironic, eh? Ironic that Ed Byrne and his Alanis Morrissette routine featured, certainly.

Only 6 of the 100 who featured are women. I've been saying it for a long time and people disagree with me for the most part but I remain convinced that people do not like funny women, just as they do not like very clever ones. A sweeping generalisation, I know, but when it comes to the braying masses I think it's true. Shane Hegarty touched on it before when he wondered why Maeve Higgins has never appeared on The Panel and Una summed it up nicely in her comment on said post: The deeper meaning: women aren’t supposed to be as funny as men in all in anyways, so let’s just rotate pretty people that have a media profile.

I don't think I'm a feminist (I'm not sure though, because I'm not too sure what "feminist" means). There are times when I feel duty bound to stand up for myself and my vagina though. I'm due to attend a seminar tomorrow on women in the workplace, which I have mixed emotions about. It sounds very 1970s girlpower, doesn't it? I was telling the Gorilla about it a while ago, and he was appalled to think that such a thing might be necessary in 2007. Being an equinanimous sort he found it hard to imagine that anyone would feel at a disadvantage because of their sex (except when it comes to relationships, where for some reason he believes women to have an advantage. Looking at him, I don't fucking think so). I was telling him about how I've experienced it in work with the likes of this shitehawk and how I often hear women in positions of power being spoken of in very masculine terms. I say I have mixed emotions about it because I too would like to think that such a seminar is not necessary, just as I'd like to think that mace and attack alarms are not necessary for the walk home after a night out. I'll be interested to hear what they have to say.

Drochlá

On the bus this afternoon there was a man sitting across from me; well dressed, mid fifties, an Average Joe. I'd been on the bus maybe 5 minutes, chatting to my colleague beside me, when I noticed him lean forward and tap the arm of the man in the seat in front of him. "What the fuck are they talking about?" he said disgustedly, with an arm waving in my direction. The man in the seat in front of him completely ignored him, as did I. My colleague hadn't noticed. He sat back in his seat and folded his arms, looking displeased that he'd made what he reckoned was a point but that nobody was heeding him. The bus was full of people chatting away in languages that I'm sure were alien to him; Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, etc. My colleague and I were the only ones speaking in a language he found offensive. Irish.

***

I was leaving work later this evening and stopped to chat with another colleague, who'd been out with me the night before. She was thanking me for the night, saying that she'd had a ball and it had been great to practice her Irish outside the classroom. "Oh" laughed the guy she works with "I didn't realise last night was a Chucky thing".

Other than someone calling me fat, there is little else I find as insulting as the suggestion that I am a Republican.

Des Bishop agus Reabhlóid na nDéagóirí

I spent this afternoon in the company of my 15 year old cousin, a beautiful leggy creature that I'm very much looking forward to having a few pints with once she gets to an age where her da won't throttle me for buying them for her. She recently followed my fine example* and aced her Junior Cert exams, so we celebrated today by going to see Des Bishop's matinee gig in Vicar St.

I saw his Tongues show on its opening night in Vicar St. some weeks back, so I knew what to expect. What I was interested to see was how a roomful of plukey faced and hormonal Lynx monsters would react to his pretty sophisticated new material. It's a routine of two halves; the first centering on his recent experiences in the Conamara Gaeltacht, the second on more general experiences of life in Ireland. The second half was shakier with the teenage audience and I suspect a fair bit of it might have gone over their heads. A lot of it referred to Catholic experiences that I'm not sure would be relevant to their experience as kids in the 90s, and more still referred to the Irish emigrant experience in the U.S. I'd say most of that was lost on them, these kids don't have immersions, they aren't limited to two TV channels, they have toasters and mobile phones and no concept of Ireland in the 80s. I have little experience of it myself, thankfully being but a snotty-nosed whippersnapper at the time, but we did have a grill, an immersion and a black and white telly (in fact, in this shitty flat, I still do have a fucking immersion). I'd love to think that the Lynx monsters will think a little more about all of these things that they have after listening to him today but there's a good chance that the little fuckers were too busy taking photos of him on their camera phones to take any of it in.

To give them credit though, they laughed in almost all of the right places. Makes you wonder if they're just faking the vacuousness and they have some social consciousness after all.

The first half of his routine was on something they could easily identify with, however: Foghlaim na Gaeilge. Learning Irish in school and hating every fucking minute of it is an experience common to many if not most Irish people and one that Bishop felt he needed to share in order to better understand the Irish psyche. Not one given to half measures (if you want evidence, check out his 2004 RTÉ series, The Des Bishop Work Experience) he's been living in Conamara for the last 7 months, and will be there for 5 more. Now that's hardship.

It's a great routine, playing up to the aspects of the language and the way in which it's taught that everybody despairs of but at the same time conveying a genuine enthusiasm for it. He has grammar jokes for the nerds, familiar phrases for the not-so-fluent and translations for the utterly lost, all of which make palatable a message about the state of the language that needs to be heard but that people normally won't listen to. Namely; that the way Irish is taught in schools isn't working and that the curriculum is long overdue an overhaul. The Irish speaking community (and I mean that in the general sense, not in the Gaeltacht sense) has been rattling on about this for an age, hell, it almost became an election issue. But people don't think about it, aren't interested, didn't like it in school and don't give a fuck that their kids don't either. Bishop's 2 week run in Vicar St. will hopefully get anyone who's seen it to think a bit more about the language and their relationship with it, be that good or bad.

*Those results represent the pinnacle of my achievements to date: 8 A grades and 2 Bs. I've sat on my hole rested on my laurels academically ever since, something that I'm not proud of but not motivated enough to remedy.

So, Belarus, eh?

I believe I may have mentioned (eleventy billion times) how unprepared I was for last week's humanitarian adventure, having been roped in just 2 weeks beforehand. Man, did I underestimate the impact it would have on me. Okay, I knew (as did everyone else who knows me) that the cycle would likely kill me. As it happened, the mosquitoes got there first, so I was spared the indignity of falling off my bike and instead suffered the indignity of 3 days on a bus with my legs in the air (which is not nearly as kinky as it sounds) and dropping my pants in the back of an ambulance (which, again, is not as fun as I'd like to imagine). Those days on the bus were hard. 35 degrees outside, travelling along at 4mph behind the cyclists, smiling at the jibes from my fellow travellers about how this was a handy excuse not to cycle and trying not to hate them as much as I hated the mosquitoes. I had some low moments, and were it not for the company of a fellow banjaxed budgie and our two medics I think I would have been on the next flight home.

But the cycling (or not) was only for 3 days, and for me was never the real point of the trip. Having spent two rowdy nights in Minsk at the start of the trip, we left the small village of Babruysk and headed for our first destination, a sanatorium in Svetlagorsk. The institution on whose grounds we pitched for the night acts as a sort of summer camp for local children, something that is apparently very much a Belarussian tradition. Sort of like my brother and I being packed off kicking and screaming to Stewart's Hospital for 3 weeks every summer, I suppose. Tightly controlled fun is the name of the game! Still, this was a gentle introduction to the mindset and culture behind the places we would see during the rest of our trip.

I hadn't appreciated how different the Belarussian culture would be to Irish culture. Belarus is effectively a dictatorship, and that much is apparent the moment you step off the plane in Minsk. We'd been forwarned that the militia are not to be fucked with, and one look at them was enough to reinforce that. I met a group of musicians on the last night of the trip (a Beatles tribute band from Amsterdam... you'd wonder) who told me of a scene they'd witnessed at the festival they'd played at the day before. A group of young lads were set upon and batoned by the militia and when the band asked why, it was explained to them that the kids had been waving the old Belarussian flag, rather than the new one approved by President Alexander Lukashenko. Jeez. I know the Gardaí come in for some flak here, but you'd generally have to be properly acting the cunt to get a kicking for it. Anyway, we learned quickly and coped with the politics the same way the locals do; keep a low profile, and don't piss people off.

From Svetlagorsk we travelled on to Rechitsa, where we had a charming welcome from the resident kids. The director of the institution in Rechitsa is the local hero, Ivan Ivanovitch, a military man who runs a tight ship but must have a huge heart. We didn't get to spend long with the kids there as we'd be interrupting their routine but the ones we met were gorgeous, and made everyone feel that their suffering (be it bike or bus related) had been worthwhile. The kids put on a concert for us that night, shouting tunelessly to the rancid strains of a piano accordion, and I don't think there was anyone there who had ever clapped harder at a gig. To see kids so happy to engage and so eager to befriend us, despite their sad circumstances and limited prospects, was truly a lesson in humble optimism.

At this stage of the trip, everyone was feeling the emotional strain as well as the physical, and it showed. We dealt with it each night in the way that large groups of relative strangers with limited options tend to do (vodka was readily available at about €3 a bottle). Not exemplary behaviour, I grant you, but as a social lubricant and a short-term coping mechanism we owe a lot to the boozing we did on the trip.

Fuck it, sure I didn't have an 80k cycle ahead of me the following morning. What did I care?

Our final port of call before heading back to Minsk was a place called Vasilevka, near Gomel in the south of Belarus. The institution we visited there played host to us for 3 days, and will play on my mind for the rest of my life. But more anon. It was a long week, and I need a stiff drink.

On why I didn't comment on the general election

Twenty Major said it better.