Snow Joke

What a couple of weeks the country is seen. Just when shit gets real and the IMF are called in to really take advantage of us like a loan shark would a drug addict out comes mother nature and gives the whole country something else to moan about – snow.

I like snow. I really do. The old cliché of something being a winter wonderland holds true in my mind. On day zero when the snow first blew in I had to go to the shop to get supplies (bread and a few biscuits for the tea). The snowfall ensured it was a lonely journey – there wasn’t a sinner out and even the main road across which the shop is located was deserted. I elected to walk to the shop to take advantage of the fact that I was going to be the first person to put footprints along the entire length of my street. It was bliss. So quiet that I could hear every satisfying, soft, crunch upon each footfall. One of the things that really struck me too was how bright everything was even late at the night. The reflection of the moonlight on the snow really lit the whole place up and quiet simply it was mesmerising. I even made a few snowballs and threw them at nothing knowing (hoping) I wasn’t being watched. It was such a welcome change from the routine my normal weeks abide by. Next morning however; chaos.

The unfortunate side-effect of snow is the reaction by the general public. The panic that sets into people when they spy white fluff falling from seemingly out of nowhere is astounding. Instead of going about their normal routine everything is dropped and the entire working population gets together and pulls out onto the roads in one huge synchronised effort. To add to the gross and instant over-population of the country’s tarmac you have the cocky eejits who think that because they can go a normal enough speed in a straight line assume the same applies for a corners. Throw in the people who like to get close enough to your back bumper to read the manufacturer’s stamp on your rear windscreen and before long you’ve exchanged a winter wonderland for a slushy nightmare filled with twisted metal, cracked bumpers and blue hands. It’s not surprising that over the course of just a few days everyone’s facebook trail morphs from happy pictures of snowman construction to a national competition over who took the longest to get home from work – the winners being the ones who didn’t get out of work in the first place apparently. 10 days later and we have a thaw upon us. Or at least an expected thaw.

The problem I have with the thaw is that while I will welcome entering and exiting my car through the driver’s door again in the mornings (my driver’s door lock is prone to a good solid freezing it seems, and I possess neither the build nor the agility to clamber over the centre console with any kind of grace) I will also miss the novelty of the country finally having a tangible and surmountable problem to tackle. While there were so many idiots on the roads determined to spoil things I saw numerous cases of goodwill and community camaraderie throughout the cold spell to help me realise that while the country appears to be on its knees, perhaps I was too quick to write us off as a nation yet. Seeing and hearing of passers-by pushing stuck cars, home-owners clearing the footpaths outside their homes, bored farmers (sure dere be’s no farmin to do in dis wedger) dragging trucks up hills in rural areas using their tractor and hearing of more than few examples of genuine compassion for others I’m going to hold off on declaring ultimate mega-doom on the nation for now.

Right now, as a citizen who has to vote in January, I feel like a sailor on a sinking ship and the last lifeboats just floated off into the distance. Some are filled with my emigrant friends heading west, others with the politicians and developers heading for a safe distance – close enough to witness the main mast disappear under the water but far enough away to not to get dragged under with the down-draft. There are others like me, plenty of them, there are plenty others still who are infinitely worse-off (I have a job at least) but I hope that somewhere along the line if or when the IMF has had its wicked way with us that we can plug the leaks and stop the whole thing from capsizing. While a week or two of snow is nothing compared to the arctic blizzard that is our financial crisis, the best I can hope for right now is that when faced with the harshest of circumstances there are enough people with enough backbone left to dig in deep and push through to the far side.

If I’m really optimistic I’d pray that those people don’t complain too much about it on the way.

I know. I shouldn’t push it.

Desperate Housewives Night

So it’s Tuesday night and I’ve just sat through 2 hours worth of Champions League football and now it’s Mrs. Things&Junk&Stuff’s turn to have the remote. I hand over the remote willingly because I know any efforts to delay will be futile and frankly more than unfair given she knows more about football from having to endure my addiction every weekend than Rafa Benitez. I know what’s coming and I’m not going to like it. It’s Desperate Housewives night.

I’ve watched a few episodes here and there while flicking through boards.ie on my iPod and I shake my head at the amount of times I see the denizens of Wisteria Lane (yes I Googled that) end up in one predictable but humiliating scenario after another. I’ve realised that the writers of this show have built a career on putting female leads in embarrassing situations before having them awkwardly claw their way out of them. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that is happening plot-wise from what I’ve seen. All I can see is Susan making a bumbling idiot of herself repeatedly to the delight of the female viewers. I think by tapping into their target audience’s worst fear of humiliation they have found a winning formula.

Should I applaud their genius, or dismiss it as more generic tripe flowing out of TV land? I’m genuinely undecided.

Paul Scholes. Legend.

92 minutes gone – despair as the title looks further and further away.

92 minutes and 43 seconds gone – Paul Scholes and his little ginger head pops up to head the winner. Delirium.

Violent Video Games

Just like buses, there have been no posts from me in ages and then two come along at once (see below) but I simply could not ignore this pathetic emo kid having a ‘moment’ over the fact that the new Call of Duty game wasn’t up to his obviously high standards. Perhaps all those right-wing, daily mail reading loons have a point about the damage being done to our kids by violent video games.

Over-connected.

I recently procured a shiny new iPod Touch which grants me wi-fi internet access at any location where same is being offered throughout the nation and indeed the world – including both at home and at work where I have access to the net in abundance via traditional means but that’s not the point. So instead of my witty Facebook posts being just witty Facebook posts they now have the added spice of “via Facebook for iPhone” underneath anything I submit (which annoys me a little actually because I don’t have an iPhone but that’s for another day). I also have the ability to check cinema times, play tiger woods PGA tour, and even update this blog on the rare times I might be arsed – all the things I could do a few weeks ago pre-iPod, but would have had to make the arduous journey to my PC to do so or risk burning up phone credit for an hour using my mobile – and herein lies the downside: The trouble with all this connectivity is that it is only encouraging fewer excursions away from my couch/bed in order to pursue my digital exploits as I now have the world at my fingertips and I’ve got broadband speeds to work my magic with.

It was with this new-fangled iPod device that I recently outdid myself one morning last week. I woke up with time to spare and with the click of an app button I turned on my PC across the room and started my downloads – all from the comfort of my bed 5 feet away. I had had a space odyssey 2001 moment – I could hear the deep bom-bom-bom-bom background percussion echoing as I turned 5 feet of (sort of) fresh air into nothing. I had conquered where reaching precariously had failed. I thought about all the major stepping-stones of the human race – the Wright brothers inching their craft off the ground in Texas back in 1903, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in 1969, the (until-now-unsuccessful) Large Haldron Collider and the impending doom it is expected to wreak upon us all, and me, me starting my torrents on my PC, using an iPod connected wirelessly through my broadband router downstairs to the internet. This is where the human race has been heading. This is how we have peaked.

It’s not even Hallowe’en!

It’s around this time every year that I notice people begin to comment on how ‘early’ Christmas has started. The same time every year (around the first/second week of October) you can hear people remark these exact words – “it gets earlier every year, sure it’s not even hallowe’en yet!”.

Listen, people, listen when I say that if it were getting earlier every year, even by a day, we would be seeing christmas gifts advertised in June by now. It’s not getting earlier every year, it’s the same time year in year out – you’re just so in need of something to piss and moan about being a grumpy Irish citizen freezing their balls off having had “the worst summer ever” that you will complain about something that does not exist.

Pipe down and do something constructive with your time instead of moaning about Christmas coming early.

An Early Setback

A plate of cereal.

You always know your day is going to be challenging when you attempt to have a plate of cereal. Sigh.

Warning: You Are Entering A No Bad-Day Zone

Since all this recession business has kicked in and people are turning up in droves to claim their dole payments I’ve noticed a worrying trend developing in relation to the fact that a citizen who has kept their job no longer has the right to piss and moan about that job.

12 months ago before the fall of Lehman Brothers bank and the subsequent worldwide economic decline, many people (including myself) were in jobs which, to say the least, were less than desirable to them. People who actually enjoy their job are few and far between. It’s more likely that if you are working,  you’d rather not be and therefore you’re one of the many who dislike their job. Now most of the time you will still go about your job on a daily basis with little or no fuss. Despite acknowledging that you are untested, your brain is on standby at best, and your use-em-or-lose-em skills are slowly decaying and getting lost in the monotony of your day-to-day, you carry on regardless because hey – it pays the bills.

From time to time though your standard-issue mediocre day turns into a horrible day – a step down regardless of the usual starting position. I imagine even the best jobs have the worst days and so from time to time it became necessary to explain to the world that you were having a bad day. Just a bad day. Out of the 365 days in a year you were having this one day where everything was bad. It’s not a major disruption but for that one day it seems like it is. Most people took no notice, others comforted you, some gave you the tough love and told you to suck it up.

Fast forward 12 months and tens of thousands of redundancies and suddenly the job you hated and are now being paid even LESS to do is suddenly a job you should be grateful for. Now, upon expressing your living nightmare in having a bad day you get such insightful replies as “At least you have a job”. Upon proclaiming your wish to be disemboweled slowly as remedy for the pain and suffering experienced at work you are being barraged with a recession-made guilt trip. You’ve come in that morning and who knows, maybe already in a bad mood because of say, idiot drivers, stepping in a puddle, scalding yourself with tea, being late etc. and as such the chain reaction of a bad day has begun but oh no, that’s not allowed you see. You have a job, therefore you must like your job.

A bad day used to start in many ways; you arrive into work and you see the one person above all others you wish didn’t exist. You make it to your desk only to find someone has boosted your stationary. Upon booting up you forget your logon password you’ve had to change 6 times a month (being sure to include numbers, letters, symbols and a urine sample each time) and subsequently get locked out, only the IT guy is out of the office that day so you’ll have to use Jimmy ‘B.O.’ Jones’ computer until tomorrow. When finally hacking into your PC and opening your mail there’s your boss’ name with an email asking you to complete x, y and z because your lazy-ass colleague that you have to pretend to like either didn’t do it or can’t be trusted to do it without screwing it up. Then the phone rings….

Normally it’s around this time that you’ve decided you’re having a bad day and regardless of what happens for the next 8 hours, nothing is going to change that. It’s a write off. A year ago this would have involved a mandatory post on bebo/facebook followed by a rant email to another colleague triggering a bitching session about how poorly run this entire company is, complete with the mandatory “if I ran this place…” line of expert entrepreneurship. All in all, you would make it known that you were just having a bad day. These days however you’re expected to bottle it all up and tell yourself over and over that ‘it could be worse’, ‘at least I have a job’, ‘it’s better than the dole’ for the fear of upsetting someone who was unlucky enough last week to be paid 200 quid for NOT driving to work, for NOT giving up 40-odd hours of their life they’ll never get back and for NOT having to pay taxes. Go figure…

Lisbon Mk. II

The media coverage on the impending referendum on the ratifying of the Lisbon treaty is on the increase and already some major groups have begun canvassing and telling people what way to vote this time around.

Most of the reasoning for voting Yes centres on politician’s claims that a good reason for voting Yes is because we’ll look bad to other member states if we vote No. We have ministers and other senior members of the country’s political circles persuading us to vote Yes on the basis of what is essentially peer pressure – only on a international scale. Unfortunately what this will translate into is more No votes as people do the exact opposite in spite of the implied peer pressure. The No vote last time round was attributed by many No vote campaigners, including such notable groups as the British Nationalist Party – essentially the UK’s answer to the KKK (what lovely friends we’ve made), to be a victory targeted at the ‘evil domineering agenda of the European Commission Overlords who want to conscript us all into an army and cut our unborn sons and daughters from the very wombs of our nation’s Mothers’. The same change-is-bad brigade are likely to be quite vocal in the run up to this referendum.

During a light-hearted conversation with a colleague this week I was told by that colleague his reason for voting No – ‘The Irish Government’s cheek to ask me twice”‘. My efforts fell on deaf ears when I tried to explain that all of the major issues which were raised during the original referendum such as our nation’s military neutrality, right-to-life laws and representation have all been addressed and amended with guarantees. This person’s reason for voting no was purely because he was being asked to vote at all. I imagine this attitude is a fairly popular notion amongst the angry public who wish nothing than to exact revenge on Cowen and Co. for the mess our country is in – not realising that in the process of inflicting pain on our Government they are inflicting a greater pain on our Nation.

To those campaigning for a Yes vote I would say to concentrate less on how Ireland is going to ‘look’ should another No vote come to pass and more on grinding down the treaty and it’s confusion into a list of simple benefits this treaty will bring – particularly in relation to the issues that have been addressed since our last outing.

Each citizen’s vote is their own and I am not one for telling others what to do with that vote but I would ask that you choose your vote on the basis of what you are voting for, not on the basis of who told you to vote, what they told you to vote for, and how many times you’ve been asked to vote. If Ireland are ever going mature into a contributing member of what has in the past been a fruitful economic partnership with our neighbours, then we should start acting like it and get to the party. Recent events in how we are handling our own affairs serves only to highlight our need for outside support and guidance. While Ireland is still trying to find someone to blame as our banking and construction sectors crumble, other EU members states are seeing a reversal in their decline and posting economic growth.

Ireland should accept that we lack expertise when it comes to sustainable economic policy and start humbly accepting the advice of neighbours who wish only prosperity for those willing to share it. The first step, in my opinion, should include ratifying the Lisbon treaty and showing Europe that we do have it in ourselves to be team players and not the spoiled brat who spits out his dummy the second things start to go wrong. We had our day as golden child and we can ill afford to opt out of repaying the debt we owe by turning our backs on Europe. The last time this country was in a recession as deep as this one it was membership in Europe that got us out and gave birth to the Celtic Tiger that my generation got too used to enjoying – it would be foolish for us to ignore a second chance now when the bottom of our current recession is still not clearly in sight.