Poke

"Are you on Facebook, Andrew?"

"No."

He looks at me like I've just started dry-humping a life-size Margaret Thatcher doll.

"Oh, right. That's the only way I keep in contact with people now."

I didn't kick him in the shins, but nor did I feel guilty any longer for having gotten his new baby's gender wrong at the start of our conversation.

ratewhatusedtobemyfriends.com

I missed a friend's going-away bash the other day. She's going to England, where most career-minded young teaching graduates are going this year. I haven't struggled to resist the temptation to join them. Various horror stories I've heard, coupled with my deep suspicions as to why English schools need to recruit so aggressively over here mean that I'm reluctant to go over there and live in Rutsford-under-Lyme while young Wayne and Chanelle throw chairs and chewing gum at my proud Paddy beard every day. Besides, leaving your beloved behind on the Auld Sod while you go off to earn a few pennies in Blighty: bit 1972, isn't it?

So anyway, I failed to make it to her farewell do. I had other friends I wanted to see that night, and I decided I really couldn't be ringed leaving my group and heading to a pub in an entirely different part of town just to do the token "just sticking my head in" gesture. I felt slightly bad about it for a while, until I started to think about how I have loads of friends of about the same level whom I haven't seen for ages, and am unlikely to see any time soon. Just because, really.
There's something about moving to a different country for a while that makes people want to round up every fucker they've ever met so that they can bid their adieus. I've experienced this feeling on trips to Kenya, Tanzania and South Korea. On no occasion was I gone for more than a month, yet I found myself unusually keen to let all of my acquaintances know I'd be away and I found myself crestfallen when there was no sign of a government delegation to greet me upon my return.

Yet that nagging feeling of guilt remained, until I decided to seek a scientific solution to the problem. It wasn't a think tank that was called for, it went beyond that: I needed a cognitive cabal. Comprising the world's most scientific brains from fields such as geophysics and quantum mechanics, the group was spearheaded by that most legendary leader of men and outside-the-box thinker, former Cameroon striker Roger Milla (not to be confused with King of the Road crooner Roger Miller, who I've always found to be utterly useless in such circumstances). Their findings may forever change our perception of social guilt. The cognitive cabal have devised an ingenious an utterly fool-proof formula for calculating whether or not one ought to attend such functions.
It goes as follows: (TxL)+(DxR)=S.
That is to say: (Time x Liking)+(Distance x Rarity)=Size of obligation.

Need that broken down further? Fine.

The number of years you have known the person is multiplied by how much you like them on a scale of one to ten (ten being your bestest BFF and one being the guy who used to wipe his ear wax on your jumper in French class when you were fourteen). My respective figures for this half of the formula were 0.8 x 6.8 (which equals 5.44).

Second, you rank the distance they are moving away on a scale of one to twn and multiply it by the rarity with which you expect them to return home (ten means they'll never come home, one means they'll be back to stock up on six-packs of Tayto most weekends). My figures for this side of the formula are 1.2 and 1.7 (which multiply joyously into 2.04).

You then add these two final figures together to work out the precise size of your obligation. Mine weighed in at 7.48. But don't fret! My boffins inform me that anyone whose final figure falls under 11.7 should not feel remotely compelled to attend the send-off for the person in question. Huzzah!

Though further testing is still required, this formula looks set to be proven a reliable and important one as it offers a way out to those who:
(a) like the person just fine but have only known them a matter of weeks and/or
(b) have known them forever but secretly can't stand them and/or
(c) adore the person in question but think that moving from Rathmines to Ranelagh is hardly the catalyst for an emotional send-off.

So now you know.

On writing, Radiohead, Red's retirement and uh...mixtapes

Weird the way when you go to write a post after a fairly lengthy gap you automatically want to be all apologetic in tone, isn't it? (Though that might just be me). I'm not sorry at all, though, I've never understood why so many bloggers seem to feel this compunction to keep writing even when they know they've nothing to say.

I had this notion that unemployment might make me feel more creative in some way. I was about to say that it hasn't, but when you're as non-prolific as I am then I suppose one half-written short story, one fully-finished piece of crap and one three-quarters done post on an issue isn't that bad. The story will be entered into a competition if the end result turns out OK, the surreal piece of crap will be consigned to the bin, and the post should appear shortly.

As an aside, Radiohead have apparently said that they won't be releasing any more albums, but will release individuals songs, presumably as downloads. One such song has been released this week, it's called Harry Patch (In Memory Of), it's very good, and it's available for just one of those things the Brits like to call "pounds" right here.

Continuing the musical theme, I bought some new headphones the other week. They cost €25, which is not a lot when you consider how much they can be, but is more than I've ever spent on headphones before. And, listening to a bit of Nina Simone late one night, I got to thinking about how some songs really sound best when listened to in a quiet place, on your own, with headphones. It reminded me of my brother's complaint on the one and only occasion that he came to a music festival with me: "I think I prefer music in private. To that end, I've decided that the first ever mix-tape I plan on putting together will be made up of subtle little numbers that work best in a chilled out space on your own. It's almost an anti-festival mix, if you will (though I'm still all excited about the Picnic next month). I will send out a copy to absolutely anyone who would like one, regardless of where you live. so if you're interested in getting one just email me and I'll get right on it. My email is in my Blogger profile at the top right hand corner of the page.

And on that note, I'll finish by saying that I was sorry to see the retirement of the Queen of the Mix Tape last week. Red has been one of the good ones throughout the entire time I've been reading blogs and my feed-reader is going to miss her.

i never let on that i was on a sinking ship

I was on the bus home from work today when I started to get all excited about the fact that College Green is becoming a bus-only zone during rush hour from Monday onwards.

"What crazy capers might I get up to with the extra five minutes or so this should afford me in work?" I wondered, largely quietly.

Then I remembered that, come Monday, I won't be going to work. I've been teaching English to foreign kids for the last four weeks. but tomorrow (Friday) is my last day. Spanish and Italian kids are, understandably enough, not coming over here in anything like the quantities they once were. You'll have noticed that you haven't had to step off the pavement quite so often to get around them. Finding out whether there may be sufficient amounts of them to get me work for August has proven an impossible task.

"We'll give you a buzz if any work comes up" is the standard line my colleagues and I are hearing. There was a time when the only people in Ireland who received such vague promises were the Lithuanians they hired to rub muck onto free-range eggs to make them more expensive. Now it's probably par for the course, whatever industry you're in.

And that's the thing about a recession, it's one hell of a leveller. So many people here got it into their heads that they were special, that they deserved everything they had and that good jobs would always be around. It's perhaps no harm for everyone to get a massive reality check. Because, judging by the national debt figures the government are mentioning, this mess has been a long time coming.

This life and then the next

Circumstances and geography have found me shopping in ALDI (do you need to capitalise it, like LIDL, or is it just Aldi?) quite a lot recently. I'm generally accompanied by the lady, who knows exactly what is what in there and guides me through the process ever so smoothly, subtly steering me clear of the 29 cent custard creams in the process.

But yesterday found me there alone, getting stuff for dinner. This task accomplished, I began looking for the pink lemonade that we got there the other week. Having no success in this quest, I was about to go up to a manager type who was busying himself in the booze section to ask where I might find this most satisfying of liquids. But then I stopped short, remembering that the reason these places are about 20 times cheaper than Tesco or Supervalu is because, like Ryanair, they save money by not doing customer service. I had this vision of the manager suddenly pulling out a loudhailer and shouting

"ATTENTION CUSTOMERS, PARTY TIME IS OVER! THOSE PORK CHOPS FOR 1.99 ARE NOW GOING TO COST YOU 5.87 AND WE WON'T BE DOING THOSE 2GB MEMORY STICKS FOR 12 CENTS ANY MORE. ANDREW COULDN'T FIND HIS WAY AROUND AND NOW HE'S FUCKED IT UP FOR EVERYONE."

So, I leave, sans delicious lemonade, but vowing to return on Thursday with a GPS to help me find the memory foam pillows for 12.99.

I relay my fears to the lady later on.

"Nah," she laughs, "they're really nice in there."

Seriously, then, what's the catch?

Chuck Norris doesn't bowl strikes, he just knocks down one pin and the other nine faint

An alluring combination of mechanics and a job interview in Blackrock find me briefly in Bray on a Monday afternoon.

The familiar sound of teenage skangers causes me to turn and look across the road. There are four of them, about 15 years old, decked out in Nike and Umbro's finest and clearly bored shitless. One of them is grabbing his balls in a fashion so lurid it makes even me blush. This may be a reaction to the young lady crossing the road at this point, it may be a rather overstated but necessary crotchal adjustment on a such a humid day, or it may be that he simply enjoys making a show of clutching his testes in public.

It's not really my place to speculate. But he and his chums have caught my disapproving glance. "Hey, pervert!" is shouted. My heart sinks as I realise they mean me. I immediately am reminded of that episode of Peep Show where David Mitchell's character Mark is chased back into his flat by teenagers shouting "Oi! PAEDO!" at him for no apparent reason.

I have a quick decision to make: Do I scurry on, pretending not to have heard them, but appearing very much like a guilty paedophile to any onlookers who may have viewed this incident out of context? Or do I front up, telling these little scuts to go fuck themselves?
Disappointingly, I pick the former option. There were four of them, after all. And life has made me very good at feigning nonchalance.

"Chuck fuckin' Norris!" is the next catcall. As insults go, this is a marked improvement. Chuck has never been a style icon to me as such, but with my beard and almost slightly long hair I can see where these kids are coming from. As such, I feel empowered enough to stride across to their side of the street, channelling every bit of Delta Force I can muster and casting them a glare that says Chuck don't take no shit off no punk-ass kids. Or something. It appears to be a remarkably successful move, as these little scallies shrink right back into their boxes and not another word is heard.

Kids, when attempting to vex older members of the community on the streets, don't compare them to the greatest human being the world has ever known.