ding dong merrily

It's Christmas. And I am happy.

Phone me in the head, why don't you

There's a band called The Spoonbenders based in Buenos Aires, as it happens. You really should listen to them. ALRIGHT, I admit, I am not entirely subjective. But still. They sing in English with the best lyrics I have ever heard. These lyrics are mainly written by the lead singer, whose marvelous use of English has long gobsmackered me. Born in Spain, and then carted about continents for years before settling in Argentina, he has a way of molding a language to suit his purpose that produces sometimes comical ("I just felt tenderised," he said in one sweet exchange, while in another claimed he'd been "hornified" by something unrepeatable on this blog) but always appealing results. Then I heard his wonderful tunes, with lyrics such as: "As I fall to sleep, something travels with my mind," and my favourite "I'll phone you in the head..." Readers, I am phoning you in the head. Go listen to The Spoonbenders at: http://www.myspace.com/listentothespoonbenders

Swimming

This time we got to swim. Cold feet, it turns out, warm up pretty quickly by a wood-pellet stove in a round rock house on the Oregon coast.

Racing

It's not, dear readers, that I have nothing to say. It's that I have no time to say it, lately. What with the running around and great and numerous activities. I will come back and say more things when the time : things to say ratio has righted itself a little. I'm sure you're all on the edge(s) of your seat(s).

What have the Romans ever done for us?

I know America is not very fashionable right now, but being the day that's in it and all, I just thought I'd say hurray for all the delightfuls it's given me over the years, among them the wonderful words of e.e. cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer ... (my list trails off into a roll call of looming great literaries and a reverie on the lovely moments spent with well-spun words missing arguably unnecessary vowels); the music of the Beach Boys, Janis Joplin, Sufjan Stevens, Johnny Cash, Will Oldham (I can't keep these lists up or they'll gobble the screen); movies like (almost all the best ones I've ever lived in); that growing-up J1 summer on Cape Cod; chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream; one big love and several big life friends; last month's Portland sunshine; this computer I'm typing on that brings me to you; heroes, heroines and in the dark ages of Ireland when things were low, hope. Oh, and this picture. Happy Fourth of July.

Surprise!

I lose my mobile phone. A lot. Not proper lostness, just temporary misplacement. Every five minutes or so. Often when I'm about to leave the house. So, every time, I call it from my landline, and when I hear it twittering its location is revealed. Aha! Under the bed! Behind the cushion! In the fridge! My phone and I are emotionally reunited and EVERY SINGLE TIME I get excited when I see that I've missed a call. I check the missed calls, all gleeful that somebody wants to talk to me, only to be reminded that lo and behold the missed call is from MYSELF, from my own landline in fact because I just that second called my mobile in an attempt to find the cursed apparatus. Every. Single. Time. Technology is clearly wasted on the likes of me.

Cold water

I wish
we'd
swum up
to the waterfall;
instead,
we let
our feet
get cold.

America

I just lost Harvard. I mean, the one I had imagined since I first heard the word reverently mentioned in hushed tones that implied great wisdom and ivy-ness. In my head it was broad and green with the university ambling in the middle, a bit like Trinity College (I never said my imagination wasn't limited), and in some kind of wide open, sprawling space in the Massachussets countryside.

Today Mike brought me to see my imagined Harvard. Except it turns out that place doesn't exist. There were buildings and coffee shops and different colours and cityness. And it wasn't autumn, and the trees weren't rust-coloured with students swishing learnedly through piles of leaves. Poof! My Harvard is gone. Replaced with the real one. I'll tell you one thing, I'm NEVER going to San Francisco now.

Soupy Norman

This from Time Trumpet, but it's the only relevant clip I could find for a new series that began on RTE last night called Soupy Norman. Stupendous enough for me to break my habit of not posting videos on my blog. See for yourselves.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, you morons!

So. It turns out this whole blog thing is public - who knew?
Now, before you hit me with all those Snigger Out Loud acronyms, I did actually know that and all, kind of in the same way I know where the kerb is but still manage to park light years away from it. But, as I am the only gombeen in the blogosphere who has used her own name on her blog (ah, there's no end to my smarts), several people who know me and who clearly have far too much time on their hands have happened upon this little corner of the internet. Curses. I mean, I knew every post was out there to be read by all and sundry - I just expected all and sundry to be strangers I would never meet, cyber people as it were, not people I know or have known in my ramblings and certainly not gentlemen I might have stepped out with on occasion. So I knew it was public - I just forgot that I actually know members of the public, and now they know a lot more about me. Oops.

First up was the Neurotic Philosopher, who stumbled upon my last blog. And the one or two entries that, you know, may or may not have referred to him. Yikes! Abashed, I immediately erased all the relevant posts, along with any that revealed me as anything less than a Nietzsche-spoutin' Barthes-totin' genius. You can imagine what that left - the odd pilfered photo and some tumbleweed. Luckily I changed domain name and learned from my mistakes. Ha! Turns out you can't teach an old blog(ger) new tricks. So along came the new charming friend with whom I was attempting to come over all coy and mysterious. Yep. I'm such an enigma, me - read all about it in my highly personal online journal! And yesterday, lo and behold, the delightful Aussie Ex (I am compelled to use such adjectives as I now know he reads this, but in your defence AE, it's sincerely meant) mailed me to let me know he Knew Where I Lived. Cyberly, I mean. So any airbrushed version of my love life I might have been tempted to create, along the lines of a millionaire-rocket-scientist-human-rights-lawyer boyfriend who plays guitar to ailing children in his spare time, makes furniture and rescues baby seals in his manly arms - well, kinda scuppered, frankly.

So just to set the record straight, my name is Juan-Paddy and I am a very tall gay farmer from Tuvalu. Google me!

Progress? Pah!

Sometimes I come over all poetic-like and enter posts like that previous one, which, on re-reading, makes me want to womit a little. Even though it was meant in the best possible way, I could have just said something along the lines of: "My very good friend is coming to see me in a week. I haven't seen him in three years. I hope he got rid of that anorak."

Last night, full of such melancholy sentiment, I sent a mail to a certain gentleman - he of napkin fame - positively dripping with overwritten pathos. This morning I have no idea what mad woman got into my email and sent such overwrought balderdash out under my name. This is why I should NEVER write at night. There's something about 3 a.m. and wi-fi and a glass or two of vino (veritas indeed) that allows me to act immediately on such powerfully-felt emotion in a way that snail mail - ah, the days of several kindly hurdles to be jumped before a letter could even set off for a destination - would have prevented. If only I'd woken up this morning and found a scrawled epistle by my bed! I could have shredded it, laughed at it, maybe even filed it, but certainly not put it in an envelope and posted the shaggin' thing.

Alas, I have no way of inserting my hand into a street-corner postbox and retracting the offending document. Why? Because it's already In His Inbox. Marvelous. What kind of ludicrous system is that? And they say technology has improved our lives!

Amistad

It's been three years since we stood by the rusty bridge in La Boca and looked out into the gloom together. I remember you wearing an anorak, and that we'd walked a long way, and I remember our friendship wrapping around us as the light eased into the dark. We both had absent loves oxidising in a future we couldn't see back then. Things would happen - sooner, later - to change the contours of our hearts. Our lives were behind us and stretching ahead, but we were present then, you and I, in a city neither of us were born to but where, right then, we belonged.

When you touchdown in Dublin airport, you and I will be three years more than we were back then. Our geographies have shifted - seismic changes, shifting plates - but we'll both be in the same place. Three years will have been and will be gone. We'll walk a long way, along a different river. You may not be wearing an anorak. But our friendship will wrap around us and the light, as it does at the end of the day, will ease into the dark.

Spillage

What to do with twelve red napkins that tumble through your letterbox? Twelve red napkins, covered in Somebody's slowly drunkening hand in a first class seat to the other side of the world. Folded - yes, impressively - then sealed in two envelopes and urgently posted at touchdown. Twelve red napkins of words to be read and re-read, red and staining the edge of sight as they fall across white sheets. And it strikes me now that they have lost their purpose. Now that they have been written all over, they can't wipe anything away.

Tirty Tree

Go on then, all ye non-Irish who have spent years slagging me over the 'th' business. At long last, I'm turning TIRTY TREE today, providing you with a full year's entertainment. Oh yes, every time I mention my age, you will all collapse in hysterics. Just wait until June, when I turn TIRTY TREE AND A TURD! Ah, the good times we'll have.

Aunty me

Petrichor

It's the scent of rain on dry earth. At its strongest during the first hard rain after a long dry spell. Try as they might, the noses of the world have yet to bring it through a bottle to our city skins. It can only be found in the desert, after rain. But it has a name, this elusive, far-away fragrance. Petrichor. The scent of rain on dry earth.

And then he x-ed me

There is nothing that can make my stomach flutter like a kiss on the head from the right man. It's not a lead-up kiss, or a bye-honey kiss, or a stop-talking kiss. It's a kiss that is all tenderness and there is really nothing like it. Except. When you've been corresponding for months, mail forward, mail back, and then, out of nowhere, he plants a little x on you. Just there. Outside of anything else. A little, lower case x in an email. And it almost floats to the top of your head and lands somewhere in your hair. And oh the flip and sigh of it. Sweet.

Czech Inn - get it?

After that, well, it was all we could do but drink. "God Save the Queen" sung in Croke Park. 43-13 to Ireland. I even drank Guinness in my patriotic fervour. But where did we end up carousing? In Eastern Europe. See, we started out in Keatings. Then the Hop House. O'Connell street was mental, crawling with little folk with big bellies in green jerseys, wrapped in tricolours and carrying foam hands and jester hats. Then we went to the Sackville Lounge where we met a self-confessed twat from Surrey. He even wore tweed. And then, well, after much meandering up and down the quays, we ended up at the Czech Inn.

Entering this particular establishment is a bit like rushing through platforms nine and ten to end up on three-quarters. It's a whole other world. As the only Irish people there, it was buzzingly like we were on our holidays. Dancing strange feet-twisting dances to the beat of a red-jumpered drummer (special mention to this tiny stick-wielding rhythm master with his carefully parted hair and expression of faint surprise every time they made contact with the drumskin). Drinking Czech beer and eating Czech crisps and chatting to George and Joseph (not their real names - the English equivalent of their real names because we were having such a hard time pronouncing their real names after so much Czech beer). Boy those lads can drink. And do. They even put us Irish to shame.

So there we were. On our holidays in the mini Czech Republic. As all of Dublin was awash with all things Irish and green and comeallye, we managed to celebrate the historic moment by going abroad. Folks, it was quite a trip.

And that, I think, is worse

The Neurotic Philosopher and I wailed down the phone at each other in the lonely wee hours of Sunday morning coming down. "Why don't we match anyone?" he asked. It was my question too as I clamboured gracelessly out of another budding two back into one again. I just don't match anyone. On brighter days, I add the yet. But sometimes, when the shared shards of all those almosts, all those sweet but also rans, chime against my ribs, I wonder if I ever will.

Audible sighs

OK. Now I'm just sad. Because not only is Miss Tickle having theatre troubles, but now they're closing Andrew's Lane Theatre. The cretins, whoever they are. Only weeks ago, I was back in its blacked-out belly with a box of hand-made chocolates on my lap and an all-singing, all-dancing cast at my feet. And I thought to myself - how nice that despite all the changes in brand-spanking, go-getting Dublin a little shelter for old-school arts like Andrew's Lane can still nestle contentedly on a city centre sidestreet. But no more, we were cruelly informed on Valentine's Day, of all days. It was too much for a drama queen like me. Hence the sighing. But the sadness, folks, is genuine.