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A prank too far!

Once, I had very long side burns, and one night I decided to shave them off, they were much too long and unruly, but when then fell from the razor’s keen blade to shining armitage shanks below my nose, my lips fell to quivering, and my mouth took to laughing, for below me, the hair that was cast aside had just become the cornerstone of the most fantastic prank ever undertaken by yours truly.

                       You see, the follicles, once fallen, had the aspect of pubic hair. So, I beeing the cunning and merry trickster placed said hairs on my unsuspecting fellow lodger, and left the dwelling for the night. Haha! Haheee! Hahooo! What a merry prank it would be!

           Wow, did it ever fucking go wrong. I was away, and couldn’t smiling tell my housemate that they were only side burn hairs, and reassure him it was all in good fun, if I’d have been there, he’d have punched me a bit, but that’s okay, we’re men, that’s the way we solve a problem. Well, that’s not how the problem was solved, when I came home I found he had emptied nearly all my Ralph Lauren ‘Romance’ aftershave, he had taken all my clothes and hidden them, had put my shoes in the washing machine, my duvet behind the couch and had filled my jeans pockets and shoes with shaving foam, which I didn’t find out until I put them on the next day, yeah, I’ve never pranked anyone since.

           moral of the story, always stick around and manage your pranks, or don’t prank at all.

Friends

People become friends of your’s for any number of reasons.

         I’m thinking how you make friends in the first place. The first friends I made were other kids in baby infants when I was little more than four, now at that age, a friend is someone you play with, there’s very little to it, sure, you liked some more than others, I clearly remember that there was this kid, and one day I was calling him my best friend and the next I was shouting “I hope you cry yourself to hell!” at him (I was a vitriolic lil’ bastard) but then, over the course of primary school one or two people became closer friends, there were two guys I used to eat lunch with, every day, we’d stand by the radiator looking out the window and discuss the important events of the day, ones just begun a PhD in engineering, straight out of college the other a masters in Cinema, it’s kinda funny the three of us staying friends even though we’re at other ends of the country.

         Then in secondary school there’s a slightly larger scope, more people to choose from, so to speak, from secondary school I only really retained two close friends, and they became friends through common interests and shared experience.

            College is where I’ve made my closest friends, people you live with, study with, and work with, that forms a pretty strong bond, and especially since in college you are more likely to find people who are like-minded, especially with a given field, lets say, History, it draws you together.

             Friendship seems to be a constant at any stage in life, where ever you go, you always seem to make more friends, and thats a really comforting thought.

lost

Not the T.V.  show, and not the condition in its strictest sense, but the sensation itself.

I remember feeling it very strongly a few years ago in Dublin, I was young and still unfamiliar with the city, it just felt like I was in the middle of something too big and horrible. I don’t like big cities, or big crowds, you get lost so easily that way, that’s why I prefer to stick to smaller places, and to always be with friends.

Musings

This one is going to be a real ramble, I haven’t had internet access in a while, so it’s all pent up.

                  The other day I was thinking of an old friend, now this old friend, well, she liked to sing, she’d sing for herself mostly, I never even heard her to tell you the truth, other people overheard her singing once or twice and told me that she sang very sweetly, these people understood that she was singing for her own amusement, it wasn’t for the stage, it wasn’t dreaming of stardom, it was singing for singing’s sake, and that’s a good thing, a beautiful thing, but, when people started to listen to her, when people asked her to sing she stopped, and I don’t think she ever sang again.

                                         I don’t know why I thought of that, it was just something I think about from time to time.

music

I am an artistic person, I like colour, curves, crisp lines and pleasing shapes, I like words, written works such as novels and short stories, I especially love films, I love music too, but I have recently something I long suspected was confirmed for certain…I am as musical as a horse. Aislinn says that is an insult to horses!

Aislinn took out a keyboard the other day and tried to teach me a simple tune, but to no avail, she kept on saying, “Now hit E! No! that’s B! That is E!” note the exclamation marks, Aislinn was really exclaiming that much, I felt very confused, I mean, the keys all look the same to me, and I don’t know the scale, and I don’t know what A or C or any of the keys sound like, I am tone deaf after all. Sinéad even chimed in, insulting me at every turn, she was astounded by how I didn’t have any musical inclination.

It really just proves that liking something doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it.

Change

It’s weird seeing change, I’m here in Maynooth now, on the campus, and I’m thinking about all the changes I’ve seen right here, the canteen burned down, their putting up a new arts block, their building a new hang out centre for the students, and all of that just happened in the last year, that’s pretty fast, don’t you think?

Any way, change is strange, because when it happens, you may not know if it’s good or bad (whether it is or isn’t is another matter altogether) but it’s different, and that can often take time to comprehend and adjust to. Of course the great thing about being human is that we can adapt very quickly and learn on the fly, so it’s very rare for there to be a change that’ll totally knock us on our backsides. For example the Euro, when that came in, sure there was disruption, confusion and head scratching, but I think we all got used to it far quicker than what we were expecting, I mean, before hand there was all kind of hysteria, people were expecting cats to explode and bread to grow wings and fly, such was the public apoplexy at the very idea of changing currency. Now the keen eyed punter can discern a twenty cent piece from a fifty cent piece at one hundred yards.

So, we see that change often isn’t as disruptive or as life changing as it used to be, you’ll live the same life you always did, perhaps in a different place, perhaps in a different way. For example just recently I moved in to new accommodation, parting with friends I had lived with for the best part of three years, (Two of them are a couple who got their own place just ten minutes walk away, while  Snake moved to Japan). Now, you expect the feeling to be greater, you expect to feel it every day, but you don’t, you carry on, because as people we adapt to change on the wing, without slowing down or needing to stop.  That is no bad thing, otherwise change would be debilitating, we’d be paralysed forever, we’d be in limbo, we wouldn’t grow or move on (Jesus, that sounds very after-school-specialish, doesn’t it?) But you don’t want some things to change, some things you want to stay the same, like a favourite restaurant or pub, your cousins farm, or a town you knew well when you were a kid. Those things, those things that are wrapped up in sentiment and nostalgia, we hate to see them change, they’re really precious to us, you’re favourite restaurant might close down, you’re favourite pub might change the decor and become a techno haven, your cousins farm might be sold off and concreted over, the old town might become clogged with traffic and dense with new apartment buildings casting dark shadows on every street.

So, lets see, we deal with change, we always do, irrespective of whether it is good or bad, but we don’t like change when it comes to fond memories.

phobias

I wouldn’t say that I have any phobias, I am uncomfortable with heights, but that’s more because I have terrible balance. If you do fall from a height you are likely to hurt yourself, look at the statistics, how many people in Ireland were hurt in a fall last year? Very many I presume (I presume because I can’t actually find any statistics pertaining to falls) any how, I’m just trying to rationalise my fear, mine is valid, people fall from heights and die in Ireland every year. Yet you will find far more people who are afraid of spiders, this doesn’t make sense, you’re likely to be many thousands of times the mass of any spider you encounter in Ireland, you never even hear of people being bitten, not to mind being injured or killed. So why are people afraid of something so tiny and innocuous, if you ask them why, they say it’s because they are hairy and creepy, I don’t think that these are valid reasons.

I have a friend, a big brave buck of a lad who has a terrible, horrible, debilitating fear of moths. Mention moths and he will shrink up in fear, curl his fingers and screw up his eyes to all corners of the room, or the lights, or the window, expecting to see some fluttering, winged lepidoptera. It’s hilarious and I do it every chance I get. But most people have some phobia or another, but exotic ones are ridiculous, like  fear of the number thirteen, or fear of ducks, or fear of string, these people are mad and should not be afforded any place in civilised society, they should be locked away forever, I believe this to be the correct course of action.

Okay, I was being facetious, but that course of action would be just as inane and irrational as the fears these people hold, it  is hard to be patient with someone who won’t enter a room because there is one puny spider in the corner, or another who has to cross a street to avoid a duck (Seriously, one of my friends crossed a street to avoid a duck) it’s insane. I mean, why do we have phobias? Most of them are irrational and can hamper us in our daily lives, I mean, being afraid of fire, good, being afraid of drowning, good,  being afraid of  murderers and rapists, good, being afraid of the traffic lights, bad.

It really does go to show that man is an irrational, stupid animal.

jksdhfjkfjkl

Does the title throw you off? Well, it’s meant to, I like to try random things like that, apparently it was a message much like the title that formed the first email oh so many years ago. It was through ARPANET back in 1971, for the next twenty years most people didn’t know what an email was, then in the nineties we started to hear all about them, the Internet boomed, now, in the noughties nearly all of us send and receive emails on a daily basis. I remember as a child mobile phones were used only by remote and glamorous figures, by Bond villains and guys like Gordon Gekko, today I saw a snot-nosed urchin thumbing out a text message, when I was his age my house had one rotary-dial, Bakelite phone, my the transition.

             I remember coveting my older brother’s walkman, now, the ipod can hold up the forty thousand songs and it is only a fraction of the size and weight of the walkman, if you had cassette tapes that held forty thousand songs they’d fill up your bedroom floor to ceiling in. The same with computers themselves for the greater part of the nineties, they weren’t owned by families or by individuals, they were owned by schools and colleges and businesses, now nearly everyone owns one, in fact families will often own a PC and a few family members may even own their own laptops too. It’s not just the hardware, it how we use it too, I mean, what large event happens with out some footage of it circulating on youtube afterwards, some time it’s utter dross, like seeing somebody falling off their chair on a quiz show, but sometimes it’s something shocking and real, like the 2006 bombings in London, footage of that, taken by people at the scene on their camera phones, was on the net within hours, in fact, politicians have to be very careful when it comes to the Internet, how many compilation videos did you see of George Bush saying “I know the human being and fish can co-exist peacefully” hundreds if not thousands of videos, some with more than a million views are out of George Bush, surely they helped sway opinion of him, or at least amuse those who didn’t like him already.

      Today, it’s hard for a news worthy event to occur with out the BBC or Sky news or RTE using twitter posts or blog posts by those involved, for example, during the 2009 Iranian election protests twitter was one of the main ways in which those protesting were able to tell the outside world of what was really happening. Sure, it didn’t really help them, but in the future, the public, society, democracy, which ever one you want to use, take your pick, is going to be influenced more and more through information garnered from communication technology such as the Internet, which is free to be used by all, rather than by the media (by the media I mean traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television) which as we all know is influenced greatly by  Government, for example, RTE apologised to Brian Cowen for showing paintings at the centre of the Moobgate scandal, it’d be fair to say that if he had been a private  individual, and not the Taoiseasch, then the national broadcaster would not have had to apologise. But you can’t make the Internet apologise, just moderate or take down offending materials, but there is a greater sense of freedom. In the future it is hoped that the dissemination of our old communications technology to African nations will greatly aid the fight against corruption, much as the cheap, old video technology that is no longer used in the west is giving a huge boost to African film makers, hopefully technology, and its constant, onward march, is a good thing, we can only wait and see.

Here is a link to a video that I think suits the tone of this post.

 http://inbflat.net/

No post.

Yesterday, there was no post, but that is because I was shot, beaten, stabbed, poisoned and drowned and so I couldn’t post, unfortunately.

Today’s post is about college. I’ve finished college, yeah, but I’m starting a masters in a little over two weeks in the same college I attended as an undergraduate, so it’ll be totally different, it’s been a year since I left and only about two or three people I went to college with will be doing masters this year, so it’ll kinda be strange being in college with out my old friends there, it’d be weird because it’d be the same place, but it would be in an entirely different context, I dunno, I haven’t thought about it all that much really.

Any way, I’m going out with Aislinn now and I’m more than happy to hang out with her friends and make friends with them, and maybe even make some new friends, but still, it’ll be strange being in Maynooth with out all my old friends, don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean I’ll miss them, it’ll just be strange because it doesn’t feel like I should be in Maynooth when I finished a year ago. It’d be different if I was else where, like in Galway or Cork, or Japan, then it wouldn’t be strange, it’d be just being out in the world, I dunno, I love Maynooth, but it feels like I’m a big lazy hanger on.