Fuck the bakery

Actually, that was the fourth fake job.  A fake-cake job.  They can all get fat while I starve in the gutter.

Authentic Employment and Saltwater Pools

I love this pool

I was able to swim 137 metres without stopping this week, in a saltwater pool by the sea.  Seriously, it's the kind of thing people would pay vast amounts of money to access in most parts of the world, and on reflection I suppose I should have been less resentful of the five-dollar admission charge.

But anyway, that's quite a distance; halfway through the length I was beginning to lag and the other side seemed so far, the other swimmers absolutely minuscule.  And I could only manage the full thing once; the other lengths had to be done in sections - with the occasional bouts of "agh it's too deep to stop" anxiety.  I am going to invest in a pair of goggles as soon as I can afford them - the crawl is way more efficient and I can never do it properly without them, though I did try.  That day by the pool was very nice, the weather was soooo beautiful, with hot sun and a cool breeze, and a bunch of us just lay around on towels for hours. 

Fake Jobs

So far I have gotten three fake jobs.  The first one in fairness was too good to be true; it was our first full day here and my sister and I got approached to work in a clothing store (the expensive yoga-wear variety), and we were like "wow, this is amazing!"  I envisaged the money rolling in, guaranteeing carefree lives of glamour for months to come.  But it turns out that we were the extra-extra staff, called in only if we were super-required, and I got about five or six hours at most; the other "call-in" people all had "real" jobs in Best Buy and the like.  In fairness the snacks were yum (ketchup-flavoured crisps and so on), and a tagging-gun no longer is the intimidating thing it used to be, but these past few weeks have been so frustrating because I like working hard - seriously - and the lounging around has been stressing me out; it's very expensive to live here but it's so lovely too, and it would be nice to just enjoy things without having to worry about how much exactly is left in the account, or where exactly that exchange place is so that I can change that emergency ten-euro note for dollars...

The second fake job was at American Apparel - the most confusing hiring process ever.  Well probably not, but it was a bit odd, the way it turned out.  I went into their open-call and was interviewed after about ten minutes (during which I wandered around, vaguely examining clothes I definitely can't afford).  Then the following morning got an email to say that there would be training that evening, and to please confirm attendance... I thought, "that's so fast, how strange", but was fairly excited about getting a job there so thought, "grand, make sure I look nice and turn up on time".  So a few other girls and I went through a training session with the girl who had interviewed us, and some of us were slightly confused at the start but we asked "if, like, this was an audition, or, like, if we were actually hired...?" and it seemed that we were, and all of the advice and information we were given seemed legit.  And the second hour of training involved choosing store-outfits (the cost of which, the company would cover) and that might have been all right but I'm an EXTREMELY indecisive shopper, basically because I almost never have money to spend; an item usually needs to be on-sale before I'll even give it half a glance, and then there are all these other investment issues to be considered - like fit, style, materials, colour, match-ability with other clothes etc.  So this rush to get an outfit together was highly confusing, but eventually I was advised to go for a particular pair of high-waisted shorts - which in fairness are a great pair of shorts - and a top which I was less sure about but whatever, thinking, with mounting enthusiasm, "well this is different but it's a cool-enough look... and sure I can build up my wardrobe with the staff discount... yay this is actually so great!"  Then the following morning I got an email to say that they were actually at maximum capacity, and thanks for the time and so on.  WHAT?  And the training-pay they promised still hasn't gone into my account.  Ugh.  Well at least they like the look of me; perhaps I wasn't mean enough.  Like no joke, I think that was possibly it.

So then the THIRD fake job was... possibly a combination of too-good-to-be-true and not being assertive/emphatic enough.  Two of our lovely housemates had gotten jobs as waitresses at a newly-opening place downtown, and I had gone downtown to follow up an ad I had seen, ran into them, and they were like "go on in there; they're definitely still looking for people", and so I wandered in (there was still construction tape by the outdoor seating area), and was talking to a manager who seemed very sound and was like, "well, if you don't have much serving experience I'd rather you start out small, and our other place is definitely looking for people", and I was like, "aw amazing", cos the other place seems really really nice and you can make massive money on tips, and he had said to expect to hear back from him in the next couple of days.  That never happened so I went into them again, where I was told - in completely different tones - that "no we haven't done our promotions here yet, we're definitely not taking other people", and I was like, "but what about the other place?"  "I dunno, go in and talk to them I guess but..."  Anyway so that was annoying, and I had planned on going into the other place the next day but instead spent time following up stuff in the local area.  Which led me to two potentially authentic jobs; a hostess in another restaurant, and a server at a lovely bakery/café.  I seem to have gotten the latter which seems great - it's very much a word-of-mouth place with all-natural ingredients and lots of regulars.  So hope hope that goes well.  Also, in direct opposition to American Apparel, they advise unsexy androgynous clothing AND you get to try out all the cakes.


Drawing cooking ginger

We've been cooking lots of stir-fries in our kitchen; with enough people to eat it and divide up the cost, you can't go wrong.  I guess the problem with them would be if you lived on your own, just cos you'd have to buy vegetables but then they'd rot and stuff over time so that'd be a waste of money.  But anyway we've cooked some yum ones - like, with red onion and ginger and garlic and soy sauce and mushrooms, and lemon juice on top.

Anyway the first day we bought a ginger I drew it with graphite on a piece of card packaging - which had originally come with a horrible purple tablecloth that had been bought as a temporary solution to the constant problem of keeping a glass table-top looking clean.   One of my plans this summer is to get wayyy better at drawing, cos in all honesty I find it scary because - unlike abstract painting, say - you can be totally wrong at it; "that's not a ginger, that's a horrible mis-shapen foot".

I took a term-long drawing class in California  and at the time I found it really really stressful; I could never get anything right and also I hate hate the sound of charcoal on paper - hate it.  Also the teacher would always provide instruction as we drew, and it was really fast-paced so you could never get fully absorbed in anything.  And it was at 1pm and ran for almost four hours, and I'd always have had at least two 90-minute classes by that stage (oh American universities and their mad-early starts), and it wasn't a chatty, Portishead environment the painting class the previous term had been.  I only fully liked it when we moved onto working with ink, cos that way I guess you're forced to be precise and not all ghostly the way pencil can be if you're drawing things in an indecisive/unsure frame of mind.  So at the time I definitely didn't properly enjoy the class, but actually it's the kind of class that totally stays with you - like, as I try to draw the teacher's very valid advice will surface in my brain - it turned out to be a very effective long-term style of teaching, I guess, which is pretty cool.  Although this drawing looks pretty shit - I'll improve, though (I hope).

Layout

I like good layouts, and don't like this one (the blog's).  I'll try to improve it.

Right yeah

Ok so it's been an absolute age since I wrote anything on this (and there I was thinking, oh great, blogging's the best thing ever and then I promptly abandoned things).  In the intervening time I finished undergrad university forever (well, unless I do something else) - this involved exam-induced stress but overall I was actually fairly calm about it.  I made pretty infographs to remember things like the state of the Dutch economy c1640 and so on... I love infographics!  Basically I'd make horizontal bar-charts using Microsoft Paint, with the various incidents and lifespans of different periods marked out in different colours.  Of course, this is where I realised that Microsoft Paint is pretty shitty for some things and that once the file gets too big it gets all pixellated and makes editing really tricky.

That's it there, the unfinished Dutch infograph.  Yeah it's kind of ugly but it helped.  Starting out, I wanted to make them out of watercolour paper and acrylic paint or ink, so that they'd be artworks in themselves and I could memorise them just by the fact that they'd be on the wall.  Also they'd look prettier, in fairness.  But digital technology won out.

I made charts for the other subjects as well - it was really useful for Romanesque because when you're discussing anything way-back-when it's obviously really important to pinpoint events and buildings and objects in relation to their lateness or earliness in a given century, but it's difficult enough to remember what makes, say, the 11th century all that different from the 12th (unless you're a medievalist I guess).

Anyway, what I learned was that the Dutch relied on herring processing and importing grain from Scandinavia (thereby freeing up more of their own land for more diverse agrarian use but ensuring a solid food supply)... There's this book by Michael North called Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age which I found and it was all interesting but I never used any of that in my exam.  But the bar charts were my best way of learning/revising, definitely.  The exams themselves.... I dunno, you'd go in there, sit at your desk, have a glance around to see where you were, hope your wobbling table wasn't being too irritating, and so on.  I guess I was way way more laid-back about the exams than about any other part or assignment of the year; I think the whole time I was in a bit of a panic because I was no longer used to their ways, was worried about not doing well, and in truth was fairly bored and then guilty about feeling bored.  Anyway.  Also the bits of art-writing I had done during the year made it really easy to write fairly coherently in the exams, and I think the American ways of teaching/learning (emphasising a thorough understanding, rather than memorisation, of material) really helped. 


Oh yeah and I meant to write an update about surfing.


Went to Lahinch for a week between my dissertation deadline and the beginning of my exams - best thing a final-year student could do, in my opinion. 

Being in the waves was absolutely fantastic, though seeing vastly more athletic peers advance way more rapidly in the surf stakes was a tad frustrating.  But anyway it was great; all swimming (obviously) and yoga lends itself so well to surfing - the first couple of days were lessons and the usual acclimatising-to-that-kind-of-thing had to be done, but it's so so addictive and by the third day I spent about four hours in the water (with my own rented board that time), sitting about on the board like the girls from Blue Crush (in my mind, in any case), bobbing along and steering my board appropriately and watching for the next promising-looking wave to climb and saying "YAY it's a goer, it's a goer!", and getting lifted up and rising and zooming towards the shore and (more often) rising and toppling off prematurely and ending up under the wave.  But you get really used to it, though the prospect and reality of being hit in the head with the board can be a bit disconcerting. 

Afterwords one of us and I wandered back in as the evening light was yellowing the sand (the tides that day had meant that we were out there when the tide was turning and it was beginning to come back in, which had made the water more weird and unpredictable) and it was so nice to just wander along the sand in a wetsuit, invigorated and salty and carrying a board like such a cool-dude and knowing that people around you possibly don't know that you're really actually terrible at it (but might get better, yeah?).

 Then after getting changed we were all in the car and we all got ninety-nines and good grief that evening I was more physically exhausted than I have ever been in my entire life (possibly); it took massive amounts of energy to even concentrate on things people were saying and my hands were red-raw and it looked like bits of flesh had been taken out of my palms, and the abrasion + salt combination stung a lot.  But I was proud of them all the same.

Lovely, yeah?  No-one else's palms were affected in the same way; I think it's cos I was so afraid of falling off every time I was swept to one side I'd grip really hard.  Also possibly because I had been living a fairly indoorsy life in the library and so on, and paper-cuts are one thing but hardly toughen skin surfaces in the same way a surfboard would. 

So that was the surfing.  And all the immense shoulder-stiffness that follows (raising your arms becomes a chore).  And I definitely did stand a few times later in the week; coming towards the shore I'd be kneeling and be like, oh I guess I should stand up and then would, trying to stay balanced but falling off immediately.  And I missed it so much when I got back to Dublin; it'd be so so nice to live near a surfery beach.

And then...

So after the surf there were finals, and after the finals I had to high-tail it out of my apartment (they make you leave the day after you finish, and you accumulate so much crap in one year it's ridiculous).  A kindly security guard adopted the plant I had been cultivating - an orchid I bought in October/November that I had never expected to live so long and spruced up the fairly industrial-looking kitchen space considerably, and which according to my sister I became increasingly obsessed with and would provide information about its welfare rather than mine when asked how I was. Also I had a tendency to introduce it to every guest.  It just seemed like the most interesting thing in the kitchen, apart from the view.  It was an interesting/pretty way of acknowledging that time was passing.

November 2010 

May 2011

Anyway it looks a bit spidery in that last picture and would have been extremely difficult to pack and would definitely never have made the last train extremely-last-minute the way I somehow managed to do with the rest of my luggage.  So there you are.

After all that I immediately went to Kerry with a bunch of lovely people which was very nice though I was still in a post-exam haze and possibly only became coherent in the last few hours there; the sky was all silvery-rainy and the slugs came out in hoards and there were lots of duvets and roses and fresh clean air and greenery and the palm trees out front made it all vaguely tropical. 

Ate yum chicken fillet rolls and for lunch and drank tea and then cider and also saw the sights - well, the local nightclub in any case which was filled with an unexpectedly diverse range of people and was quite large and modern-seeming, to be fair, and possibly only the usual amount of creeps but perhaps it was difficult to tell, so possibly there were more.   


THEN... 

Ok this was always a vague plan but basically a couple of days later my sister and I booked tickets to Vancouver because if we were going to actually do Canada (go over there, get jobs, make money etc), we had to make it happen there and then.  So um, that was that.  There were two options: go to the Rockies and get a job in a posh hotel that would also provide accommodation, or, go to Vancouver and sort something out.  Unemployment in an apparently lovely city seemed far less daunting than unemployment way up in the middle of nowhere, so we opted for that possibility.  Found our social insurance numbers, gradually packed our bags (including plenty of teabags and some Cadbury's chocolate), and found ourselves on flights across the Atlantic and across the U.S., where I devoured A Thousand Splendid Suns and then got bored and agitated by the annoying pay-per-view-ness of the films on the domestic flight.  Then in Seattle we hopped on a propellor plane with about five other passengers and an older, extremely glamorous air-hostess (like a silver-haired Barbie, perhaps) and took off north, into an evening of bright sunlight glinting on the slowly rippling sea-surfaces and the soft island-grasses below.

So that was that, and then we were landing in Vancouver.  

We stayed at a hostel for the first while.  They had free breakfasts of bagels and cream cheese - the first morning felt like a beautiful luxury; the jet-lag meant that we were starving at dawn, and so the sight of a massive basket of warm bagels and huge bowls of cream-cheese and jam and butter, and glass kegs of orange juice or apple juice, and whole massive tea/coffee-dispensers and "The Suburbs" playing... it was good.  Especially as the bagels were cinnamon-flavoured (the smell of North America, possibly).  But after a few days of creaky bunkbeds and extremely close proximity to strangers, along with all the ice-hockey fanaticism right outside our window (hoards of blue-clad fans yelling and yelling and yelling), we were ready to leave.

And in spite of the horribly high rent involved in living in this lovely city we managed, somehow, to luck out. We followed up a promising-looking ad and now live in the loft of a beautiful awesome old disintegrating minty-blue/green house in a beautiful area, so that's great.  The house was owned by a Japanese family for like fifty years and has loads of shelving and random spaces which seem to have just been gradually added on.  We have a balcony with built-in seats and I'm slightly terrified it'll crumble if I stay out on it too long, and from it you can see a matching minty shed and it's all very lovely.  Apparently there are vaguely creepy paintings in on of the attic cupboards but we've been too afraid to look.  Also there's a large black cat who keeps trying to get in who might be the cat of the previous owner.  And there are massive raccoons and we're all a bit afraid that someday they'll invade.  Also, the house is going to be demolished in the autumn so that means... that we can write and paint and draw all over it.  And there are beautiful overgrown gardens full of flowers which is so so pretty, and large wooden oriental gateways at every turn (well I've counted at least three around the perimeter).  And there's a verandah, and also ten other Irish people in the house who are very lovely so far.  So far on my wall I've drawn a vaguely geometric thing similar enough to the paint-file I uploaded a while ago, but this time with glitter cos we have glitter pens but can't afford to invest in any art materials just yet.

Melted candle by the steps

The matching minty shed

More flowers

Also I got my exam-result!  Turns out that the entire panic and stress of the year was just a complete waste of time and energy, because my grade from last year epically compensated for any anxiety-induced mess-ups or eejitry or underperforming I might have done this year... damn I should have just done the calculations at the beginning of the year and slacked off!  

Plotting on a curve

This image, below, is the type of thing I usually do when I procrastinate; during my dissertation-writing time these Microsoft Paint files absolutely littered my computer desktop.  In this case, though, I've been trying to figure out how to map out a series of geometric shapes (composed according to two fixed perspective points), as if they were careering along a curve.  Problem is that here I've opted for a circle, and I think that somewhere along the curved line I got confused and the anchor-point on the shapes reversed... hopefully I'll produce something more consistent the next time.  Anyway the whole point of the exercise was to give me a means of taking the next step in a painting I've been working on since November, I'll have to see how that goes.

Last night I had a dream about surfing; I was taking a lesson, and as the instructor was speaking I knew, just knew (I think because of the force of the waves although it was perfectly easy to stand there in the water, calm and unmoving), that the wave I would catch would be at extremely high-speed, and I was anticipating - half-fearfully, half-excitedly, the rush that that would bring.  The sea was grey and the sand was that sort of golden-grey that you get at Irish beaches, and I was wearing a wetsuit but just as I was looking at the shore, knowing that I would soon be zooming towards it on my board, I realised that I wasn't wearing any surf booties and thought, "damn!", wondering how on earth I could have forgotten something so essential.

I've yet to surf properly, though I've definitely given it plenty of tries.  The first few occasions were on the Mayo coast, with the wind slamming into you as you even try to make it to the water's edge, pushing the board back in your face and it's an ordeal to get out to a point deep enough to start.  Those were during group lessons in a restricted area of sea, and I was extremely conscious of not crashing into anyone else and still managed to do it - thankfully no-one was hurt.  It was freezing, exhilirating and unsuccessful, and my only true fond memory is of sheltering in a trailer afterwards while waiting for a lift, drinking hot orange juice out of a flask.  I never thought I'd like hot orange juice but this was lovely.  Then there was an August in Biarritz, where the sea was absolutely crazy, terrifyingly forceful and crowded; there were times when I'd half-stand and start flying, but would force myself to wipe-out because of people milling about on the shoreline.  Then last year I was determined to learn properly; college was right on the Pacific coast, after all.  Students would cycle about campus with a board under one arm, and if you walked along the shore or on the cliffs by the pointy aloe-vera plants, you were bound to see groups or individuals out there with the dolphins.

I wanted to make sure I was a strong enough swimmer first though, so spent a few months perfecting that, and by the time I'd done that I had to wait for the weather to pick back up and for the sea to become fairly surfer-friendly again.  In my last several weeks there, provided I didn't have disruptive coursework, I'd attempt it once a week.  There was a specifically outdoorsy house very near the beach, with lots of kayaks and wetsuits and boards in the back yard, and you'd cycle there after class - past blocks of pretty bungalows with rose-bush gardens and beer pong tables and comfy couches on the lawns - and park your bike in their driveway and venture on in through the gate, grab a suit, stash your stuff under the table, and you were good to go.  Over time the board-carrying became easier; initially I found it (literally) a drag - not good for the board - but soon it became easy to just hold it under one arm like a pro.  The main tricky part was getting it down the flights of steps that brought you from the cliff to the beach, and once that was done it was grand really.  Booties were an absolute must though; the seabed was extremely stony and rocky - if you didn't have some sort of footwear you'd just step on something sharp or uneven or yuck-feeling and you don't want to be too distracted by concern for your toes.  The first few times my board had a problem with its fins - I think it should have had three but one was missing or something, so it behaved weirdly to begin with.  Also, the currents were still quite strong, even in May; no matter how many times I kept flipping over there was always this urge to try again, "just once more and I'll do it!", but it was often a struggle to get back out to that lift-off point.

Over the weeks I got more comfortable with being on the board, and the getting-centred part would take less and less thought, and it became easier to understand the timing; that the wave would help to push you up into standing position and so on.  And your skin got used to the surface of the board; my hands were less prone to blistering and it was nice to just dwell there, sniffing the salt on the nose and occasionally looking behind to see the swell flatten prematurely and wait for the next one.  Then afterwards you'd take the boards back up and shower off under a tap in the wall, and change quickly and hop back into your flip-flops and onto your bike and into the sunset evening, and your muscles would be exhausted but it felt so invigorating all the same.  I still maintain that if I had had one more hour (just one more hour, even slightly less than that!) of an extension to my final lesson (which was awesome and seemed, like a lot of that year, like it was made-up; a very handsome blond surfer with a typically monosyllabic American soap-opera name was the instructor and he made my progress his complete focus; could have been worse), I would have done it properly, but as it was I only managed to get half-way up and go.  Oh well, I think I'm going later this week (in colder, breezier climes) so hopefully I'll succeed... not sure though - I definitely find it quite difficult!        

Ummmm...

SO...


Here's the first one, though not sure yet if "first" is the appropriate word... we'll see how it goes.  You see, my sister started a blog a while ago and told me I should do one too, and when I searched my mind for a particular theme or topic that would warrant consistent discussion she shrugged and said, "random crap" - or something to that effect.  We were drinking copious amounts of tea in my kitchen at the time, and just as she was leaving I decided to have a go at dismantling the scenic mountain of recycling that had accumulated in the corner.  If its obtrusiveness hadn't provoked her joking criticism/horror, I might have continued to ignore it... but instead I filled paper bag after paper bag with the packaging of final-year student-living; primarily, baked bean cans and plastic milk cartons (some of which had residual weeks-old traces of their contents; eew), took them, in several trips, down to the bins in the courtyard and sent paper, glass and aluminium on their separate ways.  All this was all extremely uneventful until I reached into the gloom of one bag and sliced the little finger of my right hand on the jagged edge of an incised butterbean-tin; the blood oozed out in a large drop that pushed out and spread to the neighbouring digit and I was conscious of its slowing progress as I finished up with the rubbish, returned, washed it, and applied a very effective bandage (from one of those airport packets you buy when you're about to go on a trip that'll involve a lot of walking).  I didn't mind clearing the recycling mountain - I was the one who instigated it; I'm riddled with guilt if I throw anything paper-esque in with the food, and separating it all out just seems to make more sense (although, from my observations of on-campus rubbish trucks, I'm not sure about how massive a difference all this actually makes)... In in any case it leaves more space in the "proper" bin for real, smell-accumulating rubbish; otherwise someone would have to empty that the whole time and that'd be annoying.

So yeah, random crap.  There are whole worlds of design dedicated to making use of this kind of refuse, and I'm definitely one to horde - last year I'd keep rice-boxes and cereal packages in my wardrobe, primarily with a view to making things to send to people by airmail, or to making a sculpture, but these things never actually happened and were ultimately destined for the massive recycling dumpster in the carpark - like much else in that apartment.  That was the thing about America - if you were finished with something you'd just leave it somewhere fairly public and someone else would take it, almost right away.  Like everything - the cutlery, the kettle, the chairs, the table, the bedsheets, one of my paintings, lamps, gosh I can't even remember... anyway I had to take it all down to this giant bin and there were people in the bin who'd take it instantly, and the stuff had mainly come from charity shops originally so... So this stuff wasn't technically about to be recycled but I suppose was going to be re-used.  I'm not sure if I can say the same about the stuff I dumped this evening; hopefully it'll get refabricated into something worth using but there's no way I can track that...

Anyway, as I was sorting through these various empty containers and so on, I was like, "yeah I could so write about stuff, what'll I write about?" and in truth I guess my reasons for forging ahead and doing the oh-so-difficult task of setting up a blog like this one maybe lie with my decision that it's a good way to organise and order my mind... there's too much free-floating thought and information that I just can't give expression to most of the time and when I have to focus on, say, more academic things I just get swept up in unrelated stuff, and perhaps allowing me to flesh things out or at least channel some observations in textual form might be a good way of letting me get on with things that, on-the-ground anyway, are a tad more important.  I had thought that swimming was good way of de-stressing, where your breath gets into the rhythm of plunging and surfacing... and in a way I do think that that sort of cardiovascular exercise is very important, but it definitely doesn't allow for the same kind of individual expression that writing or something like that can... but I suppose (maybe) a case could be made for parallels; like, writing usually involves delving into something and pulling it to the surface... and it has to be done using standard techniques that "work" - in the same way particular swimming strokes allow one to stay afloat and progress.  So... I dunno, maybe this blog might help clear my head of the various crap I allow it to accumulate, or at least to get it more ordered and organised and functional and useful, and perhaps refabricated into something worth consuming.  Hopefully.

I had a Nutella milkshake today, t'was good.  And I'm breaking in a new pair of pretty shoes, which is worthwhile, I think; my last loyal pair were suede-ish, originally a rich Harry Clarke-blue, and survived several sprints through the seawater of various oceans and extremely contrasting coasts - I resurrected them recently for ball-purposes and they are now caked in mud and rather shoddy-looking, and are finally - it must be admitted - bin-bound (though they will have "pending" status for a while yet).  This new pair have ribbons but are not as comfy and I doubt they'll have the same longevity, though time will tell.  Distintegration of soap-bars and the various trajectories of the orchid on the kitchen windowsill, and it'll show itself again in my contributions to that recycling mountain, which will reappear and draw commentary and disgust once more.