Dublin Blog...

Well, despite moaning about not having any time... I've signed up to write for the brand new Dublin Blog...

It's at www.DublinBlog.ie

Oh and my first post is here...

Gay saves the day

What ate Time?

It is such a tired cliche to suggest that modern life is hectic, nearly as tedious as suggesting that modern life is rubbish... But, golly, I don't know where the time goes anymore...

Without being overly specific, I used to have time for a relationship, a gym membership, hobbies, weekends away and well, what seemed like a vast quantity of "me" time...

Now? Well, I'm single - which seems to save me no time at all...

I've given up the gym - and am avoiding the bathroom scales, which has taken on a judgemental look...

I never seem to take holidays... and I find it hard to find time to blog, never mind shop, go for a walk, meet friends, write novels etc etc...

All of my time seems to be sucked into some kind of work related vortex... I am in work at 8am, somehow I rarely leave before 7pm, when you factor in the travel time and the post work exhaustion, I hardly live at all...

This is exacerbated by my activities this weekend, which consisted primarily of working - an 8 hour day on Saturday, a 7 hour day on Sunday... I barely had time to see my Mother...

The worst thing? I'm not in a good work place right now, frustrated, irritated, blocked in any attempt to expand and develop, yet still spending my whole life there...

Tonight, I planned to return home and celebrate the extended daylight hour by walking on the beach. I'm home, it's 7.30, my ipod is irritatingly not charged, it's raining and I haven't posted for a week...

I think I need a PA...

The ubiquity of Bananas

A small part of your mind is thinking, he's just invented that phrase as some kind of teaser to drag me into his blog, which is probably about politics or horses or something...

Another part of your mind is thinking... bananas, you know, I do see a lot of them...

So, I'm away for the weekend, in the UK... And I'm sitting on a train, wondering and gawping at the many wonderous and strange sights... hoping to see streets paved with gold etc...

Well, actually, I was on a train, ruminating about the similarities and differences between a train at night in one country and another... because this was only England, south coast, there really wasn't a vast world of difference in the appearance of the people... Equally, the fundamental design of the train was the same... As was the general, sodium light, passing at speed, urban landscape...

And then it occured to me as I watched a commuter, snacking on a banana... That the banana itself was the oddest thing in the picture... Where do bananas grow? Hot, tropical places... How well do they travel? Not very well, judging by the amount of damage a small group can sustain in the transition between the supermarket and my house... How quickly do they ripen and decline? Pretty darn quickly, unless they've been evilly frozen by an uncaring gobal conglomerate - in which case they go a kind of startled brown...

And yet they are in fact nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives - we just take their presence for granted, whether in some grotty Spar shop, or in some high end organic fruiteria....

And then, I mentioned them to a dear friend who has a grasp of trivia that is second only to his knowledge of Evan Dando... He assured me that the sale of bananas is a key performance indicator for supermarkets... although in truth, anything more than a cursory search on Google, leaves me confused about the accuracy of that statement, but let's imagine for a moment that it's true...

If you're in the mood to have a look here

Anyway, my point, more or else is we live in a furiously modern age - where we take for granted so many things... Let's stop a moment - and enjoy a banana... and remember just how complicated the process of getting that banana, into our hands, or onto our trains, in a perfectly ripe and edible condition really is...

Oblique

Not everything makes sense the first time you encounter it...

One of the great mysteries to me is how I can hear a song the first time and hate it. Yet, eventually I grow to love it and listen to it over and over again.

It happens regularly, I make snap decisions and get it wrong.

You meet someone and because they look like someone you used to know, someone you disliked... you make a decision, that you won't like this new person...

In the middle ages physiognomy, the shape of faces, gaps between teeth and the shape of noses meant more than they do today... but the fundamentals still apply... "I don't like his nose", "she's got funny coloured eyes" and so on...

Malcolm Gladwell, has written one great book "The Tipping Point" and one slightly less great book called "Blink". In "Blink" he argues that one of humanities greatest gifts is the ability to thin slice an event or a meeting and make an immeadiate and accurate decision.

I don't believe him.

I think we thin slice things and make mistakes all the time.

And if you combine snap decisions and stubbornness, well, that for me, explains a lot about how humanity carries out its daily business...

Sometimes the best things take time. Sometimes things that look great, taste awful. Sometimes a song you hate becomes brilliant.

Life is more complicated than television wants you to think it is.

I say, enjoy complexity - don't ever fear it.

Parallel Lives

Where I live, I am uniquely privileged to be at one end of a public transport system...

Why, privileged? Well, there are a number of advantages...

Firstly, your chosen means of transport is almost always awaiting you , like a vast and glorified chauffeur driven delight, it's like being Johnny Ronan, the guy from Treasury Developments who has a brand new Maybach Benz (there are only two in the country, the other one belongs to Enya, they cost about half a million euro) sitting outside his office all day, with his driver, on standby...

Obviously, it's not quite like that, but there is some similarity...

Clearly this cuts down on waiting in the rain time... It also means that you get to see the patterns of other peoples lives much more clearly...

Every morning, I sit in a certain place and around me, the same people gather... There's a girl, with blond hair and a dark coat, who sits at the furthest end, as close to the driver as possible, there's a man in a hat, who looks entirely different when he removes it, there's a girl in a tracksuit who smokes, there's a girl who's dad drives a brand new Mercedes CLK and drops her off every morning... This morning, he stopped to give her money...

And at each stop along the way, you get to recognise the same faces, there's an older woman and a dark haired woman, who get on together at the same stop, there's a man who always seems far too warm and insists on opening windows... there's a girl who looks familiar, but isn't...

All these parallel lives go on around me every morning... and it's weird to see and so different to driving in a car, in a little isolated world....

The thought that started all this was, the other morning, as I was walking towards the stop, a tall man, emerged from his apartment, he walked in front of me all the way to the stop, I watched his back pack bob up and down....

In fact, the only thing that drew my attention to him was that he seemed to be carrying an empty aftershave bottle in his hand... he tried to bin it along the way and it fell on the ground... I spent a good five minutes wondering, why and how he came to be carrying an empty aftershave bottle in his hand... I had no answer...

And that evening, as I returned home, the same guy passed me, back pack bobbing, departing from my view at the same apartment I met him at in the morning... And i wondered, what had he done with his day? And how odd is it that our days were exactly the same length? and what did he do next?

So much blogging...

Wow, the level of coverage and cross blog support today is amazing... It really does feel like a community - and not just because we all emerged blinking from behind our monitors and braved daylight... Although that may be part of it....

Imagine for a moment, if every night out with friends involved people taking photos, writing up the highlights of the evening, posting videos, linking to each other and sharing what happened with those who couldn't be there?

Are we at the start of a future wave of virtual community meeting the real world? Or are we just a bunch of sociable people who leapt at the chance to share a few drinks and chat with people who we feel we know because we read their thoughts almost every day?

It's an interesting question I think - and I freely admit to spending quite a bit of time, looking through photos, reading as many of the blogs from people I met as possible... It really does feel like a community experience - although in some ways it shouldn't...

Let's face facts - when i walked into the Alexander Hotel - I physically knew two people... I had spoken by phone with two more, but it was an entertaining and enjoyable evening that has only been enhanced by the photos and accounts that other people have subsequently shared...

In some ways, I had a better time and warmer feelings following a night where I had never met 164 people then I did after the previous week at an industry function where out of 500 people, I probably knew 164 people at least by sight....

Odd...

But I'm looking forward to next year

Joining Irish Blogs

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Well, I think it's time to say hello to the world... with this post, I will join Irish Blogs - I think the spotlight will only encourage me...

The concept...

I was at a gathering of Bloggers last night... and as is customary at these things, eventually everyone there gave out about my inconsistency in posting, about my posting of the trivial and my posting about not posting...

I did explain to many and all that I had, in part because of these things, decided to retire my current blog and create this new one, which will see me post more often and on more interesting items, while also protecting my anonymity in the general world...

I have realised of course, that it would be difficult for me to write at length if I thought no one would ever read my thoughts, that primary ego gratification is a part of the ened to write in the first place...

I did have an interesting conversation with a friend, who I haven't seen in a while, she is an accomplished blogger, therapist and independent consultant... And I shared with her some of my thoughts on blogging...

I will recap on part of our discussion here, at the risk of returning to my old favourite theme of why and when I blog...

But, to some extent the point that she made is true - that blogging or any public display of your thoughts or creativity is in fact like art - it is an exhibition, a controlled display of things that you think when taken together have a merit.

In art, or in sculpture or in photogrpahy, the decision on what to include and what to leave out, the choices of what make the display are part of the nature of art... So, what we write, the tone we take, the amount of our lives we allow into the world is part of a structured display of content - an exhibition

In that way a blog is more than just a website, or a diary that is available on line - it is to some extent a work of personal creativity, which displays and details facets of the blogger's personality.

Some people my be more ostentatious than others in their displays - some people use simple blogging tools like closed community blogging - Bebo - and the like to interact with their friends... But the point of all of this, is that, it is a new way to define in part who you are and to tell the world how you feel and how you choose to interact with the world and other people...

In the same that you join a club, or name your house, or attend mass... Blogging is part of an expression of you - expressing yourself to the world at large

I think there is also a potential therapeutic role in it too - but I will return to that at another time....

In the meantime, with the advent of Irish Blogging Awards and having seen a room full of people who have had the courage and creativity to express themselves on line - I am optimistic that this may well be a new way to open debates and have conversations with the world at large in a way we have not done before...

Do you like My Manifesto?

Welcome

This in truth is my third attempt at a blog.

The first one, I made the classic mistake of telling people I know about it... Yes, instant ego gratification, instant inability to write anything of interest or reveal any of the gritty, sordid semi truths of my battered existence....

Hmmm...

Blog No. 2? Yes, overdid the gritty thing - posting at length semi coherent rants and details of my life that even I find hard to read...

So, why Blog No. 3?

Well, this time, I think I will try to strike the famous happy medium...

I will remain anonymous... I will write about things that are actually important to me... I will not sputter and spray dark hearted thoughts, nor fill the blog with spam and updates from uninteresting newspages...

Here, perhaps, I will find out, if I can write...

Welcome... And I hope it is an enjoyable visit