Auld Dog - the first instalment

If you scroll down to the previous post, you will see that I have invited people to submit an Auld Dog post, which is a summation of all the nuggets of wisdom you have collected to date. Several people have mailed me back looking for guidance, headings, questions, etc.

If I do that, then I will be imposing my agenda on your thoughts. Which is not what I want to do. This isn't This much I know, this is Auld Dog.

In other words, just write the goddamned things will you! You're all talented people.

But here's one I prepared earlier, in case this happened.

Auld Dog

By Queenie

Queenie is a thirty six year old Irish woman who now lives in Canada and works for the NDP.

______________________

The rate at which we, as a species, are consuming every single thing on this planet terrifies me. I saw a documentary recently on seahorses, which will be extinct soon because people like to have dried seahorses to hang on their walls, or to eat, or something.

My first tattoo was of a seahorse. I love their shape. And the way the males nurture the babies.

They harvest them alive and leave them to slowly dry out in the sun by the way. The seahorses.

I fell in love with my partner when he and his buddy Martin cooked a romantic, candlelit, lake-side dinner for me and Martin’s wife and two other girl friends on a camp stove. Next day, I overheard the other women talking about how great he was, and I had this lovely warm feeling of ‘he picked ME!!!’ inside, which is still there every morning. He’s taught me how to make our love for each other spill over into everything else we do and make it shine.

I think what we need to do now is hold every action and object in our hands and ask ourselves, what’s the impact? It’s so tiring sometimes, though, I have to go to BurgerKing and rebel for a minute or two.

Good politics (by that I mean dialogue) does good things for good people. It’s power that’s the problem. The man who said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely was the cleverest one ever.

Ohmygod! I just assumed it was a bloke said that. That says it all, really.

Every single morning for the last two years I have woken up and wondered whether or not I should have a baby.

But imagine if I had a child, and when it saw my seahorse tattoo it assumed it was like a unicorn? An allegorical symbol, not real?

When I watched the German film Stalingrad, I was so moved that I was lying in a foetal lump bawling my eyes out at the futility of it all when the last soldier walked out into the snow. That’s why I rent dvds. Catharsis is so much easier in the comfort of your own home.

There’s a selfish little bit of me that just doesn’t understand why all my Irish friends won’t come and live here in Canada. But there’s always the telephone.

Technology is a tool, not a status symbol. People who use technology in public to highlight their status are the tools.

I always thought if you gave teenagers the vote the world would be a better place, but now I reckon the people who tell them what to buy will tell them who to vote for, same as the rest of us.

I wonder who tells me to vote Left?

I had a boyfriend once who reckoned everyone was one or more G&Ts below par. I try to be just one, but some evenings I feel a good way down the bottle below par. So I don’t keep gin in the house.

I always took my parents far too seriously, until one day about a year ago they asked me to stop. I think they just want us to enjoy each other’s eccentricities now.

We developed social networks for a reason. For our survival. And yet the whole modern success mythology is based on the need to be a redoubtable individual.

For that reason, I was hugely relieved when we invented the Internet, but now we have MySpace…

If I were locked alone in a tower in deepest Albania from which no sign of life could be spotted across the mountains, I would find a party. It’s the Irish in me.

I can’t imagine a life in which I don’t talk about politics every single day. I blame my dad. He made me read the Irish Times when I was too young to know any better.

Sometimes I wish I weren’t so serious-minded. It played havoc with my sex life when I was single. Men just don’t want to sleep with the Head Girl.

One of the things I love about my partner is that even though the Head Girl was on vacation when he met me, he took it completely in his stride when term started again.