Interviews and blue bins - the cycle of life

Early Saturday morning, pot of Just Us! jungle blend coffee scenting the apartment, sunshine streaming in the window, no snow ploughs this morning hence silence on the street, blog.

Perfection.

Himself is up and out already, gone to a job interview. Those of you who follow this blog will know that Himself has been assiduously trawling websites and personal contacts in search of a job these past few weeks. He actually got one this week, but the wages were so low it would have cost us money to send him there every day, so he graciously declined.

I'd imagine it is very difficult being a red-blooded, hunter-gatherer type male whose girlfriend is currently paying the bills. But I don't think it should be so difficult that you'd work beneath your ability and worth to get out from under it.

It was a bit stressful for Himself I think, turning down a job that was THERE FOR THE TAKING. So I twisted his arm a little, because I wanted to take the stress out of the decision for him. And the relief when it was done was visible.

Anyways, in the way of things here in Nova Scotia (and everywhere else I'd imagine), I arrived home from one of the shittest days in work ever, in a state of pure despair at life, to find him happily wading through a sheaf of interview offers.

Six in one day.

Yes six.

Has anyone ever in the history of the world been offered six job interviews in the space of three hours? Apart from David Beckham when he announced he didn't like living in Manchester anymore?

I have concluded that the second Friday in February must be 'get off my arse and call some applicants about an interview for that job I've been paid to advertise for the last month' day here in Nova Scotia.

Himself is all tail up now, as one would be when one goes from 'worried whether there's something WRONG with you' to 'in huge demand because there's a labour crisis in the province' in the space of twenty four hours.

Also, the ONE is one of them, the ONE being a good job that Himself would like, that pays well and offers the kind of supervisory responsibility of which he is more than capable.

So whatever kind of juju you use for these things, lash some of it on us for the next week please.

Because whatever about getting a job, getting the ONE is the icing on the cake.

And we like iced cakes in this house.

I made two chocolate cakes, with added chocolate and melted dark Lindt chocolate spooned on top with a sprinkling of ground almonds, the other night and they are both gone.

I don't know what surprised me more. The fact that I made two cakes. Or the fact that they were so nice they lasted thirty six hours.

I shouldn't be surprised they were nice I suppose. The Queen Mother makes a mean chocolate cake and taught me well.

I suppose I was surprised they were popular.

Although some of the people living in this house LOVE chocolate.

Also I brought one of them in to work yesterday, as I knew it was going to be one of the shittest days in work ever, so I thought my colleagues should have something nice to get them through the day.

I. Am. Getting. So. Effing. Domesticated. It. Is. Effing. Scary.

The reason work was so shittest day ever was because we had to clear out the library and the filing room in order for the renovators to move in and re-arrange the space.

Think twenty years of random dumping of file boxes. Think dust hippos. Think paper cuts. Think hours and hours of standing at the recycle bin ripping off plastic binder spirals. Think endless hours of removing steel filing clips. Think of doing all this in a tiny room with your colleagues.

Normally I wouldn't really mind this kind of thing, it being an excuse to not do any real work. But Lady Moonbeam is in town this week, so think all of the above with a grinding pain in my lower back and abdomen and a complete absence of any sense of humour.

The Chief of Staff understood the signals emanating from Queenie well enough to order pizza for lunch.

I like the way he is starting to adapt to my way of doing things!!

Our leader and a couple of our MLAs had turned up just before lunch and stayed to chat. Not for the pizza. God No. Intellectual conversation was the hook there. Definitely.

So we all had pepperoni slices and Sprite and chocolate cake and talked about This is Spinal Tap for thirty minutes.

I must say I do like working for a political leader who is happy to sit with his dusty, grungy team who are a bit stinky after a hard morning at the recycle bin, and shout 'this one goes all the way up to eleven' and correct their interpretation of the lyrics of Stonehenge when his mouth is not full of pizza and chocolate cake.

I can't imagine Rodney MacDonald doing that.

Then I had to go back to the recycle bin for another four hours. Which was devastating.

Himself has just called to say he got the job he interviewed for twenty minutes ago, which we had agreed is the NEXT BEST to the ONE, the interview for which is Tuesday. So we're set now either way.

HOORRRAAYYYY!!

Of course, this means he'll be earning more than me again now...

I kinda liked being the top cat!

Sunday morning, February sky

Sunday morning, 8.30am. I have lost the ability to sleep in. I can't remember quite when I lost it - sometime over the last two years, so while the house sleeps on, I am up with my coffee and my online copy of The Observer.

It snowed again last night, so the snowplough is out, scraping up and down the road every twenty minutes. Probably what woke me up. Or maybe our neighbour, who gets up at six am on the weekends and clomps down the stairs in hob-nailed boots to go who knows where.

The sky is utterly, utterly blue and all the trees and the gardens are covered in snow, so the scene from the window is postcard perfect eastern north america this morning. On days like this, I always feel I should wind a long striped scarf around my neck, grab a book bag and go to some highly erudit post-graduate tutorial in a mock-Victorian college.

Given by Norman Mailer. Or Robin Williams perhaps!

I'm tired of the winter. The cold, the sliding and slipping on the path. Scrambling over frozen lumps of unmelted snow to get on the bus. The biting wind that makes every foray outdoors unendurable. And there's still another six weeks at least to go before it warms up. It stays bright until after six pm though, so it's becoming more bearable.

Himself is up in Halifax full time now and looking for a job. It makes me froth at the mouth watching him go through the process. He submits resumes and rarely hears a word. Canadians don't respond to applications period. Unless you get an interview. Sometimes they don't respond after that. I find it incomprehensibly rude. Lazy. Imperious.

And then they wonder why people pack up and head west.

And the wages are so unbelieveably crappy here. I am trying to feel my way to an understanding of how the economy works in Nova Scotia, but it baffles me. Wages on job websites are down on last year. But there's a shortage of workers in almost every sector. And people who are looking for work find it difficult to get a job. But employers are in to us whingeing about labour shortages morning noon and night.

That's not logically possible.

I must be missing something.

Anyways, what I do know is that Nova Scotians are feeling a sort of hard to shake unease at the situation - a rumble of thunder at the picnic (to paraphrase some author I can't remember who).

Speaking of authors, we went to the library yesterday. Himself, Queenie and Kitty, Himself's daughter who is living with us now. We got seven books between us. Which was a victory for the reader in the house!!

Kitty is starting junior high in Halifax tomorrow. We were at a dinner party last night and one of the other guests had gone to Queen Elizabeth High. 'What was it like?' I asked. 'I can't remember' was the answer. 'That bad?' I asked. 'That much pot!' was the answer.

Sigh.....

Being a grown up sucks sometimes. Particularly on a cold bright February day, when all there is to look forward to is another six weeks of winter, replete with responsibility for beings other than one's own.

There I said it. I was wondering whether I would or not.

But it could be worse. The sky could not be utterly utterly blue. I could be still roomies with psycho-Bruce. It could be raining and I could be in a tiny apartment in Dublin with nothing to look forward to but a day of worrying about work. Tomorrow all I will worry about is whether Kitty will be offered the hand of friendship on her first day in junior high in Halifax. And hope to christ there isn't a glowing joint in the hand. And what I will say if she isn't. And whether it will offer any comfort or it will be just the same crap* I heard when I was her age.

Being a grown up is very difficult when you think you're still twenty on the inside.

*crap as in everything is crap when you're sixteen, not crap as in actually crap!

Oisin's an Auld Dog

Oisín,36, lives in Cork, Ireland, where he’s a tutor in philosophy and politics at UCC. He’s just finished his Master’s there, and—since philosophy appears to have succeeded in gripping him firmly by the head—he’s returning to Canada soon (where he and his angelic wife Katherine used to live, and are looking forward to living again) to begin a Ph.D. More fool him, perhaps!

In the last moments of my mother’s life, hoping to ease her distress, I urged her not to be afraid. I told her she was “pioneering” for us—where she was going, we’d all be going too.

But what was I talking about? What happens at “death”?

First, it seems clear that our familiar notion of “life after death” is incoherent, since it involves an outright contradiction; it wouldn’t really be death, you might say, if life continues.

Aside from this, what (if anything) could it mean for us to survive death?

Well, we can safely assume that our body doesn’t live on (since it’s bodily death that defines death). So perhaps some immaterial part of ourselves survives (if there is such a part), or is “reborn” into another body. This may involve our traditional notion of a “soul”.

If the soul survives without a body, then it must be either in the material world (as a disembodied “ghost”, if such an idea even makes sense), or else in an immaterial world. If survival is in an immaterial world, then such a world will presumably be either good or bad (these cover our traditional notions of heaven and hell), or else neutral (this, perhaps, covers our notion of purgatory). If the soul survives as a ghost or else is reborn into another body, these eventualities could also be good, bad, or neutral for us. The only other possibility is that there is no immaterial part that survives bodily death.

How ought we to feel about these options?

Well, if there really is a soul that survives bodily death, then (in any of the above options) we’d be justified in fearing worse and desiring better outcomes for our soul. (Personally, I find the idea of hell, stated in terms of eternal punishment for misdeeds performed in this life, to be one of the most morally repugnant ideas ever dreamed up.)

But what if no immaterial part survives (either because there’s no such thing, or because it too dies upon physical death)? How should we feel about death if it’s the irrevocable end of our existence? Would this be a good or a bad thing, from our point of view?

One way of answering this question is to agree with Epicurus, who asserted that

Death …, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

Even so, it’s possible that the process of dying (for example, if it’s painful or slow) could be extremely unpleasant from our point of view. Still, if death really is the end of our existence, then maybe Epicurus is right. After all, the supposed harm of death (if such harm is supposed to consist solely in the fact that we no longer exist) does not apply to us while we’re living. And to whom could such harm apply once we’re dead?

It’s clear that death, if it’s the end of our existence, involves the end of our enjoyment of life. But surely we don’t think that we’ll miss enjoying life, given that we’ll no longer exist! We may regret not being able to continue enjoying life forever. We may wish to live a long and healthy life in order to enjoy more of life. But these thoughts don’t seem to capture the dismay we may feel at the idea that we will no longer exist at all.

As Thomas Nagel puts it,

The thought that the world will go on without you, that you will become nothing, is very hard to take in… [But] It’s not clear why.

Consider the following two facts. First, most of us readily accept that there was a time before we existed, namely, a time before we were born. Second, anyone who’s been under general anesthetic—say, for an operation—knows that it’s not like anything to be anesthetised. We’re normally untroubled by the fact that we didn’t exist before we were born. And the complete absence of conscious experience under anesthesia demonstrates that it can’t be a bad thing, experientially, to have no experiences at all.

But the case of anesthesia prompts another consideration: We aren’t dead when we’re anesthetised. We’re still biologically alive, we just lack consciousness. What this suggests (at least to me) is that it isn’t life so much as conscious life that interests us.

In any case, it’s not obvious what there is to fear. Death would be truly fearful only if it held in store for us something like hell (and I’ve already aired my views on this concept). Otherwise, what we think of as “fear of death” is likely a combination of regret at not being able to continue living and a desire for yet more of whatever we enjoy in life. Added to this may be genuine fear that the process of dying might be painful.

Is this, then, the whole story? It seems not. Perhaps illogically, death still strikes many of us as about the worst thing that could happen; which is to say, it remains fearful.

So maybe we’re looking at things wrong-headedly.

In the minutes following my mother’s death, I stood outside her nursing home; warm sunshine flooded the evening landscape. My mother was dead. I recalled a story about a fellow who’d crashed his bicycle at an intersection in the city; he’d smashed headlong through the passenger window of a car, but had escaped serious injury because he’d been wearing his helmet. For the whole next week, he was euphoric at being alive. In those minutes following my mother’s death, I experienced something akin to this feeling. I was simply in awe at being alive, consciously alive, in the world at all. The fact that there is conscious experience in the world at all is one of the most deeply mysterious aspects of the universe in which we live; it appears to be thus far outside the realm of what science can even hope to explain (this is the infamous “explanatory gap”).

Perhaps instead of dwelling on the fact that we may cease to exist, we should consider the quite astonishing fact that we are here in the first place, as consciously experiencing beings.

I cannot think of anything more astonishing than that.

Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, where people offer their pearls of wisdom for the rest of us to ponder. If you would like to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 words of wisdom, along with a bio and photo (or I'll write/ pick them) to auld.dog@gmail.com and I'll post it here.

Mags' an Auld Dog

Mags, 40, is an Irish woman who lives in New Jersey and leads the state's conservation agency. She is an environmentalist, political activist, triathlete and book collector (bio and pic by Q).

If you live your life for someone else's approval, you're not living your life and you're not going to get approval.

I envy selfish people and people who are certain. I worry too much to have certainty and empathize too much to be truly selfish. Although I am working on being selfish - it's my current self-improvement project!

Getting ahead is about timing - being in the right place at the right time having laid the right foundation in preparation for that timing.

Money is the root of all evil. In any and all situations that elicit a painful wail of "Why?" from a puzzled populace, the answer generally lies at the end of the money trail.

My genes dictate that I am prompt, organized and ever so slightly anal. I've lost the fight with my genes and have surrendered to my promptness, organization and anal nature! I am turning into my mother and I no longer mind.

It is impossible to be good, to be truly good and think good thoughts and do good all the time…you need to cut yourself some slack every now and again.

Animals are much cleverer in certain ways than humans. Birds can navigate 3,000-mile migration paths year in and year out, timing their arrivals with emergent food sources and their departures with the tiniest temperature trend changes. They don't have compasses or thermometers or maps. Snakes will take the shortest route, a straight line, between their hibernacula and their traditional breeding areas and they don't have GPS to help them.

I don't think humans are inherently bad, but I do think that a few bad humans give the rest of us a reputation we don't deserve and mess things up royally for those of us who seek to tread lightly on this planet. I think a lot of people believe in god because they can't believe in humanity. I think if we could all seek and find our reward in this life, rather than expecting it in the next, the world would be a much better place in a much better state.

When I am being strong and assertive, I think people think that I'm being bitchy. If I was a man being strong and assertive would they consider me macho? Sometimes I have to flirt to get what I want in work…in fact I just flirted my way into a $15,000 sponsorship deal for my big fundraiser. It annoys me that men don't have to flirt!

I think books are the best things about being alive. I think I prefer books to anything in the entire world and if I was to be stranded on a desert island and they offered me a choice between company or books, I would take books every time.

Finally, I get happier as I get older and I remain surprised at that fact and annoyed that nobody told me that was going to happen. Or maybe they did once and I just didn't believe it then!

Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog that provides the pearls of wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you would like to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 words to auld.dog@gmail.com along with a bio and picture (or I'll do them) and I'll post it here.

Happy Birthday Percy!

Percy's Two today. As in two years old. As in this blog.

Probably not a party, but maybe a post later, if I can wrestle the computer away from job hunters and MSN-ers.

Happy Birthday Percy - Queenie

Saved by the shopping

This Auld Dog lark is great. For a number of reasons.

I don’t have half as much blog guilt since it started.

Looking into other people’s heads is sooo much fun, isn’t it!

Seeing what’s inside their head is pretty interesting too. For me anyways.

Watching who steps up the plate is pretty nifty too.

Anyways, there’s three more this weekend. I was going to space them out and then I thought, nah, Auld Dog’s are like birds at a feeder, doesn’t matter how many are there – you can stand and watch all day.

Speaking of stepping up to the plate, someone who did suggested I might write about my holiday in Ireland.

I’m still thinking about it… and now the shopping’s arrived, so I gotta go for a while.

Luke's an Auld Dog

Luke, nearly 35, lives in Dublin, works in tv land, and generally has more than enough side projects to keep him busy (bio by Q).

I used to want to live in the future when I was a kid. Maybe it was because at the time, the present was the 1980s. Maybe it was because I was a geeky kid with braces on my teeth and I felt things had to get better than watching my brothers kick ass on the rugby pitch and studying trigonometry for the Inter Cert. Well, things did better. And now I feel like I do live in the future. Though there's a distinct lack of jet-packs to get to work and silvery androids to do the hoovering, it's actually pretty good. This internet thing is deadly. This country is no longer full of mad bombers and psychopaths (well actually it is, but they do considerably less mad bombing than they used to). Flying to Paris for €20 is pretty good too.

From what I can tell, talent is not the most important thing if you want to get somewhere in life. There are two things you need if you want to succeed - luck and desire.

Experts on the TV are not experts. They are people who are willing to go on the TV. Most real experts couldn't be bothered.

I must have had ten different beards at this stage. I worry that this is a sign of confusion about myself.

I worry a lot. At least, I am today as I'm writing this. In fact I'm worried what people reading this will think. But not enough to not post it. You could call this neurotic narcissism I suppose.

Some days I'm just carried along on an unstoppable wave of positivity, possibilities, bonhomie and bad jokes. Today is not one of those days. By the way, the word positivity is not in the Microsoft Word dictionary. Figures.

It seems to be the done thing to give your opinion about the world in this Auld Dog yoke, but I don't really feel I have anything interesting to say. And when it comes to global affairs I'm beginning to prefer people who have interesting opinions rather than correct ones.

Speaking of which, is George Bush so bad? I can't help thinking he's probably not, but he is surrounded by people who are genuinely evil.

I keep talking about moving to London. I've been doing it for five years and I still haven't gone.

I love blogs but I couldn't be bothered to have one myself.

It never ceases to amaze me how little logic I apply to the various situations and challenges that I come across in life and how difficult it is to get any perspective on them.

I'd like to punch Ricky Gervaise in his Ricky Ger-Face. (He looks like my mate Gerry BTW. And no, I don't want to punch Gerry's face).

I think one of the big problems with men is that they can't talk to their friends about their emotional difficulties. I think one of the big problems with women is that they can.

I have a terrible habit of trying to get somewhere in my career and then when I get there, to start looking around for something more interesting. And I don't mean the next rung up, I mean the next ladder across. It's like a sort of lateral ambition. Lambition?

Is it more important to enjoy life or to leave a lasting legacy? I don't know, but right now I'm tending towards the former.

I distinctly remember the last night of my twenties as crushingly depressing. But once I turned 30 things perked up. I'm 35 this year. Feels like it might be a big deal.

I have a job where I never have to wear a suit. But bizarrely, I end up wearing a "uniform", artfully scruffy clothes that scream "this is the job I do". It's a bit annoying, because I don't remember making a conscious decision about this. It seems to have just happened.

I hate when people tell me they are "trying to write a book/be an artist/make a film." Either do it or shut up about it. By the way, I'm trying to write a book at the moment.

I like my laptop too much. I show it to people who visit my house. It must be so boring for them.

Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, which offers the collected wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you want to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 pearls of wisdom, with a bio and a photo to Queenie, or I'll write it, at auld.dog@gmail.com

Trish Byrne's an Auld Dog

Trish Byrne, 36, writes abstracts for a living and novels for fun, rescues dogs and cats (and her friends when necessary) and sometimes prefers the age of sail to that of the combustion engine (bio and pic by Q.)

People who talk about the demise of rural pub life in Ireland talk about the smoking ban and, now, random breath testing. But what they don't talk about is the other factor, that for years men went to the pub in the evening, sat there all night, and then waited for their wives (or, indeed, their mammies) to come and fetch them. Since women, even in the Irish countryside, have social lives of their own now, that's not going to happen for them.

I've lived on a housing estate for a large portion of my life, and they are strange places. Everyone has plenty of space, but it's all individualised, and the potential collective bargaining power of the estate never seems to be realised. Why don't we get together and get a communal Tesco delivery, for instance, and reduce our delivery costs? Or a communal pizza delivery at 7.30 on a Thursday night? Or have our own estate-wide broadband network? It's not how estates function, is why not.

Not having any children, the three things that have taken over my life since I became an adult are back pain, dogs, and writing. Back pain in a bad way. When you've got it, that's it, you're incapacitated until it's passed. If you drop a pen or a glove on the ground, forget it, it's gone.

Dogs, well, they're like permanent toddlers, and they thrive on routine. If you don't have a life with at least some routine in it, I recommend you don't get a dog.

And writing, well, I've always done it. I used to think I wanted to be published, but now I think I just enjoy it. Making up stories is fun. Writing a certain number of words in a day is fun. Just getting to the end of the page is fun. Filling up a notebook with your handwriting is satisfying, even if you never read it back. It seems like a strange hobby to people, but I don't really understand why. People run marathons and don't win them. They play in bands that will never have a record contract, they paint pictures or take pictures that aren't for sale, so what's strange about writing novels for fun?

www.accentmonkey.blogspot.com

Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, which offers the collected wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you want to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 pearls of wisdom, with a bio and a photo to Queenie, or I'll write it, at auld.dog@gmail.com

Trees in Portumna, Ireland December 2006

People in treehouses shouldn't give out the password

So, Queenie's been a bit lax the last few weeks. Sorry about that. Life has been a bit complicated.

Suffice it to say that the days of coming home from work and lounging around the apartment langorously while dreaming up blog posts are over. For a bit anyways.

Work is as relentless as ever. Even when there are no scandals and no Legislature sittings, which demand a relentless conveyor belt of what my colleague refers to as 'bright, shiny objects' i.e. issues, for the assembled politicians and hangers on, day to day life in the world of oppositional politics still demands a relentless conveyor belt of bright shiny objects for the media.

Plus we had our annual electricity rates bunfight this week, with the power company asking the regulator for a rate increase, and the forces of good rallied against them, and a veritable vulture flock of lawyers going chi-ching, resulting in mounds and mounds and mounds of badly written documentation about coal prices and executive bonuses and why the poorest people in this province have to pay the most for their energy and gas flue desensitisation and blah-di-fucking-blah that Queenie had to plough through to no avail because the power company took the hit before the hearing started in any course....

Here's a thought.

Instead of creating paper and using electricity to write on the pages and send the documentation to a gazzilion people who have better things to do than read them seeing as it appears to be a pointless exercise, why don't we just save a load of time and money and burn the trees in the power stations?

And while I'm on the subject of trees, the ugly issue of the treehouse is rearing its head again.

Treehouses...

When I was nine, the lads on our road built a treehouse and I was never allowed to go into the treehouse because I didn't have the password. I found the whole episode singularly unfair at the time and I suppose it was my first entry into the 'you can't be in our club because you don't have a penis' part of life that DRIVES ME CRACKED and sends me flying into a rage that is so earth shattering that it proves to the boys that it was a good decision not to give me the password.

God knows, I might have torn the treehouse down during one of my pre-menstrual fits!!

One would think that twenty eight years later I would have either figured out the password, or it would have been abolished.

But no.

It's alive and kicking in the twentyfirst century workplace.

The only way to deal with it is to imagine said workmates wearing Just William clothes, including a jaunty school cap perched sideways on their heads, while sitting in a treehouse instead of an office, peering out through the slatted sides with their war paint on, keeping sketch for the other gang, who are planning on making a raid from their clubhouse down the road.

Thinks about that for a second.

That's so like the way it is it's scary.

Thing is, I don't actually want to be in the treehouse. It's cold, it's wet, it's hierarchical, it's boring sitting around waiting for the raid. I'd much rather hang out with the girls and tear their personalities to shreds while we make mud pies for the battle of the treehouse.

I just want to know what they talk about while they're up there. Strategy? Leadership? Tactics?
I should try to tame my nosier shores I suppose. It's just I have a sneaking suspicion they're all in there having a competition to see who can emit the noisiest fart, while us girls are all down at the bottom of the tree making the bright shiny objects that actually win the war in the long run.

Colombo's an Auld Dog

Currently living in Dublin, Ireland, Colombo (not her real name - Q)has more years of technical writing experience than she cares to admit. She is also prone to ringing good friends who live on the other side of the world for rambling philosophical conversations... or sometimes gossip or occasional drunken chitchat.

I dislike New Year's Resolutions and rarely make them. As someone who isn't pushed about sticking to things, personal resolutions hold no interest for me--it's like setting yourself up for automatic failure. However, this year I seem to have made minor lifestyle changes without officially resolving to. They sort of snuck up on me sideways. Since Jan. 2nd I have walked to work every day, unlike the previous eight years of taking public transport. I have also made more of an effort on the domestic front, but there I didn't really have much choice since I have been a nomad for the past couple of months while my house is being renovated.

Breaking up with the boyfriend 4 Jan was more of a spontaneous decision. Not quite the same thing, although one could argue it might be a lifestyle change.

When you are staying as a guest in friends' homes for extended periods, you have to adapt to their routines and try to be on your best behavior. Staying one night or a weekend with friends doesn't count. I am firmly convinced anybody can get along for a short period of time. Everyone is on their easygoing, relaxed behavior then, and house rules are not even explained, let alone enforced.

The various friends whose spare bedrooms I have taken over in various countries (er, two) are great friends: laidback, warm, generous people I like to socialize with (as are others who offered but live too far away). Staying long-term in a friend's sitting room is doomed to failure. You are guaranteed to disrupt their routines and annoy them. Having your own room makes it easy to give the loving couple some time on their own or even avoid them if they or you are particularly grouchy.

However, these cushy housing situations I have found myself in still have their pitfalls--I try my damnedest to conform to their household routines and be a polite guest, but their varying kitchen routines are a minefield. I was and have been dealing with two couples, which means four sets of kitchen rules and guidelines--too much for my little brain to follow. Okay, some of the rules are pretty easy: what goes into the dishwasher and what gets hand washed. One of my hosts is the designated kitchen king and gave up on trying to teach me stuff, preferring to do everything himself efficiently. Another host rinses everything before putting it in the dishwasher, while a third queen of the kitchen puts everything in dirty (barely scraped off) but taught me which way the utensils have to face.

Apparently, how much you pack the dishes into the dishwasher and how often you run it also vary greatly from one household to the next.

Admittedly, I am not a goddess of domesticity. One morning during breakfast and elaborate party preparations, I toasted a bagel in the toaster oven without noticing that there were meltable ingredients intended for the party sitting on top of the oven. I got a red card for that one, and was sent to the shops in search of pomegranate juice, cornichons, and steno lighters. That guaranteed my absence for a few hours, especially since I hadn’t a clue what steno lighters looked like.

Perhaps I am just rusty. When I was growing up, we had to clean the dishes until they were practically spotless before putting them in the dishwasher (I never saw the point myself), and now I do not even own a dishwasher. My friendly hosts have other piddly kitchen guidelines, but you get the idea. I will be going home soon, back to my own kitchen domain where I can set a new routine, perhaps incorporating some of the lessons I have been taught. That sounds suspiciously like a resolution though…


Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, which offers the collected wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you want to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 pearls of wisdom, with a bio and a photo to Queenie, or I'll write it, at auld.dog@gmail.com

Fay's Little Friend, Long Island NS (minus 18C)

Pamela's an Auld Dog

Pamela Glendenning is a twenty three year old tarot card reader, world traveller and artistic soul. (bio & photo by Q.)

I think the Wicca philosophy for life is wonderful, "Do as you please, as you want, so long as you do not harm yourself, or others." You need to have a pretty strong belief system and a well defined set of values to live by it. It can be interpreted differently by those who use it, therefore it's not going to work for everyone. It is taking me a long time to reach the ability to do this, I've been striving everyday for years; a real challenge keeps you motivated!!

I'm pretty young and i dont know a whole lot, but to have no fear, to strive to help others, and to be at peace and stillness in your own mind, are worth more than any amount of material wealth, really.

Some people say that the world is controlled by a minute few, very rich, little known, almighty powerful people. They are shape shifting lizards in suits, who live off the emotion of fear, and need humans as their slaves. Whether this is true or not is highly debatable!! But I hope it is, as I can never understand the motivation behind our most powerful leaders and the decisions they make concerning human life and the environment. If they are reptiles motivated by sheer greed and lust for power I can kind ofunderstand where they're coming from, otherwise their reasoning is completely lost on me.

Drugs are the worst thing in the world and the best thing in the world. A dychotomy, like most things in life, completely simple in its complexity.

We are so technologically advanced it is a wonder, but our ignorance and lack of empathy concerning our fellow human beings rivals that of our cavemen ancestors, most of the time.

I find that if you wear sandals as much as possible your overall perspective on life becomes more chilled back, relaxed and calm. Free your feet!!

I have seen far too many coincidences and patterns in scrying tools; tarot cards, crystal balls, pendulums etc., to dismiss their uncanny ability to tap into the unconcious mind, and to allow a reader to consciously analyse the information given.

Everyone is the same but also very different. Each has his own ability and stength to cope with what life throws their way. Therefore I think it's important to keep this in mind when dealing with folk and their problems. Do not judge another against yourself, each lives within her own context.

Everything in life is energy. How you use or ignore this power is completely up to you. If you harness this energy for positives and redirect it back into the universe, in a very short period you will start to see some very special, amazing results.

Television is probably the most pointles activity one can immerse themselves in. It is a cheap (and effective) means to control the masses, it wears down one's intellect, and it turns people into slobs. I know because I used to watch it eight hours a day. I haven't watched TV for a few years now, no advertisements invade my space, tis bliss!! All you need to do is unplug your arial, and get a dvd player, all the best movies and quality shows are available on disc, sorted!!

And as for the news. . . buy a paper, that isn't owned by supervillain (lizard) Rupert Murdoch.

As the old maxim gos: "All energy follows thought." If you project fear, paranoia, and restriction, these forces will enter and control your life. On the other hand, if you fill your head with love, joy, and freedom . . .well the sky is the limit, for sure! I know it sounds corny but it works.

Giving up smoking is the hardest, yet most liberating thing I've ever done. It took years to accomplish, but worked eventually. If you feel theinclination, go for it, you have the power!!!

Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, which offers the collected wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you want to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 pearls of wisdom, with a bio and a photo to Queenie, at auld.dog@gmail.com

Chocolate Lake, Halifax, January 2007

December Sunset, Lough Derg, Ireland

Is it over yet? The SCANDAL I mean

I read somewhere recently about an office game that some people play, I can't remember its name, where you make up funny statements about the war in Iraq, really ludicrous ones, statements that can't possibly be true.

Damned if I can remember any of them now...

Maybe Despite the whole world, including the US Army, wanting the opposite, Bush sends more troops to Iraq! was one of them.

Anyways, I've been thinking about that all week, which has been a lively one in Nova Scotian politics.

We had a SCANDAL, boys and girls.

Nova Scotian Cabinet Minister rear-ends Sports Editor and journalist going home after night in the pub and runs away!

Freelance photographer follows Cabinet Minister home and cell phone films him weaving across the carpark!

None of the media workers recognise the Cabinet Minister.

Eventually, Halifax cops get footage and tell photographer it is Cabinet Minister.

Photographer sells footage to the CBC and ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE!

Cabinet Minister resigns and takes extended leave of absence from Caucus and no journalist asks him why!

Desperate to keep story running, media discover that Minister's lease car - a second hand Jetta - costs taxpayers $880 a month.

Nova Scotians wake up to the real scandal of over-priced car leases and say hmmmm...

At this point Queenie does the same and checks all the lease companies and their directors against the Tory donation list - grand total $13,500.

Never mind that!

The Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief of Staff and the Director of Communications were all told about the fender bender on the night in question by the Tory Caucus Chairman who drove past the incident and said, jeez, that looks like Ernie's car.

Which is fine, except they'd all been pretending that they only found out two weeks later (giving the Minister time to sober up, presumably).

Upon finding this out, media who have been scrumming the Premier spot the Chief of Staff sneaking out of Government Buildings and abandon the Premier in mid-sentence to chase his elderly Chief of Staff down the road and pin him to some railings until he answers question.

Chief of Police holds press conference to point out that cops are not incompetent for failing to breathalyse the Minister - he didn't answer the doorbell when they called round.

Chief of Staff holds press conference and says he didn't ask Minister whether he'd been drinking because he didn't want to know. Then states that he had a drink with the Minister earlier on the night in question.

Media don't ask the Chief of Staff why he didn't want to know.

NDP filibuster bill on campaign finance and rip into the Government at every possible opportunity and House sits until midnight every night for a week.

Media chase every politician they can find wanting to know what they know about the SCANDAL.

Minister for Agriculture, who until today had been open about incident, now states that he has a lawyer and is not answering questions and gets chased to the railings. Three times in one day.

Liberals, who are propping up the minority Tory Government, say they are having serious discussions about not doing that anymore, in between voting for the Government's crappy campaign finance bill.

Queenie is very amused at the complete lack of dignity shown by everyone in this situation but the NDP.

This is a great game, all the same.

Matthew's an Auld Dog

Matthew is a 38 year old, married father of three (Evelyn, Charlie and soon to arrive baby - Q): a veteran, a liberal, a hopeless romantic, and a walking cocktail party of information from Minneapolis/St. Paul.


If your rational for getting fit is a date on the calendar, it will fail. It has to be a lifestyle change. I can see why some people get real frustrated. I can gain 20 pounds in two weeks easy, but to lose that 20 pounds will take me 6 months of working out and watching what I eat.

Let's face it; the USA is the bi-polar nation. We tell everyone that looks don't matter that it's what is on the inside that matters, and then have our NEWS reporters telling us all the latest Paris and Britney gossip. We tell everyone that they need to be healthy, flooding them with exercise options and healthy advice, only to immediately follow it up with monster burgers, out of control portion sizes and junk food cheaper than healthy food. We tell people it's not what you want, it's what you have, and then create a society of lemmings with false desire for the newest and latest gadgets,often in a brazen quality that suggests that this one phone/car/television is the thing that will finally make you happy.

I love Minnesota, and Canada for that matter, but Ireland is truly wonderful, with the most beautiful people in the world.

Don't ask someone about their past if you don't want to know about it. Just know they are with you now.

Here is the great debate. Work something mindless, with limited interruption, put in your hours and leave, have some physical labor involved, but you never will bring work home, and earn $30,000, or work that skilled position where you work way over 40 hours for the week, constantly bring work home, think about work even when you don't have to, sacrifice family functions and make $70,000. There are times I wish I were still pouring beers in a bar.

I will say I am glad I am eating steak and fresh veggies instead of spaghetti and bananas.

We in the USA really push ourselves hard, much harder than I think we have to. I think it is a vicious pyramid where the guy at the top feels that making 40 million a year is not enough and then pushes upper management, who in turn push middle management, who then in turn create long hours and tough shifts for the workers, so that the next year they make 42 million. In that same time, no one calculates the accumulated cost of lost family time, stress on workers at work, stress in workers lives caused by work. I think we devalue the cost of actual living.

I had a boss tell a staff meeting that if you have a loved one who is getting ready to pass away, that she had no problem refusing to let you go be with them because you shouldn't wait until the end to let them know how you feel. It told me more about her than I ever wanted to know.

I love the men and women who choose to fight for the ideals that originated in the greatest democracy the world has ever seen. They have come freely to serve. They give themselves and their blind faith in our country fills me with pride. There is only one thing they ask in return for their service; don't send them into personal or unjustified conflict.

Do I love the troops? Of course I do. That's why I don't want to see them come home in body bags from a country that doesn't want us there, for nothing more than potential corporate profit.

George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever seen. He is the Anti-Lincoln. Instead of sacrificing his personal agenda for the betterment of the country, he sacrifices the betterment of the country for his own personal agenda. He is even worse than William Henry Harrison, the President who died a month after his inauguration.

I have to live somewhere that has four distinct seasons. Change is good.

Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, which offers the collected wisdom of an individual for the rest of us to ponder. If you want to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 pearls of wisdom, with a bio and a photo to Queenie, at auld.dog@gmail.com

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.

On the Future, and its coincidence with New Year's Resolutions

In response to my previous post, when I was using prevarication about what to write on as a space filler to make the post look like a half decent sized one,

Andrew Farrell said...

Talk about the distinction between your New Years Resolutions and your hopes for the future!I'm not just taking the mick, I'm interested in what bits of your future you do and don't see yourself having control over.

Which comment has been mulling around in my head all day. Without much of a breakthrough so far.

I have however:

• painted the bedroom set an ivory base-coat,
• tidied the utility cupboard, the linen box and the fridge,
• sorted out the recyclables,
• filled a garbage bag of clothes and shoes I don't wear anymore to send to the SallyAnne,
• spray-painted the red fold up chair black,
• shouted at Himself about something that needed shouting about,
• read the Observer online,
• talked online to my mate Juicy Lucy in Aswan, Egypt, where she is currently leading a Dragoman trip,
• made a stew,
• ordered photographs online,
• made Himself's birthday present,
• started a new photobook on Shutterfly (DON'T do this - dreadful interface, I am only doing it because it comes free with this year's photo print plan),
• finished John Updike's Terrorist, which is pretty darned good for an Updike,
• and played numerous games of Farm Hustle (and got to round three finally).

A typical lazy Sunday afternoon Chez Queenie.

I jest.

All of those things had to be done today because I should have done them all in November. In November I sat on the couch feeling sorry for myself, drinking wine, eating chocolate and watching television. Which is the only way I can get through November after trying every other possible alternative.

Which brings me to the first of my NY resolutions, to wean myself back off television.

Which leads me to Andrew's essay title: The Distinction between Queenie's NYR and her hopes for the Future.

I made an interesting realisation recently. As I am a person who needs other people's affirmation in order to feel good about myself, putting myself in a situation where the only people I have in my life are workmates and television actors is a bad thing.

Yes, I know, I know, I should know this. I do know this, I have known for a long time, for example, that working in politics, which is dog eat dog at the best of times, is bad for a girl who needs a lot of affirmation. I have also known for a long time that television is bad for the soul generally, but particularly for \ sensitive soul, who is worried about the colour of her teeth, skin, hair, size of her bosom, hairiness of her arms, blackheads on her nose, shape of said nose, etc. most of the time, not to mention every second sentence that comes out of her less than tactful mouth.

But there is a hell of a difference between knowing something and realising it about yourself.

There is.

Hence the decision to wean myself off all television except for Heroes, Ugly Betty, and Grey's Anatomy, which are all full of flawed people and therefore ALRIGHT TO WATCH.

Great, I hear Andrew say. Just great. But what about the dog eat dog world of Monday to Friday?

Hmmm... I guess that's where we enter the realms of 'parts of my life I have no control over', albeit temporarily. Seeing as my Canadian residency permit is conditional on my having a job in Canada, and my work permit is for this job only.

But if I spend the evenings undertaking self-affirming stuff, I'll be better set up for the day.

I had another realisation recently. I am a creative person.

I am.

I am a creative person who thinks I should be a writer because I love to read and I admire authors, but I am a creative person who needs constant affirmation from others, so taking photos and making calendars and painting furniture and making pretty cards to sell in the market and writing in my blog is much more satisfying.

Which leads me to the second of my resolutions.

Fuck the novel.

It's never going to happen.

An enormous weight of self-loathing is lifted off Queenie's shoulders.

However, the desire to write novels was always grounded in the need to try to make some money from being creative (those of you who wish to sneer should examine the bank balance of one JK Rowling), so the downside of the resolution is that I have to try and make some money from my photos this year.

Especially since I sneaked the Canon EOS in before 1 January and the third of my resolutions.

I have enough things (apart from a car).

I have enough clothes. I have enough shoes. I have enough art. I have enough pieces of pottery. I have enough dishes. I have enough books (until I have finished reading them all). I have enough music. I have enough make up and body lotions. I have enough jewellry. I have enough throws. I have enough linens. I have enough curtains.

I don't have enough money in my travel budget. I don't have enough savings. I don't have enough money to invest in a business someday. I don't have enough money to buy a piece of land near the Tobeatic Wilderness, and build an off-grid house on it.

So this year I resolve to cut down on my expenditure and start saving for the future.

Which leads me to the issue of the future. And my control over it.

I must say, Andrew, I laughed my ass off when I saw that.

Control??????????? ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Does anyone?

No I am not giving the lecture on global warming, although Himself's son has copped it now and apparently we are all going to be flooded in thirty years. You have been warned. Start practising your paddling.

Then I started to think about it.

What can I not control?

I can't control the decision to be made by Immigration Canada. I can't control the way Ireland is now and the loss of what I liked about Dublin. I can't control Himself's dreams of the future (although I can influence them to a certain extent. not that I ever would. much. :-), which have a pretty strong impact on my future. I can't control what happens to my family and when and if they will need me to care for them.

I can't control the price of property in Ireland and the ECB rate and its impact on my mortgage. I can't control my income too much at the moment. I can't control when the Tories are going to call an election, which will impact on my life.

So I guess my resolutions are all about how I fill in the time while I wait for these forces to move me one way or another.

Most people call this time life. I call it this year. I don't think any further than that. I never have.

Maybe I should extend my view. I don't know...

Whacha think, Andrew?

And my final resolution for this year is to start a 'This Much I Know' column, a la Observer magazine. I'm going to call it 'Auld Dog', as in 'the auld dog for the hard road'.

For those of you who don't read This Much I Know every week, it is a column in which a person, old/ young, famous/ normal, male/ female, etc. etc. is asked to summarise the things they have realised about life. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are sad, sometimes they are downright sensible and useful to think about, sometimes they highlight just how shallow the person is, sometimes they reveal hidden depths. My favourite last year were Bill Nighy's and an elderly guy who sells vegetables in Covent Garden market.

To submit an entry, email 600 - 700 words of wisdom, not less than ten individual Auld Dog conclusions if you can, along with a short bio and a photo if you like, to Auld.Dog@gmail.com and I will post them here.

Happy New Year everyone. Finally.

Queenie's back in Canada

Having had a month’s break from blogging, it is as difficult to go back to as it was to go back to school.

Or work.

Or to get those essays in by early January.

Or face into exams.

Queenie has spent ALL DAY tidying her apartment: and by tidying her apartment she means the kind of tidying that entails laying her socks and tights out in orderly lines in their drawer, which has been dusted and lined.

Of sorting her tops into piles named: basics, summer, funky all-year, sporty (there was just the one), outdoors, and sparkly (lots of them of course).

Of rearranging her rock collection.
And her ornaments.
And her candlesticks.

That kind of difficult.

Studying for her finals kinda difficult.

A big ‘uuuuunggghhh’ of boredom mixed with guilt and a tincture of panic squeezing her temples everytime she tries to tackle it kinda difficult

At least her future isn’t riding on her blog…

But now she is bored of tidying, not that she’s finished, no sirree bob, it will have to be in order to find the bed tonight.

So maybe a bit of writing might break the monotony of folding.

So why the long break?

It wasn’t intentional, although Queenie could pretend it was and no one would be the wiser. It just panned out that way. Early December was frenetic – pouring four weeks of work into two so that Queenie could go on holiday; going on holiday for three weeks; and then another frenetic week in work while she tried to figure out what she was supposed to be doing in 2007.

Watching the federal government try to work out how much of a threat to their planned June majority Stephan Dion is, and watching the provincial government drive itself out of office through its own incompetence, whilst trying not to laugh at either of them because we are a RESPONSIBLE Opposition is what I’ll be doing mostly, it would appear.

Also, watching the Labour party fuck up the election in Ireland AGAIN is on the cards too. But at least that won’t lead to any canvassing on my part.

Queenie will sit this one out.

A lot of politics is sitting waiting patiently for the other shoe to drop. More difficult than it looks.

Anyways, more of that anon, I don’t want to talk about politics today.

What should I talk about?

New Year’s Resolutions?

The Best of 2006?

My trip to Ireland?

My impending application for residency in Canada?

My hopes for the future?

The band of uuunnnggghhh tightens imperceptibly at the thought of all of them.