clearbluecup

Sorry the site went down for so long over christmas. The downside to hosting my site on free university webspace is that it is subject to the whims and vagaries of sysadmin who go on two week holidays.There were so many things I could have written about, and each time I checked to see if the site was up my idea evaporated in a puff of dissapointment. But here we are now, in the ever-changing present, and I am not really writing about much of anything at all.

Consistency is comforting, however, and not saying much of anything blends in with our very quiet holiday, during which we didn't go out much or do anything exciting. At first I felt twinges and prickles of guilt. We're young and hip, dammit! We should be shaking our booties in nightclubs and having cocktail parties in our livingroom and having the most fun possible in every single moment. But then I relaxed and picked up a paperback and laid on the couch and melted away into the world of poets and paris. (Enid Starkie's biography of Baudlaire. Very highly reccomended, but there is no picture of the cover on Amazon which caused some confusion as to whether I should break the continuity of my books section over there on the right.)

Of course, even through our holiday of non-events, there were events that happened. Happenings sloshing over from other people's lives into the calm pool of our own. Sisters fighting with each other, friends going travelling, other friends coming to visit us on their travels. A dress-up day at work means I decide to go buy a hot pink feather boa. A friend from tom's university days comes to visit and now we are committed to visiting Glasgow in the not-too-distant future. It's actually quite difficult to do nothing. The tides of time have a forceful current.

The still and misty grey days spent on the couch and sitting at the kitchen table looking out onto the street have been creatively blank, but seeds have been dropping into my mind like silent parachutes. While I wait for them to germinate, I wash the saucepans and hang up the laundry and wipe the breadcrumbs up from the counter. In the long, dark evenings of rest and reading, my mind sinks into an armchair and the stillness expands with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Last night tom & I sat around the glowing screen of our computer monitor and he taught me how to converse with robots to get files off the internet.

It's a very strange concept for me, chatting with robots, but in the "plane of existence" that is irc, they serve an important purpose and have no real need to be human. Gives an interesting slant on the Turing test though.

However, it is kind of tricky to find things if you don't know what you want to look for. I'm trying to build up a collection of albums that I like so that I have some tunes that I really enjoy listening to (and so I can justify getting a swish new mp3 player). So I cast out a net to you, my readers, and beg you to send back some threads of good music for me to follow - What are you listening to right now that you are absolutely loving?

So, we tried to watch Gangs of New York last night. When I say tried, what I mean is that we turned it on and watched the grotesque opening slasher flght scene, through several scenes of knifings, beatings, random violence, American Patriotism, swaggering arrogance, and love scenes in which the girl nearly opens our handsome young romeo's jugular with her hidden knife before they passionately embrace. When the swaggering arrogant butcher was about to torture the young hero in a crowded dancehall, I had to stop watching.

Now, maybe I'm just squeamish and lily-livered. Maybe I'm too innocent, too much of a chicken girly-girl to really appreciate this movie. Maybe I'm just too far removed from American gang-culture to really appreciate the deeper meaning of the different kind of stabbings ("this is a wound" *stab* "this is a kill" *stab* "Now you try it"). However, I am starting to get really, really worried about the state of the world as we know it.

I know that this could all be the result of my own perception of American culture right now, but it's starting to get more than a little nauseating. The propaganda machine is in full swing, and it's saying "get out your knife, the enemy is just over your shoulder. Don't be afraid to die for your country."

I even caught hints of this in the Lord of the Rings - the noble death of the warrior fighting for what he knows is right. (I know, I know. It was part of the original story, and fighting for what you believe in is nothing new. But they sure made joining the army seem noble and glamourous) And what about poor old Samwise Gamgee anyway? He sure got the short end of the stick, after all that being doubted and having to carry Frodo and save his life and all. I guess it's just a dog-eat-dog world out there, and the truly noble don't get adequate recognition. They probably wouldn't have wanted the attention anyway.

I switched ears today. I always wear my headset on my left ear, but it started hurting yesterday and so I figured it was time for a change. A filter was lifted, some static cleared out of the line. I could hear the echo of my own voice in the speaker of the customer's phone, a hollow echo of my self reflected in some random irish household a hundred times a day. 117 times today, in actual fact.

Every connection submerges me into a random personality for some arbitrary period of time. I am houdini, tied up in the limitations of corporate-speak and representation and doubly-bound by my own personal issues of the day. (what argument this morning? what headache? what uncomfortable trousers? what irritating co-workers?) It is my challenge to escape with elegance and flair in the shortest amount of time, no matter what is thrown at me. You know it's time for your last tea-break when the voice ceases to be a human voice but instead becomes what it is on a very basic, physical level - incessant noise in your ear.

It's the fatigue that does it, I think. The energy required to recognize the individuality in each caller and to acknowledge their basic humanity and respect them for it evaporates over time. Chills, (why can they not figure out how to make it more than 15 degrees in my office?) fatigue and sheer frustration all grind away at my polish of professionalism and telephone technique, making the great escape much more clumsy.

Regardless, I have been learning things. Today I learned (again?) that anger is just a mask for fear. Nearly every caller who is angry from 0:01 is afraid of something. Afraid of being disconnected, afraid of their lies being found out, afraid of being robbed in their own home because their streetlight is burnt out, afraid of having to move into their new house with their newborn baby and dozen other children without any power for the heating or the waterpump.

But after dealing with 117 people who are every shade of angry, frustrated, ignorant, senile, illiterate, arrogant, foreign, and also occasionally pleasant, grateful, intelligent, clever and humourous, I am tired and empty. So I come home and surf the internet and look into the digital windows of other people's lives and try to imagine what it would be like to be someone like this - someone who has not lived your standard-issue sort of life and who is making a point to do what she wants, even if other people are going to question that.

And then I looked here and there and everywhere. And thought about taking next year out to get a masters in philosophy. I can always think about applying it to the "so-called 'real world'" in a year's time...

What does it mean to live in the present?

What does it mean to be conscious of your own birth?

What does it mean to be conscious of your own death?

What does it mean to be conscious of the death of your inconceived child?

What does it mean to dance with your arms and legs swinging and leaping and singing with energy?

What does it mean to lie perfectly still?

What does it mean to be intelligent?

What does it mean to live?

What does it mean?

What does it?

What does?

What?

?

The systems we use at work are fairly antiquated, in computer terms. They are the same systems that were in use when the call centre was opened, and I don't even know how long ago that was - someone said 1974 to me once. They are frustrating, telnet-based, glitchy, and require you to memorize codes in order to move around the customer database. So, since this is the 21st century and all, we are developing new systems.

For months I've been thinking about the people developing the systems. They must be sitting in their little cubicles typing away, computer code trailing out of their fingers like ticker tape in the st paddy's day parade. They have the power to make the new systems either a dream come true or a nightmarish hell of angry customers and disappearing data. "How I would love to be on the team developing the new systems!" I would say wistfully, gazing out the window. "If only I had better programming skills."

Then one day the boss came up to my desk and leaned down and said, "This may sound off the wall to you, but we would like you to be on the project developing the new systems. We need people from the call centre who will be using it every day to help us design the interface and the buttons. You would come up to dublin on the 7am train monday morning and back down to cork on friday afternoon. Have a chat with your husband over the weekend and let us know on monday."

What does it feel like to have something you have wished for come true? It's a bit overwhelming. My heartbeat doubled instantly and stayed that way for the rest of the day. I was afraid I might actually get palpitations or something. I couldn't concentrate; I kept fidgeting and getting up to go to the loo and then coming back and writing emails. It's a bit like falling into a deep, fast river of fate. You have to just go with it, cause there's no other option, and that's a bit intimidating.

So, February 9th (my husband's 30th birthday!) I will get up at 5:30am and take my suitcase and catch the 7am train to dublin for training. I don't know where I am going to stay yet, I don't know how to apply for my expenses, I don't know what I am going to be doing exactly, and I don't know who is going with me. But I do know I've committed myself to weekly travel for the next six months, and I also know that this is not the sort of opportunity that knocks twice...