Bebo: Still breathing in and out

I just rejoined Bebo in an attempt to feverishly dig up photos for a friend's Hen Party and Hey! Guess what! Bebo's still around, first of all.  Second of all:

Bebo added those buttons for YOU so YOU could fully empathise with a friend's posting. As long as you wanted to empathise along the lines of "Cool!", "Funny!", "Sorry!", "OMG!" [which is how I want to empathise with everyone who has evidenced activity on Bebo inside the past three years] or "Agree" [What?]. No "FFS" button yet added but watch this space. Bebo has proven itself to be a constant innovator in the past so it can only be a matter of time.

And There You Go, Now You Know All Of My Secrets

Sometimes, when I'm feeling a little bit lonely but also melodic (not too lonely, just a nice measure for poignancy), I'll listen to Heart of Gold like ten times in a row, sometimes more. I don't even particularly adore Neil Young or anything, just Heart of Gold.

True story. Rivetting, I know.

Mad laughs on the beach

From my new favourite place, the retronaut.

The Awl

It's commenters are obviously the WORST and a few of it's heavier posts have a tendancy to drift to 1500- 2000 words*, but increasingly I'm enjoying the Awl. Especially for pieces like this which passes a soberly critical eye over fanfiction derived from Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels while floating a few interesting comments about the the darker Romance fiction publications and where their writers come from. That was a disgustingly long and incomprehensible sentence, wasn't it? I'm hope you got out early on.

* And obviously I would never ever consider withdrawing my devotion to my all time favourite love, thehairpin.com

I don't know why organisations use social media when it's awkward & unsocial, chapter 412

 Hey yall.  You interested in the upcoming Irish Stability Treaty Referendum?  Course you are!  EVERYONE is going on about it. Your search "Irish Stability Treaty" brings you to the IIEA treaty subpage with a host of interviews, charts, explanations and updates. Great! Hey guys, can I tweet this?  Can I tweet this while referencing my source? Hey, there's a twitter button!  Yay!

Let's click it, fire this social web up!

Uh, wait a second, this isn't a twitter account. Hmmmm.  Maybe I'll just click on one of these and it'll bring me to the twitter account...

Oh right, it just links to the IIEA blog. Okay, hmmm. Maybe I'll just click on this ole' tweet button here and see if it gets me to the IIEA twitter account:

Cool.The preset tweet is 20 characters over. TOO BORED, MOVING ON.

This is how I waste my time

8.45 pm: Discover Weduary.com existed
8.46 pm: "This might be useful for Roisin, or for other friends who are getting married soon. Lets find out more..."
8.47 pm: Begin planning imaginary wedding to Mark Ruffalo.
8.49 pm: Stop planning imaginary wedding to Mark Ruffalo because just planning it is getting me too excited to type.

Our weduary site is available at  http://weduary.com/LucyRuffalo. Please give Mark and I the time and space we need to plan our nuptials before ya'll start piling on about the absence of any percievable content on our weduary site: Mark is not pulling his weight in the planning stages WHATSOEVER.

Postcards From My Life

Sigh

BookTwo.Org - James Bridle is my God

"So the real problem with the ebook as it stands is that it denies us many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of cognitive dissonance. And there’s a social layer that forms around this, another timeline of reading reviews and discussing with friends, that the ebook could actually exploit better than the physical book, if we work on it some more. We really need to look at how we address this temporal mode with ebooks."

Great encouragement for people who love literature and who love ebooks and don't want to have to take sides. This blog is actually the best thing I've read about ereading & ebooks in, oh em Gee, one hundred years. I want to marry this blog and have it's babies. Can I elect a blog as president? It would be this blog, everytime.

No, I don't feel I overrely on comedic exageration to emphasise a point because I'm too lazy and stupid to have any rhetorical skills, WHY DO YOU ASK?

Bright Eyes & Emmylou Harris - Landlocked Blues.

So. Life. Blearg.

This is the best song/poem/thing in the world, ever.

No, it actually is.  I have it playing in the background while writing this and I am already crying by the time she mentions his muley cow. Ack.  Gillian Welsh kills me.

As a well-read, college-educated, reasonably comfortable white female in the south-east of Ireland, my opinion on things is OBVIOUSLY so so niche and thus is frequently sought on various matters. I read non-fiction books! Alot of the time those NF books are NOT about the Mitfords or Jane Austen and are about actual stuff that happened in the last fifteen years! I -sometimes, seriously, it is so painful though- read novels that AREN'T set pre-1950 and involve actual contemporary issues! [Gender & race politics during the post-WW2 era is kinda contemporary, right? Yeah? God, I so have my finger on the pulse of the average fiction reader. I'm so glad I work in the industry that I'm in. I would sooo hate to be out of touch of the typical fiction reader haha that would be a deathnell haha wait what?]

Also, I read the lifestyle sections of [certain] newspapers! And I have recently weaned myself off reading Roisin Ingle's IT's Saturday column for diuretic purposes! I'm so well-adjusted and alligned with the average 25- 40 demographic. Survey me! I'm, like, uber-intelligent and informed! I am!  I did a module on 20th Century Irish Pol in college! Yes! Yeah, so I can't spell for toffee outside MS Word but heck, I have opinions and I am willing to share them. Here is one and it is bland *SPOILERALERT*

So. I have a terrificly bad habit of canonizing things/people/books/authors/directors/musicians as my own personal gospel and utilising theorems/philosophies/lyrics from such as my own personal bible. Do you do this?  WHY WOULDN'T YOU? Itss pretty much how modern culture is presented to us. Like that Adele song?  Well, here's seventeen-hundred articles why Adele is awesome and why you should worship her and ALSO panicbuy concert tickets at 8am because you're told to. See also: Lily Allen, Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Florence & The Machine, countless others that are sufficently marketed to us MOR people so we prebook and think its a gift. They seem so great, let's make them our religion. Yeah?

It's a shockin' bad habit of mine, anyway, even before the marketeers cottened on to it. I have previously gotten through quitting a job by repeating a poem in my brain like it's religious verse, my (final, successful) driving test by mumbling the good luck message of a friend like it was a mantra. I have frequently reminded myself of this poem whenever I feel lost and adrift and can't understand humanity (AKA hungover).

I'm entirely cognisant of the fact that my future biographer will make great haystacks out of my professed atheism alligned with my imperiative need to idolise individuals, writers, politicans, men, women etc; and correctly question my opposition to theism. Hey.  Fine. Whatevs, future biographer: I havent done anything noteworthy yet so dunno why you exist.

I try real hard not to do it, because it's crazy and untenable and recently I have been super productive on the whole regarding-humans-I -meet-and-like-as-humans-not-as-prophets-on-how-I-should-live-my-life (look at me! 29 and still expecting to find a life mission from the next person I meet! Cult-leaders, seek me out!), but it's a slow progress.  Everytime I hit a metaphorical roadblock, I start humming "Hard times; ain't gonna rule my mind, honey"; anytime human avarice or folly exasperates me I find myself stumbling to Austen for satirical succor; whenever I feel like the biggest fool in the room I just smoke a cigarette and think of this song. And all these things, they're so great, so awesome, so profound, so off my beat that they fix me.  So, there's that. I'm not cured yet.

Stoner- AKA The Best Thing you will read, ever

I frequently construct random lists of my favourite things in my head, while driving or working or whatever, to imply I am a discerning individual with taste and standards and not just an arbitrary sampler of books, movies, music, pop culture, opinions, ideologies, oh no no, of course not.

Top five Coen movies, top five ideal book to movie adaptations, top whatever comedic novels, possible actors for the modern day movie adaption of Jane Austen's Persuasion that I will make someday and it will be awesome. Top five teen fiction series which don't offend my feminazi sensabilities.

Optimum reading schedule of sections in Irish Times weekend. Top five actually awesome female writers that are being woefully undermarketted. Top three Sinead O'Connor songs for performing at impromptu karaoke sessions. Top 600 awesome CJ Gregg oneliners [twoliners? Lets not be priggish about this; many of CJ's best lines are rebuttals]. Top five Nicholas Sparks novels. No no wait that was actually a joke.  Who actually reads more than one Nicholas Sparks novel without dying of saccharine poisoning.

Can you taste the sexy?  My interior monologue is dripping in sex, drugs and rock and roll, dudes. Point is, these lists/catologues are predictably private, dumb and pointless and subject to the dull cull of my caprices from time to time but one remains, like an totemic tenat of my cultural leanings:  John Williams' Stoner. Have you read it?  Why the hell not?

First and most presiecnt: its brilliant. Briiiiiiliant. You'll buy it or pick it up in your local library and think: "fuck, this looks like heavy going" cos I've seen four differnt covers for it and all of them are terrible. Ha ha aha it ain't. Jokes on you, bucko. This shit is SOLIDLY great.

It kicks off as the tale of a farm boy, William Stoner, hardships and pennypinching-ness a plenty, who's sent to college in urban Missouri in the 1930s to study AgSci 'cos his Mid-West father, foresight included, realises he'll need some educashun to get the family farm through to the next generation.  Our boy finds college a magical highway to learning, discourse and self-discovery and, changing his major to English, discovers all that symbolic shit that the moving from Ag Science to English for love of the subject entails.  Pissed off at such a formalaic setup?  THATS ONLY THE SETUP, PALS. The real shit happens now.

 William Stoner is everyman, bitches. He loves literature of course, which some people might not (WHO ARE THESE ANIMALS) but otherwise he's just a typical young man who decides to follow a different career path than the one his family had set him. And oh jesus is it a sore lesson This is where you learn about breaking your parents' heart, fellas.  Over the next thirty years he sits out a war, is promoted, recommended by all, expands, grows, learns and then is mollified and condemned by his department and college; all the while being the best guy you could never ever meet cos he's too sound. He marries unadvisedly - you'll be yelling at the page to stop him- and he has a daughter who he cherishes and is torn away from. And then there's one of the most tender, realistic love affairs ever to attempt a salty toast.  Arrrrg.

It's brilliant, beautiful, sad and contemporaneous. Read it, you empty headed dolt. 

Tee Hee

Facestories

Facestories by David Backer

Short stories crafted to deliver within the 420 characters of a facebook status box. Intriguing, opaque and cleverly crafter, just as a short short-story needs to be.

Instead of buying things Lou takes digital pics and prints them out and places them in the places where the things would go: pics of knives in the knife holder, pics of cups in cupboard, pics of garbage in the garbage can. Lying on the pic of her bed Lou pales and flattens, starving, and takes her own digital pic to print and put in her place.

*blush*

Oh, Roisin! You and your wit!

Roisin breaks down the facebook photo album experience into depressing, postmodernist chunks for us plebs. It's all "ha, ha, ha" until someone loses an eye.

Well, this is interesting information

Donna & Mossy's Wedding or, How I Managed to Make an Idiot of Myself While in a Lovely Dress

Donna looks on nervously as Lucy annunciates "lovers" for the fiftieth time in a one minute speech

I think, I think, I need to explain stuff here. About, hell, eight months ago, at one of our very frequent bridal party conferences (read: nights spent drinking excessively), Donna hiccoughed in between vodka shots: "Weeeell, I don't like this shit about all the men standing up and speaking at weddings. I'm not having that at my wedding. I'm going to make a short speech. And I'd really really like it if one of ye did too."

Being the hardlined feminazi that I am, I stood up and thumped the table, punched a wall and bellowed: HELLS YEAH! Only to realise immediately that I was the only one behaving thusly and the other two bridesmaids were blinking rapidly and feigning intense interest in their beermats. Fueled by intense female pride and agreement with this position on weddings and possibly also by the amount of wine I had consumed that evening, I said "Yes, Donna. I will do a speech. It will be amazing. It will be like Cameron Diaz in that movie where she is the worst sister ever and reads a poem at her sister's wedding at the end except less crappy. I may cry."

I'll save you the long story and give you the dets: on the day, I tanked. Seriously. As soon as Ronan, Mossy's brother and best man, introduced me, the whole wedding responded in a series of cheers and catcalls and whoops that could only be faithfully answered by a striptease and/or a vitriolic political diatribe, neither of which I was prepared to give, nor, I suspect, would have been welcome in the circumstances. This was due in no small part to my reputation amongst the wedding party as a seasoned idiot. Instead, I bumbled through the first three lines of my prepared "speech" (not prepared enough, watchers noted) until my garbled brain happened upon one of my "money lines"*, one of the "burn points"** essentially:

Donna and Mossy were friends first, friends always and now friends,
partners and lovers forever.

Okay. So, it wasn't hot shit. It was thrown together five hours previously inbetween my hair and makeup being done. Anyway, it has slight rhetorical resonance and I wasn't hugely ashamed of it. Until Donna's lovely husband, Mossy, piped up just after I said "partners-" with the word "LOVERS! BHAHAHAHAHA!"

The whole place wet itself. Now was not the time to explain that actually, yes, that's what I was about to say. So I did what any reasonably shy person does when finds themselves in a joke they didn't get in on at the top: I recognised the money-maker and I rode it like the donkey that it was.

I'm not proud of this. I said about five more sentences with the word 'lovers' in, purposefully, and even paused for a beat and waited for the audience to say it with me on one line. The place was in fits of ridiculous giggles and I was a dirty, dirty bridesmaid who can't speak for longer than fifteen seconds without drawing attention away from the bride and groom towards herself. I sat down, amid applause and shame and didn't look Donna in the eye for two hours, when I felt she was sufficently tipsy to not punch me.

So, yeah. Public speaking = not for me. Ditto bridesmaiding.

* & ** These are the euphemisms I employ to make me feel my writing has effect. I am frequently seen to be squealing "Yeah, fucking money line right there Luce!" when in fact I am writing shite. Now you know the truth.

It's like all my dreams are coming true...

Blogging, Co Limerick Style

Someone posted this hilarious sign on my grandfather's woodshed. Who? Couldn't tell you. That place is lousy with hilarious jokers passing through and throwing their two cents about.

What is this illusive 'Log Blog'? I don't know, I don't speak Limerickese. Content seems a bid wooden though.

A-HA-HA-HA-HA!