...more recent posts
Mar 05, 2001
A friend came to stay and his sadness was infectious. I had donned the end of winter blinders, the one's that can assist you in blundering through until something in the weather resuscitates the soul. But his sadness crept around my blinders and entered through the eyes. He lay on our sofa and was so sad that he wanted to sleep all the time. I tried not to look for fear of further contamination; I tried to remain frenetically active but ground to a halt. I tried to remember how lucky I am not to have lost a long relationship, but I grew fearful that perhaps we are all on an inexorable slide that the gods are polishing to a higher sheen with every passing year. We went and walked in Central Park and I wished we had Alex there to guide us as we didn't know the names of the birds or the trees and it would have been comforting to give them names. The birds are different from Irish birds. I remember realising this in Hyannis too on my first trip to America. We noted that Americans are ostensibly similar but very different from us. It reminded us of Gulliver's Travels. We had dinner with a friend and she and I talked and talked and he grew more and more silent. I began to question how good a friend I am capable of being, if one can be of any help to the sad friend. I gave him some xanax and put him on the plane. He phoned to say he had slept all the way from JFK to his bed in Dublin, not remembering how he had arrived in his bed. He sounded better. He said he had decided to drink wine rather than beer. Last night I realised that what I want to say to him is "defend against your own treachery." I want to say it to us both.
Feb 26, 2001
The Song of the Contact Lens.
For a weeks's pay
You can purchase two half moons of plastic
In which to wrap your corneas;
To realise that the old poly
had grown into a paltry fog
and that the new energize your retinas
Enough to make them peer up avenues
Reminding you of the simultaneously emmigrated friend
Who maintained that all of New York
Was merely deja vu owing to the pap of childhood television
Excepting the teleology of streets and avenues
Summoning you up and accross.
Gas permeable green and blue,
Acute vision makes me resolve to write only poetry—
Who needs plot with perfect vision!
Dec 26, 2000
On the third hour of dish washing when it appears that the goose fat has permeated every pore, every plate and every surface of oneself, the kitchen and its environs, it occurs to you that it might not be worth it. The big dinner with the big beast and the big friends. But in spite of the labor, the expense, the wrestling with unwieldy beasts in small spaces, the dull ache the following day in the upper right quadrant of the thorax and abdomen (what the French casually and frequently refer to as a "crise de foie"), it always is. I have no truck with the Christmas curmudgeon. I don't care what the excuse, there are too few of them as it is, excuses to sit down, stop working and break bread and wind with one's loved ones.
Feb 11, 2000
I'm in need of a job having just quit mine. Here's my resume. It's the resume of the unemployable.
The summer of high school graduation: a summer job in Rathmullen House Hotel. The job was procured for me and my best friend Helen by our classmate Juliet, Juliet's parents Bob and Jummy (yes, Jummy) owned the hotel. We never bothered to ascertain exactly what we would be doing during our summer of employment there. I was the dishwasher. Helen got to cook eggs and other things as well as wait on tables for dinner service. Helen was, and in fact still is, very beautiful; I think this may have been why she also got the relatively glamorous dining room stint. She also got to know some of the more handsome local boys; this gave me the opportunity to get to know her handsome Dutch boyfriend when he came to visit. I've always liked the fact that she didn't mind sharing him. She was miserable cooking eggs, I was miserable washing dishes: we ate huge amounts of food and left with our girlish figures and our ambitions somewhat revised. I still wonder what Juliet was doing that summer. At the end of our toil our "Leaving Certificate" results arrived; I thought I'd been saved as I had been offered a place doing what I wanted to do at University.
First summer of college: Again my employment is wrapped up with Helen. Gary had fallen for Helen. He had found himself a very lucrative job in a car factory in Germany and wrote to us telling of jobs nearby in a plum factory. We sent a telegram to Gary: "Two plum jobs for girls" and booked our train and ferry tickets. The plum jobs never materialized and Gary's job came to an end. We found ourselves shop lifting peanut butter in Amsterdam and living in the house of a strange Dutch woman. Eventually we secured jobs peeling bulbs in a suburb of Amsterdam. Unfortunately our rate of bulb peeling (slower than our eleven year old co-workers) prevented our experience from being profitable, after we had paid our rent to Frau Verbeek and paid for the bus to the bulb plant we were losing money. Helen and Gary decided to go on vacation on Gary's factory proceeds, I went home and got a waitressing job. It strikes me that the contours of these first two jobs contain all of the characteristics of all the rest of my jobs.
After college I got a job with a friend of my mother's. She ran an educational Institute in a damp and cold Georgian building in Dublin. I was hired to do administrative things. She lured American college students to Dublin where they were lectured in literature, history and archeology. The American students were always bitterly diappointed when they arrived and saw the crumbling building and the alcoholic teachers. This brings me to another recurring theme in my employment history: the suspicion that all of the businesses I have worked for are complete shams. This may be related to the fact that they are the only businesses that would hire me.
Every Tuesday I would visit the Careers and Appointments (or Disappointments as it was referred to) Office of Trinity College in an attempt to get another job. It was the year with the highest statistic for graduate emmigration in Ireland; the Celtic Tiger's parents hadn't even met at this point. The only job offer was teaching English in Beirut.
I emmigrated to New York with two friends. I got a job in an Italian cafe run by a Pakistani on Jones Street. During the day I worked as a proofreader for cable television schedules. Other jobs followed: painting costume jewelry, legal proofreader, house painting, caretaking the homeless mentally ill, decorative/so-faux-you wouldn't-know painting, teaching essay skills to junkies, magazine copy editing, ghost writer for a psychic, assistant to a mean fundraiser, PR account executive, personal assistant/nanny to an oversexed, chocolate devouring, hash smoking 19 year old movie star, copy editor/writer for a non-profit agency's publications, assistant to a pastry chef, and now hostess at a restaurant in which I have an interest. I have also supplemented my income in the past with welfare fraud and credit card abuse. I have a deep distrust of psychiatry but have actually wondered if one of the profession could help me with my atrocious attitude to work and my, what I think they refer to as, entitlement issues. My motto seems to be: bite the hand that feeds you; it's the closest. I think the only job I could perform without becoming increasingly bitter and twisted will involve working alone and for myself. References available upon request.
Aug 31, 2000
I sleep in his semi-retired white cotton undershirts, the cheap ones that get like some perversly expensive fabric from wear and washing. Every time I go to his closet and click the safety catch open to access the neatly folded pile I think of Eleanor, who used to say when I would get out of bed and take another one of the t-shirts from the huge box: "You know, you can't just take a fresh one of those every day." She was trying to make a living one student summer having had things like "girl" and "boy" screened on them and we both came from households where you didn't take a fresh thing every day. I get such pleasure from taking a fresh t-shirt every night and not hearing a reproach, merely an echo of frugality.