andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

Here it is. My first ‘Kev is off somewhere, I suppose you could even call it travelling’ post, all the way from sunny Vienna (or Wien, as the locals call it). I’m enjoying it. The weather is good, the locals are… Well, they’re Austrian, so I don’t know how I should quantify that. Arnold Schwartzenegger is Austrian, I was here before and had some decidedly mixed feelings about Vienna (beautiful architecture and a clear sense of history, set against what can only be described as generous helpings of arrogance.)´and of course there is Mozart. So far the weather has been great, Alex (who I am visiting here, she used to live in Graz but has since moved here to get a job, and hopefully I will catch up with Filip too, of whom more later)
Alex. She is dressed like this in case the agents come after her and she is not able to escape the Matrix in time. Click image to view larger version has managed to buy carpets and whatnot for her apartment, and we have seen all manner of stuff about town.

A typical street in Vienna. A lot more messy than you might expect. Click image to view larger versionReally fantastically huge and old building in Vienna, protected by marble beast women. Really. Click image to view larger versionAt the Styrian Fair, promoting all things Styrian and rustic, by making fantastic amounts of noise. You can see how this leads to other things. Click image to view larger versionThe Styrian fair with the Town Hall as a back-drop. Quite impressive, I have to say. Click image to view larger versionI think this is the parliament building, where those efficient Austrians get on with decision making. Where’s Haider? Click image to view larger version
I was quite taken by the statues here. They are impressive, imposing, well hewn from the primordial rock and also show that somewhere around five hundred years ago there was some sculpturally gifted guy who was determined to provide the world with the largest collection possible of winged, heavily-beweaponed, two-metres-and-then-some-tall beast-women, all crafted from the finest marble and stone. Really. I could have some very lurid sexual fantasies as a result of all this – although I have sworn off such things for lent – because some of them are in very provocative situations. Others just look like men, which is in it’s own way a lot more disturbing, because I very much doubt that attractive women are a recent development in Austria.
I wasn’t joking. Huge marble beast-women. Almost sexy, if you’re into that sort of thing. Which I’m not. Ever. Click image to view larger versionSee the pattern already? Huge, armed, dangerous and imposing stone chicks, ready for battle. Everywhere. Click image to view larger version
Tonight will see a night on the town which should be interesting, given my previous experiences in Austria, and perhaps more phone-terrorism from Tee, who made a drunken attempt to call me last night which unfortunately I missed but it was appreciated all the same. More drunken calls please, everybody! Apart from Ciaran, who has comfortably filled his quota for the concievable future.

More huge old buildings in Vienna. Very imposing. Click image to view larger versionAnd more old stuff in Vienna! Click image to view larger versionThe most amazingly old and dirty church ever. They are cleaning it, however, the second time in 4,000 years. Very intricate and beautiful. Click image to view larger versionOutside the incredibly big and old church, with all sorts of antics from street performers and other stuff. Click image to view larger version

I booked this flight a couple of months ago after Alex asked me when was I next coming over, and I realised I hadn’t been abroad in a while other than to England for some brief but all too tortuous business trips which of course don’t count as holiday, even for masochists, which I would like to think I’m not. Often. In the same fell swoop I also booked a trip to Devon (via Bristol) which was last weekend
Jane Cole, former runway model and Miss Devon Hotpot 2005. Also, a fantastic host and amazing person. Click image to view larger version and that kind of book-ended a series of entertaining adventures over several weeks which have gone a long way to explaining the lack of posts on this site. Believe me when I say I have plenty of new material to write about but too little time; it’s all very exciting, ranging from getting locked into the toilet to blasts from the past and beyond!

I was really feeling down on Thursday, having thought far too much about some serious issues relating to the direction my life’s been going in, work, stuff like that (money, in a nutshell – effectively, I’m on the same money I was on five and half years ago, which is no joke. Time to change that!) and I wasn’t happy about it, but I had a good stern talking to from Annette after she caught me being a bit miserable in the house and I felt a lot more positive after that.
The Maddy and the Annette being positive, just after they took me on a birthday lunch in Castleknock, which was very nice of them and a lot of fun. Click image to view larger version She really knows how to instill positive energy in people, I should suggest to her to do this for a living. Maybe she could set up a centre somewhere with positivity pods where miserable people like me could go to cop the fuck on to themselves while wired to PostivePods™. By the time I went to bed I was feeling ready to tackle the world again, though the tackling has been delayed until Tuesday what with me mucking about in Vienna for the weekend. You read it here first! Unless you’re Annette, in which case you heard it first over the course of a life-draining hour on Thursday night and are still wondering how you managed to escape… Just kidding! On the down side, I was about to write a fantastic and very dark post about it all, very good stuff and my first stab at structured writing, which would have entertained everyone a lot but of course I got a good talking-to from Annette and decided that this business of introspective self-absorbtion wasn’t going to do me any favours, and canned it. Bad Annette! But also Good Annette and shouts out to her for showing me the light!

Life’s too short, and we need to make the most of our time here, even if we make some mistakes as we go. After all, we make them to learn from them.

(Edited on 12.04.06 to add gazillions of images.)

Yes, it is true. Like the tide inevitably rolling in and dumping used tampons on the beach, I became a year older today. I am thirty three today. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I can’t possibly be that old. This means I am in my mid-thirties, I’m starting to weigh up my pension options, buy sweaters and generally hang around the house with DIY tools looking for something to fix. Because then I won’t have to change the nappies on my fourth and most recent offspring.

Some interesting arbitrary and disturbingly vague statistics: The vast majority of this year’s well-wishers were (as usual) women – utilising that vaunted multi-tasking ability to simultaneously remember 358 birthdays while failing to buy the correct type of lightbulb – and I’m not sure if I should include Neil in that – at least a third were Romanian, a lot of them were Jennifer (spread over several days, at that, though she got it right eventually) and it all involved a lot of beer. Which actually isn’t a statistic at all, but it was certainly true.

More on this when I get my head around it. Right now though, age has caught up with me, and I need another nap.

Shouts out to Oana and Moni, who are sometimes reading my rambles on this site out in Romania, for reasons best known to themselves. And Tee and Lids and Dee, who also check it out, and Garv and Shell. And the rest of the crew.

That’s me, going home from somewhere. Click to get full size.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but I’ll say it again because I enjoy a bit of repetition; I like running. There has been an interesting idea that people have had from time to time which is that I’m not lazy. It’s rubbish. I am lazy. If I could sleep for twenty hours a day, I would, occasionally foraging for food and the toilet. If I could sit somewhere and stay there forever, being endlessly pandered to by divine beauties, I would. (Hey, who wouldn’t?)It’s good for me and keeps me fit. It’s challenging (occasionally bordering on brutal). It’s hard work, which conflicts directly with my inherent laziness and I like the challenge of that too. I always wanted to get into running but I never had the discipline or the lifestyle to accomodate it so I didn’t do it, which is a shame because now I’m that bit older and it’s harder work than it used to be.

I don’t like running on pavement or roads, which is part of what’s discouraged me in the past; the run to anywhere with soft ground can be sore on the knees and ankles. I like ‘off-road’, running cross-country, grass, mud, trees, uneven ground, holes, branches, obstacles, small vicious, hungry creatures… It’s more interesting and a lot less hard on the legs. Running on hard ground can really damage your legs through the impact they have to take, even with good running shoes. Also, I like mountain-biking, a sport that sadly I can’t really indulge in because I don’t live near any mountains, and I don’t have a car to get to them with. The Phoenix park is allegedly the biggest walled city park in Europe. I don’t know about that, it may well be true, but although truly massive and a great place to running or walking, an odd fact is that half of that isn’t accessible to the public; there is the President’s residence, the American ambassador’s residence, the Ordnance Survey offices… All sorts of stuff that you can’t get into because it is private. Which makes it a lot smaller in practice, and a little annoying to navigate around.Anyway, now I live beside the Phoenix Park and I’ve made myself do the seventeen or so minute run to the park and then run around there like a psychopath for as long as I can manage before I have to run back and get changed for work. Yes, I do this in the morning before work, in the dark, sometime between 6 and 7. I cheat sometimes, because Annette offers me a lift in and generally speaking I’d be a fool to pass that up. I’ll have to stop though because I’ve realised that I might be less focused when I get out of the car and start running, partly due to Annette’s sparkling company (which makes me believe there may be more to life than pain and misery, at the crucial moment when I need to believe in pain and misery), and partly due the fact that her car is a warm comfortable place to be. Once I get out I’ve lost some of my puritanical desire to inflict health and pain on myself in equal measure.

Phoenix park, early in the morning. Traffic jam already. Click to view larger.

I run, then I walk or jog, then I run, I sprint, I walk or jog, I stand and survey where I am in the darkness, I run, I walk or jog, chase deer and so on. It goes on like this for anywhere up to two hours (not in the morning runs, as a rule), by which time I can’t feel my legs any more. I do it more regularly recently, too.

It’s a bit Lord of The Rings in the park, sometimes. Click to view larger.

So, we’ve accepted that I do this thing, this running, which has me up and hurting myself at stupid hours of the morning, no matter how wet or cold it is. But why? I mean, I like running, but I also like ice cream and I haven’t tried to drown myself in it yet. The motivation is the maintainance of my health and fitness, which are things becoming ever more precious and dear to me now that I’m scant weeks away from being thirty-three, and also because the highlight of my week is the hour of five-a-side football that I play badly every Friday evening with a bunch of guys, most of whom are a lot better than me at football… Fitness is about the only thing I can count on to make sure that I don’t look like a complete fool on that pitch; I can break that down into two areas, my ability to sprint, and my remarkably large lungs, and obviously that’s all covered by fitness.

Fantastic views, beautiful meadows, deer, the park has it all.Shame it’s too dark to see any of it. Click to view larger.

But there’s more! I’ve had an ongoing obsession with my weight over the last few years. I have a stocky build and a slow metabolism, and combine that with the aforementioned apathy and you have a recipe for getting a bit too big around the middle for comfort. Before I forget, I’ve recently realised another possible motive for all of this; I’m living in a house with three attractive, sexy, strong-minded, independent women. I’ll be fairly surprised if I haven’t started lactating and synchronising my periods with them within another month. It’s great, sometimes I think it’s like a Carlsberg house-share, but maybe I’m secretly worried that I’m going to lose my manliness. It is true, as far as I know, that men sharing a house have higher testosterone levels; and a guy sharing with a group of women… I had better find my ruler and keep an eye on this… More about life in the house to follow.I’m never going to look like Johnny Depp, but at least I can avoid waddling around like the late John Candy (and I’ve come close, in dark days when I got stuck into my comfort food.). So, I feel I’m perpetually fighting the flab and trying to get back to seventy five kilos, like I was when I was nineteen or so… I actually managed to get very, very lean in Australia due to the eight hour a day workout from stacking boxes which were anywhere up to twenty kilos, higher than me, and that was no joke (aided by not being able to afford to eat huge amounts of food, which helped to stave off the extra fat). Running really is a great way to lose weight in a hurry and I have no doubt I’ll have a whole new set of stretch marks around my midriff to prove it.

I also started swimming in a pool near where I work, but that’s been a much less successful effort. Watching me in that pool, you’d think I hadn’t swam before. I drank my way from one end of the pool to the other like a huge ungainly water slug, I’m surprised they didn’t try to harpoon me on the way down to try and preserve the water level in the pool, and I’ve been finding all sorts of excuses not to get back into the water there. If came across Jaws and he decided to have a go at me, I’d just drink everything and strand him on the spot; it’s not an idle threat either. I’d do him.

Somewhere between this renewed assault on my health and fitness, and the season (it’s Spring, for those who hadn’t noticed) or perhaps the full moon, or maybe stress from work, I was feeling down this last weekend. I couldn’t sleep late last week, maybe getting two or three real hours of sleep in between being half awake, tossing and turning, thrashing around like a sweaty dying carp and waking myself up with talking loudly in my sleep. It was pretty awful and I was completely burnt out by the end of Saturday… The Friday night football game was great but my fitness deserted me as if I hadn’t been training during the week which was a bad feeling. That didn’t help, and I think the lack of sleep probably went a long way towards that.

So, that is the epic story of me and running. I probably haven’t put in half of what I intended but there’s more to come shortly about the delicate art of disorganised five-a-side football, and some other odds and ends…

Yay! Valentine’s Day!

Hm. Actually, this isn’t the occasion of jollity that it could have been, but I’ve had worse. I used to get very bitter about this, because I didn’t have a girlfriend, had no relationships, and until a year or two ago hadn’t even managed to get laid, which meant that I felt it was simply a day for the people who had all of these things to be smug and make patronising remarks to the likes of me to the effect that ‘it could happen some day soon’; the sort of thing that gets Lotto winners beatten up by their former best mates. I did have a sudden impulsive reaction one year which resulted in me buying flowers for a girl (and I’ll say no more, other than it was a long time ago and there is a photo of her on this very blog. No more clues, I’m afraid!) which was the wrong thing to do,Shit! I will say more. It was a particularly embarrassing episode and goes a long way to demonstrate exactly how much I needed to learn a bit about people, and women in particular. And just cop the fuck on. At least it vaguely amused people for a few weeks. and since then I figured that if some wench did want flowers or chocolates then she could bloody well give me a good seeing to first and we’d negotiate the sharing of the wealth afterwards. Needless to say, that strategy didn’t work out too well, and I’ve found a far more effective technique is to get woefully drunk in front of the required female and then make out with the front cover of a magazine as demanded by that same wumon.

Frequently Asked Questions:
Yes, I miss her. No, I don’t think I’ll be flying out there (maybe though). Yes, we broke up. No, she won’t be back in a couple of weeks. Yes, we’ll see.Yeah, pretty perverse stuff, but that’s the way things go for me. How my life has changed since those dark, bitter days! Right now I’m technically single, but this is very much like telling me I own a manatee in so far as it may be true, I’ll almost certainly tell anyone who brings the subject up but it doesn’t really feel that way. It’s complicated, and you can read more about it here. Damn that woman, I wasn’t supposed to be missing her, but that’s the effect she has! Speaking of manatees, I’ve discovered the perverse joy of convincing complete strangers that I own a manatee in a reservation in Florida. It’s such an outrageous and bizarre lie that it’s actually quite successful so I’ll have to try that one out again soon. Real ice-breaker, and I don’t think it’ll be too long before I get mauled by someone with a low tolerance for mockery or some sort of hatred for ocean-going ungulates.

I hope you’re all enjoying Valentine’s Day, do try and avoid getting arrested by your local Emperor and then executed in tediously elaborate fashion, and spend some time with someone you care for. And that you aren’t related to by blood preferably, but if the local customs allow it then each to their own. Or buy them some stuff. If you don’t care about anyone, then I strongly recommend a good wank, which might help a bit and at the very least you’ll find it relaxing.

Work is poo at the moment. I know I said before (and it’s been the subject of much mirth amongst my colleagues since then) in a post that I don’t normally bring up work – and to be fair, I haven’t – but I really feel the need to go into it a bit more, which I’ll do tomorrow in between finding a reasonable picture of me for Ramona, printing more pictures of people for my new Media Wall, and continuing my project of Stuff Which Will Make The Jennifer Smile. And filing some bills, if I’m not actually sticking to the afore-mentioned media wall.

I have to do something about it, because I am getting too old for this shit. I mean, I’m a long way off retiring but I could be making more money and getting less stressed over it.