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

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.

So, that crazy night out! What about it, huh? Not much, but it was very interesting. I don’t get out too much these days, I’m old and busy and what have you, so it doesn’t interest me as much these days. I used to go out with a mentality which actually does have a term for it, and often resulted in my not having as much fun as I could have had without it: desperation.

It was refreshing to be in the Gaiety, a theatre which metamorphoses into a massive and very mixed (and occasionally interesting) nightclub with dance music, live bands, a movie and all sorts of things happening until just shy of 4am. I was not, as I might have been even 5 months ago, interested in scoring or anything of the kind, I was just there for the fun and it was a chance to hang out with Jennie and catch up, or at least it would have been if she hadn’t been extremely drunk and getting competitive with Angela and her artificial boobs. I fended off some somewhat amourous advances from nearby women and enjoyed generally being pleasantly unavailable for anything more intimate than a chat and a hug, which was a great feeling. I guess I was the token huggable Pole, in spite of not actually being Polish.

The odd thing is that not being drunk and not giving a shit about getting some action (I would even say advertising being straight but uninterested) is like sticking up a huge flashing neon sign saying “Challenge! Come get some!”. Hmm. So I guess it’s true; you can’t get it when you’re actively looking for it, but as soon as you’re broadcasting vibes indicating that you’re off the market, everyone wants some. Is that women specifically, or women, men and even mutants, god help them? That would be a good one to test the waters with in Dun Laoighaire.

So it went. I’m just sorry I don’t have photos, but that’s probably a good thing and I really didn’t think the girls would have been too comfortable with me taking photos while they were so out of it.

Sunday saw me fixing my laptop. Fixing the laptop really deserves it’s own write up; I didn’t exactly repair anything, but at least I know what the problem is and what’s involved in repairing it, and I very much want to get the relevant links up for anyone else who has this problem and sets about Googling for it. It’s a very, very common problem with iBooks (that is an Apple consumer laptop) so isolating what was causing my screen to die wasn’t, in the end, very hard. It was a tedious process though, and it does irritate me to think that I could have restored the functionality to my laptop within half an hour last week, had I known what I needed to do (remove the back from the screen and re-arrange the wiring). Now it doesn’t go to sleep correctly all the time while the laptop is closed, but it’s better than nothing and I can get some work done.

A small fact about getting the repairs done: If the repairs cost more than €250 – €300, then I’m better off buying a whole new one which will be in at around €1000 and which will be much, much better. That will take €50 and up to 9 days to find out from the repair centre. I’m telling you now, it’s a racket.

I also spent plenty of time trying to get Garret out to watch the football game on Saturday afternoon. The idea originally was to help him with painting and assembling the odds and ends he needs to finish for their (himself and Nora, his girlfriend) house. We didn’t get too much done, and with a bit of economy of truth I got him out of the house over to Kenny’s, where we watched the Irish team put on a remarkable display of not doing very much against the Cypriot team who, while not being a fantastic team, did their best to play a game of football. In fact, they would have won by a comfortable margin if it hadn’t been for the Irish goalkeeper, Shay Given, who put on a performance worthy of the Matrix movies in keeping Ireland in the game, leaping diving and generally defying gravity. This is all the more interesting in light of the fact that Cyprus is already out of the tournament on points; in other words, for them it was a matter of honour rather than staying in the tournament, and they could have gone home having lost 10-0 and it wouldn’t have made any odds to them. Nonetheless, they put up a spirited fight to the end which is more than can be said for the Irish team. It’s a moderately contentious issue with Ireland fans. It was after that, when we went to do something more interesting which was hang out in the Dice Bar, when I cleared off for the previously mentioned night of bedlam.

[edited for bad spelling, clarity and errata @ 6.41pm. Worth a re-read, I'd say]