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

Me, all fuzzy and wearing The Hat, which makes me irresistable to all women. Even hairy ones. Click image to view larger version

Guinness is great; you drink it, and then all too late you realise what it’s doing to you, but it feels so damn good, you just can’t fight it… The downside is that I haven’t had a day without alchohol since last Thursday, which is a lot less good.

Today was interesting, to say the least. I had to write off a ridiculous amount of money (if you crashed your car you would lose this kind of money), but I got a job offer from Romania! Just one line on Messenger really could have some very far-reaching effects on my life over the coming year, and hopefully be a very positive development. So shouts out to Oana, Moni and all their crew in Timisoara!

What a day though. I’ll finish the posts on my recent travels over the weekend, and put those photos up too. Unmissable stuff, I can tell you now!

(Edited on 12.04.06 to add the image)

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.

I had an odd and perhaps controversial idea pop into my head not so long ago. It was when I was visiting the Jennifer, in fact, and we were walking around Kilkenny town trying to spend my money on making me look fashionable (as opposed to looking very much like someone who had only just discovered the idea of clothes the week before), although that had (and has) no relation to the idea itself. The really controversial part of it all is actually airing the idea publicly, where people can see the idea, and have an opinion about it, which will no doubt be along the lines of a) Kevin is up to something, he’s got something going on and he’s not telling us or b) Kevin is completely mad, or maybe even c) Kevin is up to something, which is hardly surprising given that he is completely mad.

I think I might get married this year. Or have kids. Not both, of course, that would be ridiculous.

I have no idea to whom or where, the point is in fact that it’ll be completely unexpected and bizarre, it’ll all happen very suddenly and come as a shock to everyone, myself included. It could be, for example, to a Yak herder in Tadjikistan. Now, I know this might seem very off the wall to most people, and raise eyebrows with one or two people in particular, but there it is. It’s not a plan, it’s a statement of possibility.

2007 sees me buying a house. That’s not bizarre or adventurous (in fact it’s tedious and predictable, not unlike a Garfield cartoon), that’s just the way it’s going right now. Better sort out my job situation in that case, hadn’t I?

Today was my first day back at work in 2006, and I proudly joined the aggressive cunts going to work. In fact, I was one of them, cursing the slowness and inefficiency of the fools in front of me. Had one of them keeled over, dead from exhaustion, I would have gladly stepped over his or her cooling corpse in order to get ahead in the crowd, and get to the office that precious 3 minutes earlier.

Yeah, that’s my New Year’s sermon. It’s all about the benjamins, and fucking over some bastard that gets in my way as I climb to the top. I’m putting together my 2006 Plan, and I don’t look forward to the part where I have to think ahead to the next 5 years too, because that’s something I’ll have to do in the next month or two. I’m not getting any younger, and I need to start thinking about what’s next. You can tell I’ve been talking to thirty-something year-old women, can’t you? But it’s true, I have to. I have to think hard about my work situation, and where that’s going, and also about what I’m going to go and do later in the year. Japan and Romania both beckon this year, I’m going to have paid off all my debts quite shortly and be that rare thing in Ireland today, a thirty-something male with no debts (well, none to the bank; I’m sure I owe something to someone.) and in a number of ways free to do whatever the fuck I want.

On the bright side, I went for a run in the morning. I can start my 2006 plan by cutting a few inches off my tubby waistline. And pricing some language learning stuff for Japanese, Czech and Romanian.

More on all of this later, I have to tie up some loose ends, get some shit done and then I can do my 2005 round-up and my 2006 plan. And my thoughts on the first of the political parties here to try banking on xenophobia to win the next election. The Labour party as Brown Shirts? Oh no! There is much to be done and so little time…