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

This week really took off, and it taken a lot out of me, as mundane as it has all been. It’s also shown me the importance of having supportive people around. Well, perhaps supportive women. Guys are silently supportive, particularly with other guys; after all, who can deny the universal language of mockery, farting and grunting? For example, I had a trying day on Tuesday, with all sorts of stuff not going right at work (which I take seriously, so when things aren’t hitting the right notes for me, I get stressed over it. And can I ever do stress, as we know well) and these things being somewhat outside of my control. But to top it off, a man phoned up, an annoyed man. Not just any man, mind, but a man who had contacted me previously about doing some web design and development work for him, and I had promised to discuss a quote with him, after having consulted with my trusty web designer.

Three weeks ago.

So, obviously, he was annoyed that I hadn’t gotten back to him, and that was bad, not least because although I’m contracting (I’m a third of the size I used to be), I’m also technically freelancing, and extremely fearful of not knowing where my next pay check is going to come from, or if I’ll be eating food or sleeping rough next week. It was also bad because of my inherent insecurity and need to please people, even complete strangers, and because of a recent episode involving what I still refer to for some reason as ‘my’ car mechanic.

My car, a ’98 Mazda 121 1.3 litre 5 door go-busters machine which I bought from my mother during the summer. It is slightly ill, and needs a good car doctor. The whole story of me driving, well… You’ll have to sit through it soon. Lollers. 8th February 2007.. Click image to view larger version »

After an initial consultation with Ultan Potts, ace mechanic, about several things that needed fixing on my car, and several weeks of fruitless phonecalls, I realised that this man had no intention of fixing anything on my car at any price. He was just going to ignore me until I went away. I was pretty annoyed because I could have had these things fixed many weeks ago by someone who could both fix cars and operate a mobile phone, and that the state of the economy was such that tradespeople could do this to you in this day and age, and wouldn’t it be better if it was like in the eighties where no-one had any money and people climbed over each other to do things for you, and how dare he. Yes, it was all very frustrating, and a little new to me since I rarely need car mechanics or builders or plumbers, I can usually fix any small thing I break with sellotape (to be fair, I fixed the broken wing mirrors on my car with Duck tape, so you can see that I’m moving up in the world) or blue-tack. Now, I’ve since managed to find a big and relatively expensive garage to fix the issue with a no-nonsense approach and at four times the price, so I’m only bothered now about the principle of the thing.

Which of course, is why I was more than a little bothered about having unintentionally inflicted a very similar situation on someone who won’t forget this in a hurry, and I’ll have his irate words floating through my mind as I eat scavenged three-day-old french, sorry, freedom fries to eat in my cardboard box near Camden street. The supportive remarks came from the ever-pragmatic Oana, who (more delicately than that) more or less told me to get over it. Here’s a gratuitous picture of her, since many people have asked about it:

This is Oana Bizian, my girlfriend. She’s sort of looking very… Russian or something. And not being as sarcastic as she can be. She’s Romanian, and this was taken near Oradea where we stayed for a few days here and there to get the salty water there around New Year’s. 31st December 2006.. Click image to view larger version »

The ‘pleasing complete strangers’ issue is something I should look into, really. Before I know it I’ll be featuring in a Ken Loach movie.

What a response on that last post! I didn’t think anyone actually read this any more, but they do. More accurately, you do. That actually does mean a lot to me, which is part of the reason for the redesign and some of the new features; time to see if I can add something new to help you use the site, enjoy the pictures and all the rest of it. And those little user icons on the comments; send me a picture or get your own on Gravatar.com. I’m trying to change my daily and weekly schedule a bit to fit writing into it, to avoid what Anthony calls ‘boo-urns’. Boo-urns is a technical blogging term for a fairly serious state of affairs, and you should check out his site for a more detailed explanation, since he once nearly lost not only his job, but in fact his left leg over it. He was lucky, but I might not be if the situation gets out of hand. Anthony’s site is entertaining, and also unique since he has more links to individual Youtube content than actually exists on Youtube; there are now people in San Francisco who have a cult based on him, and his Youtube linking ability.

That’s Anthony ‘Boo-urns’ McGuinness in the middle there. Ironically he’s drinking some piss of some sort which isn’t Guinness at all. From left to right, Martin, Paul, Paul and Kenny. We had a vote to see if we could call them all Paul but ended up with Clive instead. 20th October 2006.. Click image to view larger version »

The other thing that interested me about the last post was that although there were many comments (for which I thank you all very much) there were no comments from Garret. At all. None. I was wondering about this, but there is an answer; Garret just hasn’t checked back recently. He’s been relentless surfing Youtube for months now, discovered some hilarious videos of kittens trapped in toilets while their owners film them drowning, and so hasn’t checked back to see if I had written any more. Garret is entertaining, and also unique since he has viewed more individual Youtube content than actually exists on Youtube; there are now people in San Francisco who have a cult based on him, and his Youtube viewing ability.

G—– S—– and N— A—–, and explosive combination! Chortle chortle, a bit of an in-joke there. Man, you can sympathise with N—, huh? G—–’s very nice, really. 18th October 2006.

However, one of the things that made me pause and re-evaluate what I was doing here on the site was in fact Garret’s comments to my second-last post, which started at severe mockery and ended up quite rapidly with severely abusive, which was less than entertaining. Offensive, actually. You’ll see it on that post, and you’ll see that I sanitised several of them. Censorship? Well, yes, basically it is, and I don’t have a problem with it, because those comments are sitting on my site where anyone can see what were, let’s be honest here, incoherent rants. I mean, really inarticulate, badly-spelt, nuggets of abusive rage which I haven’t fully understood but in the interests of not getting shouted down on my own web site I decided to clean them up. I know many of you (indeed, most of you) find Garret’s comments amusing and of course so do I, but… For me this crossed a line.

I guess, that it would be akin to playing a gig, performing your music somewhere, and someone you know just screaming abuse at you, for no reason whatsoever. Is Garret secretly my jilted lover? Is it because I eloped with his dog? But in a situation like that, I think most people would ask themselves why they should bother producing something, which I did, and the answer was because I enjoy it, whether or not anyone else wants to read it. And if anyone doesn’t like it, then they can choose to not read this. I’ll have to thank Tee for a bit of solid perspective on that, and of course the inspiration of Tadhg for his relentless writing, which would surely inspire anyone, regardless of how they felt about messing up someone else’s pages with Oily Orang-Utang, or whatever it’s called.

Therese O’Reilly and Some Girl. Man, I should remember these things. It was a crazy night out and there was… stuff. And things happened. And later that day, I had alcohol poisoning, which just goes to show what an eejit I am. 28th December 2006.. Click image to view larger version »

Oh, and before I forget, I got treated to the Slovak perspective on European history last week by Maddy’s (One of my housemates) boyfriend Rado. Apart from the fact that it was highly entertaining, I never realised that their empire lasted for so long, and was so powerful; they ruled over the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, and even gave some of their territory to the Russians, because they were so generous. And those other guys, the Slovaks fok them, and the other guys get fok too. But they got fok by some guys from there. Eventually of course, they had to let the Hungarians and the Czechs get independence, and rather generously the Slovaks let the EU join them.

Of course, if you ask the Czechs, then they’ll tell you that they had the most powerful country in Europe, and they fok these other guys, and I’ve heard similar tales in Romania too, where they ruled this that and the other, and fok a whole bunch of other people. At least they all agreed one one thing; they all fok the Turks. I just never knew that European history involved so many people get fok by other people.

(edited 28.06.2007)
Obliterated the photo of Garret and Nora, by request.

Just a quick post tonight; I’ve been busy again, partly taking some time out to relax, with getting back to work and getting stuck into some freelance jobs, and with setting up my new laptop (which I bought along with some other stuff as part of getting myself set up as a mercenary. Sorry, freelance web developer. I did say I’d post about my next few moves, didn’t I? And I didn’t, did I? I even have my company/trading name, the URL has been bought and the hosting paid for… And it’s not Kraton, Defeater of Meat Slugs, it’s a lot less exciting but more useful.

Now, I hadn’t posted this before, and I partly was waiting a little bit, but here it is. Tee, who you’ll either know personally, or know of because you read this site and you know I go on about her from time to time, has put up a moving and honest post dealing with a serious issue on her site, ideasforcheapstuff.com (the site of the three deliciously lickable girls) and it’s something that I think people should read; I should warn you now that it’s serious stuff, and you should approach it with an open mind. I think everyone could learn something from it. The events Tee writes of happened barely a week and half after I met her for the first time, so I got caught up in it all, and it’s touched me too in that sense. Just read it, and think about it, maybe follow the links she gives and hopefully if it helps even one person who reads it then that can only be a good thing.

http://www.ideasforcheapstuff.com/wordpress/2006/06/15/confronting-suicide/

So I’m glad I’ve put that up; please don’t comment on it here, just read it and think about it.

In other news, today was my first day as a contractor for a company I’ll be doing work for over the next while (it’s ‘web stuff’, that’s all you need to know, and it is very exciting stuff to be working on for someone like me.) which was great, although I had to take a lot of technical stuff in and now my brain is full, which when added to what I’ve had to deal with in setting up my laptop (I’d rather punch myself repeatedly in the nuts than install a PC or a Mac for my own use again.) is almost too much to deal with and I’m toying with the idea of turning into a fully-fledged psychopath tomorrow, perhaps murdering some innocent bystanders on my to attacking my colleagues in the office with a chainsaw. Well, I might have considered it, but this evening I saw a Czech movie in the Czech embassy (Thanks for organising tickets to that Michaela!) and it was so remarkably miserable (And believe you me, the Czechs know how to do misery better than anyone, even people from Longford.) that you’d be incapable of harming anyone after watching it. You’d just think about it, and then break down in tears, while nearby children laugh and frolic, unaware of the sheer meaningless misery of life. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems that the point of view there is that everyone is either a bastard, or a weak fool, and everyone gets what they deserve, or gets betrayed, or things just go pear-shaped for everyone generally. Also try to see a movie called ‘Czech Dream’ (‘Cesky Sen’), where some students get a grant and then set out to make everyone very miserable, even though they were all perfectly happy to start with, just to make a point that they weren’t really all that happy to begin with. I’m being fairly facetious about it, but it’s not far off the mark, and bloody typical too.

La Multi Ani!

Happy New Year! Best wishes for 2006 to all my readers and everyone else generally, I hope you achieve your desires for the year and that you have good health and happiness. That title is ‘Happy New Year’ (or something equivalent) in Romanian. Yes, last year’s phrase was in Czech and this year’s is Romanian, so who knows what next year’s will be. That is one thing I’ve already decided this year, which is that next year I’ll celebrate New Year’s in a country I haven’t been to yet. You heard it here first (unless I drunkenly blurted it out to you last night).

I spent New Year’s with Vlad and Diana and several of their friends (Aude, Bonsa and Alina, with our genial, camper-than-Liberace host ‘Cusin’ and his housemate), and it was a good night. Certainly a change from last year’s well intended but ultimately traumatic snot-fest in the darkest reaches of the Czech Republic, in a willage somewhere with Pavel, Tanya and some friends of Pavel’s. I had a bad cold which was just that night reaching a crescendo of personal humiliation, but luckily it didn’t set a trend for the year. Actually, I tell a lie because a few weeks later I got a moderately serious infection, which convinced me of the security of fulltime employment.

I stayed in Vlad and Diana’s place, which was very entertaining the day after.

I promised a round-up of 2005, a set of photos and I also want to use this blog to do my annual ‘mission statement‘ (sort of a collection of life-improvement resolutions, which I usually package with some sort of catchy and dynamic-sounding phrase. It’s personal marketing.), but it can wait a day I suspect. It’s nothing urgent.