Power found between two trees

[Edit: Started writing this January last year]

There is a pair of old trees in Antwerp. Walking from one to the other I get stronger, faster, happier.

I've been trying to figure out how I can be a better teacher.

In college, we had this really helpful and organised teacher, he was tremendously dedicated to his craft; wonderful command of engineering mathematics. His notes and lectures laid it all out with superb clarity; matter-of-fact. But when it came down to exam and study time - it was all like grasping water; the stuff was hard to reproduce and apply. He made me feel it was easy; "All you have to do, folks, is..." But it needed more work. He made us feel safe and secure with his notes and lectures. Complacent.

Unintentionally unsuccessful.

In secondary school, we had a mathematics teacher, who was on the other end of the spectrum; she offered little to any sense of security in her classes, to the point that I was the only one out of 12 that did not find a tutor for extra support. Strangely, the end result was that the class did spectacularly as a whole; Bs and As all round. In a Machiavellian way, she created a circumstance where her students could excel.

Unintentionally successful.

Risk Compensation - a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected. Not enough perceived risk and we'll stagnate, too much and we'll flounder.

Where's that middle ground? Spoonfeeding; cast adrift..

During his workshop two years ago at Elite Athletes,  Tom Weksler talked about his approach to teaching floor-work and acrobatics; he wanted us to get a feel for moving around down there, for us to get a grasp the motor principles at play. He was resigned to the fact that he had to teach us a pattern of moves because he had found it the best way to learn lessons. But he invited us to figure out what the movement and pattern illustrated.

I had my first session with my kung fu student this evening, since the Fighting Monkey Intensive in Athens.

Fascinating, rich, thought-consuming and frustrating. It reminded me of the Buddhist adage:

"When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him."

Jozef and Linda spent 5 days showing us a full spectrum of concepts: stillness, rhythm, collaboration, situational movement instead of rote movement. Challenging us to find our own insights from the situations.

So for the coming 2 months I will not give him technical or detail corrections, instead I am going to suggest a quality that a movement or set or exercise cultivates and let him judge and question for himself if he can solve it.

The Form of Father, central in the Fighting Monkey practice, as Jozef pointed out is a set of exercises, a lot of them similar to what they do on soccer pitches every weekend, nothing holy. But the story of the father form is rich. This is 8000 thousand years old, something precious, healing, comprehensive and powerful; it will heal you and more.

My experiences and what I have heard from others that work in embodiment (Mark Walsh, Francis Bryers, Anouk Brack, Paul Linden) is that the body is very porous/sympathetic to the intention/purpose:

If I believe something, the body will do its best to support and cultivate that perception. It's why pharmaceutical companies bend themselves over backwards with double blind studies, to ensure that the patient has no inkling if it is the real pill or the sugar pill they are taking.

At the end of the session, I pointed at two grand stately trees several paces apart. I told him walking between these two trees would make him more powerful. He just has to figure out how that could be true.

Get creative, Yo

I saw a chart on Facebook a while back. It showed a decreasing trend in creativity in children from the beginning of their education all the way up to the end of high school. This was based on the Torrance creativity tests. While I was looking for the aforementioned picture (I never did find it), I came across this nicely written post called the "Creativity Crisis" by Po Bronson.

Part of me was tempted to go on a literature review for the correlations with/mechanisms behind the decades long decline in creativity and then the trend through childhood education itself. I decided instead of getting bogged down in the vicious circle that is looking for valid information that I may as well just give my opinion, which is the main reason for my blog.

As was said in the post I linked, the emphasis on standardised tests and rote learning are correlated with the fall in creativity. But I think that there are subtle nuances there. Specifically I was thinking about the way school exercises were approached when I was there.

In mathematics and sciences, what we are taught in class is reinforced by working on problems oriented around the principles. That's all well and good for internalising a specific skill, but the disadvantage is that it becomes very easy for children (I mean "me") to fixate on how the problem is solved as opposed to what the result is. We (I mean "I") can become conditioned to expect all the tools to solve a problem being clearly lined-up and colour-coded in front of us (I mean... you get the idea). It reminds me a bit of the adage from Maslow:

"[...] if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail [...]"

Although, I would contend it is a bit more insidious than that; it's more a case of: "I was only told I could use the hammer." It's something that trips me up often in work, at least more often than I would like. I have tunnelvision solving problems... what tools to use and what is possible. What I'm trying to do these days is consider what is the desired outcome and not fixate on a path that I thought would lead me to it.

I think what could be an interesting idea for teachers to employ when teaching is only doing 50% of the exercises explicitly using the prescribed method and the other 50% letting the kids go nuts, i.e. solving the problems whatever way they can. It has a couple of benefits (I think):

1. There's cross-pollination; they are more likely to remember the thing they learned earlier and not discard them at the end of course section 
2. They get into the habit of looking at the problem and sizing up what could work to solve it based on the pros and cons of different techniques
3. They build-up a personalized repertoire of techniques for solving problems
4. They won't shoehorn a technique into a problem just because it worked for other problems in the vicinity
5. They'll be more adaptable when a technique doesn't work

Added bonuses, based on successes borne of their own initiative, they could become more confident and more likely to be assertive when faced with challenges - at least that is what my gut tells me; I only have a doctorate in chemical engineering, not psychology... :/

Maybe I'm completely of the mark, but it sounds reasonable enough to me.

There's a nice parable that infers the things I just opined. Part of me feels a bit raw that I haven't offered something novel. But, there's a very rewarding rush to arrive at an answer on your own, that isn't diminished by discovering the answer existed already. I think kids should get used to that feeling. 

Make them problem-solving junkies!¹

****

¹Not to be confused with junkies that solve problems... Ah English... your ambiguity is easy pickings for some classic jokes. And hilarious example of one at that, if I might add.ⁱ

ⁱI may.

Mean Girls II: Bitchiness is Back in XS

[Edit: my aunt PhD, pointed out that I should have the pluralised from of dramatis persona therefor the person- is rocking a nifty diphthong (æ)]
Dramatis personæ:
Molly as Molly
Deirdre as Mother


A couple came to meet Mother regarding work. They had a girl with them slightly younger than Molly (reminder, my sister is only 4). So they played together while the grownups talked. After they left...

Deirdre: Did you enjoy playing with the girl?

Molly: She's not my type.

Deirdre: What do you mean?

Molly: Did you see her clothes?

[End scene/fade to black]
---------------------
Notes and comments:

• This is, to the best of my knowledge what happened, as unbelievable as it sounds.
• My mother told me this by text. I responded with: "fantastic." She responded with: "cruel." I responded that she was being realistic. She responded with: "She's some yoke."¹ Not being able to help myself, I responded with: "She uses a yoke, she could never be one."
• I think I will be patting myself on the back for the double-meaning subtitle of my post for the weekend at the very least.

----------------

Doing this tomorrow. I am hoping to recount my tangle with the obstacle course on steroids (the obstacle course is figuratively on steroids not me literally on them) thereafter.

****

¹In Ireland the word is used to describe a person that causes consternation, vexation or exasperation, etc.

A commuted Dutch lesson

4 months down in Antwerp now.

It is coming along well - cashiers and servers don't automatically respond to me in English now. The entire process is really helped along by being in a native region.

As a language, it is really growing on me, it's very expressive, almost like a pantomime. This exchange below is a perfect example of it. It was like public performance art...

A couple of weeks back, some of my fellow commuters - keen to see me progress, surely - listed useful phrases for me. It was like a role-play that we would have done for our Leaving Cert. languages.

Women A: Mag ik hier zitten?
Women B: Nee.
Women A: ...
Women B: Mevrouw! Ik heb gezegd dat je niet hier zitten kan!
Women B: ...
Women A: Mevrouw! Je hebt mij met jouw krant geraakt!
Women B: Mevrouw! Ik heb gezegd dat je niet hier zitten kan!
Women A: Ik kan zitten waar ik wil. Ik zal de politie bellen.
Women B: Bel! Bel!
[...]
Man A: Mag ik hier zitten.
Women A: Je mag! Je bent hartelijk welkom.⁰

This woman (Woman A) regularly gets the same bus as me. She's is not a morning person. She storms down the aisle, directly for the seat her mental game of Russian Roulette picks for her. The bus was not full, maybe 20% of the seats were free. Even the seat she picked was one of a quartet (two facing two). She just had to sit facing the direction of travel, even though the woman declined her request and the two seats facing away from travel were free.

After 5 minutes of bickering, sniping and misty-eyed nostalgia at "that time you hit me with your newspaper", things died down. A Stranger gets on the bus and asks to sit in one of other two seats. The entire bus could barely keep it together.

Naturally, despite the blow-up, neither woman moved until it came time for them to get off the bus.

Were this Ireland, I would be convinced that this charade was, well, a charade. However, since I have previously noted the mysterious mechanics of Picking Your Seat On The Bus In Belgium, I'll allow it. I can imagine how Sandra Bullock's character felt about getting on public transport after the whole debacle she went through. Of course, the bus didn't have to move for us for "It" to go off.¹

********

⁰Woman A: May I sit here?
Woman B: No.
Woman A: [The woman sits down]
Woman B: Madam! I said that you cannot sit here.
Woman B: [Hits Woman A on the leg with her rolled up newspaper]ⁱ
Woman A: Madam! You have hit me your newspaper!
Woman B: Madam! I told you that you could not sit here.
Woman A: I can sit wherever I like. I am going to call the police.

Women B: Call away.
[The bus reaches its next stop]
Man A: May I sit here?
Women A: Of course you can! You are more than welcome.
¹Oh no he didn't!

-------------

ⁱClearly an avid follower of Jason Bourne.

Doctor, doctor, please

When I finished my PhD, I had intended on writing a quick note on my hard learned lessons.

A mate of mine is beginning his own shortly and he asked me for some advice... so here I am...

Nothing new...

1. Every month or so remind yourself what your "end game" is - or what shape you want it to be at least.
2. When you find yourself getting nowhere, go talk to someone else about their research problems - a change is as good as a rest.
3. When doing a presentation, write a paper for it, not just throw together a few slides. What I want for myself, is, if I give a presentation or write something, that it fits comfortably within what I know. This generally requires knowing more each time. That means thinking about the literature, which I found best done by writing at length about the context of my research. As "3.5" I don't like showing "frayed edges" to people unless it is to actually talk about the frayed edges. 
4. Also - I found I did my best thinking when I was writing down what I had done in the past. Since i was writing about something that was over and done with - I had some distance on it and could see better what to do next.

So nothing new there, but one must give the ego what it wants - in this case it is being redundant :/

I have a couple of ideas for some more posts, I will probably not get time during the week to do them though, being all busy in work and interacting with people. Socially. I started tango two weeks ago. It is a lot harder than salsa. Seriously subtle stuff - I am rapt.

Quantum buschanics

Our quantum physics teacher in college, was a gent who made the stuff pretty accessible.¹ I remember he made this nerdy [i.e. I laughed] simile.

We were learning about the particulars of the incestuous mess that is Hund's Rule of Maximum Multiplicity and the Aufbau Principle [and peripherally, the Pauli Exclusion Principle]. In a nut shell, in a given electron shell there are a number of orbitals and 2 electrons ultimately go into each orbital. The energy of the system needs to be a minimum for a given number of electrons in a shell (Aufbau), the energy is lowest when the orbitals are balanced - filled to the same amount, so 1 or 2 electrons (Hund's Rule). So the result is that the electrons fill each orbital first in a shell before doubling up.

He likened it to the way bus seats fill in Dublin: all the seats are filled singly before strangers start sitting side-by-side. It's practically a law of Nature.²

Of course that is not the case in Belgium. Every morning, I see the cosmic commuter ballet unfold. Firstly, the seat filling is quite different. There are some seats that are never filled, regardless of how many people there are, other seats are filled regardless of who is in the adjacent seat. For example we have the face-to-face seats. Here, they are all about facing the direction of motion; they'll preferentially sit side-by-side instead of taking a free opposing seat. To complicate matters further when a seat is vacated someone will usually trade up from their seat to the free one. Much like everything else in Belgium it is a complex dance, and I still don't understand the running order for the best seat - I've seen people going the length of the bus for a change.

Two other things that I have noticed:
Some take their commuter naps seriously; I've seen two bring inflatable neck pillows, and conk out for their trip. One of them even sports a really long lagging-jacket-like coat that she reverses as an ad hoc blanket.

There is a turn off a highway - it takes about 10 seconds to complete. It's fantastic, it's the longest turning circle I've ever been in! Once I figure out when it happens - I am going to eyeball the g's I'm pulling on this bad boy³... when I am starting to doze the shift reminds me of the falling van scene in Inception.

While we are talking about buses and commuting - there was another blooming vakbondsactie last Friday. To add some levity a chap sporting a knitted cap in the Jamaican colours came into the waiting room. He began with a boisterous "Goede morgen, Everybody!" He then spent 15-20 minutes bemoaning the fact that Belgium has been without a government (regering) for 6 months - he's wrong it is actually over 8 months, but he didn't sound like he was interested in accuracy. To add that Belgian flair to it he was soapboxing in a patchwork of English, German, French, Dutch and Italian.

For a finish, all the men except me had decided to brave the frost outside, instead of staying inside with the man of the moment, me and the women. After we, the audience, exchanged a few glances and smirks at his histrionics, our man declared that he had to work, pulled down his cap, put a rolled up cigarette in his mouth, swung open the door and left without so much as a by-your-leave.

------

¹He told us about his own difficulties with the subject as a student, and what he found helpful. Unlike our physics teacher in first year who could tell you how many students were in the class and recalled how many were at the last class; told us we shouldn't eat coming into his post-lunch lecture because it would make us sleepy. I couldn't never followed his lectures on Gaussian surfaces, it took a lot of thinking on my own part... I suspect this guy never had any trouble learning new things.
²Obviously the quantum mechanics is practically a law of nature, but I meant, as a figure of speech, that the system for seat-filling is such a thing.
³I can estimate how many degrees off vertical it is with a piece of string, or how far I moved away from the side of the bus - I have an idea of my centre of gravity - the law of the lever on from c.o.g. what ever datum I chose for moving away from the side of the bus - a bit of vector magic... then from Googlemaps I can estimate the radius of the curve - and then the speed of the bus. ⁱ

****

ⁱAlternatively, I could look over the driver's shoulder. :/

De Bulge

So... What do I know about diamonds Belgium?⁰

It all started back when I took part in the Chemistry Olympiad in Groningen. In the build up to the exams we had oodles of activities and events to get to know each other. We did a relay/obstacle course and the Irish (go us!/ar aghaigh linn!) teamed up with the Belgians (insert French/Dutch equivalent phrases here).

One of the tasks was four-man ski-walking, where the step timing was important. I, ignorantly, suggested that the country teams do it together, since we'd be speaking the same language. I then learned my first fact about Belgium - they have two [technically three] official languages (French and Dutch [and German]). Furthermore, to keep things copacetic¹, the Belgian team was half Walloon, half Fleming. So there was awkward shoegazing on my part, my shoes that is.

Years on, my buddies from "Space Camp"² and I went to visit one of the gang in Leuven, in Belgium.³ I can't say that I was particularly taken with the place,⁴ but they did have delicious, cheap kebabs the size of my head.

If I say: Irish, English, Germans, French, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, Greek or Dutch, an image or an idea will pop into your head. Belgians? Waffles... that's all you got?

A country that is the seat of European parliament; the European diamond capital; and an economy with serious leverage....⁵ I could chalk it down to my obliviousness to things that don't appear on Physorg, XKCD, IMDB, TV.com, and the Daily Show [with Jon Stewart], but shouldn't I be more aware of these people?

There is something rotten in the State of... ugh... Belgium.

I have a theory...

Preamble:

To give me the smoothest emigration a man can get, I was provided with relocation assistance by Cartus, part of which included a cross-culture training program; I was given presentations by native Flemings to vet me for life on the ground.

The first speaker gave a litany of Belgians in power - the IMF, the EU, etc. The program coordinator and I marveled at this, that they seem to be holding all the cards. He dissembled, saying that it was more a case of the Belgians being a harmless, inoffensive bunch with no real power.

I put it to you that this is representative of their national policy: "Don't mind little ol' us. We're harmless. What?... sure... One of our boys can head up this, if you think it is alright."

The second presentation was about Belgian history and day-to-day living therein.⁶ Despite my bland summary, the presenter unfolded a riveting tale of maneuverings, twists and turns. In a nutshell, the area that Belgium currently occupies has been passed around like a hot potato for centuries, hence two national languages.

Proposition:
By natural selection, they have gotten demonstrably good at negotiating, at handling people. They are like... like political ninjas!

So what do I know about diamonds Belgium?

*****

⁰It occurred to me to write the piece like Statham in Snatch, but the idea struck too late and I wasn't going to rework it. 

¹That is the first time I have ever used that word - WIN
²The Fás Science Challenge in Florida in Association with NASA is where we met [Whatevs/brushes finger tips on jacket breast]
³Think holiday special, like the time the Bradys went to Hawaii.
⁴The locals were very backgroundy... kept staring at the boisterous Irish crew.
⁵A study that used computer simulations to estimate the response of the global economy to individual economies has Belgium in the company of USA and China in terms of impact; really punching above its weight. (Paper link, and what I read myself first [don't look at me!])
⁶In Belgium that is, not in Belgian history.

I'm walking on eggshells [wooah, it don't feel good]

SWMNBN is going nuts.¹

15 minutes from home...

She asked motherdearest to put down her window. It wasn't down far enough so she communicated this to us with pepperings of "f*cking hell", "you are all f*ckers", and kicking her inactive window switch. From here, She smoothly segued into how she hates us all, especially me.

7 minutes from home...

She began talking about how her and I can have the house to ourselves, sit on the couch, cuddle and watch a scary movie ["but only a ittle bit scary"], while Deirdre collects her sowing kit.

3 minutes from home...

She is asleep.


Mythbusters had a look at Chinese Water Torture and the found that it was not the dripping water in-and-of-itself, but the regularity of the dripping  that made the experience torture.² It reminds me of and is possibly related to this interesting little ditty from Cornell U. The idea being we look for patterns to make things simpler for ourselves, so we reduce the amount of information we have to handle. Generally speaking it has made us pretty awesome, but accidentally or intentionally complicated/irregular/non-sensical information makes us its bitch.³

****

¹Well, she is growing more apparently nuts...


²I know I paint her in a pretty bad light at times, but she is hilarious, shockingly adroit, and generally
very niceⁱ. I don't think we much cared for each other at the beginning of my time in the country, but we've gradually won each other over, like some kind of mutual Stockholm Syndrome.



³In Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, the punishment within the Maths was to copy from and memorize "the Book." It is rife with errors, which grow more insidious chapter-by-chapter, the feared result being a corruption of the mind.

++++

ⁱI'm hardly going to relate the dull bits; it's kind of like war- lots of waiting around interspersed with moments of terror.

McNamyver part 1

[Blogger's note: I had intended to write this series up before I left Dublin, but I forgot about it until I was taking pictures off of my phone.]

Every now and again I get a chance to shine.

Sometimes if a friend of mine (sometimes even a compadre) has a problem, if no one else can help and if they can find them me, maybe you he/she can hire me.^0,1

It all began waaaaay back in autumn 2003....

It was the first day of term, and fresh out of the day's last lecture I get a call from Ro-Ro. Due to circumstance more amusing not to mention, he locked himself out of the apartment with the oven on.² He had just moved in with his girlfriend and it was essentially his first day in the little flat on unsupervised. Even though herself had a key and was only a 10 minute walk away, Ro-Ro felt it best not to involve her.

The apartment is in the basement of a converted Georgian house, and there are two access points: the door and a narrow, narrow window overlooking by the backyard.^2.1 The keys were in a backpack on the bed at the opposite side of the flat (2.5 m from the window).^2.5 Being the strapping examples of human form that we were, neither him nor I could fit through the window.

On my way to his rescue, some friendly carpenters renovating a pub, gave me a discarded switch of timber, which Ro-Ro used as a fing-longer to turn off the oven. His most pressing concern solved, we stood in the garden for a while thinking on how to get to the keys. Eventually, Ro-Ro mentioned there was a roll of stiff tubing under the stairs; I felt that this should have been mentioned earlier.³

It being a dingy garden on the Northside, there was plenty of junk lying around: 5L paint drums, rusty nails, bricks, rusted wheelless bikes, etc. I hammered some nails into one end of the tubing to make a rudimentary hooking device and we fed it through the window.⁴ But it didn't pan out because the bag was too heavy and kept slipping off its perch.

Struck by inspiration,⁵ I jammed the sturdy steel handle of a foreshadowed paint drum down the end of the tube, holding it in place with those nails that were not good for much else. And thus, with my rudimentary hooking device somewhat less rudimentary, we were able to get the bag and our rightful ingress to the premises.

Stay tuned for the next installment of of McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice.

***

⁰Will work for food.

¹"Talk about poor production values, he references one 80s classic with his title and another in the introductory section; hack."

²If you like, imagine him with a too-small towel clasped around his waist, shampoo still in his hair and a back-scrubber in his free hand.

^2.1It makes sense if you tried looking out the window.

^2.5It does smack of an online game such as this, but that is how it happened to be.

³"Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."

⁴More accurately: bricked. And on a related note: Real Men Don't Need Swiss Army Knives.

⁵Recently such moments of inspiration have been shown to be detectable by monitoring brain activity. Again, I am reminded how young neuro-psyhcology is in the grand schemes of things. By which I mean they are largely focussed on things filed away under "That's Obvious;"ⁱ you only have to look in someone's eyes to see that light bulb switch on. Or for that matter, one can feel the change in the mind when the solution to a problem crystallizes.

***

ⁱOf course a number of things are incorrectly filed away under this heading so better off checking things thoroughly. As a whole that blog is worth a read [Thanks to Kevin for sending it on to me], if you can stand being told ad multiplicum how bad we are at thinking and remembering.

False Idols

[Blogger's note, once again this is one that has been gathering dust for a couple of months]

Previously on The Trouble With Máirtín - Motherdearest came to Dublin to bring back the most of the books, suits and bulky items I have gathered in the last 8 years.

As we approached home, I broached the subject of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.^–1 Often has she voiced her love of Eimhin, it being stronger than her feelings for her own father or mother. I asked Deirdre why this was the case. She figured it was because Eimhin brings her toys and gifts when he returns from far away lands. So she suggested that I bring her one of the pair of shoes that were bought for her in Dublin as an offering. I was all for smoothing over the weekend. It didn't seem of consequence at the time, but Diorraing had bought himself two pairs of sunglasses and Cárthach another pair.^–0.5

We arrived in Lisdoon, and I gave Molly her shoes, and she gushed over them and thanked me sweetly. Then she spotted Diorraing's glasses. He told her that he got them in Dublin. Molly said, rather accusingly,"Máirtín got me shoes in Dublin, why didn't he get me sunglasses as well?"⁰

Molly begged Diorraing to wear the sunglasses for a while, so he let her. Since "she got snot on 'em" he refused to give them to her again. Eager/desperate to get into her good graces, I chased Diorraing down and pried the sunglasses from his grasp. He took them off of her, and again I chased him down. This time we took it outside, where there was much wrestling and capering. In all the excitement, Molly forgot whose side she was on and starting kicking me and running away with her other brothers as I lay prone.

Inevitably, Molly broke the glasses by trying to snatch them off of Diorraing and put an end to this episode of our lives. [Fade to black]

[The lead-in: To make room for visiting cousins, I slept in Molly's bed, which goes unused.¹]

As closing credits roll underneath:

The next morning she came in to me. Asked me what I was doing in [Directed by] her room. I told her that she never slept here. She repeated [Written by] herself and added that the bed was too small for me [Key grip], that I was too big and it was perfect for her [Cinematography]. She even went as far as to suggest that I sleep in Eimhin's [Best boy] bed.

–I flashbacked to a morning a year back, where she [Continuity] woke me and disapprovingly asked Deirdre,"Why Máirtín was sleeping [Filmed on location] in Eimhin's room?"–

While she stalked out of her pink, pink room, she made the universal gesture for I-Have-My-Eyes-On-You²; and I pulled the covers up to my nose. [Ballyconnoe Productions, Logo: image of a half bald doll with a dodgy eye holding a mace]

***

^–1SWMNBN to her friendsⁱ

^-–0.5They were of Russian design I think, Chekov or something like that.

⁰My reaction was:"..."ⁱⁱ

¹She sleeps in the master bedroom with her parents. I think it is because she is used to immediate service. Since she drinks copious amounts during the night, when she finds her cup empty, she'll reach over and whack the parent closest declaring:"More!"

²Index and middle finger of the person's hand point at their eyes and then turn and point at you; This really did happen. I found out later that Diorraing had been doing it to her and as a result she picked it up.

***

ⁱThink Lovecraft.

ⁱⁱIt was how I didn't say it that said it all.

I am man, hear me whimper

I was at home last week, for Easter. As expected Molly and I exchanged words and significant looks.

She hasn't been going to crèche recently. Every morning, she gives a few coughs for appearances sake and declares she is sick. Once this has been accepted, she retires to her room¹ and watches "TeeeeVTeeees," which is what she calls television.²

I took to asking her when she was going back to crèche. At first she would cough and repeat she was sick; I rebutted with,"Oh... sounds like you need to go to the doctor." She knew she was rumbled so didn't use that line of defence again.

Instead she out-and-out ignored me. Her blanking of me was impressive, she gave absolutely no indication that she even heard me, not a dismissive shake of the head, not a turn of the shoulder; I may as well have been an imaginary friend that she had out-grown. I was so appalled that I took my tale of being-ignored-by-my-3-year-old-sister to Facebook... More the fool was I:

You read it right there, folks; My mother pwned me, pwned me royally. The irony of it all! I discovered just that weekend that my mother had unfriended me on Facebook because of a harmless comment I put on my page.³ Scant days before the above flaming, I had added her again as a friend. Surely it is ironic?

To cap it off, Molly asked her father if he could kill me; She said it so sweetly.

I have noted her cunning in the past, compared to the two youngest brothers even now her guile is otherworldly. Mr Kipling doesn't just make exceedingly good cakes, he makes exceedingly good points too:

...But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male...⁴

When the blanking seemed to have no effect on me, ["never let them see you bleed!"], she took to giving me the coldest, flintiest stare I have seen on any one, including Jon Hamm and Ian McShane! In the event of my [un-]timely demise by her machinations,^4.5 I would that this be my epitaph:

Us men,

We never have a chance.

Here we are;

Harmless dreamers;

Happy to play our games,

While the women,

The women plot and maneuver.

Sure, they call it "playing house";

I don't buy it.

Not for a second.⁵

****

¹It isn't technically her room; It's the sitting room; Supposedly a common area.

²Eimhin and I call Cárthach "DVDs." When he was younger, the thing he rattled off most often was: "We play Playstation, watch deeeevdeeeeeees [the "v" is supposed to be barely perceptible, like a caught breath] on Máirtin's laptop. It be OK" - It should be noted that Cárthach (now 6) is a computer savvy sweetheart, he has the shortcut keys down for opening movies, going to fullscreen on them and he can google online games pertaining to cartoons he likes and gets the trailers for films he wants to see; I played him in a turn based game, while I was at home, and he told me that he had my strategy figured out. Bless.ⁱ

³

I edited the image to protect the identities of those involved.

⁴From Rudyard Kipling's The Female of the Species.

^4.5The inclusion of "un-" will very much decide on who you are talking to... on reflection it probably won't come up.

⁵We'll say this is from my pink period..

***

ⁱHe only thought he did; I just about beat him.

Time with the family

Last weekend, the family unit gathered in Blanchardstown. The youngers⁰ and Deirdre swept in from Belfast, and Cillian was competing in a weight-lifting competition,¹ while Jin Xi, Eimhin and I were a-spectatin'.

Molly arrived sporting the latest in pink heeled-shoes from Monsoon. I was aghast, but having been threatened, verbally pummelled and generally bested in past clashes, I didn't comment [to her].²

We met up with one of our aunts and one of her daughters at TGI Fridays. The food was pretty good, the chocolate malt fudge cake being a the highlight.

On the way back to the car, Diorrraing told me that some other poor soul, a friend of his, told Molly that her hair looked terrible, to which she replied:

"Shut up, you f*cking hippie."

Shortly after we parted ways, I got a text from Deirdre, informing me that Molly had disowned them all and Jacko was the only one she loved.

Often in my musings, I wonder whether she learned to wield her love like a weapon herself or from following someone's example; When she was between 1 and 2, recalcitrant even then, she got into an argument with Deirdre. To exact vengeance, Molly went to sleep on the floor in the certainty that it would cut Dee to the quick.

Non-sequitor time:
I had to forgo training to meet the family. So that night I decided to go for a proper run for the first time in 3 years- the last time being when I did the Bupa 10 km run in Phoenix Park. I took ran "around the block" and it added to 2.4 miles or there abouts. I did it in 16 minutes;I was pretty happy with it, since it is the best pace I did back when I was running regularly. Additionally, it was snowing when I did it. So it is, like, manly squared or something. All in a days work me, this paragon, this zenith, this apogee... this, this paragon of the masculine form.

* * * * *

⁰This allusion to the others from Lost is as close as I will get to jumping on that band-wagon. Other than that, I do like it as a phrase; Henceforth the last three of my siblings shall be thus name. [And it was so].
¹He got a new "P.B." in the snatch- 80kg.
²I did tell any of the older one's present that they were that genus of shoe that one would expect to find on the feet of someone recently squashed by a house from Kansas- smugly secure that the reference would be lost on herself.

Always Be Guilty

Preamble

Of late, one of our lab PCs has been giving us trouble. It crashes at inappropriate times, e.g. during experiments. The instrument supplier confirmed that the current CPU wasn't up to the job.

As such, I've been emailing the guy in the computer company¹ that assembled it to see the CPU upgrades the motherboard can handle. The guy was very helpful, he gave me the motherboard name and supplied a list of compatible dualcores. I was curious to see if quadcores could be used.² He promptly got back to me with a list of those. 3GHz+ quadcore was too expensive, so I figured that I'd go to my friend, Google,^3,4 to see if a slower quadcore matched/out-matched a faster dualcore. A blog called Coding Horror,⁵ decided it for me. In a nutshell, if the requirements aren't rendering-heavy/parallelizable the change isn't worth it.

I emailed the guy, just a bit more, confirming that I'll be going with dualcore and then that I'll be in touch with the order details. While I was doing up the purchase order,⁶ I checked out a standard on-line computer sales thingy and found it at a much lower price.

Preamble Summary

I was in touch with a guy about buying a CPU upgrade, but found it cheaper somewhere else and the guy is waiting on my purchase.⁷

Coffee's for Closers

So, after much wrestling (figuratively speaking), I decided I wasn't going to order the CPU from the guy, irrespective of the time the guy Guy⁸ spent helping me. This meant I had to e-mail Guy and tell him I won't be buying the part from his company.

I composed a terse email, which I then tried [and failed] to pad out to sound friendly:

Hi Guy,

A colleague found the CPU at a lower price from an alternate vendor and we decided to purchasing it from them.

Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience I have caused you,

I conferred with Damian about it and he said I should come up with something less honest and possibly, well, nicer.

Hi Guy,

Our IT specialist happened to have a spare CPU because of a delivery mix-up, so we will not need the CPU afterall.

Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience I have caused you,

Damian had another gander, and observed it looks like a blatant lie. I agreed and imagined Guy'd see through the thinly veiled rebuff. So I defaulted to the first e-mail. I felt bad to send it to him, but somewhat soothed by "giving it to him straight."

And so I waited with trepidation for Guy's rejoinder:

Hi Martin[,]

That is fine[.]

Thanks for the opportunity[.]

Cheers[,]⁹

Guy

I felt like I had just kicked a puppy. I certainly hoped that there was at least tincture of sarcasm there. If that wasn't the case, the only images that came to mind were of Gil, "Ah jeez, I almost had that one."

I still feel a bit bad about it... so here I am writing it down; the internet is the new confessional!

* * * * *

¹I'm not tellin' which company it is. Let's just rule out Dell because they were terrible at getting back to us even with preliminary specs (10s of weeks!), let alone a quote. The company we did go with gave us our PC within 5 working days- win!

²I ascribe to the Tim "the Tool Man" Taylor school of hardware.

³A sore hoke on the aul to the prestigeⁱ that many have suffered (Newton/Leibniz, Bell/Reis/Meucci, Rowling/Stouffer/Jacobs, etc.) is the galling discovery that their original idea wasn't.

⁴Everything you need is on the internet. With this in mind, "I always Google before I do my own bit."ⁱⁱ

⁵Earlier today, I read through it to disable the pesky automatic update/restart on XP. This irritant persists on XP if you don't click "restart later" every 10 minutes. Without going into configurations or command prompt it cannot be disabled and if one were silly enough to ignore the pop-up window, it will just go ahead and do restart anyway.

⁶By "I," I mean I assumed a managerial/hands-off position as one of the first year PhD students, Damian, did it.

⁷True, I could have said that in the first place, but seemingly extraneous information helps with decision making.^iii,iv

⁸It seems rather dehumanizing to call him "the guy"; I'll give him a proper name.

⁹Either the lack of punctuation was a subtle snubbing, or he was a bit emotional about the fracas.

* * * * *

ⁱName that quote.⁴

ⁱⁱComing soon to a vendor of cheesy customer endorsements near you.

ⁱⁱⁱWell, that is what they say.

^ivI just dropped arguably off-topic footnotes/knowledge on you, my readers, because I can. Whatchu gonna a do about it!?^α

* * * * *

^αIn further unrelated news, Hippo becomes mayor of a village (link).^β

^βIn truth is less unrelated and more allusive.