Typical

Oh dear, oh dear.

Seems UL’s status as an equal-opportunities employer welcomes would-be employees with open arms, regardless of their gender, creed, ethnicity, or zoology.

I got a letter from one of UL’s many administrative chimps today, informing me politely that I had failed out of college, because my ‘cumulative performance to date does not meet the minimum academic standards.’

“Hang on a tick”, I thought to myself, what’s going on here? I read on:

The Academic Council Grading Committee has decided that you cannot proceed to the next year of your programme until you have brought your academic performance to the required standard… They recommend that you Repeat Year 3 New Media and English.

“Bollocks,” I was thinking - “guess my grades from the US didn’t get a good exchange rate.”

The letter advised that under ‘extenuating circumstances’ I ‘may appeal to the Student Status Committee for a review of [my] case […] on Wednesday July 11th.'

I decided a look at the accompanying ‘Student Residual Transcript’ was in order, and that’s when I saw it. And remembered. This is UL. The University of Limerick. The reason other colleges and universities refer to their administrative blunders as ’pulling a UL’. Those damn dirty apes made no reference to the second semester I spent studying abroad and instead had me enrolled in four classes I was at least 4000 miles away from at all times.

For the time being, I am a college-flunkie, by default. Much like I was once an enemy of the United States, by default. At this rate, I’m expecting to be declared legally dead by the time I’m thirty and come home from work someday to find the bank auctioning off my house.

Assuming of course, that I ever own a house, seeing as I’m now a college-dropout.

"Vanilla-Sully"

Lately, it's come to my attention that there is an unsettling split in my personality. This alter-ego rears its head quite infrequently, and as of late, the occurrences follow a common trend:

I am a different person during air-travel.

Startling as such a proclamation may be, its veracity becomes apparent after even casual scrutiny. Travelling-Sully's temperament is wildly different than that of regular Sully. Travelling-Sully is paranoid; he spends the hours before the flight sweating a nervous sweat, fearing that the US Department of Homeland Security is going to bust him for no good reason.

Travelling-Sully is thoughtful, he wanders around the airport gift-shop, searching for novelty items for anyone who springs to mind; whereas Vanilla-Sully deems the pursuit of shoddily assembled, overpriced knick-knacks as a heinous waste of time. Not only that, but Travelling-Sully is courteous to a disconcerting degree, delighting in the opportunity to show off the extent of his manners. Every request is buttressed with “Excuse me, I hope you don't mind but could you...?”. Even the frequent occurrence of walking past a person on the plane prompts a tirade of 'I do beg your pardons' and 'I'm terribly sorry sirs'. Classic-Sully likes to save his breath.

Not convinced yet? Travelling-Sully gets so excited about the crappy meal on the plane that he can't sleep. Yes, the soggy mess that comes in the foil container, accompanied by stale, communion-wafer-tasting 'I Can't Believe It's Not Rock' bread, covered with jam of a lower viscosity than water, and cheese that can only be described as 'something that was squeezed out of one of the stewardesses and then curdled'. I know that airline food is rank, you do too, but would somebody explain that to Travelling-Sully? It seems that this splinter-personality avails of different taste buds than I do.

He beams at the choice: “Beef or Chicken?”, furrowing his brow in deep contemplation before spitting out an answer at random; so excited that he can't think straight. Delighted by the elaborate three-course spread that sits on the 20x30cm tray before him, he restrains himself just enough to eat the courses in their intended order, as if to do otherwise would upset the airline chef. After an epic struggle with the bread that claimed the serrated edge of his pathetic plastic knife, he finally cuts his dinner-roll in half, and sets about spreading the butter, feeling oh-so-incredibly intelligent for melting it a little by placing it under the piping hot container the 'main course' arrived in. Once he's done breaking his teeth on that, he picks up the generic brand of cracker that has soaked up more rivers than global warming, and fumbles around for the cheese that the elderly women on the plane are paring down and remodelling as a replacement for their dentures.

Once the remaining slop has been shovelled down, Travelling-Sully gleefully eats the token dessert offering of a muffin made from recycled styrofoam, plops the stamp sized mint into his gob, and sits back, satisfied, the only remaining excitement he has to look forward to the 'test-your-might' game at the luggage-claim carousel...

Take That Jocelyn Nova!

This one won't make much sense unless you were here for Thursday's post, but that's okay, because I've squashed the person who was stealing my content like the insect that they were!

The site that was leeching posts from this blog, and dozens of others has been taken down, and a notice advertising this is all that remains. I was alerted to this by a seven-word e-mail from a Mark @ Wordpress, mere hours after I sent my complaint! What service, eh?

This makes me happy because it means that less people are likely to be diverted to that site than to my own from search engines (not that I get a whole pile from search engines anyway). But what it does mean is that I have secured the top spot for 'Sluttily Attired' searches on Google!



Anyway... Here's a 'real' post!

What the @&$#??

I've been robbed!

Kinda. Being curious as to how the Cartridge World poster would have found the blog, I decided to see if a Google Search for 'Cartridge World' turned up any results, followed by 'Cartridge World is Stealing From Me'. Oddly enough, it worked, but linked directly to an earlier blog.

I googled the title, 'Sluttily-Attired', and lo and behold, what was the number one result? My post. Only not my website!



Look familiar?

The misappropriated text is available here for now, if you're curious, but I intend on getting it removed, it's just a matter of how...

But kudos to me for 'coining' a real-sounding word/phrase that appears at the top of the google search, eh?

Egregious Emotional Ejaculation, Anyone?

It seems that May was my worst month of blogging, certainly in terms of quantity, and more than likely in terms of quality. The reason I'm writing less is because I have less to write about! So prepare yourself for some self-indulgent, self-reflective rambling!

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I'm in a long distance relationship. This isn't something I'm proud to admit. Long distance relationships made no sense to me whatsoever, until of course, I found someone worth the hassle. Despite having found this noteworthy person, I still feel a twinge of shame admitting that I was unable to find someone tolerable, let alone loveable on my own island.

I can recall vividly a class I had when I was fifteen years old. For forty minutes a day, two times a week, over the course of a school year, the teachers would try to scare us off recreational drug use, exploiting every trick in the book. Attempts ranged from the anecdotal (“I remember a nice young student whose life was ruined by...”), to the pseudo-scientific (“you're not actually having a good time on drugs, you just think you are”), all the way to the utterly inane (“Jesus doesn't want you to use drugs. And God only allows drugs on earth to challenge you not to take them”). One of the techniques I'm reminded of by my relationship is a diagrammatical representation of a junkie's ups and downs:

The premise was that when the junkie got his drugs, he would hit a high – that would be the peak on the chart, but then he'd come down from his high, and the line would drop to halfway. The line would spike up again when he got his next fix, but not as high as before, and the resulting fall in his demeanour would send him lower than before, until eventually our junkie friend is trying to score just to not feel miserable. This buzzword-heavy message was delivered with such a grave sense of urgency from this authority figure that we feared that we might get caught up in any 'vicious cycle', and the over-simplification of the issue was eclipsed by its seeming sincerity.

So what should one expect then of a long-distance relationship? Imagine this; for the first time in weeks, or even months, you get an audience with your main squeeze. After weeks, (or even months) of her consisting of little more than a voice on a phone or text on a screen, you see her coming towards you in an airport arrivals lounge. You need a shave, your throat is scratchy from the strange air on the plane, you're in dire need of some hair gel and your entire body smells like your socks. Of course, you'd prefer to play it cool, because you're a stoic git, but instead, you're smiling like a child on Christmas morning because you see her, and that grin only begins to fade once your cheeks begin to ache under its strain. The weeks and months you have just invested into text on a screen, or that voice on a phone make total sense now. It is in these moments that you have never been more thankful for your senses of smell, touch, and sight because what was once less than tangible is now real flesh and bones before you! You are intoxicated by the sheer novelty of being in her presence. It occurs to you that you too are trapped in a vicious cycle, but unlike your hypothetical junkie friend, with the transience of time you find that the highs get higher and the lows tolerable.

Okay, so that's obviously my personal take on it, but I'm sure it's true of most people who don't get to spend as much time with their sweetheart as they'd like. I just got back from two weeks in Wisconsin where I maintained a constant, borderline ridiculous proximity to my lady-friend at all times. The only break we got from one another was during our respective trips to the bathroom. Looking back on it, I'd even be inclined to say I walked fewer steps on my own than I did while hand in hand with her (obviously, walking in tandem is one of the clumsier methods of locomotion, but when trying to engorge oneself on as much physical contact possible, I think volunteering such minor details makes sense).

You won't ever hear me using the cliché “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. Not only because of my aversion to trite sayings, and not because it's an insult to the absentee, but because it simply isn't true. I had more than one friend ask me if I'd recommend a long-distance relationship, as if I had complied a list of pros and cons to make the matter easily digestible. I could never recommend that somebody seek out a long-distance relationship, especially given the hassles involved, but I cannot stress enough that if you find somebody worth holding onto, that you do whatever it takes to hold onto them.

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Yech – that seemed an awful lot like sentimentality, didn't it? I'm new to this whole 'emotions' thing, and I find it quite sickening, so please, berate me as appropriate on the comments section.