Transformation

I was restless last night. It was half past twelve and there was no way I was going to sleep if I went to bed. So instead I decided to stay up, play some online poker and listen to some music.

As I’ve said before in a previous post, I share a house with a number of others and one of the nice features of the place I’m living at the moment is that, because it’s been let for such a long period of time, with housemates changing over the years, the house has amassed a decent collection of ‘communal’ music in the living room. As we all know, with the advent of digital music players cds have lost a lot of their value and so people are less attached to them once they’ve been converted into the digital format. As a result of this devaluation the house has become home to a sizeable collection that various housemates have discarded over the years.

Among this collection is Lou Reed's 'Transformer'. Now for many out there I'm sure this album holds pride of place in their music collection, I however, am ashamed to admit that I had never listened to the whole album. Sure I knew songs from the album such as 'Perfect Day' and 'Walk on the Wild Side'. In fact it was the latter that led me to choose the album from the house collection and give it a listen, as the song has a sentimental place in my memory having played a part in my getting together with my now girlfriend.

On the night in question she and I were at a mutual friend's party and towards the end of the night had started chatting, while also commandeering the iPod that was playing as our own personal jukebox. I played a song first and it was greeted with about as much enthusiasm as a visit from the IMF. So I upped the ante, 'Right' I said 'You've got one chance, one song, impress me'. As I heard the first few strums of Lou Reed's guitar and she began to dance slowly back in my direction I knew there was something special  about this girl and I wanted to know more. Over a year on and she's still making great choices, and more than that she's introduced me to so many new things and transformed the way I look at others. Even now when she's not in the same country, I still feel her influence is guiding me to great things. 

A great song. A great album. A great girl.

 

A Vision of Disappointment

I think everybody experiences a fair amount of disappointment in their lives be it in education, career, sports, love or any other pursuit where, despite their best efforts, they just came up short. Like most people I’ve experienced all of these to some degree or another and they’ve all been disappointing, but over all the bad exam results, unsuccessful interviews, lost sporting matches, failed relationships and never materialising Christmas presents (I’m still waiting on a Lego pirate ship twenty years on) I know precisely the most disappointed I've ever felt.

I was about seventeen or eighteen and just starting to get into pubs and clubs on a regular basis. It must have been summer time because I was staying with a childhood friend in my home city. I remember waking up in his spare room a little disorientated and bleary-eyed after a heavy night of adolescent drinking, trying to take in my surroundings and get my still slightly intoxicated brain to process exactly where I was. However, my brain was far more interested in the fact that, although bleary-eyed, I could focus on the poster on the wall at the end of the bed. This you might rightly think is and of itself not usual, unless like me you have worn glasses with a strong prescription from a young age.

I sat bolt upright in bed, rubbed my eyes again to clear any remaining sleep and began to focus on things around the room. To my utter delight they were all in focus, I could see the poster, I could see the clock on the table opposite, I could see all these things without my glasses, I could see, I could see, I COULD SEE!! I didn't understand how I could see them, but I could. I rubbed my eyes a number of other times to make sure that it wasn't some trick, that some bit of sleep hadn't inexplicably got lodged somewhere in my eyes enabling me to focus in a similar way to when you pull your eyes at sides to provide a brief moment of focus, but let go before anyone sees you in case they think you're performing a racist impression of someone from the Far East.

There was no logical explanation for why my vision had suddenly returned to 20:20 but did I care? Not one iota, this was the greatest thing that had happened to me, I was over-joyed. I hated wearing glasses and I hated even more not being able to see without wearing them. I had recently gotten contact lenses for sport which had been fantastic and given me a taste of what life was like without glasses and I had loved it. Now I would no longer have to worry about lenses or glasses, this will be great!

My thought process as I walked to the bathroom, shortly after jumping out of bed with vigour and dancing a jig to my new-found sight, went something like this - 'This is going to be great, perfect vision! No more glasses or contact lenses, sweet! Perfect vision, just like having contacts lenses in, but none of the hassle of keeping them clean. Yea just like having contacts lenses, like last night, perfect vision without...just like wearing contacts...like last night...contact lenses...'

That was the moment, as I stared at my bloodshot-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, of greatest disappointment. From the shear elation I had felt moments earlier about my new life as a perfect sighted person to the crushing realisation that I had slept in my contact lenses, that to is in my world the definition of disappointment.

Moments before I was on such a high that I was impervious to the effects of the previous nights drinking, now the intoxication that had led to my inability to process what had actually happened was coming back with a vengeance. As I lay on the bed with a once again blurred ceiling spinning above me, thinking I couldn't possibly feel any worse, the chorus of Amazing Grace started to echo in my head.

Suffixgate

So there’s another scandal breaking in the media and surprise, surprise, the incident involved has been suffixed with the word ‘gate’. There are no shortage of examples of this phenomenon and if I’m honest, while I think it is somewhat lazy on the part of the journalists to add yet another media storm to the growing list of '-gates', I can appreciate why they do it. It’s often a catchy or memorable name, it removes the necessity for a longer title for the incident referred too and in some instances it can have an element of humour. However, while I understand why the media uses the suffix with such frequency, I’m less understanding of its use in everyday life. My tolerance for it was exhausted after living through ‘Milkgate’.

For those of you who have ever experienced communal living ‘Milkgate’ may bring back memories of incidents you’d sooner forget. It all started on 5 June. Truth be told it undoubtedly started before then, but this was the day that the half-empty carton of milk, that would come to form the centrepiece of ‘Milkgate’, past its expiration date. Nestled in the communal door area of the fridge its ownership was unclear to all but the person who returned it to that position. I’m not sure if this is universal, but certainly in any property I have shared the fridge is divided on a shelf per housemate basis while the storage in the door, albeit an occasional bone of contention, always remains a free-for-all. Thus, anything in the door of the fridge could belong to any member of the house.

In early August, a whole two months after the effects of pasteurisation had been exhausted, one of my housemates was leaving us and moving on to sunnier pastures. Before leaving the housemate in question cleaned her room, tidied the communal areas and, of course, cleared out her section of the fridge. In her vigorous attempts to get the fridge as clean as possible before our new housemate moved in she accidently disturbed the half-empty carton of, what no longer resembled, milk which proceeded to fall from its perch, hit the floor and expel its contents both into the fridge and onto the surrounding area.

I truly believed I had smelled some pretty foul things in my life, a teammate’s rugby kit that went a whole season without being washed, the toilets of a bar I worked in that almost exclusively sold Guinness to old men and many others beside. But nothing came close to the stench I encountered on entering the kitchen that day, and to be honest I didn’t need to reach the kitchen to smell it, it was there as soon as I opened the front door and as I think back now I’m not sure that I didn’t smell it outside and mistakenly think it was the bins that are stored near the front door.

Now the incident itself did not warrant its addition to the realm of ‘-gates’. However, the stand-off which ensued is what led to what will in the minds of the four housemates be forever remembered as ‘Milkgate’. The departing housemate was by the time I arrived home, out in the garden with the other housemates recovering from a bought of vomiting of Team America proportions and was categorically refusing to clean up the mess.

Thus the three of us that were more tolerant of lactose began to debate which of us would be careless enough to do such a thing and more importantly who was going to clean it up. After a couple of hours of heated debate it was clear we would never know for sure who was to blame and with such a horrible prospect facing the guilty party nobody was prepared to take one for the team to restore peace. So we did what seemed fairest. Deck of cards, lowest card cleans up.

I drew first… 10 of clubs. An occasional poker player I knew this offered me quite a few outs. Next to draw… king of diamonds. Queue fist pumping and shouts of joy from a much relieved housemate. I was envious, but I knew that I was still in a good position. When I saw the jack of clubs come out, my heart sank, the realisation of what lay ahead of me meant I completely tuned out the jubilant celebrations that were going on around me.

Three hours, a staggering quantity of bleach and a considerable amount of dry-retching later it was finally clean. But the scars remain. I swear I can still smell that putrid milk from time to time, it’s as if it has taken up a permanent residency in my nostrils, coming back to haunt me whenever it pleases. It’s my Vietnam.

‘Milkgate’ was debated in the house for a long time after and what was the accepted conclusion of these debates? That the milk had most likely been purchased by ‘she who spilled it’ for her dairy-loving boyfriend who had stayed with us the week before the milk expired and was later ignored by the three regular milk drinkers who knew it was not theirs.

So you’ll forgive me if the suffix ‘-gate’ leaves a bitter taste in my mouth… and vile smell in my nostrils.