Notes Of An Uninteresting Event

A job rotation I’ve been doing for the past few months is coming to an end this Friday. It’s been a total departure from what I had been doing for the previous fourteen years, and I’m really sad to be finishing up. The team has been so supportive, and it’s given me an opportunity to show the business what I am capable of, which is what I set out to do. I hope it will result in some upward movement, as I feel confident shouldering more responsibility.

I was standing outside Cypress Avenue on Caroline Street with my husband, brothers, and friend after our exit from a gig we had all attended when my friend commented on how nice it was that my brothers and I all liked the band we had seen. Adam, the brother, said to her that all the music he and our younger brother listen to had been influenced by me. He had mentioned this to me before and added how our mutual friend had brought up how, as teenagers, they would all listen to the music I discovered and how I epitomized the ‘cool older brother’. Back in those early days, I was into alt-rock and nu-metal, and we would sit through afternoons watching music videos on MTV2, Kerrang, and Scuzz in our parents' TV room. It felt really good to know that my brothers' and others' musical tastes were influenced by me in some way, and that I have continued to seek new music even today. We no longer hang out in our parents' tv room watching music videos, but whenever I see them, I share what I am listening to or post it on an Instagram story.

Today, I reminisced about the time I decided to get a tattoo following what I think was me realising that I’d wasted a lot of time procrastinating / doing fuck all. Looking back at it now, it was a sort of turning point.

It was around 2009, before ‘doomscrolling’ on Instagram or TikTok and before the word entered the lexicon, I would endlessly scroll through Tumblr, looking at anything from art and design to porn and photography. I lost a good chunk of my evenings and nights from that time through to 2013, a time which epitomizes ‘Peak Procrastination’ in my life.

Anyways, I’d spend excessive time online scrolling through photos of tattoo’s I really liked, super detailed snake skin designs, and full arm tattoos. I started to lean toward scripted tattoos, though, with some meaningful word or phrase. A guy I followed on Tumblr at the time had a really nice tattoo across his upper chest, just below his clavicle, and I liked how subtle it is (not on show on my arms or legs).

Around the same time that I was browsing for inspiration, I kept discovering some great new music, like I still do today. One band was a Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine side project called ‘One Day As A Lion’ that had emerged around 2009. Super funky sound, with amazing drum tracks and I was really into them for a few years up to that point. The band’s name coming from a quote by none other than Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” So, as a call to action, I thought it would be good for my tattoo to read “Live Every Day As A Lion.” I’m a Leo star sign, so at the time, it felt as if I was telling my subconscious that I didn’t want to be the way I was and that I needed to change, to be more like a lion.

Holy Cow, a tattoo place in Midleton that my brother had recommended, was where I got it done, and the rest is history. I got another tattoo a year later but none since, and I won’t rule out getting more in the future.

Last week, my husband and I went on holiday to Croatia for the first time, flying from Cork to Zadar. Our Croatian hairdresser had been recommending that we go, and upon disembarking the return flight plane last Monday into Cork Airport, we wished we had stayed longer. Zadar, a city on the coast, has a wonderful old quarter with narrow streets, Roman remnants, many churches, and the “Sea Organ,” where the waves flowing through compose a constantly changing melody. We traveled down the coast by car as far as the city of Split, the second-largest city in Croatia, and the amazing Plitvice Lakes National Park. All in all, it was a wonderful trip—very hot, but a place we’ll hopefully go back to in a few years.

A friend of mine recently got braces for his “gapped teeth,” and it got me thinking about my own experience with having correction done for my mal-positioned gnashers. I would’ve been put on a waiting list in primary school, as was the case for many receiving orthodontic treatment publicly back in the nineties. And when I eventually got my referral to the Cork Dental Hospital, located on the grounds of the then Cork Regional Hospital, I had just finished secondary school.

Due to overcrowding in my mouth, which caused my overlapping teeth, four molars had to be removed to accommodate the orthodontic appliance. In a follow-up session, I vividly remember sitting in the dentist’s chair, looking out at the car park opposite the entrance to the dental hospital, mouth held open with some sort of appliance, as the dentist applied adhesive to my crooked teeth and the bonding of the brackets. I can recall the feeling as the wire was being attached to each bracket, the metal taste in my mouth, and when all was complete, it being anchored on the four stainless steel molar bands wrapped around my four back teeth. The feeling of pressure on my teeth and the scratching of the inside of my cheek by the molar bands, using wax strips alleviated the latter but the former lasted for days / weeks afterward.

Regular visits to adjust the braces occurred for about eighteen months or so until they were removed just before I moved to Saudi Arabia for a year. A new mold was taken to create a retainer that I used at night for an additional year to ensure my teeth stayed in their new position. All in all, it took about three years for my teeth to get realigned, staying where they are to this day, and I enjoyed listening to my friend talk about his experience. By all accounts, not much has changed in the twenty-plus years since I had mine.

Back in the early nineties, in the estate where I grew up, three people had cancer at the same time over a period of about two years. It was a tragic time because one of my friend’s younger sister passed away, as well as an older neighbour who left behind his wife and three young kids. I was young when it happened, but my parents have recently spoken about how it shook everyone in the estate because they feared it might have been related to where we all lived. I vividly remember being in the local church for the young girl’s funeral, where her primary school friends sang Joan Osborne’s ‘One of Us.’

… What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us Just a stranger on the bus Tryin' to make his way home?

Since those tragic events over thirty years ago, unfortunately, cancer has come to affect those close to me. My mother received a diagnosis this past February, and although she’s responded incredibly well to her treatment, we all have a collective superstition that bad things come in threes. So, waiting for a second and third bad thing to happen, the news that cousin, who is only in their early thirties, was diagnosed with a brain tumour hit us hard. Finding a malignant frontal lobe tumour following a seizure she had, meant her doctors quickly removing the cancer but she has a long road of treatment ahead. Then to cap off the phase that bad things come in threes, only yesterday, I found out that a dear colleague of mine from work has a brain tumour and the outlook isn’t good.

At the time we found out about my Mum, I exclaimed to her and the rest of my family - Fuck cancer!

I want to shout it our as loud as I can :(

In the living room of a childhood friend’s home hung a framed aerial photo of their house taken from a plane. Their detached house stood alone on a large plot, separate from the rest of the semi-detached houses in our estate. Since the parents owned their own business, they had disposable cash to splurge on getting the image from such a height. Fast forward thirty years, and small battery-powered quadcopters with high-resolution digital cameras can create stunning aerial imagery, making a framed photo of your own house within reach of the average family. Note to self: frame the aerial photo of our house.

At 5 p.m. on Friday evening, as I was just leaving work, Kate from the solicitor’s office rang to say the sale had closed on the house we’d waited seven months for and that we were the new owners. I was jubilant and rang my husband to tell himself the good news, and that we were going to pick up the keys right away.

Opening the door for the first time was a curious experience because we’d spent most weekends over the last few months parked in the park across the river from the house and walking around the area. It was ours now, and the enormity of what we needed to do began to well up inside me. But it’s where our kids will grow up, when we have them, and where our families will visit for special occasions or anytime. Keeping an eye on that is going to help me get through and not be overwhelmed. One step at a time.

Watching Top Gun: Maverick a few weeks ago, there was a line of dialogue that Tom Cruise’s character uttered to himself in the cockpit of his plane during an amazing final scene toward the end of the movie, in reference to another lead character, he says, “Don’t think. Just do.” The character he was referring to had previously been paralysed by fear and unable to take action, but in this penultimate scene, he overcame his mental obstacle and triumphed. This got me thinking about my own fear. Around the time of the COVID lockdowns, I contemplated procrastination and whether my overthinking in my early adult years had inhibited my love life, social life, and professional life up until I met my husband. His support has helped me reframe my world, priorities, and sense of self to the point where I now say I’m a recovering procrastinator or that I’m able to better control it. I’ve read articles that outline how procrastination is a person’s way of protecting their precarious self-esteem, which I did, or that living in clutter is a sign, which I also did (photo from 2003), to humorously ‘Procrastinators: Leaders of Tomorrow.’ It’s also been linked to depression, which is something I’d never considered or fully know much about, but I’ll be digging into it. For years, I didn’t see any problem, but for an outside observer, it looked obvious. Now that I’ve been shown the mirror, I want to get better and be better for this next chapter in my life that I’m entering. Don’t think. Just ask for help.