Watching lots of Flight of the Conchords.

I'm having a spectacularly nice day. Nothing much is happening that's even worth telling about, but that absolutely won't stop me from telling it. Here's my day:

I woke up with a hankering to read The Anatomy of LISP. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but this is something that always puts me in a good mood, and I started the day by being impressed and happy with some clever recursion. After that was that cat's morning harness training, which went really well -- she's not quite stepping into the harness, but she's standing patiently while I assemble it; the leash is going to be another story, I suspect -- and then we went for brunch. Paradise Cafe makes great veggie breakfast burritos with tofu and artichokes and things. After that I walked around Manhattan a whole lot, and ended up in the upper east side, so I bought the Irish Times at a shop there that's good for international newspapers. I got takeaway apple and cinnamon tea at Alice's Teacup then sat in the breezy sunshine drinking tea and doing the crossword and eating a low-calorie chocolate muffin, which sounds like it should be rubbish but was actually delicious enough to warrant an advertisement. Buy these! http://www.vitalicious.com/

Then I went to the United Nations, which was pretty great actually. I kind of love the UN in the same way that I kind of love the postal service: it has its flaws and it sure has its detractors, but the fact that it exists is a wonderful thing. Such civilisation we have! There's a great photography exhibition on there, all moving and funny and shocking and clever and sad, like a good photography exhibition should be. I bought some books, and looked at the crafts from everywhere (delicate ceramic teapots from England; skillfully turned wooden pots from Armenia; appalling green hats from Ireland. *dies of shame*) then hung out in a park I'd never seen before, which had adults and kids playing hockey together, and (even better!) no filthy squirrels. I started heading home, but got waylaid by a street fair on Park Avenue, where I bought grilled corn on the cob (and applied too much chili powder, yikes), and saw two guys carrying lacrosse sticks, something I've only ever seen in comic books. They're smaller than I imagined.

On the way home I passed a great vegetable shop, so I bought some potatoes and an onion, because we have turnips and carrots in our fridge (it's a long story), and I reckoned that owning some potatoes and an onion would make it them more likely to leave the fridge while still solid. And I bought gruyere too, on general principles. I couldn't find the potatoes for a while, which was frustrating because if you have an irish accent there is no way in hell you can ask where the potatoes are, but it worked out ok. And then I came home.

Now I'm waiting for a vegetable and cheese pie to bake (and I pretty much never cook, so you can imagine the immense childish pride here). And then Joel and I are going to see the Hurt Locker, which I suspect will not end the day on a happy high, but that's ok. It's kind of lovely and strange how small unremarkable things can add up to a perfect day.

Half the shops in Manhattan have "No pets" signs outside. I always want to go in with a bowl of goldfish under my arm.

Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

The word of the month over at JoelAndTanyaHQ is crepuscular. In case it's as new to you as it was to me, I'll rip off wikipedia's definition here and tell you that "Crepuscular is a term used to describe some animals that are primarily active during twilight, that is at dawn and at dusk." This creature classification includes our own Keeper of the Schedule, who woke us up at dawn by racing around the living room then falling into a basin of water I'd left on the floor. Since she normally wakes us up by thumping me until I feed her, I found this a pretty entertaining start to the day.

Wouldn't Crepuskula be a good name for a cat?

I bought a small animal harness and a bag of tuna snacks, and my project for the next few weeks is to brainwash Lucy into associating the harness with nice things. Day one was inconclusive: nobody got bitten, but she backed into a corner with an expression like the end of the first act of Full Metal Jacket. The tuna snacks are our only hope for reconciliation.

For the second time this summer, I have an enormous hobbly foot. There's no new puncture, so not mosquitos this time, but I felt something burning when I was in our potential new garden yesterday. Ants, maybe, or tiny invisible spiders, or alien chemicals coating the grass. It hurts kind of a lot. Anti-histamines didn't work (though they added an interesting dimension to the day at work), but a basin of ice water is making everything nice.

Being a proper internerd, of course I've been twittering pictures at intervals. Watch as Righty changes from oddly lumpy to brute squad. (Or don't if you'd rather not. I realise that posting pictures is abnormal.)

I don't normally put my surname on things. My first name is a unique enough identifier for the parts of the internet that matter and, for the rest, I don't like to be too searchable. There's no particular reason for that -- my internet presence is reasonably well spelled, and there's nothing I've written since I've left college that I'd be ashamed to put my name to -- but it's a habit that I've never seen a reason to break.

I've been thinking about this recently though, and I'm starting to see the value in presenting an internet profile which is distinctly you. Part of this is something that olethros mentioned a while back, that people who aren't on facebook still have a facebook silhouette. Without a profile, your profile is defined by the people who mention and tag you. It might be worth being there just so you can exert a small measure of control over what you look like there.

The bigger reason is that there are so many people online now. Even if you have a relatively uncommon name, the odds are high that there's going to be someone there who could be mistaken for you. There's no guarantee that you won't be embarrassed by them.

Right now Joel and I are applying to join a co-op, and it's very reasonable to expect a potential neighbour and business partner to check us out online. There are at least three other people on the internet with my name, at least one of whom is either very young or dangerously vacuous. It frightens me that someone might think that that person is me.

Anyway, my longwinded point here is that today I attached my real name to my twitter account and to my Google profile, so there's some of me on the front page of a search for my name. Both of those link directly here. And if you're reading this because you're a member of the co-op board for that place on President Street, then you've done some good detective work. Please say hi! I promise that Joel and I are ok neighbours.

Tonight: Manhattan Cubed. Watching Manhattan in Manhattan while drinking Manhattans. I've been excited about this since I invented it last week.

Edit: Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.

Playing an accordion near other people's back garden is domestic terrorism.

Since I'm thinking about Irish-abroad cliches, here's a quick list

Irish in New York things I don't do:
- call the locals "Yanks".
- know who won the All-Ireland.
- own a Wolfe Tones CD.
- complain about American beer. (Dudes, the microbreweries here are ASTOUNDING.)
- have people smuggle me bacon and sausages from home.
- drink six pints and get bollocksed with my Irish friends every night at the weekend.
- sing along loudly any time someone plays Fields of Athenry.

Irish in New York things I do:
- crave chips all the time. Jesus Christ.
- correct people when they call Irish "Gaelic".
- be picky about buying Irish butter. (The French are good at butter too. Everyone else needs to stop trying.)
- say "jaysus" and "shite" and "deadly" and "ah now".
- say "No, you are mistaken" when someone claims to have been drinking good Guinness in America.
- have people smuggle me Taytos from home.
- hate people telling me how adorable my accent is and how I'm so, so funny.
- lie about not singing Fields of Athenry.

Irish in New York things I used to do but life's too short:
- find it irritating when people get all "You're irish? Oh my god! I'm irish too!" when they've never left the continental US. You'd have to spend your life irritated. Now I'm nice and show an interest instead. I'm so heroic.

Linguistic hilarity this evening as the Rosetta Stone software gives me a failing grade in my foreign language pronunciation... of English. I thought it would be my irish 'u' sounds that it objected to, but apparently those have been exorcised; if I could only get my 'i's and 'd's right, I could almost be mistaken for a fluent speaker. Ah, English is a difficult language.

Irish is easier, studies have shown. It's been fourteen years since I studied Irish last, but this evening I got 125/126 on Irish Level 3. It probably helped that I put on my best LUAS accent[1] for the pronunciations, and tried to sound a bit regretful for the characters. "Ta an fear ag leim den dreimire, ah, the poor craychur"[2]. Irish is a slightly anxious language.

Realising how much Irish I have unwittingly retained makes me want to learn it again, but wanting to learn Irish when you've emigrated to America is a bit of a cliche, so I think I won't. (I did go see the SawDoctors, but that was ironic.)

[1] The LUAS, Dublin's lovely tram system, announces each stop in English and Irish in an accent that was designed to sell irish whiskey or Enya cds on television. I've tried not to, but I can't help repeating "Margadh na Feirme" in the tweeest[3] possible LUAS-voice. (I'm fond of it really).
[2] Man jumps off ladder. Nobody's sure why, but the Rosetta people were there with a camera.
[3] Well, you tell me how to spell it.

We just had an offer accepted. If nothing goes wrong (and oh there are so many things that could go wrong), we could be living in our own place in Brooklyn by Autumn.

I am making a face like this: :-D

Edit: Actually, I'm making a face like this:

Really interesting comments, both online and offline, on my locked-up-brain post. I love that some people are like "Yes of course" and other people don't understand what I mean at all. I will think some more on what this all means and report back. You're on tenterhooks, I can tell. (I'll reply soon too. Thanks for the comments!)

In other news, this weekend is Pride, and there's a street fair and a parade and masses of other things. The Company has a bunch of people in the parade, and I was thinking of going along and waving my flag if they'll have me. I'm not certain that it's ok to be in the parade if you're marrying a dude and you're not a dude, but I reckon that's it's similar to people from everywhere celebrating Irishness in the Patrick's Day Parade. Wouldn't you think? Is anyone else going?

In other other news, the cat is sprawled out on the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World giving her underbelly a thorough scrubbing. A cat and an atlas makes a good still life, I think, but I'm not sure exactly why. It's just a good combination.

Six Feet Under now. I have only seven episodes left, in the world, ever.

I'm reading the 1001 Nights and, you guys, either the translation is really lacking, or the ancient Persians spent most of the time bored out of their skulls. These are not gripping stories. If Scheherazade tried the same tactic today, there is not a chance in hell that she'd have made it to day three. She'd be in the middle of relating what the djinn said to the fisherman about the wazir, and Shahryar would completely lose it and have her killed.

Even if she skipped the poems.

There are times when my brain gets frozen up. I mean, sometimes I feel like there's nothing I can't do and the possibilities stretch out in every exciting direction, but occasionally it's like I have a single slow CPU and context switching anything onto it is a really slow and painful process.

Do you know that phenomenon, where you can't properly think? Or almost like you're choosing not to properly think, in the same way as you choose not to put too much weight on a slightly sprained ankle: you could do it, but you know it will hurt. That's how it feels to me when it happens, like there are two hundred thoughts which each want a go on my slightly sprained brain, and I'm apprehensive about letting any of them put too much weight on it. They don't go away either, so you have to periodically cycle through every one of them and make sure that nothing has changed and there's nothing you should do about it, but without letting it put its full weight on your brain.

What's worst is that recognising it, and naming it, that doesn't help much at all. You can say "Brain, we're having a bad mental health week here. Let's take it a bit easy and wait for it to pass.", but you can't make it stop happening any more than you can stop a cold. And of course taking it a bit easy is a big lie. How do you stop new thoughts? It's worse than that, even, because I find that the maximum magnitude of the things I'm capable of thinking about shrinks, and, when there's nothing small left in the queue, my brain makes more work for itself, starting emails, or fixing small things at work, or writing blog posts, and often those end up unfinished too. So the queue grows and grows, and the brain gets scared and under pressure.

Does this happen to other people? Please tell me about it if it does.

There was one evening last week where I tried to fix it by declaring that I would achieve one single easy thing. Anything. Emptying the dishwasher was too hard, this is the level we're working at, but I reckoned I could walk the one block to the gym and go on the elliptical machine with my eyes closed, and not think about anything, and then one thing would be done and I'd win.

And god, the universe stood up to block me: I couldn't find my water bottle, all of my gym clothes were in the wash, American Apparel weren't selling the usual ones, the changing rooms were locked, the cashier had gone out the back for something, everything they sell makes me look lumpy anyway, whatever, whatever, buy the least bad thing and go. All of this in a dark brain-fog-haze, of course, not really focusing on anything, just moving from obstacle to obstacle like a less alert Guybrush Threepwood. I made it to the gym, whereupon my pager immediately went off, and I came home again. That was the kind of week it was. It wasn't a very high achieving week. It was shite, actually.

Anyway, an instance of the Bad Mental Health Week ended yesterday evening, with as little reason as it started, and I vowed that I'd think about it a lot this week, and try to figure out why it happens and what can be done about it next time. And, much thought later, I still don't know. I had more sleep interruptions and it was rainier and a bit more dark. I was doing more things at once than usual: apartment buying and wedding planning and on call and post-holiday unpacking; is it a case of too many inputs? Or is there a bizarre virus with no physical symptoms that finds some advantage in making a human stupid for a few days? I have no idea. I slightly suspect the last one.

I'm particularly interested in comments on this, even if they say "I have no idea what you're talking about." What's the internet for if not finding out that you're the only person with a particular brain disease.

Carb coma. *holds belly happily*

Fish and chips tonight in the form of sushi rolls from Blue Ginger and big fat salty chipper chips from A Salt And Battery. I'm excited about trying these things together, but concerned that I might not yet have determined the optimal route: it needs to allow me to have the chips at their hottest and the fish at its freshest while not being tempted to eat either until I'm sitting at home on my sofa. The evening's plan may also involve throwing my pager in the river, accidentally.

(If anyone from work is reading, that last bit was a lie.)

Weight watchers update: I've lost almost 15% of my initial body weight. They asked what my finish criteria were and I said "whenever I get bored?" and that was apparently wrong, because you have to have a GOAL. I find it really tremendously difficult to deal with earnest people, which is probably ok, since they seem to find it just as difficult to deal with me.

Anyway, I reckon I'm pretty much finished, with the proviso that I should will keep going to the gym and probably will not go back to living on bagels and rye whiskey, and will therefore prolong my life. In summary, I still recommend weight watchers, but I wish it was called something less stupid so I wouldn't feel like a tool every time I talk about it.

It's interesting, buying houses, because the rules aren't really obvious. Do you offer the asking price, if it's a reasonable price? My dad says no, not under any circumstances, are you a fool? But the internet says both yes, offering a lower price might alienate the seller, and maybe, depends how much you want it, and some co-workers agree that it's good form to offer the full price if it's not overpriced. Overpriced is a funny thing too, because after a while the numbers stop having meaning, and you start referring to a $600k apartment as "way too cheap", and wondering what's wrong with it, because you just don't get a thousand square feet in commuter-Brooklyn for that kind of small change unless there's only one window and actually it's boarded up. How can an apartment be worth so much money? You don't even get to own it, you know; you get to own shares in the co-op that owns it. It's so strange.

We sat down with some internets last night, and looked at every single place which was comparable to the place we've decided we might probably want, and read too about what kind of offer is a good offer to make. The conclusion that there's not a single better place on the internet (for the kind of money we can convince a bank to give us) is both exciting and scary; maybe this is going to be where we settle down and grow turnips and small dogs and domestic joy, or maybe this place is already gone and we have to wait for something else good to come along, or maybe it's not gone and we buy it and move in and hate it straight away and they shut down the F train and the cheese shop goes out of business and and we catch swamp-lung from the canal and end up all negative equity and depression (and swamp-lung). So, it's pretty exciting, is what I'm saying here.

Neighbourhood of the week is Carroll Gardens.

The other thing that's going on with me is that the hotel we've been wrestling with for wedding stuff finally sent a picture of the room they're pushing for a wedding ceremony, and it's a lot like where you'd hold a small internal conference if you were a beige reseller of enterprise human resources middleware. You can just about see the three ring binders with inspirational slogans about customer trust. I mean, I think there are some in the photographs. The Church of Elvis gets more and more tempting. (Or faking Catholicism, but Elvis has better music.)

How've I never seen The Shining? Joel, Gavin and I are at IFC for a late showing. I avoid scary movies, so watching The Shining after my bedtime is clearly a fantastic idea.

Edit: That scared the crap out of me (and I loved it).

Lucy tried to join me on the fire escape where I was doing lemon tree maintenance[1], and was clearly disconsolate to be shooed back inside. Can you buy a leash (or an encounter suit) for a cat? I'd like to let her explore out there, but I'd be afraid she'd get startled by the traffic below and we'd never see her again. A super-long cat leash would be brilliant. I'd love to take her to the park and let her do some squirrel chasing[2].

[1] not a euphemism
[2] not a euphemism

Edit: Yes you can!