Events of 2011:Sunday 2nd January 2011After listening to many doom-mongering reports of madness and waves of paranoia engulfing Ireland, I decided to return to monitor the situation more closely and do what I could to prop up the economy. Maybe I would buy a Mars bar in a local shop, or hit on some poor Polish girls in such a clumsy and offensive manner that they only way they can get a night's sleep is to leave the country permanently, thus freeing up some drudge jobs for recent Irish university graduates. Airport Drama II took Christina with me, as she has long been regaled with tales of wet greenery and alcoholism, and wanted to find out for herself. We marched, bleary-eyed but confident, into Terminal 4 of Ontario Airport at 6:30 am on the 19th of December. There was a brief conversation with a ticket agent, who crept up behind me while I was trying to enter my details into the touch-screen computer.
The error was a subtle one. I had turned up to a US Airways ticket counter for a US Airways flight which was, in small writing under the US Airways, "operated by United Airlines". So we took a bus to Terminal 2, whence our United Airlines flight was departing; and thence to Denver, and thence to Philadelphia, and thence to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, where our adventure reached its first hurdle. There was a lot of snow on the ground everywhere we went, but its ability to screw with us reached a high point in Paris. As soon as we landed, they shut down the airport. The Aer Lingus ticketing desk was, for some reason, in the basement, an entire floor beneath all the other airlines. This was where the thousands of people whose flights had been cancelled decided to camp for the week. They had been sleeping on the floor for days, waiting for a replacement flight, or some news, or any news, or anything. We were standing in a queue for hours. No one knew anything. People were organising trains and buses to boats or other less snow-bound airports. We were frequently told by idiotic cynics, "Ha! You're not going anywhere today, lads." I don't mind cynicism, but I prefer it to be informed in some way. Standing around for hours really brings out the best in people. Despite the fact that we were all stuck, and we would all like to be going home for Christmas, there were some people who felt that their need was greater. One lady in particular jumped straight to the top of the queue, much to the consternation of Christina and myself. Christina tapped her on the shoulder and said, with uncharacteristic restraint, "We're actually all waiting in a queue..." The lady responded with words to the effect that she simply must get on this airplane, and brought up something about her mother. Christina responded with the logical, "But we all want to go home, and we're all waiting in this line...", to murmurs of approval from people behind us. It was to no avail. This lady obviously believed that she was just more important than everyone else; that her problems deserved instant solutions. There was another lady before her, who insisted that our line was for "confirmed passengers only" and that "stand-by passengers" should stay away. Her attitude changed when the French ticket agent at the counter informed her that she was not on the passenger list. Only now could all sorts of exceptions be made. And so on. In IrelandAfter a 16 hour delay, we eventually secured an airplane and made it to Shannon, where we rented a car and drove home. Everything was icy and covered in snow. Then, coming out of Limerick, a thick freezing fog presented itself. Nothing beats navigating the mess of roundabouts that is the outskirts of Limerick in zero visibility at minus ten degrees. Christmas Day was a bit grim. It was nice to see my father again, but he was his usual taciturn self, only cracking a smile when someone fell over, or when Stalin came on the television. The coldest winter on record led to our pipes freezing and water stoppages. We had Christmas dinner at my uncle's house, across the river. He had no water either, and no central heating, but they managed to nail together a fantastic day. Originally I had planned on travelling around a bit, meeting some friends, checking out some castles (I suppose), but the lack of salt available for de-icing country roads was making headline news for days, so I decided not to. We just stayed inside and talked to Brian about the stuff he was watching on The History Channel. We heard more grim news on RTE about the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States being shut down due to heavy snow. Airport Drama IIThankfully all the airports opened up the day we left. We marched, bleary-eyed but confident, into Shannon Airport at 6:30 am on the 29th of December. There was a brief conversation with a ticket agent while he was trying to enter my details into the computer. He told me that he could only programme my luggage with three destinations. As we had planned to travel to Heathrow, and then Philadelphia, and then Denver, and then Ontario, this was a problem. I told me to check the luggage all the way to Denver, and I'd just pick it up there. This was a mistake. I horribly misjudged the layover time for Denver, and picking up our luggage meant we missed our flight. As we were on a late flight, the entire ticketing area was deserted, except for one old, lonely-looking black man. Our nerves were frayed and we were feeling pretty crappy. We couldn't get another flight to Ontario, and all the following day's flights to anywhere were full. We tried to book to Ontario, LAX, and even the worst airport in the US, Orange County. Everything was full. We ended up staying in Denver for two days being bounced from flight to flight on the stand-by list. There were a bunch of people in the same position, because we recognised them as we huddled around the terminal gates for each Ontario flight. I never thought I would be delighted to see the featureless pile of dirt that is Riverside, but I was. My plan now is to nest, and never leave the apartment again. Sunday 8th May 2011I decided to accept my friend Vanessa's suggestion that we do the Gladiator Rock 'n' Run in Irvine at the start of May. She can probably claim this as charitable work on her taxes; I don't know. In any case, she correctly guessed that I was very out of shape from sitting around all day drinking Coke, typing reams of gibberish and chomming handfuls of Oreos. As preparation, she proposed that we "hike to the C" on a regular basis before the event. A "hike to the C" is regarded by UCR students as a rite of passage, or something they should do at least once before they are thrown out of the nest after graduation. A "hike" is an American term for "an unnecessary walk", or at least a walk to somewhere other than to or from the car. The "C" is a giant concrete C slapped onto the side of the mountain facing UCR. The plan was solid. We ran up and down the mountain regularly. We even made some friends! Yes, only in that rarefied altitude will you find people with True Grit (and gangs of students who trash the place). One of them is a Polish mathematician and Renaissance Ubermensch, Marek. He tried to explain Number Theory, but we ended up just agreeing that the thing about numbers is that there are too many of them. Another is a guy who looks like he's in a Megadeth tribute band, but turns out to know the Latin names for all the indigenous snakes in the area. These are the kind of people who hang out on a treacherous rocky mountain climb. Those who have stumbled up its dusty, 45-degree slopes may laugh at my use of the word "treacherous", but they can fuck off, because the last time we trained, five days before the main event, I was running down a nasty stretch of rocks when instead of landing on my feet, I landed on my right ankle, pushing the full force of my body onto it, and then screaming like a girl and rolling onto an adjacent patch of grass. Somehow I hobbled down the rest of the mountain and into my car. Thankfully nothing was broken, but I had five days to get over a rather serious ankle sprain. I didn't want to let anyone down, and I had already paid, so I made a decision that I would do it anyway. This was greeted with laudable equanimity by Vanessa, whose dreams of being in any way competitive were torn asunder in front of her eyes. I could see a slight dimming of the light behind her pupils, but otherwise, she rallied magnificently and even managed to pretend some concern about my injury.
The day arrived. Vanessa booked an early morning spot, which was a very good idea. We had perfect running weather - it was cool and overcast. There were thousands of people there already, with more arriving every minute. It was timed such that five hundred people would be released into the mouth of madness every half hour, and we were scheduled for expulsion at 10:30. After a brief delay caused by a "bottleneck at the cargo net", we were off. We ran down a little road. We jumped over walls. We hopped through tyres and had large inflatable balls flung at us by well-meaning staff members. We scrambled like escaped prisoners over cargo nets. We dropped down long, bumpy slides into muddy waters. We crawled through fifty yards of thick mud, which stuck to our clothes and clung to our skin, and later dried out so when we moved, it flaked off. You can see the lovely mixture of wet and dry mud on my arm in the photo above. As you can divine from my shameful results, what took a normal healthy man about a half hour, took me about an hour. My ankle hurt the whole time I was running on it, and the only breaks I got were when certain obstacles were thankfully backed up, which annoyed everyone else. By the time we were done, it was completely screwed up, but it didn't matter then. I have all the time in the world to do nothing. Wednesday 19th October 2011USC is in urban Los Angeles, just off the I-10 freeway. It's where Los Angeles County refers people who qualify for free health care by virtue of being both a legal resident and poor. The USC trainee doctors get a constant supply of patients with diverse problems, and poor people get to put off death for another while - everyone wins! Parking at USC sucks. We drove to the top of a six-storey parking structure without seeing a single empty space, and then fortuitously noticed someone moving out on our dejected return trip. After snaking our way through various corridors and staircases, and being twice forced to ask employees for directions, we found the ophthamology clinic, which is on the fourth floor of clinic tower. The waiting room was low on laughs, putting me in mind of an airplane, which including the obligatory screaming child whose mother seemed oblivious to his piercing wails. A nurse told us that the average waiting time was five hours. I met a black lady (who shares a surname with an early president), still waiting at 3pm, having been referred to the clinic at 8am by the ER. She told me she was attending USC because her previous low-cost health care option at UCLA was "not right". There was another nurse guarding access to the treatment rooms, armed with a clipboard. Every so often she would shout a name, which seem to have been selected from the Big Book of Stereotypical Hispanic Names. After I started writing them down, Luis Rodriguez, Carla Hernandes, Consuela Reyes, and Jose Sanchez were all present and in need of ophthalmic attention. Apart from the Hispanic majority, there were five black people, two white people and two Asians. I'm not sure what any of this means, but I was one of the white people, and the other white person was an old guy called Gerald. During our six hour wait, a number of informal Hispanic entrepeneurs were selling things, I suppose, for which people who are effectively imprisoned in a room for most of the day would pay: candy bars; drinks; coloured bracelets; and at exactly 4 pm, a lady came around asking us in Spanish if we wanted socks. We were good for socks. On the way home, it emerged that the one time we managed to interact with a medical health professional, he told us we would be better off attending a proper doctor. |
