After my bouncy bridge happy accident the other night I wanted to experiment with some more long exposures. This was taken on O’Connell Street with my camera propped on the top of a bin so I could set the shutter speed to eight seconds and capture the light trails of the traffic. The larger version shows the ghostly pedestrian a little better.
I just found this old article from the New Yorker by John Seabrook. It’s fairly long and it’s about the whole co-sleeping versus Ferberizing debate that new parents (myself included not so long ago) are obsessed by in the quest for more sleep, so you might not be interested in the whole thing (unless you’ve come here while trawling the internet at 4am desperately googling “how do I get my baby to sleep?!” in which case you might find it very useful). This paragraph brought me right back to those early months…it’s such a perfect description:
After four months of co-sleeping, the situation began to deteriorate. His polyphasic habits did not seem to be shifting toward our monophasic sleep. Instead, the opposite seemed to be happening: my formerly unified block of sleep was now broken into two parts, according to the baby’s schedule, but, unlike him, I couldn’t easily go back to sleep once I’d been awakened at 3 A.M., and spent the rest of the night in a hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness, with surreal images drifting across my unrested brain. Then his four-hour sleep phases shortened to two hours. Instead of sleeping in his crib until 2 A.M. and coming into our bed, he was coming in at midnight. He still seemed to be getting the sleep he needed, even if he wasn’t learning to do it by himself. My wife and I, however, were beginning to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation: the burning eyes; the band of fatigue that tightens around the skull, a sensation some liken to the feeling that you’re always wearing a hat; the irritation–at each other, at friends, at the cat’s water bowl, which I kept kicking by accident; and astereognosis, or the inability to recognize things by touch, which is a classic sign of sleep deprivation. There was a sense of growing distance between ourselves and the world. Did I go out this morning to get the Times, or was that yesterday morning? I glance at the weather report in the top right-hand corner of the front page, and it says “Interesting clouds.” Hmm. Interesting clouds. Never seen that forecast before. Then I realize it says “Increasing clouds.” But “Interesting clouds” made perfect sense.
Eve is sleeping peacefully in her cot right now and will do until about 7:30 tomorrow morning. There was a time when I would have paid a lot of money to know that she would ever do that.
I’m feeling a little tired this morning. Four hour’s sleep just doesn’t even come close to being enough for me these days. Still it was worth it because not only did we get to see “Hot Fuzz” we also got to hear Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright talk about the making of the film. They jokingly described it as a Hot Police Romp (or HoPoRo); it’s the story of an overachieving London policeman (Simon Pegg) transferred to a seemingly sleepy village when his big city colleagues feel he is showing them up. There he is paired up with a slightly dim but lovable village police officer (Nick Frost) who thinks his new partner has just stepped out of Bad Boys or Point Break.
Inevitably the question I keep getting is “Was it as good as Shaun of the Dead?” and to be absolutely honest I would have to say that no, Shaun is still leagues ahead. Hot Fuzz seemed slower, more cumbersome at times and for me it lacked the swing of emotions, from laughter, to scary, to genuinely touching, that made Shaun of the Dead something a little bit more than just a comedy. Still, this film has it’s share of very clever humour and the film really picks up and comes into its own in the second half. The action and laughs (and gore of course) all ratchet up a few notches in the last half hour. Before then there is a sense that perhaps they had a few too many cool ideas that they just couldn’t bear to edit out or there were just so many people lining up to have a cameo part that getting all those actors introduced and worked into the storyline weighed it down.
I hate saying anything bad about it though, since I walked out of the cinema with a smile on my face and I know I’ll buy the DVD and watch it again. Especially for the extras which they told us include a new Michael Caine, Sean Connery version of one of the scenes from the movie.
The three guys didn’t stay to watch, they had to run off to the Meteor Awards after they’d introduced the film to present an award to Westlife. They got back just as the credits were rolling and sat down at the front of the screen for the Q&A. I got the impression that they are incredibly nice guys, genuinely bowled over at their popularity and appreciative of their fans. They talked about how Shaun of the Dead had come out of where they were living at the time (East London) whereas Hot Fuzz was more a film about where they grew up. Their preparation for writing the script came through watching hours and hours of police movies just like the ones Nick Frost’s character is a fan of in the film.
I only wish they could have spoken more, or at least answered more questions from the audience. Only a couple of people got to ask anything because the compere’s questions went on so long. People were mumbling that he was someone from TV3 but he didn’t introduce himself properly…I guess he just presumed everyone recognised him. His questions weren’t even proper questions, more like rambling statements that he’d finally offer to the guys to either agree or disagree with.
Annoying Irish telly interviewer aside, we had a great night. I would say definitely go and see this film, like Nick Frost’s character would say, “You just have to learn to switch off.”
In 1993, not long after I’d finished animation college and still a few months from turning 21, I moved to Lubbock, a small town in West Texas to study in a programme called Adventures In Missions (AIM). For nine months, with a class of 80 people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, I studied subjects like the Old and New Testament, Apologetics, team dynamics and teaching methods all in preparation for the practical side of the programme which would mean working as an apprentice missionary in a foreign city. After the nine months were over our class had been divided up into teams to be sent to countries all over the world and my team of six…four girls and two boys…had chosen Mexico city as our home for the next nineteen months.
That year and a half was the most amazing time of my life. We lived in two apartments (one for the girls and one for the boys) in the south of the city close to the university where the 1968 Olympics took place. El D.F. (pronounced “El Day Eff-Aay”), as it’s known to the locals, is one of the largest cities in the world. At the time it had something like 29 million living there although how they could possibly come to any reliable figure I don’t know. I’ll never forget the first time I flew over the mountains and saw the city stretching from horizon to horizon.
As I sit here and try to encapsulate it all I find it almost impossible. So many experiences and emotions were crammed into that short time that I’m afraid I’ll misrepresent it in some way. Part of my hesitation is the job we were doing there as I know that many people would raise their eyebrows at the thought of mission work. Usually, here in Ireland anyway, when I’ve told people I spent some time as a missionary they think one of two things: either they picture a nun or medical missionary working in the jungle, or they think of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that call at the door. Neither one describes my time down there.
We didn’t really have a typical day, it changed depending on what stage we were at in our Spanish and what was going on in the church that we were working with. The Metro congregation is a large group of Christians that meet in the centre of the city and a lot of our activities revolved around their young people. One day we might be playing football in the park with the deaf members of the church, another day we might be painting the building. We were there to soak up whatever we could and hopefully help more than we hindered.
But that was just the framework of it all. My memories of that time are a mixed bag of the weird and wonderful experiences:
A daytrip to watch autopsies at the city morgue with a law student friend of mine.
Wednesday night dinners with Mama Carola.
Terrifying bus trips into the mountains that I thought I might not survive.
Watching Ireland get beaten by Mexico in the World Cup and the celebrations on the street afterwards.
The 7 point earthquake that rocked my bed across the room one morning.
Learning how to salsa in the middle of a huge street party.
My short-lived career as a model.
The citywide (and somewhat scary) egg and flour fight that happens on Independence Day…
…and so many more.
Niall asked in the comments to my previous post why I left. Well, I could have extended my time there, and others did. In fact some of them have gone back and are living there now. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I had stayed but really by the time the nineteen months were up I was ready to go home. I’d formed such strong bonds with my teammates (eventhough we had fights that would put Big Brother contestants to shame on a regular basis) that I didn’t want to stay once they’d gone.
So I went home and started the difficult process of finding my feet again. It took me four years to find a job as an animator and during that time I actually had some worries that I’d made a mistake by flitting off to Mexico instead of getting my career off the ground. I don’t have those feelings anymore; in fact I miss it every day.
Can you see what it is yet?
On my way to catch my train home the other night I stopped on the Millennium Bridge to try and snap a shot of the Hal’penny Bridge which was reflecting perfectly in the calm River Liffey. Crowds of commuters crossing the bridge at the same time, all in their own hurry to get home, made it impossible to get a clear shot because the bridge I was standing on was bouncing so much. In the end, after many failed attempts and with just ten minutes to get to the DART station, I decided to just go with it.