Christmas Is A Rabid Shopper

I find (and this might just be my cynical side talking...) that Christmas can really bring out the worst in people.  The the vicious tongue lashings to a sales clerk just trying to satisfy the hoard, the squinty-eyed venerable that hasn't driven in 364 days, but just has to get that last gift for little Sally, the rabid circling and defense of a particularly mouth watering sales rack.  That stress of commercialized Christmas spirit (On sale NOW!) just seems to permeate the hearts and minds of what starts out as a giving spirit, and twists it into cruelty and rage.  It's the knotted muscle in my back, the discomfort from which shortens my fuse to an intolerable length, and then the beast comes out...

This is the part where you ask yourself, "Does this guy have anything but a cynical side?"

I was walking home from work the other night, eying up the bumper-to-bumper traffic lined up in each direction (take the horrifyingly incomprehensible Dublin traffic system and just add Christmas) and I realized...

I'm not driving!

I have no car!  No white knuckled drives to the mall, or grating slags up the freeway to Fry's!  I also have very limited exposure (being thousands of miles away) to the pressures and stresses of the big, fat red-rolled, white beard pushing loads of stuff that no one wants, but will fit perfectly on my credit card.

I am divorced from Christmas!  I am the severed head of Christmas Spirit!

And then I realized...I also am thousands of miles away from all the family and friends that would normally make these stresses (almost) bearable...

Yes, this is the part where sentimentality ruins what was shaping up to be a perfectly brutal rant on all that is bad in the world.  

When I was a kid I was more than happy to reap the benefits that all that commercial spangle-wrapped goodness could offer.  I was like a race horse scrapping at the gate just before presents were opened.  These days I find that the most important part of any holiday is getting together with family, enjoying a wonderful meal, and then slipping into the food coma that is sure to follow.

Just know that we are missing all of our friends and family and we are thinking about you today as we sit around in our pajamas and watch movies, play games, and eating food.  It's just us today...

Merry Christmas!

P.S. Anyone that didn't receive a gift from me (and that is pretty much everyone), you have my permission to go buy yourself something.  Something that will bring you a little bit of joy, something you can afford, and purchased at your leisure at a time when you don't have to worry about a frothing, middle aged, red and green plaid blouse wearing, shut-in house wife clubbing you over the head with a giant plastic candy cane because you were eyeballing that 60% set of his and hers reindeer slippers...

Merry Christmas again, just for good measure!

Like Pouring Guiness

In case you hadn't heard (and how's that bomb shelter treating you, by the way?) the economy is F*CKED!  Sorry about that, but there really is no other equally appropriate descriptor.

Our relationship to this downturn is particularly acute as we are right in the heart of the industry that went down first.  Architecture, and the construction industry in general, is notoriously the first to collapse (pun intended) and the last to be built back up (again).  This time, however, the egregiously large, thin-membraned bubble that we (construction industry folk) were all happily bouncing around on was right at the heart of this plummet.  The catalyst.

This, I think, darkens our viewpoints a bit more than those outside of this industry.  I am surrounded by architects.  I have very few friends not in architecture these days, and all of them are back in the US, so all around us is doom and gloom; the status of the economy reflected painfully in the faces and conversations we see and hear every day.

Take staffing and redundancies (layoffs, for those reading at home), for example.  The most evident reflection of our economic status.  When I think about architectural staffing in Ireland I think about someone tipping out a pitcher only, instead of dark, thick Irish beer flowing out, it's people, all toppling out straight onto the sidewalk.  I'm not going to detail any specifics here, but, suffice it to say, it's not pretty...

We still have jobs!

I just thought I would throw that out there in case all of my morose harping was starting to make you nervous...

This was #1 on my list of things to be thankful for this past holiday and it looks positive that I will get to continue being thankful for it, at least for a little while.  As much as people would like to reassure us that the worst is over...they don't know sh*t!  Every partner/director is walking around with a big "?" on their forehead.  We might be OK for now, but without new work coming in we could just as easily be twiddling our thumbs (on the street) in a few months time.  We can only hope that some of the work governments are doing to try and spin things back up will take hold.

This is, by no means, to say that other industries are not feeling the crunch.  Obviously this misery is well on its way to saturating other markets, but it seems like most of the people outside of Architecture, here in Ireland at least, aren't incurring quite as many stressed induced comas as we are.