Mock the Week

These are the highlights. Seriously.

Friday night I went over to my friend's house and hung out with his girlfriend, CE. She drank a bottle of Bailey's (a sequence of straight Bailey's Irish Cream on ice in pint glasses) in the course of 1.5 hours and proceeded to tell me about her week in work. I have no idea what happened in her work other than the fact that her colleague was a "bitch" and her boyfriend was "to-o-otally" tired all week. She also informed me that she is applying for a Masters in Human Rights Law, which "fucking rocks!" (she has no law degree, a requirement for the course) and plans to write her dissertation on the connection between ethnicity/immigration and policing in Northern Ireland. "That would be interesting" I say, thinking she is referring to the police's response to hate crime in NI, which has been criticised of late. She then explains further..."cause like, if people are dealing with police in their home countries that are like, evil, then we have to deal with it because they move here. Isn't that awesome! I just was sitting there on the bus and it totally came to me." I wouldn't be so judgemental, but this is all coming from a woman who six months ago refused to move to Birmingham because "there are too many muslims there" and she doesn't want to live somewhere where she is a minority" (she is a hispanic-American living in Belfast).

Saturday night I went to another friend's house for a party. CE, the human rights whiz kid, drank so much that she feel down the stairs. She then proceeded to cry hysterically for about two hours while refusing to go home or to bed. I meanwhile listened to a dentist, who was dressed like a 'punk' and wore a prayer scarf as a fasion accessory, tell me about the evils of American politics. This happens to me a lot. People here love to tell me about George Bush as if I had never heard of him before or like I am his best friend. Someone once made reference to September 11th in conversation by asking if I had heard of "the time when terrorists attacked those buildings in New York."

Sunday was superbowl time, and being a New England girl I settled in to watch the Pats go undefeated. I realised later that there is truth to my friend Pat's theory that all Boston teams have benefitted greatly from my not supporting them.

Monday I spent the day working on the house with my friend RP. This was my favourite part of the week. RP told me about a girl she met in Amsterdam that is in Belfast now filming a documentary/arthouse film about a "neo-classical, electronic, dance/performace art piece" that they are on the road with at present. Not being an artist myself I asked RP what the hell she was talking about. She said it was like Bjork's more weird stuff. Apparently RP was asked to find them a horse and a helium tank to be used in filming. RP always has stories like this. She once told me about a man who came up to her in a bar and said she was "so hot" that asked her to hold his beer, went to the bathroom, came back and told her "I just put a condom on for you." RP insists that not only is this true, but that she later saw him kissing another woman after using a similar line.

Tuesday I went to my mate SM's house for 'pancake Tuesday.' I was surrounded by off duty police (SM's husband OM is a recently qualified police officer). I accidentally called a German man by the wrong name in spite of having had a 2 hour long conversation with him at the last SM/OM party. More discouraging was the fact that I realised that I had spoken about the German welfare system for 2 hours (while drunk)to someone who speaks so little English that he struggled to answer me when I asked him how he was doing and where his girlfriend was. The highlight of the night was when OM produced his gun, which had no safety, in the kitchen and the boys ooh'd and ahhh'd over it. I had to leave because I am a 'big dirty hippy' (one of OM's many colorful descriptions of my political/social ideologies), and being in a house with a gun simultaneously freaks me out and pisses me off. I tried to stay up and watch the results of Super Tuesday. It was not quite as super as I had hoped (although Obama supporters really showed their muscle, yay!), and the time difference meant I couldn't even stay awake until the polls closed.

Wednesday I spent the evening convincing my husband that a Ralph Nader presidency would be the answer to the world's ills. He is getting there, but can't understand why I love Nader so much but still get excited when Obama does well. I told him I am an idealist, not a fantasist, and I have to take it where I can get it. He said I was a bit of a hypocrite.

Leaving us at today. Today I led discussion seminars for undergraduate Criminology students on Social Policy. Sixty 18-25 year olds who could not find a connection between social exclusion issues and criminal justice issues. When I threw out the devil's advocate statement "all offenders are bad people, there is nothing we can do to rehabilitate them and so we should just lock them up and keep them there" in an attempt to spark interesting debate, some of them agreed with 'me.' No one challenged the statement. Ladies and gentlemen, the future of the UK criminal justice sector.

Tomorrow I am off to the ballet. Perhaps a bit of culture in my life will balance me out after a week of, well, nothing really.