Have You Ever Seen the Rain Coming Down on a Sunny Day?

As I am sure you all and the rest of the world wide web noticed, I took the weekend off to lick my wounds from another emasculating week of job searching. I also dried my socks, which takes at least forty-eight hours since Cork's atmosphere is at a constant 98 percent humidity. It reminds me of a section of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which rings truer than I ever expected:

From October to April the walls of Limerick [or Cork!] glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments.... (12)

Thank God Ireland now has electricity!

The weather is playing with me. I really feel this way. Every morning for the past week I wake up, throw aside the curtains and embrace a perfectly clear sky. "It's going to be a nice day!," I think to myself. I shower, eat, doddle around a little bit, and eventually leave my building to go conquer the day (which, admittedly, is usually around 11 a.m.). By this time it is usually dark, windy, and raining. All one can really do in these conditions is drink tea. Indeed, I will never make fun of the British and Irish tea habit again. The fact is the weather absolutely requires it. (I will continue to ridicule the "tea time," which is asking for it).

While I'm on the topic of perplexing phenomena, a few words on systems of measurement. The Irish have no idea which system they're on. For all intents and purposes, both English and Metric are official. One trend I have noticed, for example, is that most measurements of distance, area, or speed are expressed in metric. Speed limit signs are in km/h, apartments are advertised in square meters, and the nearest market is "oh, fifty or so meters up the hill." But most measurements of height and weight, especially when described verbally, are in English. So-and-so is six-foot-one, I went on a diet and lost forty-three pounds, etc. Most of the personal scales are in stones! (For the Americans: one stone equals fourteen pounds. I weigh twelve and one-quarter stones, how about you? Break out a calculator and have fun with it). And at open-air markets, about half of the prices you see are "per pound," the other half "per kilogram." At the very least, these circumstance can make one fluent in metric pretty quickly.

But every culture has some peculiarities. Walking around the city last night––Sunday night––I saw something that I think I admire: most of the pubs were not only open, there were full.