Week 17 - Andrew - Mental Health

LEGO Grand Emporium Review : LEGO 10211

(Review date - April 2012)

This set comes complete with 2182 pieces and 7 mini figures. In 2012, it was available for purchase either online from lego.com, or in store direct from Lego shops. The set is part of the ‘modular’ series. It’s a spectacularly detailed three story department store.

The set is perfect for building sitting slack-jawed and catatonic in your living room. This will allow you to revisit all of the choices in your life, as you click the pieces together. Take a moment, as you put together the detailed facade, to remember how perfect Lego is. Lego taught you to think. Try to piece together your identity as you assemble the grand chandelier that hangs over the central atrium.

This reviewer recommends purchasing this set with friends, friends you haven’t seen in a year. Travel, if you can, to the Lego store in Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara. This is only a 25 minute drive from Menlo Park. To take full advantage of the journey, remain monosyllabic. Ignore the opportunity to be in a part of the world you have never seen - ordinarily something that fills you with joy - and remain preoccupied, caught in an internal feedback loop.

The intricate design of the Emporium includes a revolving door, opening onto a ground floor clothing section. You have the power to select pieces, and assemble them in order. This is a satisfying level of control, the kind of control you cannot exert over your life.

The seven figurines include a window washer, store clerks and even an ice-cream vendor! All of these figurines have found a place in this world. You have not. What are you doing. You love your wife. Why are you like this? You got off a flight from San Francisco this morning. You didn’t bring her a present, but you bought yourself this giant lego set? Really? And now you can’t even speak to her? The window cleaner cheerfully wipes down the top floor glass panes, safe on his platform. He is comfortable with the choices he has made in his life.

The exceptional level of detail even extends to the shop fittings - the cash register, mannequins and brick-built escalator transform this set from a childs toy to a detailed model. It is still a childs toy. You are thirty years old in less than a month, sitting on the floor of your apartment, playing Lego. You are failing in ways you cannot understand at a career that you didn’t even choose.

Once you complete the Grand Emporium, you can collect the other Modular Buildings sets, and assemble them into a street. Alternatively, the set is attractive on its own. As yet another choice, you can take this as the moment that you decide that this is not a way to live. You can decide that nothing is worth this, and start to make changes in your life.

OVERALL SCORE: 8/10
Pros: Great set, very involving, lovely detail, long build time, forces contemplation of long-term anxiety.
Cons: Lots of repetitive structural work, wearing the same clothes for three days, jetlag, silence.

Week 17 - Laura - Mental health

It’s easier to be depressed on a Monday than a Friday.

I don’t feel quite as alone in my unshiny world on Mondays.

Scratch the surface and there’s no comparing us, but the frowns and moans Monday mornings motivate in most people I come across make me feel a little less alone, a little more normal.

I know it’s selfish, but seeing other people going around in the doldrums on Monday, with the weight of the working week to come on their shoulders, in some way makes my load a little easier to carry.

I can pretend we’re all in the same boat.

I know we’re not though.

The good days are the worst. The conventional good days, that is. The ones we've been socially conditioned to think are happy ones. Like the first day of holidays. Like summertime. Like Christmas Day. Like birthdays. Like Fridays.

I hate Fridays.

If Mondays allow me to fool myself I'm just like everyone else, Fridays show me that’s a lie.

I want to join in the collective good mood, I really do. I get the smiles. The working week is over. The weekend is just hours away. Friday for most people is the gateway to about 64 hours of freedom, and the chance for all kinds of fun.

I get the Friday feeling in theory.

I just don’t get it in reality.

It doesn't work out that way for me.

I'm not even sure Friday is covered by a sheen that’s any less grey than Monday to be honest. And even if I believe for a minute that it is, the Friday feeling doesn't stand a chance against the knowledge that any let-up is fleeting, and bad times are just around the corner.

And so Fridays are when I feel most alone, and when the tsunami of bad feelings are most likely to swallow me up.

Week 16 - Andrew - Movies

This is an extract from an interview with Joey Ridge, during the press tour for the movie based on the unexplained death of Duane Richards.

Joey Ridge - Lead singer; Lightning

I have a lot of regrets about that time, you know? Things you won’t see in the movie. It was all so intense, I think i lost who i really was. And while the rest of the world saw this gypsy queen, in command of everything, I was just this lost little girl.

Duane was this dark genius prince. The first time I met him, he was so...quiet, and so centred. It was in the Gold Dust in San Francisco, we were both recording nearby at the time, and we both ended up there late in the night. I just wanted to dance, and allow myself to be free. Duane was at the bar with some of his buddies - that big guy, Alexei, and they were both throwing back whiskeys.

I knew the second I saw him that we would have an affair, we were both burning so brightly at the time. I was going through a really bad time with Rick, and I think it was obvious from the pain on our songs that our marriage was over.

I remember trying to get him to dance, and he wouldn’t. It got me so mad! But he must have seen something in me, because he invited me back to his hotel once the bar closed. We broke out onto the roof, and sat there staring at the skyscrapers around Union Square. Anyone else would have brought me straight to the room, but Duane wasn’t like that - it wasn’t his princely way.

He kept trying to talk about how this could all be wiped out tomorrow, that everything was hanging by a thin balance, but then I kissed him. That was a beautiful moment for me, kissing on that rooftop. I really felt like our two primal spirits were combining.

Of course a few months later, he called me up when we were mixing the album, and told me to drive out to this rinkydink airstrip, and he was going to fly me to Omaha. I couldn’t believe it. Of course we had our own tour plane, but this was different, this felt like love. It felt very significant, him sending the jet for me.

Then when I got to Omaha, he shut me out! I couldn’t believe it! He gave me a quick kiss in front of everyone, but then when we got back to his room, he wouldn’t even look at me. He just kept checking his watch, like he was bored of me.

Well I didn’t take that well! Like I said, I’m still a little girl inside, but sometimes, I need to be a princess, so I started screaming, and shouting, and throwing a little tantrum. That’s when he got so cold! He told me that I could sleep in the room, and he’d find somewhere else.

No one ever walked out on me like that before. He left me heartbroken and devastated. I wrote ‘Sleeping Alone’ that night, and that lyric - ‘staring at the stars, waiting for the world to end, in four walls, you aren’t a friend’ was about everything that happened.

Week 16 - Laura - Movies

I've been avoiding scary movies ever since I saw my first one.

It was Disney’s ‘Bambi’.

Stop laughing.

I think it emotionally scarred me.

Like Bambi’s poor mother, the hunter’s shot that killed her took me completely by surprise.

Oh, how I cried.

I was an empathetic creature, even back then. I wept for poor old dead Momma deer, who didn't even get a name in the movie. I sobbed for lonely, little Bambi, left to fend for himself in a scary forest. But I think I cried mostly for myself, as I realised that mothers - and therefore mine too - could die.

I vividly remember a little girl who was obviously on her second screening walking down the cinema aisle, whispering assurances to the kids in each row that what was happening on screen wasn't real, and that everything would turn out OK in the end.

By the time she got to our row it was too late.

Week 15 - Andrew - Coming Home

All hotel rooms are the same. Entry card holder just inside the door the door, a passage way with a bathroom to one side. The wifi is slow and complicated to access. I never turn on the television.

There’s always a suitcase stand. I stand my suitcase there. I hang my jacket in the wardrobe. I have iron-blindness. More times than not, I have called reception to have an iron dropped up, and there has been an iron in the wardrobe. I know where my iron is at home.

The bathrooms vary - gold taps, marble tiles, silver taps, white tiles. The consistency in the bathroom is that the shower control will be inventive. I once saw a t-shirt in a market, with the slogan:  ‘You think you’re smart until you use someone else’s shower’. Regardless, all hotel bathrooms work better than my shower at home.

In other rooms in this hotel, people are having affairs, romantic mini-breaks. People are travelling for their last visit with their dying mother. Wealthy husbands thrown out by their wives are ordering room service cocktails. I’m a business traveller. I’m a background detail in these stories. I have no individual identity here, like one policeman in a riot squad, or a single dancer in a kick line.

It’s easy to feel lonely, travelling. But home isn’t a place. It’s not where you keep your tools or your pots and pans. Home is the people you love, wherever they are.

Home is a rushed burger before you both run to different trains. It’s under the striplighting of a curry house. Home is on a bridge across the Seine. Home is people.

Why limit your home to the place you keep your stuff? Although you do know how the shower works.

Week 15 - Laura - Coming home

Unarguably, the best way to come home from the bog is on the fruits of your labour - sitting like a king or queen atop a trailer full of turf.

There’s no feeling quite like sailing along the winding roads, cosy in the nook hastily dug out in the five minutes or so while your dad checked the load was secure and ready for the journey.

Turf has been nothing but a burden up to that point of the summer of course - first the back-breaking work footing it, and more recently the arduous task of getting it into a trailer and getting that trailer out of the bog without getting stuck.

Now, though the work of throwing who knows how many hundreds - no thousands - of sods from trailer to shed still lies ahead, it’s time for the turf you've been cursing for weeks to give something back.

The first few minutes of the journey is all about perfecting the vaguely you-shaped cavity you've fashioned in the turf mountain - throwing certain sods out of your little retreat, and rearranging others slightly so that - contrary to form - they’re actually supporting your back.

A minute or two of tweaking, and it’s finally time to settle in for the journey.

It’s not unusual to be lulled almost to sleep, thanks to the combination of the rocking motion as you’re pulled along and the white noise of the tractor’s engine that makes conversation impossible.

Curled up under the blanket that just an hour ago acted as a picnic tablecloth, there’s no meditation in the world that can beat the tired, relaxed feeling as your weary muscles slowly unwind and you let go of your ill-will for the bog and everything connected to it for another year.

Week 14 - Andrew - Possibility

Dad always said 'look for the third possibility'. In situations where there seem to be only two terrible options, look for the third possibility. I would go to him with a problem, something one of the other girls had done to me in school, and he would take off his glasses, and ask me to describe the problem.

He would listen, he would stop to ask detailed questions, and he would want to understand who had done what to whom. And it seemed that no matter what way I described a problem, he would still, in his mongrel accent (Polish, with twenty years of Cavan) come back to his refrain; 'What is the third possibility'.

I think about this now. Ronan is sitting at the table, crying. He hasn't been home for almost six months, and he looks different. It's hard to see your son's eyes in a junkie's scabbed body. We lived through the cliches. He's lied to us, he's stolen from us. I've borrowed money and I sold my jewellery. When Eoin died, I noticed that his watch went missing. You can't close your door to your son.

I want to reach over and hold him. I want to be his Mammy again. I want to give him a wash and some new clothes, make him a hot milk and tell him a story. That's not going to help him. He's crying, switching between shivering, pleading, and asking me to help.

We're at our kitchen table, again. It feels like we've sat here for years, since the first time the guards brought him home. While Eoin got sick, bald and thin. Then just me. I started to try to make the kitchen nice. I dried strings of peppers. I hung cheerful lights, but there was Ronan, in trouble, slumped at the kitchen table.

It gets boring, after a while, the apologies, the pleas. This time, the story he told me frightened me, but didn't surprise me. He had borrowed money, again – he said he had a way to make it back, but the money was taken from him. Of course it was, the fool. He could never hang onto anything.

I have almost ordered everything around the house. I can get a few thousand euro for my car. It'll be a hassle, but one of the others will be able to give me a lift here and there.

When they came to get the money, he tried to save himself – He must have been crying and screaming, like he is now. He told them a secret, something he shouldn't have. He knows what'll happen now. There'll be two men coming for him. They'll put him in a car, and we'll never see Ronan again.

They don't want the money anymore. It's about the secret he told – something terrible he did, for someone else.

He keeps crying that he doesn't want to end up in a mountain. He's so specific about this – the mountain – that I know he's been that man, driving people up to the mountain.

We can't call the guards – they aren't going to rush to help  Ronan. They know him, and they've arrested him enough times. And what can you say? My son is going to be killed, because he told someone about a man he murdered for a pittance?

Ronan can't get in their car, when they come. My son will not end up buried in a mountain, even if he might deserve it.

My other two sons arrive – family men, pudgy around the waist, in cars strewn with toys and cornflake crumbs. When Ronan told me about the men, I called them, they understood. They brought rolls of plastic sheeting, and cans of petrol. Eoin's shotgun is by the door, loaded and oiled.

When the two men come, and realise just how far into the country we live, they'll understand that there's always a third possibility.

Week 14 - Laura - Possibility

There’s a big difference between theoretically knowing something, and really, properly, personally knowing it, and believing it.

I think to a large extent my concept of personal possibility has existed in the theoretical realm for much of my life.

Apart from getting 15% in my first ever Science test when I was 13 (how was I to know I was meant to learn something from flying paper airplanes in class?), I've always been an academic success. I got a good Leaving Cert, and a place in my first choice course in college. I left college with an honours degree, and picked up a job in the corresponding sector.

On paper, that’s a success. And of course in real life it’s a success too.

I think I've also let it pigeon-hole me in a way though. I'm good (not great) at what I do. That’s made me less likely to test myself for fear of failing. And as a result that’s made me, to some degree, actually fail myself.

I'm a good girl. I like to think I've had my moments of rebellion throughout the years, but it’s always been within a system I've never seriously thought of working outside.

To date I've mostly played it safe.

Writing that - and reading it back - shames me.

Playing the game well is clever. I am clever. Bowing out of the game and deciding to play your own game is even cleverer, and that's what I want to be.

The best work I've ever done has been when I throw away the rulebook. When I don’t measure myself by the existing standards. When I come up with my own way of doing things, of reaching goals, of making something work.

In recent times I've begun to mentally re-draw my professional parameters, and give some thought to what success is for me.

Re-configuring what’s possible with life (which is pretty much anything) is heady stuff. Getting to the point where you really believe it's possible is exhilarating.

There’s no guarantee I’ll be good at what I set as a goal for myself in the future, or that I’ll be a success even if I am. But my truth from here on in - not just theoretically - is that anything is possible.

Week 13 - Laura - Failure

I fucking love being a failure.

Being pretty shit at pretty much everything is bloody brilliant.

When’s the last time anyone asked me to do something for them? Long enough ago for me not to remember. When’s the last time I felt under pressure to do something well? I'm fucked if I know.

What do I do every day? Not a whole pile to be honest. Get up when I can’t be bothered to stay in the scratcher any longer. A bit of Call of Duty maybe before lunch. I call round to the Ma for that most days. Head down to the pub to hang out with the lads maybe, if I've a few quid in me back pocket.

Does being a bit of a waste of space in the eyes of most of society bother me? Does it fuck!

I’ll be honest with you. I've mates who are pretty much the same as me, ‘cept it bothers the shit out of them. The pressure’s gotten to them. They feel they’re letting themselves down, that they should be trying to better themselves, you know?

I’ll tell you the secret to not giving a shit though. And now’s the time to take heed of it, when you’re still young.

Fail early and fail often.

That’s it. Honest to God, couldn't be simpler.

I think people who want to be a success use that as a motto too though, so it’s important to remember the goal. You’re not trying to eliminate ways to fail to get to success. No, you’re acclimatising yourself and everyone else, so you’ll be left in peace to do fuck all.

I remember giving a shit back in the day. I used to feel bad when I failed a test, or fucked up a job.

But the trick is to get used to being a fuck-up, and get everyone else used to it too.

Soon enough everyone will give up hope and stop bothering you. And you’ll be free as a bird.

Fail early and fail often my man. You’ll thank me in time.

Week 13 - Andrew - Failure

I’ve never spilt any coffee in my Saab. It’s an old 900 Turbo, two seater. The aircon is chilly on the aged black leather seats. The car is clean, and there are no empty water bottles in the passenger footwell. There are no warnings about low coolant, burnt-out headlamp bulbs or windscreen wiper fluid. The car is always well maintained. I do it myself - on Saturday mornings, in the garage. I blast Springsteen over the speakers, and tinker with the old turbo.

Aoife left for work earlier than me. Here in LA, her commute is longer than mine. To be honest, we’d probably prefer not to live in LA, but with the show in production, it just makes sense. The place we’re leasing (right on Manhattan beach) is maybe a bit more expensive than we’d like, although if you’re going to live in California, and you have a bit of spare cash, you might as well get somewhere right on the beachfront.

I pull into the Paramount lot, and get out of the car. I’m still a bit stiff from the 10k I ran at dusk last night. I try to keep meals out & drinking to weekends - cardio is my midweek vice. To be honest, running along the beach with Bunk & Fitz (our dogs), I get most of my thinking done.

I like to get in to the writers room early - before the rest of my writing staff. It’s a good example. It’s also when I crystallize my ideas. At times - when I was younger, writing for community radio, I would get ideas late at night, three glasses into a bottle of gaudy red supermarket wine.  Now, I find that my ideas are clearer in the morning, the characters are more real, the words are fresh and crisp. All the jokes the studio selected for the Emmy showreel were written in the morning - early and caffeinated (although I am trying to cut down on coffee).

I still listen to music when I write, and I do still waste some time fine-tuning playlists to match the mood of what i’m writing. Today, I sit down at the giant writers room walnut table, open up my laptop. hook up the speakers, and kick the day off with some Roxy Music. I’ll turn it off when the others come in.

The progression was clear from college. It started with a mixture of the novel - my first, about the girl accidentally managing a rural private detective firm - and the radio show. A few friends and I produced a comedy talk show on a small community radio station. We shopped it around a few commercial stations, and it found a late night home. That gave me the profile, when my novel was published, to get decent promotion.

The second novel followed a year later - The adventures of a trumpet player in an old tumbledown Paris restaurant. That was picked up and became a small cult film - then the BBC wanted to make a series from the first book. The detective story. Two years in London - Aoife learning about the yoghurt powder market, and me desperately weaving tv scenes from chapters in our small place in Clapham.

It turned out the show was a hit - then we got the call from Paramount. That’s when everything became tense. I can’t remember a more stressful time. Aoife was finishing her contract in London, and we were living on airplanes, back and forth, ten hours at a time. The studio wavered on the pilot. They wanted rewrites, recasting. Two sleepless months. I’d given up hope by the end.

The night we got the call that were picked up for a full season, we were sitting under strip-lights in a curry house on Tooting high street. Aoife ducked out to the Pennycatcher across the road, and came back with their only bottle of Cava.

I walk around the writers room, picking up rubbish (I can’t call it garbage). We have a whiteboard along one wall - character arcs, story circles, themes, ideas. In red, I’ve graphed out scene and episode deadlines. At one point I read a book about project management. There’s a way of mapping projects called a Gantt chart - I had someone teach me about them. Ever since, that’s how I manage the writing schedules. That’s what keeps us smooth. In another life, I might have been a halfway decent project manager. I often wonder what I’d have done.

The first season was a blur. That’s when I got thin. Sixty hours a week, sweating  in this writers room, I could have gone two ways - Super fat or Super skinny. Luckily, I beat the odds, and spent my evenings panting on a treadmill.

Once we hit our third season, we were in shape. We had a handful of Emmys, consistent ratings in the key demos and the studio loved us. We had a routine. I found a deputy head writer - one of the associate producers - and i found that working as a team reminded me of the first time that writing changed everything. The night in DCU we wrote the outline of the panto, Cinderelish. Friendships, life choices, everything came from that first page.

The writers are trickling into the office. Starbucks coffees, yellow legal pads, macbooks and  moleskine notebooks start to crowd the table. Shooting schedules are stacked up, table reads are booked in.  I’m always taken aback at the size of the machinery that comes together to tell the stories I dream up.

It all came down to finishing. First the panto, then the novel and the radio show. I don’t know how my life would have gone if I hadn’t finished them.