Alex from KindaMuzik e-mailed pleading for a link! I'm pleased to oblige since I need to get my butt in gear and start posting again! Anyway, I don't have a lot of time to surf the net anymore but if I did I'd read KindaMuzik.

Kathleen in duff-SFA album shocker. I don’t buh-lieve it!
I got the new Super Furry Animals album on Friday and still haven’t decided what I think about it yet. I’m not sure that it’s as bad as the NME review says, but maybe it’s just fan loyalty clouding my judgement. For me, bad SFA is still preferable to 80% of the rest of the music out there. And it’s not as if the songs are bad–they just seem to be missing the spark and heart of the other albums. Gruff’s normally witty and dead-on lyrics seem tired and recycled an Whatever became of that all-electronic album we were promised? I’d really be interested in a Cian Ciaran solo project. On the same shopping trip I picked up Rings... I also bought the new issue of Mojo, mostly for its “Soul Riot” CD (the quality of writing in their articles is just atrocious). d the band sounds bored in general.Rings Around the World is the mag’s album of the month and they heap so much praise on it even makes me cringe. But I did get a chuckle out of this little dig: “It’s a bad world out there...We have a right to moan, to complain, to protest. If you’re Radiohead this means the right to make a brace of horrible half-finished electronic albums that sound like Victor Meldrew and a bag of wasps complaining about the price of stamps.”

The new Super Furry Animals album, Rings Around the World was released yesterday. So why can't I find it??

Yesterday I turned 22 and didn’t care. I’m usually quick to tell friends and strangers about my birthday but yesterday I couldn’t find the strength to tell many people who didn’t already know. I just didn’t see the point of marking it. It’s not a special birthday like 16 (driving) 18 (voting), 19 (drinking) or 21 (“welcome to adulthood”). It’s just another year between 21 and 30.
Right now I feel at least four years older than 22. Graduating from university has left me without any sort of signposts of where my life is headed. But I’m also feeling the physical strain of the past few weeks. Walking everywhere has turned my legs into two muscular tree trunks but has reduced my feet to sweaty blistery messes and left my face windburnt and eyes bleary.
Then there’s ye olde job search. Reading all the want ads has made me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life the past few years. I’m starting to think that if I applied to make balloon animals for children in a shopping centre that the interviewer would ask me for my degree in balloonology.
As a woman I’m well aware that I have more career choices than I would’ve had fifty years ago. But it seems that nowadays you have to decide what you want your life direction by age 15 and work towards that and only that. Whereas fifty years ago it would be no problem to start a totally new and different career, so long as you had the drive and desire. Today, people don’t want to give you the time of day unless you’ve been working at a similar job for at least two years. Never mind that I could learn the skills in about half a day if they gave me the chance.
So I go back and re-write the CV for the twentieth time, cloaking my real personality in the polite to-whom-it-may-concern babblespeak. I don’t work well that way so that could be why I haven’t gotten many responses. But I’m afraid if I did write what I felt that I’d come across as too flippant or demanding. I’m afraid they won’t like the Real Me. But why should I care about that? If they don’t like the Real Me, chances are I won’t like the Real Them.

I’ve now been in Ireland for officially three weeks. A few days ago a friend from back home e-mailed me, inquiring as to whether I was alive or dead. It’s nice to know someone cares.
The past few weeks have been full of the usual growing pains associated with moving to a new country–culture shock, physical and emotional exhaustion, anger and fear. Things seem to have finally settled down for now although I still have that tiny little detail of actually getting a job to sort out. (My CV is online, if you want to have a looksy)
Therefore it’s understandable why this blog hasn’t been top priority for me of late. But my time in Ireland (and time away from blogging) has led me to the realization that I need to write. Maybe it’s the new surroundings and experiences but I’ve got this constant monologue running through my brain critiquing everything that’s happening. Maybe that’s normal; I don’t know. What I do know is that I need a place to unload my brain and here’s a good a place as any (I’m running out of paper and don’t have a computer of my own). So in between the online job searches and constant e-mailing of friends and family I’ll try to write about how I’m getting on. I’ll try to be as articulate as I can while being charged at two pounds an hour to use a computer.
So! Get to the good bits you say! Well, on Sunday night I saw none other than the Magnetic Fields at the Olympia Theatre. I had a fabulous time, and Stephin seemed to be in good spirits, despite suffering from serious food poisoning. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how the evening got more and more goofy as the night went on. Early on Stephin’s rendition of Asleep and Dreaming” brought me to tears, but later in the night Ÿeah! Oh, Yeah!”, with its brilliant Claudia-Stephin bickering, had me in stitches. I’m struggling to write some kind of review/commentary on the show that I can shop around as proof of my music critique skillz to the Dublin music papers but it’s not coming out right. But that’s OK. If it did come out right on first try I’d be worried.