My Ottawa and Brooklyn correspondents complain about the bitter cold, but here in Ireland spring has sprung early. The lawnmowers hum. Daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses—check. The birds are getting their Valentine rocks off. Our pond is full of frogs spawning dinner for the mutant goldfish below. I am prone to singing and hopping myself these days, when no one’s looking.

Here is a list of places I’d like to live:

-Brooklyn
-Vancouver (except for the rain)
-West Cork/Kerry/Clare (see above)
-Portland (see above)
-Toronto (except for the cold)

It’s based on my perception of kindred spirits per head of population, and on my crush on Canada. I haven’t even been to Vancouver or Portland, and have barely grazed Toronto. It’s a shame they have disagreeable climates in common, but probably not a coincidence. We are shaped by adversity.

I’ve stumbled across some great Irish sites recently (many by non-natives, as it happens.) I add them to my blogroll as I go, but they’re worth a shout-out. Here’s a sample:

John’s site, North Atlantic Skyline, has great photos and stories from the west of Ireland. I read this to confirm that no, I didn’t imagine some of the odder aspects of growing up in Ireland. The man gets everywhere! And disses Limerick! Check out Dastardly and Muttley.

Karlin Lillington is a Canadian/Californian journalist working in Dublin. She usually hangs out at Techno/Culture, though the site seems to be down at the moment. Love her views of Ireland and technology.

Bernie Goldbach writes prolifically at Irish Eyes. He teaches multimedia at Tipperary Institute. Smart guy, lucky students.

On Saturday, Gareth took me on a tour of the finest pick-up joints in Cork. We spluttered together, evil Dublin and Limerick spies, watching the crowds that split girl/boy as neatly as if they were still under the thumb of the Christian Brothers and nuns. Cork men wear those Tin-Tin quiffs—bless—except for the brave types who go for bizarro boyband spikes. They orbited the gangs of women, who focused all of their very confident attention on each other, tossing hair and comparing tops. The women wore halternecks, straight-ironed hair, and tans, and they looked much better than we did ten years ago, when UCD girls shrouded ourselves in bulky sweaters and jeans for fear a provocative curve might show. They also looked better than Irish lads, who tend to wear beer bellies scarily young.
    “She asked for a six-pack and he gave her the whole keg,” says Gar with a smirk.

The tan thing, though. This bothers me. Irish skin is clear and fair, but no longer good enough for local breeding purposes. My beautiful youngest sister never heads for a night on the town without tinting her skin. Our female TV presenters are orange, and so are the Aer Lingus flight attendants. At Irish dancing competitions, a subculture that has become as creepy as the junior beauty pageants of Jon-Benet Ramsey, fake tan is obligatory for seven-year-old girls. I asked Gareth, my one-man poll of Irish singles, if he liked fake tans. He shrugged. They looked fine, he supposed, but he didn’t know why they did it.

Last week I read that Accuvue is launching a new range of coloured contact lenses for daily wear in Ireland. All kinds of colours will be available, they said, but they expect the most popular choice to be Chestnut Brown. Brown eyes: double-dominant genes that are the default setting across 95% of the world. We Irish are a potato-faced lot, but from even the spuddiest faces shine jewel-coloured eyes. Yet our bias is pronounced. It is the Brown-Eyed Girl that Van Morrison serenades.

Imagine a streaky Molly Bloom. Picture Jennifer Connelly with fake brown eyes and an orange tan, and weep. We have few enough natural resources as it is. Listen, lads, buy Irish. Don’t put out for these homegrown Donatella Versaces, and they’ll soon see sense.

How vain to post a picture of myself, but I love the composition of Tim’s portrait. I am reading my guidebook over chowder and stout in Dingle. He lay with his cheek on the bar to figure out an angle. Then he propped the little Olympus Stylus Epic point-and-shoot up on beermats and set the timer. (A Yashica T4 viewfinder would make this easier, but it doesn’t quite fit in a shirt pocket.) I am slouching and laughing at him, off-camera, because I don’t think this shot can possibly work. But it does, in natural light, with the glass of Murphy’s posing in front of the Murphy’s sign, the curtain behind looking like a creamy head of stout, and the whole scene reflected in the diagonal sweep of the polished counter.

Tim gets stuff with a basic point-and-shoot that guys with thousand-dollar lenses never see. I wish I had his naturalist’s eye.

The most distracting thing about early Orkut is Marc Canter’s open marriage.

Orkut, if you don’t know, is a social networking website. There are several of these services, of which the best-known are LinkedIn, good for professional networking, and Friendster, for turning friends of friends into “activity partners” (snicker). I’m waiting for Dumpster, myself.

Orkut is the private bootstrap project of a Google engineer, which was enough to start buzz when it launched last month. Cunningly, at launch it was invitation-only, creating further ripples of vanity. I don’t know how the original Orkut Mayflower community was chosen, but here’s how it works now:

Someone lists you as their friend on Orkut. You get an email asking you to visit the site and acknowledge that person. “Is Chris Locke your friend?” Orkut asks, like MacCarthy’s Senate committee. Shyly, I admit that he might be. “Are you sure Chris Locke is your friend?” it demands. Oh God. When I was seven, the wrong answer to that kind of question meant social death. It still gives me the playground heebie-jeebies. I press on, hoping the world won’t shun me.

Invitation in hand, I now create my own Orkut profile. I puzzle out the Brand Called Me with the help of leading questions. Which religion are you? What ethnicity are you? List your favourite books, movies, and music. Have kids? Do they live with you? Check boxes to describe your sense of humour. (There is no box for ‘None’.) What lesson did you learn from previous relationships? Orkut, it seems, is the hectoring date I’d send straight to voicemail the next day.

When my profile has been polished I can invite friends of my own, though mostly I prefer to wait to be asked. My flesh-and-blood friends aren’t online types, and anyhow I know how to find them. But of curiosity I invite some far-flung friends to join my gang, hoping to balance the current tilt towards American tech-workers. Doesn’t work. They send email excuses.

Tiny photos of my Orkut friends are tiled on my home page, a little mosaic of love. They are listed in order of who has most friends.* In most cases I’ve never met them. They can write testimonials, or rate my coolness and sexiness. This makes me anxious. Perhaps I should write a voting-bot to inflate my rankings. Below my friends’ photos are their names, their availability, and their number of friends, which for entertainment value I choose to read as age instead. Betsy is married and 78. Peter is committed and 26. I am 11.

I click on Jeneane’s name and see her mosaic of love, tiled in self-reinforcing popularity order. Marc Canter is top-left. Marc is 442 and has an open marriage. His photo shows a slight Salman Rushdie leer. I click on another name and there he is again, top-left, looking relatively fresh for his age. And up he pops on Frank’s page. Who is Marc Canter, the Orkut MVP? I start to think about his open marriage, which seems like none of my damn business except that the fact of it occupies prime real estate on every Orkut page I visit. In my mind, ‘Marc, Open Marriage, 442’ becomes the Orkut tagline. (In fact, the real tagline is even dorkier: “Expand the circumference of your social circle.”) I am slightly disturbed by this brand, and feel, perhaps unfairly, that friendship is the wrong term for 442 connections.

The directness of Orkut and Friendster is clunky. Real people don’t say “Are you my friend?” and, past the playground, they don’t get others to ask on their behalf. Worse is the lack of shading, the Friend/Not Friend binary that belongs in a videogame. And the popularity-contest aspects make me regress to touchy adolescence (which, granted, doesn’t take much).

Yesterday I got a plaintive group message: “Can someone explain what Orkut is all about and how I can use it properly? I’m feeling a little lost right now.” Good question. Orkut wants to be a bottom-up, emergent technology. Members can self-organize into interest groups, for example, Writing, Burning Man, Pet Shop Boys, etc. You’re allowed to send blanket messages to friends of friends, and you get to see how people are linked to you, which is fun. So far I am connected to 23,442 people through 11 friends, presumably thanks to the keeners. If I could control the minds of 23,442 people I could take over the world. More usefully, I could find kindred spirits no matter where I am.

Orkut and Friendster aren’t services I’d use much myself, given that I lurk in the kitchen at parties. I meet plenty of people here at Ego HQ, and if distance were on my side I’d spend more time with real people, not thumbnail photos. But the online world is a great source of likeminded people, even for cannibals. Those who don’t keep personal sites—and many of those who do—still want to tap into that. The strength of these services is that they takes the friction out of expressing interest, both in individuals and in groups.

*Update: They have now fixed the bug that sorted friends in descending order of their number of connections. Much better, Orkutters.

I’ve added more of Tim’s pictures to illustrate some recent pieces. There are good shots of Caitriona, the Cliffs of Moher, and Peig Sayers’ grave among them. Scroll down on the main page if you care to see them.

    “So what part of America do you live in?” asks Tony while he chops my hair.
    “Is it that obvious?” Since I came back to Ireland I have been trying to purge my speech and spelling of Americanisms. I thought it was working. I’m wrong.
    “Ah no, it’s not too bad as I’m listenin’ to you. There’s only some words are fucked up, like,” he says kindly.

He’s around my age and works for one of the posher salons in Limerick. They seem busy. He says it’s quieter than it used to be; they notice the slow-down. The haircuts (US$60) are still regular enough, but business has dropped off on expensive colours. Where clients used to come in six times a year, now they might see them four times.
    “Still, some of them can’t live without their highlights and that’s that. They don’t seem to be affected by any downturn at all. Some people never are.”

He lives twenty miles out in Killaloe, on the banks of Lough Derg. It’s beautiful out there, though the lake is now choked with expensive cruisers and poisoned by agricultural pollution. He’s thinking of selling his house. Herself insisted on moving out there, but it’s too far out. They can never go out for a pint in town and he’s getting sick of it. He thinks he’ll get about $850K (US) for the house. Clare County Council has brought in new Planning Permission requirements that mean you can’t build certain areas unless you’ve lived in Clare for ten years. His place can only go up in value, he says.

He wouldn’t dream of living in a housing estate again. He wants a house on its own land. He has his eye on a place in Parteen that a client tipped him off to. Your man wants $625K for it, though Tony thinks he’s asking too much. He was thinking about paying cash, but it probably makes sense to take out a mortgage since the borrowing is so cheap. Then he’d put the rest of it into another house. Like most Limerick people I’ve talked to, he would never consider going back to Dublin. “It’s no life up there. Half the day trying to get to work, and then no one wants to go out at night because the mortgage is so high.”

Last week there was a news story about Irish hair salons going to South Africa to recruit staff. Slowdown or no, they can’t meet demand now that Ireland has discovered grooming. I ask Tony if he’d think about setting up on his own. “Sure why would I do that?” he says, looking at me in the mirror with an eyebrow raised. “I’ve a great life as it is.”

I can’t afford to live in my own damn country. I drink my hairy coffee and nurse my injured sense of entitlement.

Almost all Irish kids wear school uniforms. Mine was navy blue, a colour I’ve never worn since. In Limerick these days the girls wear wide skirts down to the floor, a pan-school trend. At bus-stops they move as if on castors. It looks peculiar, this Catholic burkha, and doesn’t help large Irish booty (though it avoids the great depilation debates that absorbed my class). I can’t even figure out where they’re buying them.

Tim was convinced it was a regulation length. Why else would a teenage girl wear a skirt past her shoes in the Britney Era? So I asked them. Fashion, they confirmed. This way you can wear whatever shoes and socks you like. You’d be laughed at if you wore anything above your ankle. But in Cork and Ennis, they said, the girls wear uniform skirts up to their arses. With over-the-knee socks.

They wrinkled their noses at the idea of pallid Cork goosepimples on display.