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That’s my last update for the day. But it’s St. Patrick’s Day, so I’m going to share something I wrote for one of my classes back at BU. The assignment was to write a travel feature, and all of it is true. The professor who taught the class loved the piece, and it’s within a few degrees of relevancy to today’s festivities, so why not?

My drink recommendation is Jameson and Ginger Ale. Be safe. Don’t Drink and drive. Don’t wear orange.

Enjoy:

DUBLIN-The Irish hangover is a strange beast. A violent half-mad cur abandoned and left to wean itself on whiskey and stout lapped from the gutters of Dublin.

You should never look a mad dog in the eye, but looking the Irish hangover in the eye is inevitable. You must never flinch, or else it will pin you in bed to wallow the day away wishing for death.

Act carefully. Appease it with carbs and coffee. Get straight enough for normal human functions.

But today is not a day to be straight. I need to go on the offensive if I’m going to get twisted enough for what’s coming.

Ice. Rum. Coke. An American drink to curb an Irish Hangover.

Today’s the Irish Gay Pride Parade. More specifically, it’s the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Pride Parade. While not representing any of those categories, I’ve agreed, at the request of a friend working with Amnesty International, to walk in the parade.

Better pour another one.

It’s the summer of 2007, and I’m staying at Dublin City University with a study abroad program from Boston University. DCU, despite its name, is located about 20 minutes away in the relatively quiet suburb of Glasnevin, so getting into town requires a trip on the Dublin Bus service.

It’s an imperfect system. They’re not strict on fare collection, and the top floors of the busses are generally dens of lawlessness, where drinking and smoking run rampant despite the sternest protestations of the law.

Regardless, they get you from A to B.

But the bus will not be depositing me in the friendly confines of the early alphabet and its childish connotations. I’m headed for the exotic, unwieldy region. The outcasts. The Ws. The Xs. The Qs.

Ireland is a Catholic nation, but also a liberal one. In Dublin, churches and pubs blend together seamlessly to form a subdued, but uniquely European cityscape.

Abortion became legal the same time divorce did-the ’90s.

Gay Rights are still in the air, but on the ground that day the situation was strange, bordering on surreal. Angel wings, rainbow wigs and hot pants were being worn proudly in every direction. A crowd of Irish lesbians were dressed in black and pink spandex, looking not unlike a roller derby team. I saw a member of the Gardai-the Irish police force-walking through the crowd to, I assumed, keep the peace.

Nope. He was wearing leather pants.

This was the scene in Parnell square, near the top of O’Connell Street. Had the parade never moved, I still would have seen something more bizarre every time I turned around.

But it does move, affording Dubliners on both sides of the River Liffey a look at the spectacle.

In any political demonstration, poignancy and irony are always separated by fine lines. It was poignant when the parade passed the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, site of the 1916 Easter Rising that kick-started the Irish freedom movement. Here a new generation of Irish citizens was standing up to be treated as human beings.

Outside the GPO is the Dublin Spire, dedicated in the early 21^st century as a monument to the Irish freedom movement. The Spire towers over everything around it, an expression of pride beyond the usual Irish capacity.

The locals call it the Stiffy on the Liffey.

The parade continues over the river into the south side of Dublin. This train of free-willed individuals beyond the norms of religious society passes within a few scant meters of Trinity College, home to one of the oldest known versions of the Bible, the Book of Kells.

The parade makes more sense on Dame Street, near Temple Bar. The shirtless men in angel wings, the Marilyn Monroe costumes and the yards upon yards of rainbow spandex would be at home here any night of the week. It’s where tourists come to drink, and the locals laugh at their expense.

Dame Street runs by the green dome of City Hall and the mortared stone of Dublin Castle, ending at the spires and steeples of Christ Church Cathedral. The parade surges past them all, begging for political or religious defiance.

It never comes.

There are no protests. No picketers. No violence. Instead, the parade simply ends in a park, where revelers enjoy a festival of human freedom.

Maybe that’s too much to comprehend for an American accustomed to harsh reprisals for coloring outside the lines, or maybe walking has worn me out and left me dehydrated, but I’ve seen enough.

I’m heading back to normality, or whatever passes for it in this country.

Basically, I quit facebook because It wasn’t worth having anymore. Back when I was actually in school, it was nice to have a way to get in touch with people, or to contact classmates or floormates or what have you. But now that I’ve graduated and my account was four years old, it was so loaded down with random people (freshman year I decided that it’d be fun to friend everyone named Seitz I could find) that I wasn’t getting information from people that I was actually interested in hearing about/from.

I didn’t have the 400 or so friends that facebook said I did, and after closing it down, I still have the same number of real friends. If any of those people want to get in touch with me, they can email me or call me. I don’t need to go to a website to hear from someone that I know in real life, and I’d rather have a conversation with someone than read a profile.

In case you’re curious, I will also not be starting Twitter any time soon. If you read just about anything on this site, you can tell that I can’t form coherent thoughts in the span of a mere 140 characters. Running a Twitter feed is just a half-assed way to make yourself sound clever. Again, I’d rather just have a conversation with someone.

There is a certain irony, I’m aware, in the fact that I’m bitching about these websites on my personal blog. I really don’t have an answer to that, except that I own this domain name, built the site myself and I won’t sell my own information to marketers in exchange for access. If you’re going to broadcast your thoughts and opinions, you might as well put some effort into it and make it at least somewhat original.

In the unlikely event that someone cares, here’s my rationale for some parts of the design:

• No Sidebar: Technically, there is a sidebar. It’s just at the bottom of the page. I’ve always hated the look of most blogs, because you get so much stuff piled up on the edges that it tends to take away from the real focus: the content. Since I don’t have any ads and this is nothing more than a personal website, I didn’t really see a point to using a traditional sidebar.
• Color: I already made my case about black type on white backgrounds. I went with a small color palette because, again, I’m trying to keep the design elements of this site as low key as possible.
• Fonts: Sans-serif fonts (Arial/Helvetica) for the headlines and serif fonts (Georgia/Times New Roman) for the type.  Unfortunately, I don’t actually have Helvetica installed on my computer, so I can only hope that it comes out right for those that do.  The Georgia font has a really nice texture for the type though. It’s a lot of weird serifs and strange letter/number spacings.
• Overall Design: I nicknamed this my “adidas” template.  It wasn’t intentional, but the whole thing came out with a kind of funky euro-minimalist look when I finished it.

This is version 1.0 though. I’m probably going to change little things here and there as I move forward with this site. I definitely want to work on creating an actual logo for the header, but until I figure out what I want it to look like I’m okay with this. I also might try to figure out how to turn this into a distributable template at some point, but for right now there are a couple parts that are essentially lashed together with duct tape and paper clips.

(For example, I had to go back and make some changes just to get this post to display right. Damn unordered lists.)

Big thanks to www.wpdesigner.com for their tutorial series. If you’re interesed in making wordpress themes but you don’t have any idea where to start, I highly recommend it.

Special thanks also goes to Paul Rausch for helping me out with this site whenever my techno-retardation flares up. Like when I don’t know how to use ftp.

Anyway, I’ve started working on designing a new template for this site. I’m not a web designer or programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I know just enough to get me by with a little help. I found this great tutorial that I used to figure out the basics, and now I’m bludgeoning my way through the rest of the process largely through trial and error. I actually like doing it that way, because I figure I’ll learn more from my own mistakes.

I’ve been tossing around a couple of ideas in my head for how I want the whole thing to look when I’m done, and, pursuant with Murphy’s Law, I had an epiphany (albeit one of those obvious ones that, in all likelihood, somebody else already had long before me) last night before I fell asleep.

All the graphic design work I’ve done (two whole semesters!) has focused more on print design than on web design, because journalism education is nowhere near catching up with the realities of the journalism industry. When you’re designing a print layout, you have almost complete control over how everything looks in the end. With the web, how it looks in the end is largely determined by the system that the reader is using. This irritates me to no end, because now I have to learn some coding.

One of those tediously fun aspects of design has always been white space. For those who don’t know, white space is essentially the summation of your margins, padding, leading, word spacing, and letter spacing. It’s basically everything that doesn’t contain design elements. Traditional printing has usually been black ink on white paper, hence, “white space.”

So my little epiphany is that you really don’t get white space with web design. You do get some control over it, but the wide range of resolutions used by everyone looking at the internet pretty much means that there will always be more or less negative space than you expect when the final product is viewed.

But level two of the epiphany is that white space on a computer screen isn’t actually white (right now, people who are more computer literate than I am are probably laughing to themselves, as if the little print Neanderthal had finally discovered fire). When you’re using ink or pigments, white is the absence of color and black is more or less the domination of color. But with pixels and light, white is the domination of color, while black is the absence of color (I know that this doesn’t completely apply to most monitors, since traditional LCD displays will always generate a little bit of light, even on black pixels, but let’s pretend that everybody has 10 grand to plunk down on an OLED monitor).

In the beginning, when computer were first going into use and there was just DOS, it was a black background with white (or colored) text. When everybody started using graphical operating systems, word processors and graphic design software, the goal was to imitate the final output. So it went to black text on a white background. The irony is that imitating the look of print required a full reversal of the principle of print. The text becomes the negative, while the white space becomes the positive.

In terms of publishing, that worked because people weren’t reading the final product on the computer screen. If you design a newspaper or magazine page on the computer, it was going to be printed anyway, so the final product would be black ink on white paper. It didn’t matter than the negative space concept was reversed while it was being created.

But now the writing, designing, and eventual publishing stays on the computer. I wrote this post on the computer, and you’re reading this post on the computer in a layout that’s designed for the computer (unless you want to print it out and read it that way just to prove me wrong). So if you’re reading this as black type on a white background, the white space is still reversed. The positive elements (the type) have become negative, and the negative elements (the background) have become positive. Black has become white, and dogs and cats may or may not be living together.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a reason why I hate black type on a white background online and, whenever I finish working on my new layout, you can probably expect light type on a dark background. Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.