Shy

Being shy is a real curse. I hate it. People around me sometimes don't believe I am shy... maybe shy is the wrong word. Maybe it's that I'm painfully self-conscious. I know I really struggle to start friendships, because I just don't know how to do general chit-chat. And that means people see me as rather stand-offish. I guess it doesn't help that what I think of as my 'neutral' expression seems to be interpreted by the rest of the world as 'pissed off'!

And with being self-conscious, comes being self aware. I'm very aware of my negative points... that I'm grumpy, intolerant, bossy, slightly misogynistic, cynical, morose, opinionated... (This is not a desperate fish for compliments... I'm also aware of my positives!)

All this leads to many of my friendships being a bit superficial, and if I meet other shy people, it's almost impossible for me to connect. I know this is mainly down to me not opening up about myself, but I'd have to say that my life has shown me that a lot of the time, being open comes back to bite me in the ass, and ends up in me getting hurt!

I would love to have the sorts of friendships I see other people have – where you can just hang out together and kill some time in pleasant company. Where instead of lurking on the internet for hours at a time like some freakish saddo, I can spend time relaxing with affable people in the real world. But guess what? The reason I don't really have friendships like that is because I don't know how to be that sort of friend.

Jeez... reading this back, it looks really self-indulgent and whiny; I generally try to keep my blog entries light, factual and positive... Is that the self-conscious Seamus creeping in? Don't worry, it's all quite tongue-in-cheek. Maybe I should look on it as an attempt to be open :-)

PS - To my friends - I love you all, don't read anything unnecessary into this post - I'm grateful to have you!

Universally Challenged!

Just a quick update... I've been accepted by Manchester Metropolitan University to study for a Masters degree in Computing. So I'm now awaiting the start of term with excitement and trepidation... hopefully this time next year I'll be Seamus McAteer MSc :-)

Orlando

After our journey to Toronto, we were expecting the worst from our travel plans to Orlando. But as it happens we had a perfect day... Two on-time flights, luggage first on the belt at the airport, and we were even the first drop off from the airport shuttle bus.

Orlando was a busy nine days, mostly spent visiting Disney theme parks - Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom and Downtown Disney. Getting to and from the parks on the buses seemed to take forever - usually 2 hours or so each way. I was surprised that there were only really a couple of headline rides in each parks, but I guess the Disney parks are really for kids. As you might expect in mid-summer, the queues were horrendous, and I'd have to say the 'fast-pass' system of booking a time to return to a particular attraction made things worse, since you'd normally get a return time 6 or 7 hours later. In one case, the queue time was shown as 40 minutes, and we were still not on the ride 2.5 hours later! But the bigger rides were good - Space and Splash Mountains, Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and Expedition Everest all ridden with glee :-)

As well as the parks, we also did a lot of shopping in the outlets - it was so cheap it would be daft not to... We were slightly worried about fitting it all in the cases, but we managed somehow! Food was also cheap and unavoidable - I seriously lost count of the number of 'all you care to eat' meals we had. I can actually say I was getting sick of food by the time we left, though we did have a nice meal at Planet Hollywood.

The temperatures were HOT - 32-35 degrees in the daytime, 24 degrees at night, and very, very humid. Almost every day had a thunderstorm - usually incredibly forceful rainfall, but short lived.

We went to Typhoon Lagoon towards the end of our trip, where we got sunburnt again within about 2 hours. The water slides in there - ouch! I managed to hurt myself on both the ones we tried - one from my shoulders bouncing over the joints on the slide, the other from landing awkwardly in the pool at the end. But I guess we fatties build up more momentum on these things, so it's the price you pay!

A good trip, but now I'm all Disney-ed out!

Toronto

It was holiday time again, and we set off from Manchester to Toronto. We were using US Airways, which meant we had to change planes in Philadelphia en route, and only had about 90 minutes to get across the airport to make our flight. We did make it though, and were soon aboard the plane and pushed back from the gate. Unfortunately, that's as far as we got for the next 3.5 hours...

There was a massive thunderstorm in Philly, which meant we were eventually offloaded and sent back to the terminal, where we were informed we would now have a 24 hour delay. Now in Europe there are laws about these things, but in the US you get absolutely no help at all from the airline to find overnight accommodation, have a meal - in fact, they wouldn't even offload our luggage from the plane, so we were literally left with nothing but the name of a hotel to try. When we eventually found out how to get to the hotel, there was a queue of about 50 people ahead of us to check in. Finally, we were in a room, and walked down the street to a pizza place for some food at 10.30 pm!

Now to be fair, the TV news told us there's been 10,000 (yes, ten thousand!) lightning strikes in the Philadelphia area that night... but seriously, a 24 hour delay and all we were offered was a glass of water - the US needs to sort out looking after its travellers!

Naturally we were worried about whether our bags would make it to Toronto (since they were now on a different flight from us!), but luckily they were there when we arrived.

So we'd lost a day of our holiday, but Toronto was great. The Just for Laughs festival was on while we were there, which meant plenty of street entertainment. We trundled up to the Bear Night on the Friday, which was held in the open air on the patio of a cafe, which was novel, though we find the US and Canada's insistence on shutting everything down at 2am a bit strange!

Two highlights - an open-top city sightseeing tour with an excellent guide in glorious sunshine, where we got a bit pinked up; and our day tour to Niagara Falls. Yes, we picked the cheapest tour, so it was excellent value, but the tour guide on this one was chronically bad - to the point where he had a go at one of the other passengers while on the microphone to the whole bus! And SO, SO dull! No tip for him!