"I'm really happy that people are responding to it. [But] I've been doing this all along. It's funny to see that people are really eating it up and loving it and encouraging me to do more."
I was 17 when I went to study law in UCD in 1990. At school in Boyle, Co Roscommon, I was interested in science and biology, but I did not take up the CAO offer to study genetics in Queen's as I was scared of maths.
I remember seeing it in drama school. I remember being so profoundly moved by it. I remember being so frightened by the performances in terms of seeing both sides to the thing that I think for most of us is, the most alive thing in our life, which is these, like, romantic relationships and the kind of inception of those things and the death of those things.
This was a very small plot of land. He was a tenant farmer, so it wasn't his. He didn't have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn't working; probably not enough to eat, couldn't sustain. So, he left and went to America, and here I am a couple of generations later.
I had lost my father just a few weeks prior, and the brain fog was real and persistent, so moments like these that managed to pierce through felt even more profound. As we were setting sail from Lisbon, I ate a pastel de nata, the ubiquitous egg custard tart, with pastry so crisp and flaky I could hear it crackle over the sound of the waves-and it filled me with delight.
And it would be ridiculously clean, with very, very beautiful sheets, very clean and very tidy. It would be so boring, actually. Luxurious bedsheets, a reflective Dame Tracey told Kuenssberg, is her reward for having lived through a much messier youth and young womanhood.
A gloriously clear day cold enough to warrant a coat and gloves yet brilliantly sunny-light shimmering on the water like Christmas baubles and a sky so blue that the tides appeared joyously high. Rainbows entered my suite at the exquisite Venice Venice Hotel; a snowy white heron perched itself on the railing of the balcony, seemingly as enchanted by the activity on the canals as we were; a pianist dressed in a long printed cape that swept the floor played into the night.
The thing that surprises me most about these personal GOTY lists, which I've been doing most years since I started working at Kotaku (including in the delivery room for my third child), is just how little I remember them after they go up. I could guess what was on the 2020 list, or the 2018 one, or my very first one from 2016, but I would probably get half of them wrong.
1. What would you change, if anything, about our experience growing up? 2. What do you admire most about Mom and/or Dad? 3. In what ways did Mom or Dad let you down? 4. What's something you wish you could have told me when we were kids? Why didn't you tell me then? 5. How could I have been a better sibling to you when we were growing up? 6. What's your favorite childhood memory of us?
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I want to see the world, experience different cultures and give myself space to reflect on what I really want in life. Lately, though, whenever I bring up this idea to friends or family, they tell me it's irresponsible. They worry I'll fall behind in my career or lose my momentum in such a competitive industry. Some even say I'm being selfish for stepping away from a stable job when others are struggling to find one.
"I had enough money but not enough time." That's what my stepmom said, multiple times through her two-decade journey with metastatic breast cancer.
"I'm the type of person who, if I'm happy, everybody in the room is going to be happy, and if I'm sad, it's going to be very quiet and tense. I'm a temperature guider in the room."
I surfed a bit. I was a gymnast as a child, so I can ride a wave no problem, except that I'm five foot three and surfboards are, I don't know, closer to six feet, so if the wrong wave ever catches me-boom-I'm dust.
I fed this woman the same line, told her a story, and quite literally waved my hands fleetingly as if running a household of four young boys and managing a traveling spouse while working full time was no big deal.
I never thought I'd put that much of myself in the film... I was very concerned at one point when we had half filmed it, and tried to get it stopped.
