Time of(f) 10/26/2009

At the moment I have so much stuff going on that I don’t really find time to blog, I promise to resume it by the end of this week. Reading week so far means no lectures and a lot of parties, but because of the fact that I have people visting Dublin right now, it gets a bit much as I never really get to sleep. I will however only comment on that with my newest most favourite catchphrase “worth it!”.

To all those outside anxiously waiting for my posts: I’m fine, just tired. Everything is going well and I manage to do some reading and working on the side, that will probably become much more again from Wednesday onwards.

Religious relief 10/22/2009

Tonight we saw Des Bishop and it was great craic. For one thing, I laughed so hard that I couldn’t feel my face for a while (then again, when can you ever really feel your face…). The other interesting side of it was the reality flash I got when I realised that that dude in grey clothes was actually the same guy I had seen countless times on youtube . Unfortunately, I can’t even recall half of the funny stuff he said (but I suppose it will start coming back after a while when re-enacting the evening with Nici) and I couldn’t catch a whole lot of it on camera (even though there will be a video in a couple of days containing the film parts and some photos, too, you will probably see that both the video and the photos are a bit shaky which has to do a. with the fact that there were a shitload of excited girls all around us and b. with Des Bishop being incredibly hyper, there’s just no way you can get a steady picture of him….). My personal favourite however was when Des took off his jacket (you can see him wearing a blue jacket in the beginning and later it’s only a grey hoodie) and somebody in the crowd went “woooh!” and he said: “yeah, this is Ireland, when you take off ONE LAYER of clothing, people go ‘woooh!’, I’m still completely covered and people go ‘wooooh!’”.

The good thing about Des Bishop in my mind is that he doesn’t beat around the bush with stuff that he has done in his life, things he has experienced. He came to Ireland at age 14 because he got thrown out of school back in New York, he was heavily involved with drugs and alcohol and, if you take his word for it, going to Ireland changed his life forever. When he decided to go into comedy, he build up his stand-up around the experience of being an outsider to Ireland even if he, in America, had always defined himself as Irish (which is something I learned that Americans often do, they don’t identify necessarily with the state they’re from but if you ask them where they’re from they’ll tell you where in Europe their ancestors came from). Through his comedy he found his way of being Irish and he does his stuff very successfully and if I may say so, very well. Moreover, he is going to run in the Dublin Marathon on Monday (we’ll see whether we will be able to cheer for him), since he’s survived cancer himself he is very active for charities.

Given that the first of his two appearances was held entirely in Irish (in which I know how to say about three things), it can only be the case that Des Bishop is that good a comedian because I actually felt like I got a lot of the jokes even though I understood only like every twentieth or thirtieth word….

Mnemonic 10/21/2009

I sometimes wish I had a huge jar to capture time with. It’s not just that my due dates come closer and closer each and every time I sit down at my little desk in my drafty humid room, it’s more like time is flying by me generally. Like when you hold your head out of a driving car and close your eyes. Today especially the weather underlines my metaphor. Up until now it has changed from rain to sun and back again about 6 times and that’s only counted from about three o’clock onwards, it’s like the seasons are changing every ten minutes. Looking out of the window I can hardly seem to remember when I came into this room for the first time, I know I burst into laughter knowing what it costs to live here and at the same time seeing what you get for it. I recall throwing my stuff on the bed and gazing outside to see the statue of a naked dude on the lawn, I recall the images, the noises and smells, it seems however not a great idea to focus and try to remember it all because whenever I do, it feels like a sheer flood of memories accumulating, threatening to come rushing back all at once, simultaneously, in no order that would make sense to me. So I stop it there and resort to keeping all of it in a corner of my mind, the very knowledge that it is there might just be the best but most bitter feeling.

21:07, I’m finally done with my fifth essay and thus also with the last piece of writing I will have to have handed in (or up as the Irish say) by the end of October….the only thing I will have had to write up until mid-November is a little piece about legends. Tomorrow the incredible Des Bishop visits UCD (see here for example:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52bna-tn_dY) and we’re definitely there!

Africa 10/20/2009

I found out yesterday that in Ireland bureaucracy on university level should be spelt with the word “random” in it. I wanted to hand in my paper and thought, man, I got this system down, I just attach this form to it that says I didn’t copy it from somewhere (which should be apparent as there is no such thing as “crappy essays for sale” on the internet which could have provided me with a comparably bad version of my paper….). As I should encounter, you need a different piece of paper for each department, again another one for each sub-department….so after running around for some time, filling in forms, trying to find a stapler, I managed to hand everything in at exactly the right door (obviously, the day stuff is due there are people delegated to stand behind a desk all day just so that people use the right forms for their essays…) in exactly the right fashion….and I guess now I know how to do it, just until there’s another pink form with a yellow envelope that I have to take to the seventh floor…..is anybody else reminded of that one Asterix movie?

Other than that, I’m looking forward to next week where I don’t have lectures (most of them anyways) and I can unwind a little, not having to write so much stuff I don’t actually care about. Moreover, I’m excited about people visting me here (probably the first group of people in a very short succession of people doing so) so that I can show them all of the stuff I have no clue about yet and will probably never learn about. Sure, I spend a lot of time on campus but I know my way around town. Most likely I’m not even aware, myself, that I’m familiar with much more than I might think. I’ll probably never be good at reading timetables or remembering street names but you get along quite well with intuition. You just have to ignore the stampedes of people passing you by on the street and the seagulls hovering over your head.

Closer 10/19/2009

Today was kind of weird, at least in part. I somewhat had trouble staying in one language and maybe it’s because you start missing your native language especially when you’re a bit mopy and the weather is so melodramatic. I don’t know. After my class today, I took a rather long walk just to think some stuff through and as that always works much better when there’s no people around (and right now we are four people living in our flat, so that makes, next to myself, three others I would have to ignore) I decided to head out. I walked around for two good hours, listening to some music, wading through withered leaves and I actually got some stuff sorted out. I believe in the importance of the little things, like for example if you miss the bus and run into somebody you haven’t seen in a while or when you bend down to tie your laces and find money on the street, so that it was a very pleasant surprise to run into a couple of philosophy students on my way back to Suckgrove. They invited me to come to a talk and I actually hesitated first, out of the usual reason, that I don’t do anything I don’t know. But halfway back to my room I suddenly realised that that was actually what I’m always talking about, doing stuff just because you can. So I texted them asking whether I could still come and, granted, I missed the talk of course because it had already started and I didn’t know where exactly it was. Later I figured it out and I made it to the room just in time to find the others walking out…to cut a long story short, I got awesome potatoe dinner at Glenomena and enjoyed some of the craic I actually prefer over loud electronic music, the one where you stay in and talk while making potatoes. I might be the biggest nerd of all times for thinking it was fun but seriously, when it comes down to it, it’s about whether something is worth doing to you even if it seems a bad idea to everybody else.

I just wanted to take a minute and explain why I do the “today’s tune” section because apparently to people who live outside of my head it just seems a column with songs and doesn’t make much, if any, sense. The idea behind it is that each of the songs has to be understood in connection to the posts, they are what I listen to while writing these entries and I hope they help people recreate the mood in which I did so.

From scratch 10/18/2009

I haven’t exactly had a lot of time this weekend to do anything, really. I was out a lot and barely just now finished my fourth essay but I guess as long as I still make it, it’s worth it. Yesterday at about nine I got texted on facebook (which really rules with regard to spontaneous gatherings) that there’s a birthday party on campus and I didn’t, for once, hesitate to get ready and text some more people to come. That’s the fun part here, that a good handful people meet up on the way back from the Centra shop over at the Merville student residences and none of them know the guy whose birthday it is and none of them care. We ended up having a great time in the relatively tiny Belgrove kitchen where, apparently, about 50 percent of the people spoke German and later some of us had toasted bread with olive oil and salt while watching a pretty weird movie at Glenomena. Luckily, after all of that, I still managed to get home not too very late and could enjoy the Sunday in the city with Nici. We took advantage of the student discount they have in this one piercing place in Temple Bar, which compared to the stuff we did the past weekends was something rather different, but still, great craic.

This was week seven, a lot of fun was had by all and a lot of new stuff was learned by most. As the first load of essays is almost through the first half of my time here comes to a close and for once, I’m not gonna try and sum up anything. It can really spoil a good time to constantly contemplate consciously….if you’re always fully aware of what time it is, you never really get the chance to enjoy any of it so I think I’ll have to postpone the being sad part, the not wanting to leave part, the part where it gets hard again, this time not because of the uncertainty that awaits me, the very fact that I don’t know where this’ll take me, but because then I can be sure of what I had, what I could have had here, the certainty that I’m not coming back, maybe not to Dublin, certainly not to this right now. When I come back home, I don’t come back to what I left, that I know, and I’m pretty sure that subconsciously that was what I wanted.

Cookie monster with Nici hand puppet…..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye8mB6VsUHw&feature=fvst

Beer and Soothing in (Las) Dublin 10/17/2009

I’m sure I say this every weekend, but yesterday night was so cool and fun I can’t even say. It was one of these things where you just had to be there in order to understand how epic it was. We started out in Temple Bar which in itself was fun enough, just sitting and talking to people (the best thing we ever did was to bring BoB in contact with the people we’ve met at the ERASMUS meetings). There was one legendary man against man staring contest that, to my recollection, felt like it went on for hours, I suppose it was about 20 minutes which is still pretty good for a staring contest. The best part however must have been us coming back on campus and hanging out at Glenomena with a very decent combination of hot chocolate with chilli, Toblerone, peanuts and a story, more like a group narrative, that, as it unfolded, just kept on becoming weirder and more creepy and macabre…as I said you really had to be there to imagine the craic we had.

Funny thing to conclude with: they’ve just installed all of the stuff in order for people to open the gate to Suckgrove by themselves at night (which the other residences have had for some time). And when we came to Glenomena at about one we all snuck in trying not to look like we don’t live here, because you may actually not be around or in the residences after half past eleven, officially, and when I came to Suckgrove, eager to try out the new gate-opening technology I found that they left open the door next to the dump and I just walked in.

Five and a half hours of sleep later I got up and I wasn’t tired or sick or anything, I still had to stop and break out into laughter a couple of times while showering and making breakfunch (it was 12.30 by then). I decided to do my laundry (because I’m alright doing it every other week and because I can) and took my laptop down with me to try and finish my essay for Monday (which, as I’m sitting here watching my laundry spinning in the machine typing this, is not really getting any longer, let alone better) and I had a really weird feeling in my stomach, something I hadn’t really known before, a curious mixture of being homesick and being here-sick if that makes sense. I suppose you’d get bureaucracy and crappy rules at whichever university you study, so I might have gone to any other place. And given the fact that my time here will not really have a huge impact on my studies back home (I won’t be able to go great lenghts with the one course they’ll probably give me credit for), I could well be disappointed and angry with myself that I didn’t choose a university that offered me more and to be frank, in the first couple of weeks I was. So what did I choose Dublin for? I don’t even remember, I didn’t actually sit down and contemplate the pros and cons of the university or the city…I had a hunch about this, a feeling that it is where I need to be and if there’s only a handful of occasions where you should actually go for what your gut feeling tells you, this is one of them. I wouldn’t have learned all of what I did anywhere else (I would have learned other things for sure but shoulda woulda coulda…) and there’s at least a couple of people I would have never met and by now it’s no longer about the mere fact that you meet people and have fun, by now it becomes more and more about who these people are and how much of a coincidence it was that all of us have decided to come here now. That is what makes me want to stay. That is what makes me wonder about what else might happen in the future if so much great stuff has already happened in merely seven weeks. That is what makes me sad thinking about the fact that it’s not gonna last forever. But one day, probably a grey rainy one, I’m gonna have to wake up from this time-out that I’ve been given here, a time-out because everything that sucks just sucks half as much and everything that rocks just keeps on rocking and it carries you straight into the next week. Like the fact that I should write 2000 words for my essay and I just spent an hour writing about a thousand here…doesn’t bother me, because I know that I’m going to get there eventually….oh, my laundry’s done.

Hypothetical 5 10/15/2009

I tripped over a piece of plastic this morning, you know, those cords that you use to keep packages shut and apart from the fact that I hurt my hand (no worries, I should be fine by tomorrow) it kind of woke me up. I’m running the entire time here, running not knowing where to and over it more often than not forgetting why I started running in the first place. When I sat down on the side of the road, drying up my bloody hand (again, just a little scratch), attempting to recover from the sudden dizziness that had overwhelmed me for just a second, I found that I never do that. Just sit down and take some time to lick my wounds, to take a look around at what got me to where I am and how, from here, I can go on. The past seven weeks have, now that I can look back on them, gone by so very quickly and thinking about it, a rush of images comes to my mind, of people, of instances, of things that have been said, how they’ve been said and the countless times I walked from point A to point B, unaware of the fact that while doing so, I would grow more and more familiar with everything that is around me. The number of people I’ve met (most of whom I will probably never see again, which even now just makes my knees a little weaker), the things I’ve seen and done, all of what I’ve learned. They say you can only really get a good look at something if you take a step back and watch from a distance, I’ve seen that what I need to do is to not take a step back from myself because that’s what I was doing at home, looking at myself from a distance and when you do that, observe, analyse and evaluate, there’s almost no time that you don’t find mistakes, that you don’t see ways to improve yourself, to improve an imperfect situation. So instead of trying to make people see through my eyes I should probably first try and see through my eyes myself.

It took me about a minute to get back up and after the very friendly truckdriver (who probably was a lorry driver…) who was nearby in the courtyard thing where stuff is delivered to the café (yes, I use the delivery entrance) had handed me a band-aid, I just started running again a. because I was already late for class and b. because that little incident had shaken all of the fatigue off of me. I fall down sometimes and, so it seems, as long as you get back up on your feet, for all I know that’s a good thing.

Fortress made of awesome 10/14/2009

Oh boy, does it feel good to get some credit around here for once. Granted, it’s not really that big of a deal that my favourite lecturer here judges my analyses as “superb” (because I’ve had lectures like that about two years ago) but it helps to see that what I’m doing works here as well as it does at home, for once, I guess, I know what I’m doing. Moreover, I got some of the results of last semester’s courses and I can say three things about that 1. it seems I’m on the right track with the topic that I’m planning to do in my MA thesis because it has proven very popular in the (so far) two essays I used to lead up to it, 2. you can get a pretty good grade in something linguistic even if you have virtually no idea but know how to phrase it, 3. apparently I’m more than qualified to write speeches for the Nobel Prize in Literature…hold your fingers crossed for Paul Auster next year.

For some reason, my room smells weird today and that is not to let you in on the weird things about my room or my student residence in general, it says something about Ireland’s climate. However hard you try, you never manage to have your towels entirely dry because the humidity is just insane. Of course you could wash and dry your towels and clothes and stuff every other day to make sure that they’re always dry and fluffy….if you’ve got the money. One wash and dry is 4,50…and even if, by now, I could afford to wash more often because at the moment it seems that the roughest time is truly over, money-wise, I refuse to do so…..what the hell, Ireland? I’ve kind of found into my routine of washing my stuff every other week which works out just fine because of a combination of not wanting to give any more money to my residence and the recognition that you can live off of much less than you’re used to if you have to. Seriously, you always think you have to go to a poor, barely civilised country to learn about the value of things, the abundance in which we ususally live and the very small amount of material stuff you actually need to get along okay. It’s not like we’re living here dressed in potatoe sacks (which would still make sense, it is after all Ireland) sitting in the dark and cold nibbling on old mildewed bread but it just shows by now, I’m sure, that I’m doing all I do (except for having fun) with a tightened belt. You just realise very soon how much quicker time goes by (if you want it to or not) if you’re not worrying about how you do things and just do them.

My piece of wisdom for today: don’t use student card as a bookmark.

P.S.: Here are some pictures about our awesome “dinner party” tonight (Nici came over for pizza), please note the pieces of cheese that didn’t melt (because apparently there are cheeses that melt and others that do not…) and the salad which for wordplay’s sake can only be called “Topfsalat” as we do not own a bowl or anything that could help you make a salad….

Deferred Karma 10/13/2009

Delay, oh sweet delight….to postpone work is to knowingly put off the inevitable, pretending for an instant that time is not gonna catch up to you…I have officially finished essay 3 of 6 today so that I am one step closer to having all my dues paid for this month.

Once and for all, the Irish like to go around in circles, it seems. Sure, they do have a lot of roundabouts (of which you don’t find as many in Dublin, of course, as the city itself has not been planned to hold large amounts of traffic..it kind of developed out of the economic boom) but I’m rather talking about what they deal with in class…they seem to enjoy talking about themselves and that almost to a degree where I want to ask whether I actually need to be there or whether Ireland can take that out with itself. It is not however the case, which might come as a convenient thought, that they particularly enjoy themselves, oh no, they don’t. Again, it’s what we’d call an “Irish attitude”, reflecting revolving around the same thing not because of the immense pleasure you take from it but because there is nothing else to talk about….like our friends from Connemara would say: It’s just the f**king way it is…or less bluntly, nothing to see here, move along. And, in a way, the Irishness of that has gotten to me, what else am I doing, reflecting revolving around the same thing day after day after day not because I find it particularly exciting but it’s the best thing I got, Ireland that is.

Just now the fire alarm in our building went off which, considering other incidents like this, is nothing unusual here, especially for our house. If I think about it, I guess no other house here has ever had their alarm going off…it’s always a little awkward, going down the stairs in your pyjama pants and slippers, gathering with the people you regularly just pass by in the hallway, mumbling a “hi” of sorts, now everybody is looking at each other trying to find out where he or she belongs or whether that one guy with the sandwich somehow managed to set off the alarm with ham and lettuce. I always see Doug and Marc from downstairs whom I know, so after all, it’s kind of a weirdly nice way to meet people again. Tonight it felt like a drill, taking everybody out of their routine, their sitting and writing and reading to bring them outside for a couple of minutes, have them breathe some fresh air, seeing some people for once. So, really the fire alarm is a way to check whether everybody’s still there and to make sure that they don’t just dwell in their rooms, never seeing anything outside of their flat…nice to know that people are taking such good care of us…..*holding up my sarcasm sign*.

My favourite link today:

http://fhsukams.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/first-vegetarian-spider-discovered/