Live it our way 11/24/2009

I can almost touch time now, if I just hold out my hand to try and grip the breezing stream that rushes by in front of me. I’m neutral though in the way I look at it, it just goes on and I wait and see. Nothing I do now seems to lead me anywhere, which is mostly due to the fact that I don’t spend any time in my room at all. While during the initial time here all I would have wished for was to bump into a person I know on campus, which basically never happened for about three weeks, by now, there are days I run into six or seven people I usually hang out with a day so that you just go from conversation to conversation and never actually get to sit down and do stuff. And you never really get to be home when, as soon as you’re there, you find somebody to go have a pint with. The rule is, if there’s no early classes the next day and no homework for the next day, you grab your shoes and go. So far, so carpe noctem.

I have one more essay to write for next week (which I have kind of 40% finished), the others are written but still need corrections. I’m doing okay on all of it, although you can definitely tell which topics my heart beats for and which ones I only have to get it over with. I’m trying to keep the upper hand considering that I feel so out of time that the last three weeks just went by without me even noticing, so that by now I’m unable to tell you what day it is and how much time I have left before my dead lines. That being said, I’m gonna have to do as I did the last two weeks, namely use the weekdays to buckle down and just write down whatever comes out of my head so that I have stuff to rewrite and to eventually hand in…naturally, the exams are almost immediately afterwards so that I keep wondering how on earth I am supposed to focus at all. I suppose we are all working as hard as we can considering the, in my mind, rather weird structure of the semester where you never really get to dive into a topic but you basically just start dealing with it, you write stuff down, hand it in (or up as they say) and move on.

A topic I have not addressed in depth so far here is language. Given the fact that Irish English is not exactly easy to understand, the both of us have not had any bigger problems from day one. Sometimes you just nod along when you don’t understand stuff which can lead to awkward silences that you can always end by saying “cheers” which means pretty much everything from hallo, bye, thank you, okay, you’re welcome to actually cheers. Of course, all of us are recognised as non-native speakers because we all have accents (although I have to say that those people I hang out with most are excellent speakers of English….as far as I can pass judgement on that, see belo) but I’ve come across a couple of instances where people guessed my nationality and I got responses ranging from British to American over “not German” (which is a weird sort of classification delivered by a German himself) up to Australian last night. Indeed, you have to choose your audience wisely. Sure, you get a lot of different guesses which all to a certain degree make sense but you have to be aware of who the person guessing is. Drunk Irish are not good guessers, neither are people who are non-native speakers themselves, have nothing to do with language, people without an ear for the how who exclusively focus on the what. The most competent judges are, as far as I’ve learned, native speakers who hear you speak in more than one situation to more than one time of the day (because while you might sound pretty German in Centra at 3 pm, it could happen that you suddenly dash out the Irish accent speaking to a cabdriver in the middle of the night) and they will most often come to the conclusion that you speak almost accent -free English, that you could pass for a native speaker (in certain situations). I’ve had and still sometimes have trouble sticking to one English as I make the mistake of observing it a lot. The nice posh British accent I had back home immediately upped and left as soon as I met the first Americans. After a couple of weeks of very heavy USofA-ing, I started taking over some of the cute little Irish-isms they have here and recently I rediscovered the British so that I guess, the guy finding me to be Australian (which is funny because I would go up in flames as soon as I’d set foot in Australia) kind of has a point….and I do enjoy calling people “dude” and “mate”.

PS.: For the afficionados of wordplay, some of the verbal lapses of the last days (of which I’m still pretty proud because I got myself laughing extremely hard as well as those around me who appreciate some fun with words). What’s the name of James Hetfield’s (lead singer of Metallica) cat? James Catfield. While talking about aquariums and the cleaning fish people have to keep the tank clean, I realised that if I had a cleaning fish I’d call him George Cleaney…

PPS.: Should people have any wishes or requests on what I could bring along for them from Ireland,they’d better tell me soon so that I can start looking. Same thing with Christmas presents…I haven’t a clue…

Miss a thing 11/17/2009

I know I haven’t been posting a whole lot of stuff in the last couple of weeks, it just shows by now that I do not only have a lot to write for class but that, in the time that I don’t, I take every chance I can get in order not to sit at home in front of my blog trying to come up with something wise and profound to write whilst listening to my housemates passing their time with what I can only interprete as playing soccer with a kitchen cupboard as a ball in our stairway. I don’t wanna regret not trying everything to be somewhat content here (I think the first couple of weeks of getting used to here have already taken away so much of the good experiences I could have had) and at the same time I don’t want to leave everything behind. By now, though, I can start to find how and why all of this will eventually help me. There are already some moments when I feel I might someday be okay with the fact that the people here will no longer be my roommates, my fellow students, my friends even but that they will make some of the best memories anybody could ever have. I will just have to accept the fact that “right now” is not always the best situation for everybody, as much as I’d like right now to stay here forever, I would have wanted a time where all my friends back home were still in Konstanz to stay forever. But it didn’t and you can’t make it stay even if you cry and you beg. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the sharp ache I feel in my chest when I think of the good times we’ve had (both here and in Konstanz) progressively subsides and can eventually, if I try hard enough, make some space for something else, something new, something more optimistic. For now I don’t try to think about it too much (which of course is impossible if you write about it all too often) and instead attempt to enjoy as much as I can while I still can.

Born(e) in mind 11/13/2009

That’s how important this blog is….I’m using one of the best title ideas I’ve ever had here instead of other places…well, never mind. Tonight’s ska party was very different from the first one about a month ago, it was much more mellow and talky and we didn’t dance at all, which might have been because everybody is (mentally and/or physically) exhausted or because some of the people who had been there last time weren’t (because a. they have mysteriously disappeared, b. because they’re back in the US or c. because they had some other place to be where they, believe me, could not possibly have had as much fun…). It was great craic though and I got to tell people about the ridiculously appropriate metaphor I came up with to put all of this into words (I might tell you about it some day when I’m in a really good mood). The last three days I studied over at the library or in the main arts building to 11.30, 10.30 and 10 respectively and I finally got one of my essays done so that now it’s “only” two more to go and while I know about (and am annoyed by) the fact that it’s always a damn process, because you don’t just think of an essay topic, write it down and hand it in in one day, you have to plan, do research, read, read, read and then do your analysis, I can say that I’m on a decent way, having planned out one essay and having made an appointment to discuss the second essay on Monday. I should be on the right track.

For all of the contemplations of this week, that I maybe want to stay here, about what it really is that keeps me here or whether it is something that keeps me not here but just from coming back, I have to say that I’m planning on not giving that any thought until I’ve had the chance to take a step back from it and do some proper evaluation of all of it. A lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking about was basically just in my mind, there was no actual decision made, no plans formulated so that now, after almost a week of trying not to be entirely torn between what I have and what I want, nothing has actually changed. I just have so much more to take into consideration when I come back home, so much stuff to look back on and to filter in order to see what it is that nourished me in this time, that gave me so much I didn’t want to leave it in the first place.

Pause 11/10/2009

Today, I don’t really feel like recapturing how everything I did and said did or did not shape me in any way, made me feel better or worse, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. So basically, what I feel like doing is share a little piece I wrote about a year ago. Those not interested in any kind of literature can, if they want, just stop reading knowing that I’m okay. For everbody else, this is the beginning of a piece called “Cry”:

“Curiously, it had been raining all night yesterday and at one particular moment in time, a period of about ten minutes or longer it seemed, bolts of lightning, thunder and still misty rain joined forces to one giant grey-cloudy mass hanging threateningly over the city, sudden rays of electricity jolting inside the roaring, soaring vapour. It must have been the very first time that I realised how the closeness to the sky that my roof-top flat provided me with, an inconvenient position, elevated me to a zenith as if presented on a silver platter to whatever it was that chose a thunderstorm as foreboding. Once I had opened the window it occurred to me, that impossible oddity that the airy aura of the city would, shortly before it started to rain, exude the most exquisite, yet most massively heavy warmth. In a distance I could see the thick blurry grey approach slowly, steadily towards where I was. It felt like the idea one has of romantic; a gloomy setting mirroring a heart-felt sickness, a weighty mood that might have been caused by the uninviting weather, that might have caused it.”

Needs 11/10/2009

I might be a weird fact but I’ve never actually thought of doing a huge amount of work in the library here which is especially strange as I live on campus and could basically do so every day. On the other hand however, I don’t need to sit in the surprisingly chilly library surrounded by creepy-looking people trying to focus when I can do the exact same thing in my room where it is as cold but not as crowded. Tonight, I felt like being here, like freezing between books on the history of Christianity. I’m not gonna say that in the almost three hours I’ve been sitting here now I managed to finish everything that I need to but I got some good work done and if nothing goes wrong (which it most likely always does) I should get on pretty quickly with my workload, especially if I keep up the pace. I have three more papers to write, one I’m through halfway now, one of the others should be on my mind the entirety of next week, for the third I will have to get an appointment on Monday and see how it goes from there. I’m virtually forced to just write stuff down, maybe look over it again and hand it up right away so that I can go on with the next paper, while I still have continuous assessments to do like presentations, commentaries and journal entries….what with the nervous breakdowns I have nearly every day by now. However, I’m planning on making lemonade out of the lemons life hands me and indulge into work as much as possible so that I can get it over with the work and enjoy some of the last days of Irish craic this trip will hopefully provide me with. By now, I’m pretty sad about the whole situation but I’m trying hard to look on the bright side of it all, that after everything is said and done, I will probably be able to look at life differently and, so the plan, take the measures necessary for me to finally arrive at a state of being content with what I’m given, with what I’m doing, with where I’m going. The guy on the one tour through Wicklow said that in Ireland you have to lower your standards if you want to be happy, maybe what you actually have to do is shift your focus in order to understand the importance of certain things….he also said that if you want to see rainbows you have to learn to live with the rain, which of course was meant literally as in Ireland it rains virtually every day (even if people deny it) but if you wanna read it metaphorically I think it makes as much sense, if not more.

Bubble 11/08/2009

I feel like I need to do more stuff, generally. I mean on the one hand, I have postponed a lot of work in the last couple of days because whenever I heard I might as well be out, I did not really hesitate to do so and I will definitely have to pay for that in one way or another, one way being that I now have to sit down on a Sunday night and work. What I’m getting at is more that I have postponed or avoided a number of other things simply because I didn’t dare step out of my bubble. It would be naive to think that I could overcome years of not doing what I should have done in merely a couple of weeks that I have left here, but I feel at times that my eyes have been opened for certain things. I know that if I say we went out to some pubs and talked to some people it does not really sound like a whole lot but what you have to understand is that whatever I do here I’m trying not to question it (which is hard because I always do). There’s nothing wrong with having questions and with wanting to know about things, I’m getting at the attitude however where you never leave things be, where you never just accept and enjoy. I learned that what you believe is not what you know that you believe but what your default belief is, what you know without being aware of it. I learned that doing is better than talking about doing. I learned that people in Temple Bar blow bubbles in the middle of the night. I learned that learning is what wakes me up, what keeps me awake, what keeps me from falling asleep again. I learned that you need to go with your gut on certain things and I for one am not good with logic, with structure, so gut is all I got to rely on, maybe it is time I start doing that properly.

Right now in all the messy and chaotic manner my mind spins around its own axis, I feel weirdly determined, I feel like I have a plan and I think that I need to follow through with it as long as it still seems like an actual option, I don’t think that I’m escaping anything, I feel like I’m embracing something else.

Off-limits 11/05/2009

I’ve had a pretty weird day today, being all tired and annoyed by everything. It seems whatever I do, I can’t get any amount of work done, so far not a big problem because most of the deadlines are still fairly far away but it’s just another thing adding to the pile of stuff that is coming up and that I would just love to put off forever. So basically, I’m getting a pretty heavy heart thinking about what’s ahead which leads me to not exactly feel comfortable, which does not exactly help me appreciate the little things anymore like bumping into random people I know and making plans for the weekend. I’ve come to think about the fact however that even if I say I feel blue right now I’m not half as miserable as I would be back home in a state of mind like this. Generally, I guess my default mood at home would approximately correspond to a bad mood here, so that in the end I’m still pretty happy right now, by comparison. That makes me wonder however about the reasons for which I’m not half as bad-off here and whether in some way it means that I should move out of Germany for a longer period of time. I’m sure right now that it’s more or less the still pretty exciting things I do here and people I meet that make me think that, that it’s just the exceptional situation making me believe that life is better here, that the grass indeed is greener on this side. But I’m sure to reconsider that when I’m home, I think that might be an actual option and I will definitely give that some thought and see what I can make out of that. I guess that not much good can come out of a gloomy mood like this so I’ll basically just get some homework done and go to bed early and hope that tomorrow life will look differently even if it’s not really different at all. Maybe the couple of things we have planned for the weekend will endow me with a different perspective on things because if there is one thing I’ve learned here is that everything depends on perspective….time and space and people, work, fun, life really…so if that can help make me feel better, just changing the way I see things, I’m happy to be deceived into thinking that everything actually is good.

I swear 11/04/2009

For lack of a better topic, I decided to dig an old one out for today…you will probably never come to appreciate it from me but one thing you will automatically start doing once you live in Ireland, is curse like a sailor and find nothing wrong with it. It took me only a couple of days, as far as I remember, to adopt the frequent usage of the f-word (in a variety of rather colourful and floral combinations), the s-word and a number of things that cannot be so nicely abbreviated. I found I have enough reason to be cursing like a local as soon as I found myself confronted with the local weather, local food and local “bureaucracy” (which is in inverted commas because it is so the opposite of German bureaucracy but it still does not speed things along). Soon I watched myself use the bad words in every sentence and by now I’ve gotten so used to it that I don’t even think about it anymore. Interestingly, a friend from the US (the ubiquitous BoB) drew my attention to the fact that he has started the excessive cursing as well but that he would never practice that to the same extent in the US…so he is basically screwed if you consider that I would never be able to transfer the cursing into German, he on the other hand will have a pretty hard time getting rid of it. I have to say however, that it kind of grew on me….it’s not like cursing is something entirely bad here, it’s more like terms of endearment for the way life is…and it’s not frowned upon at all which indeed must be something very Irish and all of us have made great use of the opportunity, let’s just leave it at that…and a picture of Noam Chomsky (the little old dude at the podium):

Unknown flying object 11/03/2009

Apart from the fact that I didn’t really eat a whole lot today, I managed not to do anything too bad. We finally got to discuss an upcoming presentation with the lecturer which revealed to the both of us that we should really not worry about not doing enough work….he was indeed satisfied with next to nothing….I wanted to tell him that whenever he says we shouldn’t worry too much about stuff I’m worried about not being worried enough and that really worried me….up until the point where he started praising us for the great ideas we have and the good work we had done thus far…..yeah, I didn’t really get where that was coming from but I’m sure you shouldn’t question things like that, they might blow up in your face if you do.

The Noam Chomsky talk was pretty interesting even though it was really long and apparently he only does them about American foreign policy, which is fine but it’s neither a piece of cake nor a piece of generative syntax. Basically, we had fun though pretending to be teen girls at a rock concert imagining that Mr Chomsky would enter the arena flying in from the ceiling to the sounds of “Eye of the Tiger”…I guess, this is just one of the things you do for the heck of it.

Now I will have to go back to my homework but only for a couple more minutes as I have already done most of it yesterday. Then I will enjoy going to bed early, which on the one hand is something nice and easy, sleeping as much as possible (and probably still necessary as my cold is not all gone) but which on the other hand worries me a little, I mean how much can I really see if I’m asleep all the time….what will I miss if I do….am I trying to resort to sleeping in order not to see the ugly truth of the matter, that there is not as much going on as I would want there to be in order to make all of this special? Maybe I should sleep on that!

Fire without a spark 11/02/2009

The last week was, now that I look back, a blur of being sick, consequently sleeping a lot and enjoying the perks of reading week, consequently not sleeping a lot. The combination of the two, which believe me is not only confusing to people who read this, left me in a peculiar physical and mental state. Well, first of all, I’m on my way to getting better, I guess it was just a solid cold that lasted for five days and is now in remission. The other side of the medal is the fact that I don’t really know what to do with myself. Today for the very first time I got a little homesick but in a really weird way. I didn’t want to be here because I didn’t feel the way I had felt the weeks before, that there was a reason for me to be here. The really wacky part about this is that there is no real reason for anybody to be anywhere other than the plain fact that they just are. So if I question my reasons for being here, I question my reasons for being anywhere else. The trouble with this is that all of a sudden I had the impression that circumstances had changed for me, that life here was no longer as inviting as it had been for the past month and I began to think that there was something wrong with all of this. Very likely though, with the awareness that nothing lasts forever, least of all this, came the pressure of making things count, of making the best of the few moments I have left to spend with new friends (whom, realistically speaking, I will not see again, whom I will most probably start disliking as soon as I’m home and I see what they’re doing back here via facebook). You simply cannot force it as much as you may try. And yesterday when I realised that, the powerlessness, the inability to do or change anything, I started to feel rather lonely. Now whether it was the pot noodles yesterday  or the mere fact that I’m not quite back on track yet, I got pretty gloomy about it and this morning when I got up I had a fairly hard time making up my mind about whether I want to have breakfast or whether I want to have an entirely useless panic attack. I decided for a little bit of both and realised that I need to get myself back together, after all, I still have lectures to go to, papers to write. I guess what I’m saying is I took care of the cold, I’m not too good at taking care of the rest.

Now finally, what people have been waiting for, the awesome Des Bishop video of his last visit at UCD (again, the shakiness of the pictures is just half my fault…..Des must have had 36 coffees that day):

https://connectfiles.ucd.ie/filestore1/09257063/Public/Des%20Bishop.html

Tomorrow, if we’re lucky, we should be able to see Noam Chomsky, who should ring a bell only for those people in linguistics. Other than that, not a lot of new things, I’m doing pretty good with my papers on the one hand because I’m getting good grades on the essays I’ve handed in and on the other hand because today I saved the day by buying toilet paper.