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.
