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…
