Ripe for the (Emerald) Isle - Me and Norbert on the road

Bell is broken, shout for stop

izziemone — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:48:34 +0000

On my very first day in Dublin, I wonder, whether I’ve mentioned it once or twice, I was thrust into the middle of things and found myself coping quite well, measured up against the fact that I am neither outdoorsy nor outgoing nor especially outspoken it surpised me. Measured up against the fact that I’ve already had the chance to grow into a number of unknowns, it didn’t quite come as a shock to me that if I’m looking for some place to belong I might as well look in an unlikely place where I would know from the very start that I didn’t, couldn’t belong and after a while start feeling like I did.

I have learned so much here that school cannot teach you, that life in a bubble cannot teach you, that you cannot teach yourself. The world outside of my head is pretty scary and pretty big but I’ve come to embrace it in a way I never thought I could, in a way that is addictive, makes you want to see more. Yes, I will be back home by tomorrow and yes, I look forward to it because this is not reality. From now on I need to work harder on being who I want to be, here it kind of came naturally after a while, I need to work hard to keep the friends I’ve made here somewhat of by my side and to make my absence up to the friends that I have left in August. This may be goodbye but I know that it’s more of a beginning than an end because in contrast to every other time I had to leave, I have no regrets. I only have memories, a lot of photos, thousands of good stories to tell, a handful of close friends to call on skype and a new perspective on life. I’m endlessly thankful for the people who helped me get here, both those who supported me in coming here and those who did their part here.

When I leave this time, if I cry, I know why, because I know what I leave behind here and because now, I also know what I left behind in Germany. If I cry it is because I know what I have gained, because I am happy to have found so much, because I know I will not loose a thing. The pain, the joy, it was all worth it. That’s the greatest gift anyone could ever ask for.

A bad name

izziemone — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:41:23 +0000

So here I am again. I would ask all of the people looking for regular posts here that they excuse my absence but I do really have to balance a lot of stuff here. You can’t try and soak up every last bit of the city and the people here before in less than two weeks I’m gonna have to go home. By now I’ve come to accept the fact that I’m gonna come home and I’m happy to do so. Part of it is also that I can see now that only if you leave a place you can appreciate it, that if you leave a person you know what you’re missing. So if I appreciate home more now, it also means that I will miss Dublin when I’m gone. And if I missed my friends and family at home, and I did, I will also miss the crap out of the people I met here. Because the truth is, the people you attract reflect to a certain degree who you are and in all honesty, the guys who were over at my place for a lot of PizzaHut pizza last night….awesome people.
Some of it might also be that through all of the things here, and it certainly was an emotional rollercoaster, other than the dear people back home, I had one great friend here with me who made my life so much more bearable when things sucked and made it so much more awesome when things were going good. I honestly had never expected it but that’s the cherry on the ice cream sundae that is my stay in Ireland.

For now I’m gonna close by saying that I’m doing fine but that I am tired both physically and mentally. Physically because my sleeping rhythm has assumed some weird dimensions, mentally because at a certain point your brain just starts suffering from overflow of stimuli and it shuts down….not good premises for exam weeks, I see. I will write one exam this Tuesday, two the week after so I should get into gear and finish this thing properly. That being said, going to bed.

Live it our way

izziemone — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:23:11 +0000

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

izziemone — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:40:14 +0000

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

izziemone — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:54:49 +0000

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

izziemone — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:28:46 +0000

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

izziemone — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:03:04 +0000

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

izziemone — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:29:17 +0000

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

izziemone — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:07:52 +0000

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

izziemone — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:04:29 +0000

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):