It was a philosophical week that began with this collection of remarks:

“And I had such a good day, too.”

“I’m just so confused here.  By everything.   Nothing makes sense to me here.”

“I take independence to a whole nother lonely level.”

“I miss BC.  And I don’t even LIKE BC!”

“I just wish I wasn’t alone here.”

I tried for a few days to write about these, to fit these things (said during one of two Skype Mega-Meltdowns) into the greater scheme of my time abroad.  The first draft was a far too poetic for my unliterary side, resembling something I would have submitted for a high school “tell me about yourself” creative writing assignment.  The second draft tried to attribute my loneliness to not feeling at home enough, and I planned to write the second half of it when I had tested my hypothesis (“If I learn to cook a new breakfast meal and clean my room, then I will finally feel settled in”).

The second half was never written, though, because before I could clean my room, I went away for the weekend with the International Students Society.  When the email had gone around and mentioned a limited number of seats, I impulsively put my name down, not considering that for 3 nights, 4 days, my other international friends might not be attending.  And lo, they were not.  And I was worried.  Rarely do I fare well in large group situations (large groups in my world are generally defined by 4 or more people), because I am not someone who needs to be the center of attention.  Thus, I don’t yell, or laugh big laughs, or try to lead the pack in a song.

Instead what I do is I think.  Recently, before I left for Ireland, I was in a big group, and I spent the whole night thinking, I AM THE DEFINITION OF A WALLFLOWER.  I AM THE DEFINITION OF A WALLFLOWER. And on our group’s first pit stop on the way to Killarney, I stood in the middle talking to no one, and there was that thought, creeping into the back of my mind: I AM THE DEFINITION OF A WALLFLOWER. The other part of my brain tried to defend my quietness, because it was quite late and I was quite tired.  That night, I typed an iPod note to myself:

Realized on bus that I surpress feelings to be stable.  When was the last time I sobbed?  Tuesday.  When was the last time I belly laughed? … Maybe prance upon your bed.  Maybe Howard Dean impressions.  Maybe that’s all though.

I typed this because my face hurt from smiling but my heart hurt from no connectivity.  We arrived at the hostel and split into groups of 8, which then shared bunk beds in a room the size of my freshman dorm.  Ours was made of the American, three French, three Germans, and a Swede.  I had trouble falling asleep, and I had trouble waking up.  The bathrooms were small and dirty and I had trouble maneuvering.  I then typed this note:

Had a dream about being back at Trinity.  Woke up into a nightmare.  Not really.  But this place is not mine and I was itchy all night.  It’s so dark and stormy.  I hope this trip becomes infinitely more fun before I realize just how miserable I am.

The weather didn’t suggest that it would, and yet it did.  At breakfast, I talked to a few people I recognized from classes.  Wrapped in raincoats, we boarded the bus for the long trip to the Blasket Islands.  Rain absolutely pummeled the bus, which took slow, creaking turns over the coastal cliffs.  It was at this point, when I whipped out my camera to take some shots, that I made a new friend in Alex, a German girl who noticed my camera and took out her own.  We talked about photography (and how we don’t know if we’re any good at it but we can’t wait until our first class so we can really try) until we got to the museum.  Afterward, after lunch in Dingle, I went to a pub with the Society’s officers.  We squeezed into the snug, shut the door, and wondered what was in all the shoeboxes on the walls, whether they were as authentically old as they looked.  I felt strange, being the only one who went to the pub with these four friends, but I did not feel uncomfortable.

Later that night, back in Killarney, we listened to traditional music in the pub.  Alex and I stood in corners taking pictures, and I knew one of the songs.  I went to bed early, not as itchy as the night before.

On Sunday, I was almost surprised by the amount of water in the parking lot of Ross Castle, until I remembered what the weather had been like the day before.  It was a sunny day, though cold, and it was really a sight to see.  There was a brief shower, but once we got to Muckross House it was lovely again.  It was at this point that I met Camille and Christoff, a French couple with whom I had lunch.  We met up with Alex and her friend and took a tour of the mansion and then the grounds.  It started to sprinkle a little more regularly, but we had been told we were going to see a waterfall, so off we went.

Ten minutes into the walk, IT REALLY REALLY REALLY STARTED TO RAIN, NO JOKE.  Big fat painful drops that even hurt the cows.  The Finnish girl I walked with didn’t seem too bothered, never once faltering in her story despite my interjections of “Wow!  Wow!  I am… it is really raining!”  My pants were 100% soaked.  One of my Chinese friends patted my leg in consolation, then exclaimed, “YOU ARE SO COLD!”  I shivered and stubbornly took pictures of a tiny waterfall.

I was almost extremely upset, being so cold and wet and knowing that these were the only pair of pants I had brought.  I was almost upset, until I just started laughing and saying, “I’m like a wet cat.”  Back at the hostel, with an hour before dinner, I sat on the floor with my infamous hair dryer (lowest level, of course) and using the radiator as an iron.  I was damp but presentable.  Dinner was quite nice, a reserved room for the 50 of us, where my table talked about what it’s like to date Irish men and how the approach differs in other countries.

And hold back your laughter, because this is true: I was told that I was the favorite American among the officers because I was THE SOCIAL AMERICAN.  “Really?”

“Yeah!  Look where you’re sitting, with all the international students, and look where the other Americans are!  They haven’t talked to anyone else this whole trip.”

And that’s when I realized that yeah, I had been extremely social this weekend.  I had made new friends, ones I fully expect to see on a regular basis: three Germans, two French, two Finnish, two Chinese.  And those that I don’t expect to see much I certainly had good chats with–the Swede and the other French and the other Germans.  I hadn’t spoken once to the other Americans and was mostly just embarrassed by them when the requested “Danny Boy” at the pub.  I was a social butterfly who had already exchanged numbers.

That night, I stayed up until one in the morning with the French couple having a very intellectual conversation about politics, history, and sociology.  At the end, when I yawned and said I should sleep, Camille said, “I think we have learned a lot!”

Monday morning, we packed our things and took one last stroll through Killarney before the rain started to fall heavily again.  I talked and napped and listened to music on the bus and realized that I had not typed myself anymore notes to consider–I did not have time, I was too busy enjoying the company of others.  I listened to myself talk and noticed that my speech pattern had changed, pronouncing “are” as “air” and picking up on foreign affectations.  Although I longed for my own bed, I felt the twinge of disappointment as we all clapped for the bus driver outside of Trinity.  Sure, I was tired and it had been a long weekend, and I needed some proper breakfast food, and I’m pretty sure the rain plus the hostel gave me a yeast infection, but I liked the familiarity of the west, the way I could see little slices of Chiltonville in certain towns.  I felt more comfortable with this group than with any other Dublin-based group, and I didn’t like to think that all I had was a weekend.

But future DUISS activities were announced, two in this very week, and so I walked home with not so much a heavy heart as a fluttering stomach.  The Finnish girl walked with me to the street corner.  “Isn’t it funny to say we are going home now?  When before we feel so strange to Dublin, this city?  And now that we have been away, we all call it home?”

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My second Heights article is out, and I had nearly as much trouble writing this time as I did last time, despite having been in the city for weeks now.  I find that, in general, it’s very difficult to write about my experiences here without sounding extremely whiny.  (Seriously, though?  Everything is backwards.)  So, rather than writing a sob story about my bad hair dryer experience, or my bad banking experience, or my bad scheduling experience, or my bad everything experience, I tried to be a little more positive.  And honestly, what’s more positive than video games.

Remember when you first got The Sims, and it was totally awesome and new and the possibilities were endless? You could start these lives however you wanted, reinvent people with a single action, and use money cheats? But then after a couple of kids and about 100 different living-room schemes, this whole “life” business started to seem a bit stale? And that’s when you realized that this great big world was actually just an isolated quadrant visited by the same nosy neighbors day after day, and beyond your backyard was just this faded gray nothingness, and that all of your fretting over whether you would get promoted to celebrity chef in order to pay for that Jacuzzi was for nothing, because in the end you were just one pixilated character?

Read the rest here.

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Ohh ho ho, Dublin, you’re playing with fire.  Now see here.  My hair needs to be blowdried.  If it’s not, it dries badly and my mom usually asks me why I haven’t showered yet today.  I unfortunately had to spend my first two weeks here without a compatible hairdryer because I neglected to buy a converter.  So I did as I was told, went to Target while I was in the States, and bought a $30 voltage converter.

Wednesday morning, my first shower since returning, was meant to be glorious.  I was going to go to class looking like an adult college student, not a pre-teen straggly string bean.  But you took that dream, hooked it up to dynamite, and forced its loved ones to watch it burn–almost literally.  At approximately 9:37am, Accommodation took a call from a frantic American babbling on about how “my hairdryer just blew up, I don’t know what I did wrong.  I had the converter, I attached it to the adapter, I turned it on, and there was this BIG CRACK and burst of sparks or fire or something, and now I don’t know what to do, but I’m pretty sure I short-circuited my entire room because nothing works.”

I was able to send my mom one angry email before the Internet gave out too, and then there I was.  Alone in a dark room with a scorched hairdryer in one hand and a dying Ethernet cord in the other, $11 root lift slowly drying into a crust in the damp Irish air, and four classes to go.  I spent the day in a tizzy, horrified when I dropped back for lunch that no one had been in to fix the problem yet.  I was sure they wouldn’t do it.  My roommates went an entire month without Internet assitance, without a shower door, without a light switch before I even got here.

In fact, by the time I had gone to Boots and gotten a E14.99 hairdryer, the situation was fixed, although the roommate next door was very confused about why her computer had died while she’d been gone all day.  Mortified, I admitted that it was my fault, even though I don’t know why.  My mom had sent me about 10 emails throughout the day, panicking that my computer had been fried.

But miracle of miracles, it hadn’t been, and Thursday morning was a fresh start.  Here I was in possession of a European hairdryer, designed specifically for UK outlets.  I closed my eyes and flicked the switch and it hummed into life without any explosions.  I watched as my bangs actually flipped in instead of out, and I knew right then that it was going to be a good day, that I would get things done, and

KNOCKITY KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

“O HAI HOO IZ IT?”

“WAI OF CORS IT IZ SEKURITY!”

“WAT!”

“UR HAIRZDRYER’S SETTIN OFF DA ALARM.”

“LMAO RLY?”

“YOP LOOK ABOVE U, DER’S A HEAT ALARM B/C ITZ TOO HOT IN DER.”

“BUT.  BUT.  I JUST BE BUYIN IT FROM BOOTS.”

“WELLLLLLLLL ITZ TOO HOT.”

“O FER FUCK’S SAKE.  WE IZ EVACUATIN?”

“YOP.”

“I NO HEARIN ALARM.  I NO HAS ANY CLOTHES ON…”

“K, WELL BAIIIIII.”

There really truly was no alarm to be heard, and none of my roommates heard one either, and no one was shivering outside our windows, so we just stayed in, but SERIOUSLY POMPOM?  A heat alarm?  What kind of nonsense is this?  Where was my fucking heat alarm when maintenance refused to fix the wonky vents that literally brought my and Kellie’s room to a whopping 82 degrees last year?  And why put an outlet next to a sink and mirror if you don’t expect someone to plug their hairdryer in it?  And if it was so damn hot, why was my hair still dry?  And why is there no cold air option on it?  And why do NO ONE ELSE’S HEAT ALARMS GO OFF IN THIS APARTMENT?  Open the window and dry it on the desk?  Are you for reals?

This day, this week, this country is bananas.

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I’m back in the States for the weekend, and already it feels like the past two weeks just didn’t happen.  It seemed to slip away almost immediately.  When we drove away from the airport I thought, “Hm.  This is driving on the right side of the road,” and just like that, it was like I’d never seen anyone drive on the left.  When I opened my wallet to pay for a drink and found only Euros, I thought, “Oh that’s right, I only use my debit card because it helps me keep better track of my money,” and by the end of my shopping spree I knew exactly how much I’d spent and how much I had left.

There are some things I like about being back.  For one, the reason, aka the wedding.  Also how warm it is here, and how I could take my jacket and scarf off and drive with my windows all the way down.  The prices that don’t give me heart attacks because I don’t have to bother with mental Euro conversions.  I like the sound of the Boston accent because it makes me feel less obviously American, and simply more at home.  (By contrast, whenever it comes time for me to say something Irish like “Cheers!” or “Grand!” I get too nervous, and what comes out sounds more American than anything I would ever say at home, something like, “Awesome, that’s terrific, thanks a bunch!  Bye bye now!”)  My pets are warm and act like they missed me, and this morning I woke up with Ninja Bits somehow completely under my head.  H&M was rocking SO MUCH AWESOME STUFF, and I bought a lot of cute cold weather clothes.

And then there are the things I haven’t missed.  The impossibility of scheduling and whiny employees has grown exponetially worse at work.  The confused mewling of my mentally ailing pets who can’t seem to remember what they just did or where they just were or why they came in here.  The fact that there was a pile of shredded, important papers in the middle of my room, courtesy of Fat Cat, did not say good night to me.  Being told what to do, no matter how small it is, no matter if it’s just to move my shoes.  Bizarre family issues that I don’t really know how to talk about and should by no means discuss here.

What I miss from Dublin, I’m not sure yet.  Not the good times, necessarily, as I’ve still only been out once and I’ve mostly just slummed it in my room.  I don’t have any tight friends yet, and no clubs have started.  I guess it’s just the possibility that’s there.  There’s so much that I’m right on the brink of doing–getting a job, becoming the over-achiever again, writing for the Trinity News and going on photography trips, getting close with new people, breaking into the nightlife and maybe being okay with it, having stories to tell.  My next column is due in a week, and I don’t have any stories to tell beyond “Boy am I jet-lagged from not being in Ireland again.”  I almost know what’s there for me, and I’ll never find out just by squinting from this side of the pond.

I am glad to be home for the reason that I am home, but I miss my new place already.

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This morning did not start off well, just by pure virtue of the fact that I had to see my mom off.  I hadn’t been able to fall asleep until three in the morning the night before, and though I’m not sure if it was the cause or the effect, I spent a good part of the night thinking about what a fun week it had been for us.  My favorite part was when we were in the car on the way to the airport, and my mom said,

“Windmills.  I want a windmill.  I would love a windmill.”

“Mm.  Yes.  For decoration or for energy saving?”

“For either.  …Poncho.”

“…Yes, you’re right, Don Quixote is the one with the windmills.”

“I thought so.”

“You know, if anyone else were listening to this conversation, they would have absolutely no idea how we just jumped from ‘poncho’ to ‘Don Quixote.’  It really proves how I’ve mastered the language of MommySpeak, because I know that when you say ‘poncho,’ what you really mean is ‘Sancho Panza,’ aka Don Quixote’s sidekick, who tagged along for the fight against the windmills, which they thought were giants.”

“I knew you’d understand.”

Or the time I set the alarm on my phone and said that I would not snooze past it, and after a few seconds of falling asleep, she said, “No, you shan’t, for I shall pounce upon your bed,” and we laughed until morning.

After she got on the bus this morning, I cried on the street.  I ran into Avoca and explored all the many floors, trying not to sniffle all over the expensive scarves (although I did shell out 20 Euro on a pair of green suede gloves as a form of glorious retail therapy).  Then I walked the many miles we had walked all week, up and down streets, in and out stores.  I was at a loss of what I should do with my time.

And then it occurred to me: it is Friday night, and on Friday night, people do things.  They go out with their friends.  And you are not going to sit inside just because you’re not sure if you have friends.

So I texted Lydia, met her at the international students society get-together, then went out with her other German friends to a pub, my very first pub.  The pressure was on to drink, and I said I didn’t, and everyone was perfectly fine with it.  “That’s actually very cool, really,” one said.  We talked forever, they walked me home.

I has friends, and it’s only my first weekend.

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It has set in: the sobbing.

Today was my fourth whole day in Dublin, and let me get this out of the way before I start blubbering about scheduling issues:  I love Dublin.  I really, truly like this city.  It’s terribly overcrowded, and no one knows what side of the sidewalk to use, and you have to flip a switch to get out of every fucking door and that’s just crazy talk, but I think it’s kind of perfect.  It’s lovely and I would like to spend a month here not thinking about work or school or anything necessary.  If someone were to ask me, “Would you like to take the month off from everything?” I would say, “Yes, and I know where.”

There’s the little problem of being at a very prestigious university, however, one so prestigious that it takes an absolute genius (NBS = GENIOUS OMG) to break the code that is their registration process.  These past couple days have been just a little bit stupid.  With the, oh, I don’t know, 300 visiting students (judging by my vantage point in the auditorium), the standard is for every one of us to go to the schools into which we’ve been accepted (such as English, Irish, Center for Language and Communication Studies, and Social Studies), talk individually with an upper level professor, and say which courses we’re interested in, at which point we’re given the times.  At which point we all discover that the classes conflict, and you’ve got to go back and rearrange it, and oh don’t even talk to me about tutorials, we haven’t got times for those yet, what the hell is my schedule?!  (This requires a much longer telling of the story, and it’s not especially interesting since half of it involves my sitting outside the English office for two hours, but suffice it to say, I was most displeased with the process.)

Other things have been quite frustrating, most particularly the Internet.  It has proved to be my worst enemy in these trying times.  The wall jack didn’t work in our hotel room, which meant a lot of running up and down to the lobby just to get an email home.  For some reason, my iPhone wouldn’t pick up on the wireless, either.  Once I moved into my dorm, it would not accept my username and password, although they were shiny new and correctly typed.  After several hours of storming about, I got it working, only to discover that Trinity requires a proxy network.  This prompts me for my username and password every time I open something that requires the Internet.  With Firefox, it’s fine, but the AIM program can’t bring up that prompt, which renders it useless.  So now I’ve got to spend the rest of the year on that crap AIM Express (which actually isn’t as crappy as I’d thought, but still).

This all sounds stupid, I’m realizing, and although I’ve got a long list of other things that have gone awry, I’ll hold off on the deets.  It’s just, everything that was described to us before we got here ended up having some caveat.  Everything.  My passport says I need to stay in Ireland until the 12th, but I’m leaving for the wedding on the 9th.  Where the hotel appeared to be was actually a lot of boarded up windows, which lead to a fifteen minute panic at 6 in the morning (it was actually down the street a bit).  We’ve been to three different bank branches before finding the one that would open an account.  All of my roommates are Americans, from other Jesuit schools.  The picture perfect image I had of my first week here was obviously not going to be realized, but it’s always a little disconcerting when it doesn’t work out.

I know I’m sounding whiny.  I know.  I KNOW.  Right now, it’s because my mom leaves tomorrow and I’m afraid to be by myself.  Even since I moved into my dorm, I’ve been having all my meals with her, napping in her room, calling because “uhh, I forgot that paper I knew I was supposed to bring, have known that I was supposed to bring for 4 months, can you bring it to me?”  Tonight at dinner I got an awful dry dry dry cut of steak and was so mad about it that I started to cry behind my eyes.  And then I got angry because who cares if my food is bad, my mama’s here and no one else has their mama here.  And then I REALLY CRIED because oh God, my mama leaves tomorrow, all we have left is this dinner and breakfast and then she’s gone and I’ve got to entertain myself this weekend.  I didn’t want her to know I was crying, because it was one of those–those cries where it’s about to get real embarrassing if you open your mouth, everyone will be able to hear you, and this is a jolly fun pub where no crying is allowed.  So I just kept drinking my soda and looking behind me as though I fully expected Santa to walk through the door and could not keep my eyes off it.  We got back to her room and caught the end of a very emotional Scrubs, and both wound up crying at those last 3 minutes, which to me says that she knew I was trying very hard back at dinner and was trying very hard herself.

This is the time at college where you’re supposed to say, “I hate it here, I want to go home!”  And I want to say that because it always feels better to just get it out.  But I can’t say that, because I don’t hate it here.  I really like it here.  There is a lot to like here!  I made a friend from Germany named Lydia, the English advisor told me I was a model student, and I have found peanut butter.  The croissants are amazing, the activities booths are crazy and funny and I really like being hounded by clubs who want me to join, and I joined the business/stocks club for some strange reason (cough-reallycuteIrishboy-cough).  I’m attracted to every male I see, and feel prettier myself probably because I actually look like these people (and there is an Irish look beyond the pale).  People are very friendly, although I haven’t really met many Irish kids my age, and I’m slowly picking up the brogue (“yeah” has become “yeh”).  The DART passes directly through my building, like the train is literally next to my head, and some people find it too loud, but I enjoy the rumbling.  My room’s basically adorable, and it has its own sink in it.  Trinity is SO in the center of things–I’m a 5-10 minute walk from: several grocery stores, Grafton St. shopping, a million trillion coffee shops, St. Stephen’s Green, Boston College House, Temple Bar, the River Liffey, and The Irish Times (fingers crossed that I can get a 20 hour job there).

So yeah, many things are excellent, and I’m sorry my first post has to be so full of complaints, but it’s sort of appropriate.  It’s been an emotional week, made all the more emotional by how my dad starts crying every time we say goodbye on Skype.  I know I will bawl tomorrow when I see my mom off, but I’ve got to hang in there.  On the one hand, this is my chance to be a bit different and go out and see what’s so interesting about what the rest of my peers are so into.  On the other, hello?  The wedding is next weekend, so I’m going to be home in 6 days.  So pipe down and chin up.

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