Picture Update

This is my ultimate serenity...Giant's Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland.



Of course I have to include a picture of me and my love.



This is Glendalough (glen duh lock) which is slightly south of Dublin....we traveled by car (very scary on the other side of the road, folks) with his parents this past week while they were visiting.



This is the Study Abroad group when we met with the Ambassador a few weeks ago....Travis is a baldy in this one and I am the shortest person ever.

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buy the ticket, take the ride.

So, I still need to buy a ticket home. And hopefully one to Scotland, and possibly England, then venture to Barcelona in between...but there's only so much euro in the college student's purse these days. In search of these flights over this many weekends just made me realize how fast this experience has been rolling along...it's a mixed bag. I miss things at home, but when I'm there, I'm going to miss things here. Eight or so more weekends making big dinners, venturing out, drinking pints. 'Tis brilliant! And then there are those weekends that we don't really leave the bed...watching movies, reading from our journal from our trip last summer...here's one particular great entry from last June.

mile 8852

    We're still in Maine, though not for too much longer. All the Maine license plates we pass on the road brag about being the #1 vacation spot, but I am going to have to agree. I loved everything from the sweet smell of the ocean in the air to the distant but constant sound of water that surrounds you.
    I'm glad The Pines turned out not so swell because instead we discovered The Bluff House B&B in Winter Harbor. It's a beautiful recluse facing west toward the ocean and remains to me to be the ultimate place to watch the sunrise and set. That is of course if you don't mind being eaten alive by mosquitoes, but I hear if you eat enough garlic, you'll smell like a vegetable to them and they won't bother with you. I am unbeliever until I try it next time.
Over breakfast in the morning , we watched as a hasty squirrel ate all the bird feed, while finches anxiously awaited for any seed left unshelled...Hummingbirds held my attention with both their flitting and fleeting nature. I hope the pictures we took of them feeding come out well...it's always at the very moment you are shooting the picture that they take off, leaving you with a blurry dot flying away...
The other creature that captured me was the baby raccoon that Mary, the B&B owner, rescued from being trapped in a fireplace. His name was Taddy and he made snorty little purring sounds to display affection for his new adoptive mother. The raccoon is nature's bandit.
    As I mentioned before in some earlier entries, Travis and I couldn't visit Maine without trying the lobster, even though we both tend to shy away from the usual cheesy tourist stuff. Luckily, our place-mats had directions for getting a shy lobsterto come out of its shell. Also, it's a good thing we wore those plastic bibs with the giant lobster on it...not only were they essential, but they added to the experience. I'm sure Travis would want me to note the fact that upon receiving our lobsters and in the early stages shelling, I tossed my lobsters claws into the plastic bucket they gave us for discarding anything we found not consumable. I didn't realize that there was deliciousness in there too. He said at first he though I just really like lobster and already inhaled it. With a second glance he corrected my mistake with "hey, what are you doing? That's some of the best meat in there!"
    Yesterday we hiked at Acadia for three hours and were extremely disoriented upon exiting the labyrinth of a forest...we followed the trail to a possible end but were still unsure of our location and the location of our vehicle. Luckily I worst fears didn't come true that we were miles and miles away, and as we rounded the bend in the road that ran alongside the rocky shoreline of the Atlantic, we realized we were only 500 feet or so from where we parked our car...We're on our way to Vermont now.

Good times. I love waking up and knowing I'm going to see something new today, that I'm inevitably going to run into one or more of my suitees in the kitchen and end up sitting and talking the night away, that Travis and I get to share this experience together. I hope the next eight weeks are just as great as the first eight have been. I have no reason to doubt that they won't be.
There are a few people I'm really missing at home, but I know our time will come again, and soon.



My homies and I at the always interesting Temple Bar...I've seen a guy limbo under flames, an awesome street band and a guy who fiddled with his feet, a 40 something woman carried on the back of a guy, and then laughed so hard she peed her pants....and we saw this guy that same windy night...



yes, I do believe that is a lovely floral pattern embroidered on his sweater...I don't believe that my close-eyed stumble or Colleen's pouty face compares to the very essence of random guy's being.

'Tis all for now.

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"When Things Fall Apart"

I stumbled across something today that left a lasting impression on me, you could say that maybe it changed my life, or at least my current perception about my present state of mind. I'm sure anyone that reads my journal notes that at times, these entries appear filled with sadness, uncertainty, questions upon questions about why my mindset skews to the point of despair, why the world seems like such a bad place, and where my place lies within it...

...trying to make sense of it all.

And isn't that all what we're trying to do? Don't we all have inner demons? I've always considered this notion, as long as it has prodded at my sanity, to be the very thing that separated me from everyone else who seems to be getting along just fine. But in fact, isn't this the very thing that links me in the human connection? Haven't we all hurt? And don't we all find utter discomfort in that damned feeling, because I know I do.
So my initial response, aside from that other damned feeling of wanting to drown myself in a drink or in a great hit, is to try and find a happy place again, or at least a wave of contentment---that I can ride until I crash again. Trying to ignore the sinking feeling until I can get a grip on things, and get things in order, and rotating in attempted failures of keeping things in perspective.
But maybe it's not something to be ignored. Maybe it's myself that needs to resonate the proverbial light in an otherwise dark tunnel. And then there's the possibility that this sadness, like every person I meet and relate to, is here for me to learn from. It reminds me of pouring syrup in the individual squares on a waffle, each one overflowing until it all runs together.
In knowing this, and in wanting to further discover the truth, maybe I won't have such a hard time moving past all of the things that leave me here, progressively standing still.

And to think earlier today, I was just flipping through O magazine, my absolute guilty pleasure, completely unknowing of the lightness that would follow after reading the insights of Pema Chödrön , an amazing woman who found her solace along the path in the spiritual guidance of Buddhism, after experiencing an extraordinary amount of suffering during a depression that she couldn't find her way out of. Pema became the first American woman to become an ordained Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition and has written many books addressing the universality of sadness, and that getting to know yourself on that extremely personal level, you are getting to know everyone. Essentially, can you be angry at someone who is no more guilty than you for having anger, whether or not it be misguided, or immaculately tucked away, or denied to have existed at all? Knowing these things will present us with the opportunity to be receptive rather than resistant, because we know where they are coming from...where they are reacting from.

So many things that she spoke of in this interview shook me to the very core. It took my self-loathing and turned it into a quest to take these negative feelings, which undoubtedly has an affect over my life, and learn about them enough to be able to shake them off and to put them in perspective, so that it doesn't interfere with living in the present...because let's face it, the future never arrives in the form of the future.

I realize the putting into action process may not be as easy as in reading and identifying with the words I reveled in today. But my spirit is lifted anyhow at the possibility.

the inner spinner

I am ill at ease. One may wonder how I could possibly be, seeing as how I escaped the brutal winter and bitter cold and instead am basking in the (sometimes) sunlight of those rolling green hills...that are right outside of Dublin itself. I fell asleep and awoke with this same discontentment, of the self-loathing and is it change or the lack thereof that has put me in this mental jumble yet again? I can't shake it.
But how do you change things that perhaps have never changed? How can you decipher changeable to ingrained to learned behavior to self-destructive behavior to needing to change because the world is always changing? All these questions that I have answers to, and the ones I don't, continue to float around in my head without resolve.
Back in the day I would soothe this particular ailment perhaps in writing a poem, or sitting with some friends in the coffee shop...friends that use to be my best friends, whatever that means anyway. But I've grown up enough in the last few years to realize that drinking and rolling a j is much more healthy than writing and talking about your feelings.
Note the sarcasm. Note the defeat.
I'm not sure if it's luckily or unluckily that my system doesn't take well to alcohol, but I know that it definitely doesn't solve my life's conundrums, it provides me with just enough comatose to be able to ramble on. Or it makes me sociable enough to only be considered borderline antisocial as opposed to completely.
This is a web of a mess. How to dismantle it or will it continue to grow forever, becoming more and more intricate the more and more I spin it?