Things are progressing. The Great International Move of 2011 still feels very far away (in actuality, we're down to about two and a half months), but here are some developments:
* I have a visa appointment at the consulate in D.C. next month. I am already paranoid about being late, and it requires an absurd number of documents—not just the obvious things like my work papers and my passport, but also, for example, proof of address. Let's recall for a moment that I am a nomadic recent grad (as are many many many of my thousands of fellow teaching assistants, making this all the more absurd). My permanent address (which is not where I currently reside, complicating matters even further), and the one listed on my driver's license, is my parents' address (or one of them, as they are in the process of moving, but let's not even get into that difficulty right now). Is my driver's license valid proof of address? Nope. Is a bank statement or a tuition bill or SOMETHING among the very few things actually in my name that gets sent to that address? Nope. Voter registration card? Nope. My packet of paperwork FROM THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT was actually sent to a different address, but would it work even in theory? NOPE. Has to be a rent bill or a utility bill (from a very specific list of utilities, mind you). I do not even have those things in my name for the place I'm currently living, let alone my parents' house. A quick search of the TAPIF forums revealed a convoluted solution: take proof of address in a parent's name, plus a copy of their driver's license to prove who they are, plus a copy of my birth certificate to prove they're my parent. All of this... and when I go to the appointment they might not even ask for proof of my address at all. The bureaucracy nightmare is already well underway and I'm not even in France yet. And let's not even talk about how I [might] need to be able to prove where I live solely so that they can give me a piece of paper whose entire reason for existing is to allow me to move somewhere else.
* Speaking of the moving somewhere else, I have also been in touch with both the head English teacher at the school where I've been assigned and the girl who had this assistant position last year, and among other things have learned that *dun dun dun* my school does provide housing for me! Remember how I mentioned that that was less likely because of the urban location? I subsequently discovered that it's a boarding school and got slightly optimistic again—apparently with good cause. There are still some significant cons: It's a single tiny room, a fifth-floor walk-up, and shares a "prison-like" (according to the former assistant, who didn't actually live there and encouraged me not to, either...) shower and toilet with three other rooms. While it has, at least, a stove and possibly a microwave, no one has mentioned a refrigerator, which I'm not sure I can realistically live without for a whole school year, and while I could theoretically buy a mini-fridge, there's still the issue of getting it up six flights of stairs. I would also be at a distinct disadvantage in meeting/interacting with other people due to the lack of French flatmates (or any flatmates, for that matter). But... 0% of my salary would be going towards rent, effectively eliminating financial restrictions on my weekend/vacation activities. So I'm torn. I'd be stupid not to give it a shot, but I'm afraid once I get there it will seem stupid to live there for seven or eight months when there are better options, albeit not free ones. I guess I'll just have to see.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Actually Having Information Is Awesome
My arrêté de nomination (the paperwork I need to get my visa, which includes all the info I didn't have before about things like WHERE I'M GOING) finally arrived earlier this week. I say finally because it's been a frustrating and suspenseful wait for me, but that's actually a bit unfair considering I am somewhat lucky to have it this early. I know, you're saying "You're leaving the country in three months; how is this early?!", but the French bureaucracy is notoriously slow, on top of which it's the individual académies (school districts, more or less) that are responsible for these contracts, rather than some central administration, so they come in clusters (all of the assistants posted to Brittany seem to have gotten theirs this week, for example), but those clusters happen at totally different times. Some really lucky folks got theirs in late May, but many won't know anything for another month or so, and some truly unfortunate individuals still won't have their arrêtés until August, pretty much right at the time they should be applying for visas, which is cutting it pretty close.
Anyway, I still don't actually have mine in hand, because I am in Williamsburg for the summer doing an internship, but when I filled out the pre-arrêté forms six or eight weeks ago I gave my parents' address because I didn't know yet where I'd be living now. (It's just generally been a stressful, not-knowing-anything, making-it-up-as-I-go couple of months.) But I was informed of the arrêté's arrival and it is on it's way to me via registered mail as we speak.
Also, my parents opened it and told me where I'm going, so the suspense is more or less over even before I actually receive the package.
So, the answer to the question everyone has been asking me for weeks is: Brest. I got very excited to be assigned to someplace I had already heard of before, especially after having heard many assistants saying things like, "I've been posted to [insert small town here]. I have no idea where that is, haha." I also got excited about some other stuff, enumerated below—some of which I already knew and some of which I learned after talking to my parents and immediately heading for Wikipedia.
Pros:
1. It's an actual city. By which I mean not only is it technically considered a city, but it has what I would consider a substantial population. It's not a huge metropolis, but it's relatively comparable to what I grew up with and what I experienced in Cork. I'm satisfied with that. I didn't particularly want to live someplace like Paris or Lyon or Marseilles, but I also desperately didn't want to wind up in some little village with only a few thousand people. I'd love to visit places like that, but living there, more or less alone, for a minimum of seven months, would make me miserable at least some of the time. A medium-sized city will hopefully be perfect.
2. It's a harbor city on the western coast. I won't just be near the ocean, I'll be at it. Even if it's in a region that will be fairly cold for most of the year, that makes me incredibly happy.
3. Allegedly, it's an important university town, which hopefully means there will be fun things to do, it will be easy* to meet young people other than other teaching assistants, and it won't be too hard to find affordable housing (see below).
4. Brest, and Brittany in general, really, is super close to the U.K. and Ireland, which is hopefully going to facilitate travel. (My other travel priorities are admittedly much farther afield, but at least I'm close to something.)
Cons:
1. Being on the western coast, essentially at the westernmost point in all of continental Europe, in fact, unfortunately means that I will be as far as possible from everything in France that's not in western Brittany—including my friend who's going to be teaching in a suburb of Paris. On the plus side, the size of the city should make finding transportation to other places relatively easy... but still.
2. This is a biggie. One of the things that appeals to me the most about living and/or traveling in Europe is the pervasiveness of the past. I may be going to France to teach, but I'm an archaeologist and a historian, and being able to wander medieval streets and gaze up at buildings that have stood for centuries—buildings that predate my entire home country—is fascinating to me no matter how much I do it. So naturally, I'm going to live in a city that was pretty much razed during World War II and has been almost entirely rebuilt in the last sixty years.
3. According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know), Brest was a French-speaking city even when everywhere else in western Brittany wasn't. That makes me far less optimistic about being exposed to a lot of Breton language and culture without having to go look for it.
4. The one major downside to living in a city rather than a more rural area is that the school I'm working at will be significantly less likely to be able to offer free or cheap housing to its assistants. I won't know for sure until I actually contact someone at my school personally, but I'm not particularly optimistic. I was rather hoping I wouldn't have to deal with that particular hassle.
The other news I now have is that I am going to be teaching lycée (high school), which is exactly what I wanted because A) they will probably already have some background in English, and B) their primary teacher will therefore probably also speak English, both of which are hopefully going to make my job a lot less stressful. Also, C) I was marginally terrified of getting little children, both because of the unlikelihood of either of the above circumstances and because although I like children, I often cannot seem to figure out how to relate to them, which makes me awkward and ineffective as any kind of authority figure.**
Next steps: Get all my important documents together and procure a visa appointment at the French Embassy in D.C., ideally for sometime in early August when I'm still living here in VA but mostly done with my internships, so I can take a day or two to go to Washington without it being a huge pain. Start looking at flight options and researching potential places to live. And start thinking about things to do with teenage students... and I'll admit I'm just a little disappointed that the little-kid stuff—cute stickers and maps and activity books—I was looking at in the education section of Barnes & Noble the other day won't be necessary after all.
* in general, not necessarily for me...
** It is one of the crueler ironies in my life that I would love to be good with kids but don't seem to be, while my sister is generally indifferent to kids but they flock to her.
Anyway, I still don't actually have mine in hand, because I am in Williamsburg for the summer doing an internship, but when I filled out the pre-arrêté forms six or eight weeks ago I gave my parents' address because I didn't know yet where I'd be living now. (It's just generally been a stressful, not-knowing-anything, making-it-up-as-I-go couple of months.) But I was informed of the arrêté's arrival and it is on it's way to me via registered mail as we speak.
Also, my parents opened it and told me where I'm going, so the suspense is more or less over even before I actually receive the package.
So, the answer to the question everyone has been asking me for weeks is: Brest. I got very excited to be assigned to someplace I had already heard of before, especially after having heard many assistants saying things like, "I've been posted to [insert small town here]. I have no idea where that is, haha." I also got excited about some other stuff, enumerated below—some of which I already knew and some of which I learned after talking to my parents and immediately heading for Wikipedia.
Pros:
1. It's an actual city. By which I mean not only is it technically considered a city, but it has what I would consider a substantial population. It's not a huge metropolis, but it's relatively comparable to what I grew up with and what I experienced in Cork. I'm satisfied with that. I didn't particularly want to live someplace like Paris or Lyon or Marseilles, but I also desperately didn't want to wind up in some little village with only a few thousand people. I'd love to visit places like that, but living there, more or less alone, for a minimum of seven months, would make me miserable at least some of the time. A medium-sized city will hopefully be perfect.
2. It's a harbor city on the western coast. I won't just be near the ocean, I'll be at it. Even if it's in a region that will be fairly cold for most of the year, that makes me incredibly happy.
3. Allegedly, it's an important university town, which hopefully means there will be fun things to do, it will be easy* to meet young people other than other teaching assistants, and it won't be too hard to find affordable housing (see below).
4. Brest, and Brittany in general, really, is super close to the U.K. and Ireland, which is hopefully going to facilitate travel. (My other travel priorities are admittedly much farther afield, but at least I'm close to something.)
Cons:
1. Being on the western coast, essentially at the westernmost point in all of continental Europe, in fact, unfortunately means that I will be as far as possible from everything in France that's not in western Brittany—including my friend who's going to be teaching in a suburb of Paris. On the plus side, the size of the city should make finding transportation to other places relatively easy... but still.
2. This is a biggie. One of the things that appeals to me the most about living and/or traveling in Europe is the pervasiveness of the past. I may be going to France to teach, but I'm an archaeologist and a historian, and being able to wander medieval streets and gaze up at buildings that have stood for centuries—buildings that predate my entire home country—is fascinating to me no matter how much I do it. So naturally, I'm going to live in a city that was pretty much razed during World War II and has been almost entirely rebuilt in the last sixty years.
3. According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know), Brest was a French-speaking city even when everywhere else in western Brittany wasn't. That makes me far less optimistic about being exposed to a lot of Breton language and culture without having to go look for it.
4. The one major downside to living in a city rather than a more rural area is that the school I'm working at will be significantly less likely to be able to offer free or cheap housing to its assistants. I won't know for sure until I actually contact someone at my school personally, but I'm not particularly optimistic. I was rather hoping I wouldn't have to deal with that particular hassle.
The other news I now have is that I am going to be teaching lycée (high school), which is exactly what I wanted because A) they will probably already have some background in English, and B) their primary teacher will therefore probably also speak English, both of which are hopefully going to make my job a lot less stressful. Also, C) I was marginally terrified of getting little children, both because of the unlikelihood of either of the above circumstances and because although I like children, I often cannot seem to figure out how to relate to them, which makes me awkward and ineffective as any kind of authority figure.**
Next steps: Get all my important documents together and procure a visa appointment at the French Embassy in D.C., ideally for sometime in early August when I'm still living here in VA but mostly done with my internships, so I can take a day or two to go to Washington without it being a huge pain. Start looking at flight options and researching potential places to live. And start thinking about things to do with teenage students... and I'll admit I'm just a little disappointed that the little-kid stuff—cute stickers and maps and activity books—I was looking at in the education section of Barnes & Noble the other day won't be necessary after all.
* in general, not necessarily for me...
** It is one of the crueler ironies in my life that I would love to be good with kids but don't seem to be, while my sister is generally indifferent to kids but they flock to her.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Hark! A [Temporary] Life Plan!
I think it's way past time for a new post.
I actually meant to make one while I was "home" in January, but it turned out I wasn't actually home that much in January after all, and once I got back to Oberlin in early February and started classes again, free time became a fond memory at best. (Honestly, I don't really have time to be writing now...) I started writing a post at one point but never finished it, and now it's pretty outdated. So I'm starting over.
Readjusting to life in America took longer than I expected in some surprising ways. I did not realize how acclimated I had become to traveling on the other side of the road. Fortunately I never got confused while I was the one driving; however, returning to driving after four months of walking and buses was something of a rude awakening. It turns out having a car is a lot of expense and hassle, for all its convenience. The other major readjustment was my American schedule. My workload at Oberlin is several times what I experienced at UCC (and, to be fair, what's experienced by many of my friends and acquaintances at other U.S. institutions as well), my classes always meet at the same times of day and in the same places, so my days are fairly uniform, and instead of the vast pockets of free time during the day that I had on some weekdays in Ireland, I'm usually solidly booked from morning to late afternoon (or evening, in some cases). That means I no longer have the luxury of saying "Oh, it's 9 p.m., I'm done working for the day." Nope. More often than not that's about when I get started. Which is normal in the context of my last few semesters at Oberlin, but was hard to get used to again after both a rather leisurely semester abroad and a break of more than six weeks.
Also, I drink about a zillion times more coffee and tea than I used to, which I attribute entirely to a cold wet semester in a country that relishes both of those to an even greater degree than the U.S.. (And also to the fact that I spent a lot of that semester in my apartment, which had an electric kettle, which is a luxury I had never owned before that. I do now.)
Anyway, I am nearing the end (much to my astonishment) of what has probably been my busiest/craziest semester yet, but, perhaps paradoxically, not the most stressful. In fact, I've been incredibly happy the last couple of months, despite the unrelenting workload and the increasing awareness that I have not the slightest clue what I'm doing when I'm officially released into the adult world on May 31. I think the semester away has really made me appreciate my friends and my awesome job*, but also, almost everything I'm doing on the academic front this semester is something I truly enjoy and want to be doing, and a lot of it is with my advisor, whom I absolutely adore, as a professor and as a person.
I've also been dancing a lot, which is incidental but has definitely contributed to my sanity, especially since the one truly shitty thing that happened when I got back to campus was that the new choir director decided I wasn't good enough for him, which effectively took away the one artistic thing I'd previously kept doing in college.
Anyway, the real purpose of this post is an update on Expat Erica: One of the things my abortive January update would have mentioned is that I had applied for this program: http://www.frenchculture.org/spip.php?rubrique424&tout=ok. In a nutshell, the French Ministry of Education recruits native English speakers from North America on one-year contracts to work as language assistants in the French public school system. (Because, you know, in France they actually value multilingualism enough to A, see the importance of hearing native speakers, and B, start teaching second or third languages during the window where kids are still young enough to legitimately become fluent if they have enough exposure.**)
So that happened.
And a couple of weeks ago, it also happened that I received an acceptance letter from said program offering me a position.
So... in about five months I'm going to be moving to France.
My assignment is somewhere in Brittany (that peninsula in the northwest corner of the country, south of Britain), which was my first choice of placement when I filled out the application (although that was admittedly a tough choice to make), but I don't yet know a more specific location or what age group I'll be teaching or, well, anything other than that there's going to be a lot of paperwork in my future and that as of October I'll be an employee of the French government.
But that's pretty cool, I think.
It's especially cool because one of my best friends, who spent last summer in Paris learning French from scratch by immersion, was also offered an assistantship and is going to be just outside Paris, which is only a few hours east of where I'll be. Another of my best friends has an internship at the school in Copenhagen where she studied abroad two years ago.
So let Euroadventure Round 2 begin—and this time, I won't be so alone, because when I travel I can travel to places where there are people I know.
Also, yet another of my best friends is currently serving in the Peace Corps in Senegal, and I miss her terribly, and a trip to visit her would be substantially shorter and less expensive from Europe than from here. So on one of my three or four vacations (French schools take shorter summers but get more time off during the school year), I'm totally going to Africa.
Looks like this blog isn't dead yet.
EDIT: I didn't realize until after I'd clicked "Publish" that my account was still set to Ireland time. Fixing it was sad.
* I'm the student assistant for the Anthropology Department. On paper, my job is to make copies and hang fliers and run errands. On the ground, I do those things, but I also do a lot of substantially more awesome things, ranging from equally menial to things that give me a surprising amount of responsibility. The department head tends to give me projects in the form of half-formed ideas and thereby give me a lot of free rein in figuring out how to proceed, which makes me feel important. My advisor, meanwhile, is awesome at (in addition to never running out of things for me to do) finding things for me to do that are mutually beneficial--work gets done for her, and I have to learn about things that already interest me in order to do it.
** I started learning French in middle school, which is on the young side for the U.S., but already starting to verge on being older than the ideal language-learning window. And indeed, I'm proficient in terms of grammar, but my accent and my grasp of nuance remain lamentable.
I actually meant to make one while I was "home" in January, but it turned out I wasn't actually home that much in January after all, and once I got back to Oberlin in early February and started classes again, free time became a fond memory at best. (Honestly, I don't really have time to be writing now...) I started writing a post at one point but never finished it, and now it's pretty outdated. So I'm starting over.
Readjusting to life in America took longer than I expected in some surprising ways. I did not realize how acclimated I had become to traveling on the other side of the road. Fortunately I never got confused while I was the one driving; however, returning to driving after four months of walking and buses was something of a rude awakening. It turns out having a car is a lot of expense and hassle, for all its convenience. The other major readjustment was my American schedule. My workload at Oberlin is several times what I experienced at UCC (and, to be fair, what's experienced by many of my friends and acquaintances at other U.S. institutions as well), my classes always meet at the same times of day and in the same places, so my days are fairly uniform, and instead of the vast pockets of free time during the day that I had on some weekdays in Ireland, I'm usually solidly booked from morning to late afternoon (or evening, in some cases). That means I no longer have the luxury of saying "Oh, it's 9 p.m., I'm done working for the day." Nope. More often than not that's about when I get started. Which is normal in the context of my last few semesters at Oberlin, but was hard to get used to again after both a rather leisurely semester abroad and a break of more than six weeks.
Also, I drink about a zillion times more coffee and tea than I used to, which I attribute entirely to a cold wet semester in a country that relishes both of those to an even greater degree than the U.S.. (And also to the fact that I spent a lot of that semester in my apartment, which had an electric kettle, which is a luxury I had never owned before that. I do now.)
Anyway, I am nearing the end (much to my astonishment) of what has probably been my busiest/craziest semester yet, but, perhaps paradoxically, not the most stressful. In fact, I've been incredibly happy the last couple of months, despite the unrelenting workload and the increasing awareness that I have not the slightest clue what I'm doing when I'm officially released into the adult world on May 31. I think the semester away has really made me appreciate my friends and my awesome job*, but also, almost everything I'm doing on the academic front this semester is something I truly enjoy and want to be doing, and a lot of it is with my advisor, whom I absolutely adore, as a professor and as a person.
I've also been dancing a lot, which is incidental but has definitely contributed to my sanity, especially since the one truly shitty thing that happened when I got back to campus was that the new choir director decided I wasn't good enough for him, which effectively took away the one artistic thing I'd previously kept doing in college.
Anyway, the real purpose of this post is an update on Expat Erica: One of the things my abortive January update would have mentioned is that I had applied for this program: http://www.frenchculture.org/spip.php?rubrique424&tout=ok. In a nutshell, the French Ministry of Education recruits native English speakers from North America on one-year contracts to work as language assistants in the French public school system. (Because, you know, in France they actually value multilingualism enough to A, see the importance of hearing native speakers, and B, start teaching second or third languages during the window where kids are still young enough to legitimately become fluent if they have enough exposure.**)
So that happened.
And a couple of weeks ago, it also happened that I received an acceptance letter from said program offering me a position.
So... in about five months I'm going to be moving to France.
My assignment is somewhere in Brittany (that peninsula in the northwest corner of the country, south of Britain), which was my first choice of placement when I filled out the application (although that was admittedly a tough choice to make), but I don't yet know a more specific location or what age group I'll be teaching or, well, anything other than that there's going to be a lot of paperwork in my future and that as of October I'll be an employee of the French government.
But that's pretty cool, I think.
It's especially cool because one of my best friends, who spent last summer in Paris learning French from scratch by immersion, was also offered an assistantship and is going to be just outside Paris, which is only a few hours east of where I'll be. Another of my best friends has an internship at the school in Copenhagen where she studied abroad two years ago.
So let Euroadventure Round 2 begin—and this time, I won't be so alone, because when I travel I can travel to places where there are people I know.
Also, yet another of my best friends is currently serving in the Peace Corps in Senegal, and I miss her terribly, and a trip to visit her would be substantially shorter and less expensive from Europe than from here. So on one of my three or four vacations (French schools take shorter summers but get more time off during the school year), I'm totally going to Africa.
Looks like this blog isn't dead yet.
EDIT: I didn't realize until after I'd clicked "Publish" that my account was still set to Ireland time. Fixing it was sad.
* I'm the student assistant for the Anthropology Department. On paper, my job is to make copies and hang fliers and run errands. On the ground, I do those things, but I also do a lot of substantially more awesome things, ranging from equally menial to things that give me a surprising amount of responsibility. The department head tends to give me projects in the form of half-formed ideas and thereby give me a lot of free rein in figuring out how to proceed, which makes me feel important. My advisor, meanwhile, is awesome at (in addition to never running out of things for me to do) finding things for me to do that are mutually beneficial--work gets done for her, and I have to learn about things that already interest me in order to do it.
** I started learning French in middle school, which is on the young side for the U.S., but already starting to verge on being older than the ideal language-learning window. And indeed, I'm proficient in terms of grammar, but my accent and my grasp of nuance remain lamentable.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Town I Loved So Well
There are posters all over town for a play: Sinbad and the Sea Pirates. As opposed to what, exactly? Mountain pirates? I know, savanna pirates.
The other day I was sitting in a café down the street from the university reading the textbook for my Viking archaeology class, and who should walk in but the lecturer for said class, who is also the editor of said book. I waved, and he came over to my table, saw the book, and laughed. I bet I'd get bonus points on this essay if he knew what my name was.
It snowed last night. I mean it snowed hard-core, albeit for less than an hour/about an inch. I spent most of my last day in Cork trooping around to music stores on a bodhrán quest (mostly for a friend, although I also bought a small cheap one for myself, because I thought it might lessen the pain of the nice one not being for me) through a layer of snow I had not expected to see while I was here. The pond in Fitzgerald's Park, near the river in between my apartment and the city centre, was frozen solid where a day or two ago it was mostly water with some slushy ice. The ducks and terns had fled, presumably to the river. I was one of several people walking back and forth to photograph the snow-covered rose garden from multiple angles.
My last walk by the river. Farewell my lovely swans, my awkward terns, my elusive cormorants. Farewell my funny/creepy rooks. And farewell my herons, even though there was a good deal of love lost between us after I discovered this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1064669/Pictured-The-moment-grey-heron-catches-baby-rabbit-ears-drowns-swallows-thing-whole.html. (I just couldn't look at them the same way after that.) It's funny, I never though I cared much about birds, but I may have spent more time this semester watching birds than in all my time before now.
I meant to mention before, I think, that I count swans compulsively. I like the way they're so often in even numbers. When they're not, sometimes if you watch them for a bit you can guess which is the odd one out.
It took me a month or two, but eventually I saw exactly six in the same place at the same time.*
I also don't think I realized how much I cared about water. Everywhere I have gone this semester, I have gravitated toward rivers and bays and the open ocean.
I am very sad I did not get to go back to Killarney. There is a lot that I didn't have time for, but I think that is my biggest regret.
I feel like there is so much more I wanted to say here on my last night in Cork. I could say it's strange to think I won't walk down the Western Road again, or hike up the ridiculous hill to the music building, or see the spires of a cathedral from my living room in the early morning. I could rejoice that I no longer have to live with the slovenly roommates who after a semester of unabashed disgustingness left yet more for the two of us here until today to clean up. I could mourn that I will no longer drink a pint in The Gallows on Wednesday nights, or find live trad music whenever I want it, or be able to get on a bus and be any of a several dozen beautiful and interesting (and preferably by the sea) places in less than an hour or two. I already miss some of my classes and lecturers, and I already miss MedRen and O'Bhéal and assorted friends and acquaintances, some of whom live here and some of whom have already left for wherever they came from. (And to those I would have seen if I'd made it to Tom Barry's on Friday night—I'm sorry I missed you. I hope it was fun, and I wish you all the best.)
But I don't think any of that is what I really wanted to say.
I've never been good at goodbyes. They're always awkward. And in ten minutes there's going to be a taxi outside waiting to take me to the bus that's going to take me to the plane that's going to take me to New York.
So goodbye, Cork. Goodbye, Ireland. It's been quite a ride. I hope we will meet again someday.
Good night [morning?], and joy be to you all.
* This is a geeky fairy tale reference. Look up "The Six Swans" by the Brothers Grimm, or "The Wild Swans" by Hans Christian Anderson, which as far as I can tell is based on the Grimms' story and which I think might be the only happy thing Anderson ever wrote. One of my favorite novels ever is a retelling of these tales, set in medieval Ulster. (I think. Maybe Leinster. But probably Ulster.)
The other day I was sitting in a café down the street from the university reading the textbook for my Viking archaeology class, and who should walk in but the lecturer for said class, who is also the editor of said book. I waved, and he came over to my table, saw the book, and laughed. I bet I'd get bonus points on this essay if he knew what my name was.
It snowed last night. I mean it snowed hard-core, albeit for less than an hour/about an inch. I spent most of my last day in Cork trooping around to music stores on a bodhrán quest (mostly for a friend, although I also bought a small cheap one for myself, because I thought it might lessen the pain of the nice one not being for me) through a layer of snow I had not expected to see while I was here. The pond in Fitzgerald's Park, near the river in between my apartment and the city centre, was frozen solid where a day or two ago it was mostly water with some slushy ice. The ducks and terns had fled, presumably to the river. I was one of several people walking back and forth to photograph the snow-covered rose garden from multiple angles.
My last walk by the river. Farewell my lovely swans, my awkward terns, my elusive cormorants. Farewell my funny/creepy rooks. And farewell my herons, even though there was a good deal of love lost between us after I discovered this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1064669/Pictured-The-moment-grey-heron-catches-baby-rabbit-ears-drowns-swallows-thing-whole.html. (I just couldn't look at them the same way after that.) It's funny, I never though I cared much about birds, but I may have spent more time this semester watching birds than in all my time before now.
I meant to mention before, I think, that I count swans compulsively. I like the way they're so often in even numbers. When they're not, sometimes if you watch them for a bit you can guess which is the odd one out.
It took me a month or two, but eventually I saw exactly six in the same place at the same time.*
I also don't think I realized how much I cared about water. Everywhere I have gone this semester, I have gravitated toward rivers and bays and the open ocean.
I am very sad I did not get to go back to Killarney. There is a lot that I didn't have time for, but I think that is my biggest regret.
I feel like there is so much more I wanted to say here on my last night in Cork. I could say it's strange to think I won't walk down the Western Road again, or hike up the ridiculous hill to the music building, or see the spires of a cathedral from my living room in the early morning. I could rejoice that I no longer have to live with the slovenly roommates who after a semester of unabashed disgustingness left yet more for the two of us here until today to clean up. I could mourn that I will no longer drink a pint in The Gallows on Wednesday nights, or find live trad music whenever I want it, or be able to get on a bus and be any of a several dozen beautiful and interesting (and preferably by the sea) places in less than an hour or two. I already miss some of my classes and lecturers, and I already miss MedRen and O'Bhéal and assorted friends and acquaintances, some of whom live here and some of whom have already left for wherever they came from. (And to those I would have seen if I'd made it to Tom Barry's on Friday night—I'm sorry I missed you. I hope it was fun, and I wish you all the best.)
But I don't think any of that is what I really wanted to say.
I've never been good at goodbyes. They're always awkward. And in ten minutes there's going to be a taxi outside waiting to take me to the bus that's going to take me to the plane that's going to take me to New York.
So goodbye, Cork. Goodbye, Ireland. It's been quite a ride. I hope we will meet again someday.
Good night [morning?], and joy be to you all.
* This is a geeky fairy tale reference. Look up "The Six Swans" by the Brothers Grimm, or "The Wild Swans" by Hans Christian Anderson, which as far as I can tell is based on the Grimms' story and which I think might be the only happy thing Anderson ever wrote. One of my favorite novels ever is a retelling of these tales, set in medieval Ulster. (I think. Maybe Leinster. But probably Ulster.)
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Land of Song
I meant to post this earlier, while I was studying for my exams and coming up with all of these, but somehow I never found the motivation and the time simultaneously. Actually, that's true of a lot of things I've intended to post and never have.
Anyway, for your amusement, I present: Highlights* of Medieval Irish Legends (all from the Finn Cycle). Citations available on request, but I'm too lazy to include them up front in something this informal.
The winner for best euphemism for sex/possible sexual assault: "He took her, and she was in his company."
Finn is psychic**: "At the end of the day Finn came to the hut and found the headless body. 'This is a body without a head!' cried Finn."
You go, Finn. Great clairvoyant hero, indeed. Nothing gets past you.
Creative Writing 101: Descriptions are important. "[blah blah blah] on two hills equally high with one another. And there was a black gloomy deep dangerous horrible precipice between them." Got enough adjectives there?
From the next paragraph in the same tale: "'and although your accoutrements and your clothes and your garb are hideous, and your own appearance not the most beautiful, if you make the leap she will be with you and accept you.'"
Well. When you put it that way.
This one even confused the lecturer: "and he [Finn] was dead between the two rocks. Fishermen of the Boyne found him... Aichlech cut his [Finn's] head from him, and then the sons of Uirgriu killed him." Wait a second...***
Apparently adjective abuse was a common problem in medieval Ireland (this might be my favorite): "Then a fierce pitiless powerful manly vengeful virile battle was fought between them."
WHAT KIND OF BATTLE WAS IT???
Unintended double entendres: always a win. "'Perhaps the men of Tara think that we have been long enough conversing here, maiden,' said Finn. 'If it be long enough,' said the maiden, 'since you made a start to the talking, it is up to you to wrap it up.'"
Hurr hurr hurr. Man, he's trying to be all suave and subtle and she just gets right down to business. (He takes it in stride, though—his next line leaves nothing to the imagination.)
This is the one that made me decide to do this little compilation in the first place: "'I will depart, son of O Duibhne,' said he, 'and I leave this advice with you, not to go into a tree of one trunk in fleeing from Fionn, and not to go into an underground cave which has only one entrance, and not to go into an island of the sea which has only one way leading to it,'" and the reader is thinking, Yes, yes, all sound advice to someone in hiding, "and he said, 'whatever place you shall cook your meal do not eat it there, and whatever place you shall eat do not lie there...'" uh-huh, uh-huh, that makes sense... "'and whatever place you shall lie do not rise there.'" Ok, ri—, wait what?!
This is followed shortly by sex euphemisms AND random double entendres in the same paragraph: "'Diarmaid,' said she, 'though your valour and your bravery be great in conflicts and in battle-places I think myself that that little drop of errant water is more daring than you are.'
'That is true, Graínne,' said Diarmaid, 'though I have been for a long time keeping myself from you through fear of Fionn I will not suffer myself to be reproached by you any longer; and it is hard to trust women,' he said. And it was then for the first time that Diarmaid ó Duibhne of the bright-tooth made a wife of Graínne, daughter of the king of Ireland... And Diarmaid rose early on the morrow and went to the Searbhan Lochlannach and made a bond of contract and agreement with him and got permission to hunt and to chase from him and never to touch his berries."
Also, sometimes when a lecturer says something particularly funny or witty, even if it's not really important, I write it down so I can laugh at it again when I read over my notes later. I ran across two of those from this class: "It's hard to find a point in this depressing little story..." (So we're reading it... why, again?) and "There may be a tradition in Irish literature for how you talk about sinister meals of fish in abandoned houses with severed heads." (I don't think you need the context for that one to see its ridiculousness.)
In the interest of not being a total dick (although possibly it's too late), here are a couple of things I picked out that I really liked in a serious way rather than a WTF way:
"'What is sweeter than mead?' said Finn. 'Trustworthy conversation,' said the maiden."
And Graínne speaking of Diarmaid (in a poem that's not connected to the Diarmaid and Graínne story quoted above; don't even get me started on what a bitch Graínne is there): "There is one on whom I should gladly gaze, for whom I would give the bright world, all of it, all of it, though it be an unequal bargain."
There are also some good statements made about life in the forest, close to nature, being infinitely better than life at court surrounded by fancy things, but I don't have any quotes at hand.
Conclusion: If I were a lit major, or I'd had the foresight to make an independent major in folklore and mythology, I would totally be planning to come back to Cork for a postgrad diploma from the Celtic Civ department.
* meaning: Unintentionally Hilarious Sentences
** No, really, that's actually an important theme.
*** If you're trying to figure out how many times this man has to die, as we were, here's a hint: Pronouns are ambiguous.
Anyway, for your amusement, I present: Highlights* of Medieval Irish Legends (all from the Finn Cycle). Citations available on request, but I'm too lazy to include them up front in something this informal.
The winner for best euphemism for sex/possible sexual assault: "He took her, and she was in his company."
Finn is psychic**: "At the end of the day Finn came to the hut and found the headless body. 'This is a body without a head!' cried Finn."
You go, Finn. Great clairvoyant hero, indeed. Nothing gets past you.
Creative Writing 101: Descriptions are important. "[blah blah blah] on two hills equally high with one another. And there was a black gloomy deep dangerous horrible precipice between them." Got enough adjectives there?
From the next paragraph in the same tale: "'and although your accoutrements and your clothes and your garb are hideous, and your own appearance not the most beautiful, if you make the leap she will be with you and accept you.'"
Well. When you put it that way.
This one even confused the lecturer: "and he [Finn] was dead between the two rocks. Fishermen of the Boyne found him... Aichlech cut his [Finn's] head from him, and then the sons of Uirgriu killed him." Wait a second...***
Apparently adjective abuse was a common problem in medieval Ireland (this might be my favorite): "Then a fierce pitiless powerful manly vengeful virile battle was fought between them."
WHAT KIND OF BATTLE WAS IT???
Unintended double entendres: always a win. "'Perhaps the men of Tara think that we have been long enough conversing here, maiden,' said Finn. 'If it be long enough,' said the maiden, 'since you made a start to the talking, it is up to you to wrap it up.'"
Hurr hurr hurr. Man, he's trying to be all suave and subtle and she just gets right down to business. (He takes it in stride, though—his next line leaves nothing to the imagination.)
This is the one that made me decide to do this little compilation in the first place: "'I will depart, son of O Duibhne,' said he, 'and I leave this advice with you, not to go into a tree of one trunk in fleeing from Fionn, and not to go into an underground cave which has only one entrance, and not to go into an island of the sea which has only one way leading to it,'" and the reader is thinking, Yes, yes, all sound advice to someone in hiding, "and he said, 'whatever place you shall cook your meal do not eat it there, and whatever place you shall eat do not lie there...'" uh-huh, uh-huh, that makes sense... "'and whatever place you shall lie do not rise there.'" Ok, ri—, wait what?!
This is followed shortly by sex euphemisms AND random double entendres in the same paragraph: "'Diarmaid,' said she, 'though your valour and your bravery be great in conflicts and in battle-places I think myself that that little drop of errant water is more daring than you are.'
'That is true, Graínne,' said Diarmaid, 'though I have been for a long time keeping myself from you through fear of Fionn I will not suffer myself to be reproached by you any longer; and it is hard to trust women,' he said. And it was then for the first time that Diarmaid ó Duibhne of the bright-tooth made a wife of Graínne, daughter of the king of Ireland... And Diarmaid rose early on the morrow and went to the Searbhan Lochlannach and made a bond of contract and agreement with him and got permission to hunt and to chase from him and never to touch his berries."
Also, sometimes when a lecturer says something particularly funny or witty, even if it's not really important, I write it down so I can laugh at it again when I read over my notes later. I ran across two of those from this class: "It's hard to find a point in this depressing little story..." (So we're reading it... why, again?) and "There may be a tradition in Irish literature for how you talk about sinister meals of fish in abandoned houses with severed heads." (I don't think you need the context for that one to see its ridiculousness.)
In the interest of not being a total dick (although possibly it's too late), here are a couple of things I picked out that I really liked in a serious way rather than a WTF way:
"'What is sweeter than mead?' said Finn. 'Trustworthy conversation,' said the maiden."
And Graínne speaking of Diarmaid (in a poem that's not connected to the Diarmaid and Graínne story quoted above; don't even get me started on what a bitch Graínne is there): "There is one on whom I should gladly gaze, for whom I would give the bright world, all of it, all of it, though it be an unequal bargain."
There are also some good statements made about life in the forest, close to nature, being infinitely better than life at court surrounded by fancy things, but I don't have any quotes at hand.
Conclusion: If I were a lit major, or I'd had the foresight to make an independent major in folklore and mythology, I would totally be planning to come back to Cork for a postgrad diploma from the Celtic Civ department.
* meaning: Unintentionally Hilarious Sentences
** No, really, that's actually an important theme.
*** If you're trying to figure out how many times this man has to die, as we were, here's a hint: Pronouns are ambiguous.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
The Time Draws Near
Well, the pretty little blue and red hat I knitted myself last winter is now somewhere in Galway. I hope some other poor university student finds it and likes it and gives it a good home.
I guess I haven't really written that much this semester about actually living in Cork. I've been trying so hard to keep up with everything else that the day-to-day stuff has sort of slipped through the cracks. Most of it I don't suppose has been remarkably interesting—ask many of the American students here and they'll tell you that they go about their lives between trips and adventures not all that differently from the way they would at home, except that every once in a while as you walk down the street it suddenly hits you: Hey... I'm in IRELAND.
I think what I'm trying to say is that despite all the frantic weekends here and there trying to experience as much as we can before leaving, this isn't entirely the extended vacation it sometimes appears to be. We're living here. We go to class and write papers and buy groceries and do laundry and clean the kitchen. And sometimes that's all we do. If you're one of those that thinks even the mundane becomes exciting just by virtue of being in another country, well, no, it really doesn't. Maybe for like a week. After that, you forget where you are and just do whatever it is you do.
I think I first realized this back in October when I was in Killarney and went riding with that couple on vacation from Georgia (that would be the state, not the country). They asked me what they should do in Cork, and I had no idea what to say. I have not experienced Cork the way they would. Other than the Public Museum, I haven't done a lot of the touristy things. (I think I meant to, at first, but it just never happened and after a while it didn't seem important anymore.) When I have free time, I walk by the river or sit in a computer lab on Facebook. I've gone to very few restaurants. I'm a college student; usually my version of eating out is cheeseburgers and kebabs from places a middle-aged tourist wouldn't want to set foot in. I don't even know that many pubs, because I'm not the kind of person who goes out that much, and when I do, it's the same places over and over again. If someone were to visit me here, I'd be glad to show them MY Cork and maybe explore some new things—but I have no idea how to instruct someone else on how to enjoy Cork. At least not reliably.
People have been asking if I'm excited to go home. It's a hard question to answer. It's a little like when you're a kid, and it's August, and summer's gotten kind of boring, but starting school doesn't exactly sound like the way to fix that. (Not that Cork is boring.) I think if you had asked me two months ago if I wanted to come home, the answer would have been a resounding yes. In fact, someone did ask me that, a certain blunt and insightful friend, and I almost cried. I wasn't homesick, exactly; I never really had the whole culture shock thing. I was lonely and isolated and watching my friends back home go on with their lives without me and feeling like I was missing everything important.
I still feel that way, but now I'm also more invested in my life here. I've gotten to know people and gotten involved in things that are going to be hard to leave behind. It could be worse—I know at least one girl who found a boy, and it started out as a nice casual thing, but it started too early, and after a whole semester it's gotten out of hand and she's realized just how much she's going to miss him when they never see each other again. Studying abroad, I've discovered, is more of a blessing-and-a-curse situation than anybody tells you beforehand. It's a good experience to have. It's fun. You learn a lot about yourself and about life and about connecting across cultures and all that other cliché stuff. But at the same time, it's a terrible thing to be somewhere just long enough to get to know it and start to find your place, only to have to leave it again.
I've been struck by how different this experience is than my experience with Belize, and I'm not talking about the difference between the two countries here. I expected it to be different because here I'm a regular student going to class and joining societies and just generally managing my own time and decisions, whereas there I was basically working. I was a student, yes, but the classroom was an excavation and I was there all day, every day, and I lived and worked and played with the same people all the time. It was meant to be a different experience, but I was unprepared for some of the ways it's different. For one thing, the scatter of goodbyes here feels strange and disconcerting. Things are not over all at the same time, and it makes for awkward situations when you realize that you've just done something for the last time and probably aren't going to see someone again even though you'll be here for days more. Plus you're inevitably going to miss saying goodbye to some people because you didn't know ahead of time that you weren't going to see them again.
Leaving Belize also felt less final, somehow. Or maybe that's just the way I remember it now, because I have kept loosely in touch with so many people via Facebook. Maybe it was the constant close proximity; I think a lot of us really didn't expect our goodbyes to be final, but planned to meet again sooner or later, even if not all in one group (and many have). Maybe it was just that we all knew we had the option to come back again the next year, or the year after. Obviously we knew we could never come back and have it be exactly as it was then, but it still felt different. I can't really explain it, I guess.
Here, we have no illusions. I have already said a few goodbyes in which there was no pretending that we had any expectation of ever seeing each other again. ("Have a good... life, I guess...") I walk the streets of Cork in these last days knowing that although I hope to return someday, I might very well not. At the very least, there's a very good chance that I won't before many of the people I know have moved on and some of the things I love have changed beyond recognition.
And so the answer is yes, I'm excited to go home, but I'm not excited to leave.
(And you can tell because my room doesn't even look like packing everything I own is on the horizon, let alone imminent.)
I guess I haven't really written that much this semester about actually living in Cork. I've been trying so hard to keep up with everything else that the day-to-day stuff has sort of slipped through the cracks. Most of it I don't suppose has been remarkably interesting—ask many of the American students here and they'll tell you that they go about their lives between trips and adventures not all that differently from the way they would at home, except that every once in a while as you walk down the street it suddenly hits you: Hey... I'm in IRELAND.
I think what I'm trying to say is that despite all the frantic weekends here and there trying to experience as much as we can before leaving, this isn't entirely the extended vacation it sometimes appears to be. We're living here. We go to class and write papers and buy groceries and do laundry and clean the kitchen. And sometimes that's all we do. If you're one of those that thinks even the mundane becomes exciting just by virtue of being in another country, well, no, it really doesn't. Maybe for like a week. After that, you forget where you are and just do whatever it is you do.
I think I first realized this back in October when I was in Killarney and went riding with that couple on vacation from Georgia (that would be the state, not the country). They asked me what they should do in Cork, and I had no idea what to say. I have not experienced Cork the way they would. Other than the Public Museum, I haven't done a lot of the touristy things. (I think I meant to, at first, but it just never happened and after a while it didn't seem important anymore.) When I have free time, I walk by the river or sit in a computer lab on Facebook. I've gone to very few restaurants. I'm a college student; usually my version of eating out is cheeseburgers and kebabs from places a middle-aged tourist wouldn't want to set foot in. I don't even know that many pubs, because I'm not the kind of person who goes out that much, and when I do, it's the same places over and over again. If someone were to visit me here, I'd be glad to show them MY Cork and maybe explore some new things—but I have no idea how to instruct someone else on how to enjoy Cork. At least not reliably.
People have been asking if I'm excited to go home. It's a hard question to answer. It's a little like when you're a kid, and it's August, and summer's gotten kind of boring, but starting school doesn't exactly sound like the way to fix that. (Not that Cork is boring.) I think if you had asked me two months ago if I wanted to come home, the answer would have been a resounding yes. In fact, someone did ask me that, a certain blunt and insightful friend, and I almost cried. I wasn't homesick, exactly; I never really had the whole culture shock thing. I was lonely and isolated and watching my friends back home go on with their lives without me and feeling like I was missing everything important.
I still feel that way, but now I'm also more invested in my life here. I've gotten to know people and gotten involved in things that are going to be hard to leave behind. It could be worse—I know at least one girl who found a boy, and it started out as a nice casual thing, but it started too early, and after a whole semester it's gotten out of hand and she's realized just how much she's going to miss him when they never see each other again. Studying abroad, I've discovered, is more of a blessing-and-a-curse situation than anybody tells you beforehand. It's a good experience to have. It's fun. You learn a lot about yourself and about life and about connecting across cultures and all that other cliché stuff. But at the same time, it's a terrible thing to be somewhere just long enough to get to know it and start to find your place, only to have to leave it again.
I've been struck by how different this experience is than my experience with Belize, and I'm not talking about the difference between the two countries here. I expected it to be different because here I'm a regular student going to class and joining societies and just generally managing my own time and decisions, whereas there I was basically working. I was a student, yes, but the classroom was an excavation and I was there all day, every day, and I lived and worked and played with the same people all the time. It was meant to be a different experience, but I was unprepared for some of the ways it's different. For one thing, the scatter of goodbyes here feels strange and disconcerting. Things are not over all at the same time, and it makes for awkward situations when you realize that you've just done something for the last time and probably aren't going to see someone again even though you'll be here for days more. Plus you're inevitably going to miss saying goodbye to some people because you didn't know ahead of time that you weren't going to see them again.
Leaving Belize also felt less final, somehow. Or maybe that's just the way I remember it now, because I have kept loosely in touch with so many people via Facebook. Maybe it was the constant close proximity; I think a lot of us really didn't expect our goodbyes to be final, but planned to meet again sooner or later, even if not all in one group (and many have). Maybe it was just that we all knew we had the option to come back again the next year, or the year after. Obviously we knew we could never come back and have it be exactly as it was then, but it still felt different. I can't really explain it, I guess.
Here, we have no illusions. I have already said a few goodbyes in which there was no pretending that we had any expectation of ever seeing each other again. ("Have a good... life, I guess...") I walk the streets of Cork in these last days knowing that although I hope to return someday, I might very well not. At the very least, there's a very good chance that I won't before many of the people I know have moved on and some of the things I love have changed beyond recognition.
And so the answer is yes, I'm excited to go home, but I'm not excited to leave.
(And you can tell because my room doesn't even look like packing everything I own is on the horizon, let alone imminent.)
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Come Join Me In Rhyme
At the risk of getting a lot more personal than I tend to like to do in this blog...
There's a place I go sometimes called The Hayloft. It's a tiny room (the bar takes up fully one quarter of the available space) in the upstairs of a pub in the city centre, and on Monday nights it plays host to O'Bhéal. (I'm supposed to know what that means, but I can never remember.) O'Bhéal is "Cork's weekly poetry event". The evening starts off with a silly poetry exercise, with a free pint for the winner, then a guest poet brought in for the night reads for about an hour, and then the rest of the time until close (usually around midnight) is an open mic. I've seen the crowd vary from less than a dozen to more than you'd think the room could hold, and ages range from twenty-ish to the 67-year-old who tried to buy me a drink last night. Many, if not most, are regulars.
I stumbled upon this by accident: They had a special event for Cork Culture Night in September, on a Friday instead of the usual Monday, and I saw it in the Culture Night listings and went thinking it was a one-time event. And it was love.
I forget sometimes that social science is not where I planned to end up. Four years ago the direction my life has gone, and more specifically the extent to which it sometimes seems I've turned my back on the arts, would have been unthinkable. The only literature courses I've taken since beginning my second attempt at college have been my French classes, and sometimes I'll sit down to write a French paper and suddenly remember that hey, I actually enjoy this, and I think this is what I meant to do once upon a time.*
I could go on about that for a while, but that's getting pretty tangential to the story, even for me. Anyway, I hadn't been to something like this in ages, and it used to be a huge part of my life, and it was really refreshing. And it made me really, really happy at a time (the semester had just started) when I didn't really know what I was doing yet and was trying to figure out what my life here was going to be.
I wound up not going as often as I wanted to. Sometimes I decided it was cold and I was lazy, and sometimes I was disappointed by my failure to get other girls to go with me (I succeeded twice, but that was it), but after a while I had to stop caring about both of those things because I was running out of time to say "Next week," so for the last few weeks I've gone pretty regularly. It's always a good time, and I've never felt unwelcome or out of the loop even when I'm there by myself. The guest poets are always great (the first one, on Culture Night, was a comic who recited, among other things, a very long poem that was a dialogue between Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and was absolutely hilarious), and although the things read during the open mic sometimes vary in quality, everybody gets applause and support.
The MC (and, I believe, the guy who started all of this in the first place several years ago, and who kind of reminds me of Liam Neeson) always approaches everyone in the room with the open mic sign-up list, including me. For a long time, I just smiled and shook my head. Like I said, it had been a very long time, and I was a newcomer (and a foreigner to boot), and those two things together made me very uncertain about reading anything myself.
But also, and perhaps more importantly, it had been a very long time since I really wrote anything to read. I wrote poetry constantly in high school and my first semester in college, but after that it sort of stopped. I don't think it tapered off as I got busy with other pursuits, either, it just stopped. I'd written two poems since then that I can think of, and most of another that got lost because MS Word's autosave function sometimes fails to save automatically even though I'm pretty sure that's why it exists, which sort of sucked any remaining motivation out of me. That was it.
Now, I have a theory about this cessation of writing that involves my need to write a specific poem, and you can feel free to ask me about it sometime, but I'm not going to get into it here because I don't think it's really an appropriate topic for this blog. The point is, on my way home from Culture Night, I wrote a poem. I wrote THAT poem, in fact. And it was like magic: in the last two and a half months I've written more than I wrote in the two and a half years before it.
I finally read one of them last week. I'm pretty sure it's the best poem I've ever written, and reaction I got from the audience was more positive than I would have ever dreamed. There were actually spontaneous grunts of approval somewhere to my right, at least three people made a point of telling me in person afterwards that it was great, and the young woman who was MCing that night reclaimed the mic after I sat down and said, "Erica, you can come back anytime."
I don't think anything else I have to offer would measure up, but it was pretty satisfying nonetheless.
Last night I read the poem I wrote that first night. I wanted to explain it, the story behind the writing of it if not the subject, but things were running behind and so I just got to the point. But I read it.
What I really wanted to do was write something during the semester specifically to read last night, something about O'Bhéal; it would have ended with something like "I came all the way to Ireland to find myself again," but working backwards from an ending has pretty much never worked out for me and I never really found the time to work on it anyway.
Anyway, I'm going to miss O'Bhéal a lot. I walked away from The Hayloft last night very sad to know I won't be back again. It wasn't until the last couple of weeks that I really started talking to people there, but it's been really important to me all along, and I don't have anything like it back home to return to. I'd like to try to find something, or start something at Oberlin. Whether either of those things happens or not, and despite the fact that I didn't go as much as I intended to and kind of wish I had, I think it's always going to be one of the things that defines my life in Cork as I'll remember it.
* That's kind of an unintentional play on words that no one is going to notice unless you know that my primary French professor and I share a certain fascination with fairy tales and folklore.
There's a place I go sometimes called The Hayloft. It's a tiny room (the bar takes up fully one quarter of the available space) in the upstairs of a pub in the city centre, and on Monday nights it plays host to O'Bhéal. (I'm supposed to know what that means, but I can never remember.) O'Bhéal is "Cork's weekly poetry event". The evening starts off with a silly poetry exercise, with a free pint for the winner, then a guest poet brought in for the night reads for about an hour, and then the rest of the time until close (usually around midnight) is an open mic. I've seen the crowd vary from less than a dozen to more than you'd think the room could hold, and ages range from twenty-ish to the 67-year-old who tried to buy me a drink last night. Many, if not most, are regulars.
I stumbled upon this by accident: They had a special event for Cork Culture Night in September, on a Friday instead of the usual Monday, and I saw it in the Culture Night listings and went thinking it was a one-time event. And it was love.
I forget sometimes that social science is not where I planned to end up. Four years ago the direction my life has gone, and more specifically the extent to which it sometimes seems I've turned my back on the arts, would have been unthinkable. The only literature courses I've taken since beginning my second attempt at college have been my French classes, and sometimes I'll sit down to write a French paper and suddenly remember that hey, I actually enjoy this, and I think this is what I meant to do once upon a time.*
I could go on about that for a while, but that's getting pretty tangential to the story, even for me. Anyway, I hadn't been to something like this in ages, and it used to be a huge part of my life, and it was really refreshing. And it made me really, really happy at a time (the semester had just started) when I didn't really know what I was doing yet and was trying to figure out what my life here was going to be.
I wound up not going as often as I wanted to. Sometimes I decided it was cold and I was lazy, and sometimes I was disappointed by my failure to get other girls to go with me (I succeeded twice, but that was it), but after a while I had to stop caring about both of those things because I was running out of time to say "Next week," so for the last few weeks I've gone pretty regularly. It's always a good time, and I've never felt unwelcome or out of the loop even when I'm there by myself. The guest poets are always great (the first one, on Culture Night, was a comic who recited, among other things, a very long poem that was a dialogue between Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and was absolutely hilarious), and although the things read during the open mic sometimes vary in quality, everybody gets applause and support.
The MC (and, I believe, the guy who started all of this in the first place several years ago, and who kind of reminds me of Liam Neeson) always approaches everyone in the room with the open mic sign-up list, including me. For a long time, I just smiled and shook my head. Like I said, it had been a very long time, and I was a newcomer (and a foreigner to boot), and those two things together made me very uncertain about reading anything myself.
But also, and perhaps more importantly, it had been a very long time since I really wrote anything to read. I wrote poetry constantly in high school and my first semester in college, but after that it sort of stopped. I don't think it tapered off as I got busy with other pursuits, either, it just stopped. I'd written two poems since then that I can think of, and most of another that got lost because MS Word's autosave function sometimes fails to save automatically even though I'm pretty sure that's why it exists, which sort of sucked any remaining motivation out of me. That was it.
Now, I have a theory about this cessation of writing that involves my need to write a specific poem, and you can feel free to ask me about it sometime, but I'm not going to get into it here because I don't think it's really an appropriate topic for this blog. The point is, on my way home from Culture Night, I wrote a poem. I wrote THAT poem, in fact. And it was like magic: in the last two and a half months I've written more than I wrote in the two and a half years before it.
I finally read one of them last week. I'm pretty sure it's the best poem I've ever written, and reaction I got from the audience was more positive than I would have ever dreamed. There were actually spontaneous grunts of approval somewhere to my right, at least three people made a point of telling me in person afterwards that it was great, and the young woman who was MCing that night reclaimed the mic after I sat down and said, "Erica, you can come back anytime."
I don't think anything else I have to offer would measure up, but it was pretty satisfying nonetheless.
Last night I read the poem I wrote that first night. I wanted to explain it, the story behind the writing of it if not the subject, but things were running behind and so I just got to the point. But I read it.
What I really wanted to do was write something during the semester specifically to read last night, something about O'Bhéal; it would have ended with something like "I came all the way to Ireland to find myself again," but working backwards from an ending has pretty much never worked out for me and I never really found the time to work on it anyway.
Anyway, I'm going to miss O'Bhéal a lot. I walked away from The Hayloft last night very sad to know I won't be back again. It wasn't until the last couple of weeks that I really started talking to people there, but it's been really important to me all along, and I don't have anything like it back home to return to. I'd like to try to find something, or start something at Oberlin. Whether either of those things happens or not, and despite the fact that I didn't go as much as I intended to and kind of wish I had, I think it's always going to be one of the things that defines my life in Cork as I'll remember it.
* That's kind of an unintentional play on words that no one is going to notice unless you know that my primary French professor and I share a certain fascination with fairy tales and folklore.
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