#4

You’ll all be pleased to know, in reference to that popular Sean Kingston song from this summer, that over here he’s not “suicidal, suicidal,” when she says it’s over, (because she’s too beautiful girl, that’s why it’ll never work) but rather “in denial, in denial.”
Oh what can you do with a catholic country, what can you do with a catholic country, what can you do with a catholic country early in the mornin’….
Well, I caught a cold last week, which was as good an excuse as any to get some work done. It is not easy to further these so far embryonic social relations when you’re the kid with the plague, but with good cheer I’m hoping to succeed still. At least, they’ll have to admire my attitude, as well as my nasal voice, my bright, shining red eyes, and the charming way I interrupt our rather small classes to cough up several internal organs.
My one unpleasant task of the previous week was to go to the police station and register as a foreign national. My roommates’ horror stories involved 8 hour waits, and 7 hour waits…these reports were greatly exaggerated of course. It only took me 6 hours.
I went on a Saturday, which is student day at the ol’ Garda (police station), so at least I got to talk to people of my own social class (i.e. penniless, but in good humor). I began in line four walls from where I was supposed to end up so I knew it was going to be a nice day. But considering, as everyone knows, that they get on best, who have something in common to start with, sharing abject misery was a great way to make new friends. “Hey this sucks,” you might say (in slightly different words perhaps, although maybe not), “Hey, I think it sucks too!” Says someone further down the line, “we should totally hang out.” And we did. For many hours……
(We’ve decided to collectively elope together)
After you get your number (I got mine 3 hours after I got in line, lucky number 237) you enter the building, where 10 or so booths are receiving people to variously intimidate, extort, or let through easily, depending on how they’re feeling on a given day. Then each person is called down to lucky number 13 where they receive a laminated card (American National Bruce Wayne, come to booth number 13 please….American National Bat Man please come to booth number 13 please….where is Bat Man? Has anyone seen… (from the bathroom: wait! Wait, just one second!)). In that room, I sat for only a couple hours, thinking continually to myself, the booth number 13 guy is probably going to kill himself if he has to pronounce another Chinese name…
Anyhow (forgive the long batman joke, I can’t be sure how it worked. We’re operating without a net here. Feel free to report back.)

My roommates continue to make me feel young. Dmitri (who is actually 20) has never had any kind of alcohol, which as my other roommate Holger points out, means you just can’t trust ‘im, and they all seem a little uncomfortable in discussion about the fairer sex (the American male pastime de rigeur). This is not, of course, the first time in my life I’ve been an unsavory character, but probably the only time other people have thought so too. Still, they’re good chaps. We go out to dinner together maybe twice a week, and spend the rest of the days foraging through the garbage due to what the world economy is doing to our pocketbooks (similar to what Mike Tyson did to Evander Holyfield’s ear, only with more blood). They’re great though! They really are. I complain for humorous effect, they are quiet and polite and kind.
Just a vaguely serious aside: I was sitting in class today, daydreaming about cultural identity (as we all so often do) when it occurred to me how complicated a thing it is. Americans, I think, are sort of like Cadbury eggs (for those scoring at home, this is how the notion of the indwelling of god in the corporeal body of jesus was explained to me by a TA in Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s Christianity in Late Antiquity class). We carry on our outside the knowledge that we are Americans, and on the inside, often enough an intact racial identity. I, for example, am one of them Jews. Someone else may be (and often is; over a billion in the club, so the odds are quite good, although I wouldn’t look in West Texas if I were you) Asian, for example. Here I am in Ireland, at a very international college and I think to myself, there that person is Asian (I am deeply observant). And then I think to myself, but are they Asian, Asian, or perhaps Asian-American, or Asian-British? So there are suddenly several Asians (I should see East Asian. Forgive the parenthetic frenzy. I don’t know why any mention of race, of any kind—that is, noticing that other people have them, sometimes-- makes me feel like a racist, but it does, so I’ll get out quickly and without ado) But is it not curious to think about, oh reader, how though we may multiply our identities on paper (say, the Asian American), or seem to keep them simple (the Asian Asian) yet at the same time each of those tells us very little about the specific person, while perhaps telling us something about where they came from…I don’t get much anywhere with this thought process, but I find myself fascinated by these layers of identity; how do I see them differently, how do they see each other differently… And their similarities (I promise, I would use Jewish, the only thing I am, if I could safely consider it a race without exposition), that is that their ancestry is Asian, is perhaps due to cultural shift destroyed which makes them different, but since they’re different anyway, cause each one is a person, and since no person should ever be judged in any aspect of their personality by something not deliberately chosen, even, perhaps, if embraced… is not all this speculation the sheerest bunk?
Yet bunk, as I imagine Oscar Wilde, whose birthday it is today, might put it, is the only thing worth speculating about.

On Friday I went to Newgrange, and the Hill of Tara, two places of importance to the history of Ireland. Newgrange is a Neolithic passage tomb (it looks fantastic, although it has been reconstructed), circa 3000 BCE, a great mound of green earth: it is on the Boyne river and better known to some as Brugh NaBoyne, the fort on the river Boyne, home of the sun god Oengus, the immortally young. The Hill of Tara was the seat of the ancient high kings of Ireland and the sacred center, or omphalos, of the island. Unfortunately our tour guide has a curious disease. He can neither stop talking nor say anything interesting. Also, he seems oblivious to the fact that perhaps all-purpose information is not what is wanted at our respective destinations; for example, at Tara, some of us (perhaps a minority) might like to hear about Tara and not, say, an apocryphal theory for the significance of the Celtic Cross. And I might like to have heard about Newgrange rather than the limestone deposits in the southern mountains. I know, bizarre. There’s no accounting for taste.
He also wasn’t entirely sure about anything. Two excellently good-natured girls I met on the trip—American undergraduates studying in Derry for the year-- and I began a drinking game based on how many times he used approximations when describing a date or a figure (I think it might be…1690, or maybe 1670). By the time we are halfway to Tara, we were deceased.
The most bizarre manifestation of his curious compulsion comes on the ride back where he allows himself to become entranced in talking about wood, to the tune of 20 minutes. Yes, a 20 minute dissertation, apropos of nothing but wood, on wood. At the conclusion of this peroration he passes out pieces of wood for us to feel. They are wood-y.
This leads, somehow, into a one-man discussion on Dublin’s traffic problems (during which the phrase “articulated lorry” whatever the hell that means is used about 90 times) which segues nicely into a discussion of the Dublin housing market. Just so everyone else knows too: Dubliners evidently just can’t get their heads around the concept of a lease. Please play your stocks accordingly.
I might have complained about him to his face except that he occasionally let slip in his unending barrage of talk (literally unending. If ever there was silence, I just assumed he was dead.) that he might actually be entirely insane. For example, in a discussion of prisons on the way up (why? I DON’T KNOW WHY. HE’S A MACHINE! HE CAN’T BE STOPPED! (to all my former housemates out there: MACHINE! MACHINE! Thanks, that was my first private joke)) he let slip that Dublin jails were very nasty. How did he know? A) Because he once worked with a guy who was interned in them every weekend (Doing what?.…) B) because his previous job was teaching boxing to Swedish prison inmates (yes, that’s what we need. Our criminals to become more specially trained). Evidently he then tried to do that in Dublin, but the jails were too nasty. (You’d think that’d be the end of the story, right? I would. BUT THERE IS NO END TO THE STORY. EVER.)
Instead of teaching them boxing, he evidently taught them to perform the musical West Side Story. That’s right. The Dublin jails were too harsh for boxing to be taught, but just right for Stephen Sondheim and a sweet, hip, Romeo and Juliet in the Bronx.
And most of his clientele, in this case, were hooked on heroin. “But that’s the way it goes lads. Now you see those two spiky mountains over there? There where elves come from and steal the brains of the living, is anyone listening to me, I’m afraid if I stop talking I may cease to exist, oh no someone spilled water on me, danger danger malfunction…)
I end up going out that night, after watching the rugby world championship, and end up running into the girls from earlier who have met some other friends coming in on their way to various other parts of Europe. We part ways, and then it turns out that the hostel they were staying at is overbooked, leaving them with the daunting process of spending the night on the streets of Dublin where they are very likely to be mugged, or even get caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs involved in a snapping contest and synchronized dance (oh the horror). The girls end up sleeping on my floor. Nothing remotely untoward occurs, but my roommate Marcus is most surprised in the morning to enter the kitchen in his boxers to find three apparently unsupervised, largely pajama’d girls, chatting happily and eating oatmeal. “Marcus,” I explain calmly, returning from my room. “It’s not what you think. It’s just that my bizarre sexual passions in no way conform to the ordinary mores of our restrictive society. That’s all.”
Of course he completely understood.
The other problem for today is one of shopping. My fridge, for which I did grave battle for so long is approximately the size of a hamster cage (none have done so much for so little since, as a young boy, on the third hottest day in dallas history, my father, brother, and I visited five 7-11s just to find one that sold the coke flavor. Which would be the second silliest thing I’ve done for a slurpee, the first being when, on the first snow during my tenure at Brown, I walked/slid down into the main square, some 20 minutes away, to buy a slurpee because it struck me as an entirely absurd thing to do. Which it was. I was only mildly surprised to find out later that my father had done the exact same thing when he’d move to Boston. I tell you, DNA is a scary thing. Should our tour guide ever find someone to mate with, the kid will probably be severely pounded through grade school for his endless elocutions on the subject, for example, of erasers, or grass strands. End longest parenthesis ever.) This means that I can’t really do proper food shopping. Yesterday in an impulse buy I bought a bunch of chicken patties to grill up on my foreman, as I’ve so far been eating almost entirely red meat. It is with some grave disgust that I get home to discover the box of 10 I have bought expires in three days. I will now eat nothing but chicken patties, every meal for the next three days. So when you think of me, think of me eating chicken patties. And weeping. This will be too much chicken patty for a man to handle without emotion.

Last note: I can put it off no longer. Today I do my laundry. As God forbid they throw a washer or dryer into the basement of the sports complex next door, the only place to do laundry is to walk all the way across campus (a 12-15 minute walk, which is even longer carrying your dirty underwear, and longer still in a country that rains all the time.) In the words of T.S. Eliot: Pray for us sinners. Pray for us now, and at the hour of our spin cycle.

I’m sure he meant that metaphorically
Anyway, in conclusion, and returning to the initially introduced theme (very classical, I feel my symphonically minded friends will agree…if I have any…) let me just say that I have so much left to say, and if every simple email I wrote to you could make you feel this way, I’d write them all….

Ever more in love with me you’d fall
Andrew