Day 74, 21 March: Health-, Not Health-Inducing

Nor____ _______, Day 74. Health-, Not Health-Inducing

            I spent the morning in ab work, running, buying food, getting  Katya’s parcel (not opening til I finished my first essay), and eating brunch. Health-inducing.

            I spent the afternoon and evening struggling through another rewrite of the Shelley paper. I took an hour or two off to cook a steak and broccoli dinner worthy of a picture. Finally, I just had to plough through, despite hate for being intellectually bored toward the end. The productivity took the form of an inverted exponential graph. And my new cough is bothersome. Left the library at an ungodly hour. Not health-inducing.

Finally opened Katya’s parcel. I went to sleep happy. Health-inducing.

Day 73, 20 March: Ulysses

Bewleys Hotel, Dublin, Day 73. Ulysses

11:31 AM. ‘Hey guys, we check out at 12.’

            Joe’s voice woke the rest of us up, and we cleaned our room of last night’s card game mess. As we were leaving, I mourned the loss of one of my good athletic socks. Strangely, around the same time, I picked up a random black sock in the middle of the floor and absent-mindedly put it in my pocket, where it stayed forgotten for the whole day. I consider the sock as the equivalent to Ulysses’ character Bloom’s potato ‘heirloom’, kept in his pocket all day in which the epic takes place. Mine just had a different significance: a strand of these four days of Dublinianianianian adventure.

            Cheap food, short on money—all of us. Except for Kat and Briar, who caught a 6am flight back (1 hour of sleep *snicker*). My stomach did somersaults throughout the afternoon, repulsed at my greasy choice of kebab and chips (that is, friessss). We, the guys and Anna now, sat in a park near an elementary school, upon a statue of the opened palm of a hand. Vinnie on the thumb, Mo on the wrist, Joseph and I on the bottom-middle of the palm, and Anna watching us. We had to move to a bench eventually.

           

As the three guys chilled, Anna and I walked. Over. tothemuseumIhadbeenwaitingfor. The centre of gravity upon which the loose thematic reference of this blog surrounds: Ulysses. James Joyce, an idol of a few months. Ever since UC Berkeley’s English 125: British Literature: 1900-1945. I saw it. An edition of his Ulysses from ten years after the first publish date. Torn and faded blue cover, white lettering. U L Y S S E S. My heart on fire, my eyes drinking the sustenance of a literary reality. In this Dublin Writers’ Museum, jump to jump of only the authors I knew or found curious:

Title page of Swift’s famed work. ‘travels into several remote nations of theworld by lemuel Gulliver By Dean Swift’ 1804. Ed. (random:) Chair—used by Handel at first perform Messiah at Musick Hall at Fishamble St, Dublin 13 April 1742--. Beckett. Good ole Samuel B. Progenitor after Joyce—sorta. His phone on display: red buttonofrejction for all calls he never wanted. Green buttonforfriends when they called. Playbill of first-FIRST-showshowofshowshowWaitingforGodot! Oh! Rhyming low.

Ulysses. Back to it. Another copy next to th e blue: Joyce’s handwriting. Signed a copy. Copy. His capital ‘J’s differ—the symbolic use of arbitrary defiance to typographic order upon a page, lettering not uniform. L e t t re er rerere. Lettering defiant. Joyce, James. James Joyce. JJ JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ—

Breakdown of lang. ONBLOG. Uly-ss-es, the creator of liberated words, ‘gibberish’ worth analyzing, My heart set fire to eyes impressed. Upstairs: boring portraits, faded book covers, yadadddaaddada, WAIT! A piano. Small, brownupright. Joyce. It was his. Pry it, pry it, playplayplay—locked. But the foot pedals. Work. I want to be better. Work. Like. Work. Joyce. Work. Work.

Writingthisdown. Same sheet all day. I wrote words last night, amidst enchant: lost paper, still the memory:  My cigarette—a sheet of paper / A breath of words to write / my unprofound thoughts. Unprofound—twist ending, psychological layer not actually negati—not not, it is. The word ‘cigarette’—I don’t smoke. But the same feeling of excuse to break a moment outside, seems similar. Release of words. Somersault, somersault, on the pained hour bus ride back. Anna in headphones, my pointer and thumb in writing.

            After that literary experience, I felt this last day in Dublin was worth staying for. In case the above confused you, Ulysses is a modernist novel (termed a ‘psychological epic’) by James Joyce, written in serialized form from 1918-1920, then published in its entirety 1922. As the title suggests, the allusion is to Homer’s Odyssey and every chapter is entitled after one of Homer’s, though the connection to the original story is so far engrained in a linguistic layering of metaphor and allusion that it is not obvious upon first glance—that there even is meaning to the work. It is considered the great psychological epic of modernism. The whole 780ish-page novel covers one day: June 16, 1904. A day intentionally ordinary. The greatness of it is its pure modernism, its breakdown of a linguistic style in every chapter, hence the previous paragraph’s linguistic breakdown. Liberating.

Anna and I reunited with the guys at the airport and we met up with Caitlin, Fiona, Emma, Bella, and Alex (Lauren had to catch a different flight due to complications in not getting a flight confirmation weeks ago). I got a chance to read more of Frankenstein and an hour-flight and two-hour taxi drive later, here we are. Back at UEA in Norwich. And I am back in Norfolk Terrace.

            Norfolk Terrace, Day 73. Ulysses, the hardest book I have ever read. The challenge was rewarding, though. I really felt myself realizing a new way to read, of simply seeing words recreate themselves from fragment into phrase into sentence, nonlinearly. I write this blog as a travel blog, but I keep it ‘Ulyssian’ in the sense of finding my voice in a new guise of writing. Ulysses made me want to throw it across the room, made me say aloud ‘Joyce, you’re an a—’, made me finally break from engrained convention of reading for a bit and soak in roots of creative liberty and the arbitrariness of any linguistic creation. Literature is inspired—but the words are human. That is why I love and hate Ulysses with a literary passion.

Day 72, 19 March: Guinness

Bewleys Hotel, Dublin, Day 72. Guinness

            
            Rolling into a taxi at noon, the seven of us (reiteration: me, Vinnie, Joseph, Mo, Briar, Anna, and Kat) took Dublin by storm today. I chatted with the taxi driver, who informed me of Trinity College passing on our right. Charles Dickens attended that university.

            Once we were dropped off where the taxi driver had recommend for us to eat, O’Neill’s, we had lunch (ahembreakfasttooahem) and I had an incredible double-decker sandwich of chicken, bacon, barbeque sauce, tomatoes, caramelized onions, and steaming mushrooms. I took a picture of it with Vinnie’s camera. (Despite the lack of photos from here on out on the trip, I shall borrow friends’ pictures and eventually put them up on the blog.)

            Our group split off into the three guys and the girls—plus me. The girls wanted to do the bus tour and so did I. We basically got a €16 lift around scenic Dublin and Anna, the art museum appreciator (well, leader of it), wanted to stop at the Modern Art museum. We did, but the experience went like this:

            Empty. Windows of lonely exhibits—or was the building the centrepiece? The art appreciated by its exterior container? Three sculptures surrounded the building. Nothing. Silent winds.

            We headed off into a nearby garden of a late 17^th-early 18^th century fashion. The crunch of gravel, the crunch of gravel, write it down, I wish I could, check pocket, pen…I ripped a sheet of paper this morning! Yes! This detail reminded me of my quick-minded idea this morning to have paper with me. I write the details of each day based on the fragments of a page.

            The crunch of gravel into a silent garden, its design ancient but recently built of last century. Moss-stained statue to my right, a goddess? The fountain in the centre has folding swan wings—or tree canopy.

            After a bitterly cold wait, we re-entered the tour bus (supposedly one comes every 10 minutes—we proved that wrong) and drove around a roundabout, my eyes fixed on the centre statue: the essence of this park, a Phoenix opening its wings and rising from its ashes of stone. The resurrection preserved.

            The last gas-lit lamps of Europe lined the streets of Phoenix Park. We past back into the modern life, the tall business buildings made of geometric experiments of glass, a building sign embroidered: Na Cúluteanna Breithiúnais Coiriúla—Gaelic above English, a common thing in Dublin—‘The Criminal Courts of Justice’.

            After the four of us got off at Trinity College and walked the grounds, Kat and I decided to join the guys at the Guinness Storehouse. After a wild goose chase of catching a bus, then waiting for the next one, we made it back on the green tour bus and headed to the founding brewery of all that is Guinness.

            Holographic projections of silhouettes took up the walls around the Guinness ticket line. The silhouettes moved: people walked and horse carriages prodded on. Kat and I found out the guys had already left, but we took the tour for ourselves anyway. We split the cost of a €11 disposable camera at the gift shop and dived into the first of seven levels of the Guinness Storehouse. (As we walked in, we looked down at a manuscript preserved under glass: the founder’s 9000-year lease when he started the brewery.)

            Four ingredients to Guinness: barely (grains upon grains piled in sand dune formations), hops (glass exhibiting the leafy growth), yeast (sun-golden images), and water (waterfall passing just over the walkway, the waters glittering with euro pennies). The factory insists that there is a fifth ingredient: its founder, Arthur Guinness (1725-1803).

            Second level: the production. Kat and I watched a video of the making of a storage barrel, known as a cask, for twenty minutes—the worker begins with just evenly cut lengths of wood, trims to join them (measuring just with his eye), places a ring to encircle the wooden lines, drills a hole in one side, steams the cask for twenty, soon goes into curving the wood to fit on the second metal ring, adding the top (cutting based on the measurements of a large compass), and viola, you have a cask that takes a lot more work than one would think. Guinness had cask makers of this sort for a long time.

            Quiz on the enchanted liquids and common knowledge: Kat and I both took it on this floor, 3.

            Floor 4: advertisements through the centuries/decades. Floor 5: restaurant and how to cook Guinness in basically anything (okay, just a few things…but chocolate mousse cake?). Floor 6: the procedure for pouring from the tap. Towards the upper levels, Kat and I realized that the building’s opening in the middle was shaped like a pint of Guinness, the bottom smaller and the top with more (empty) room.

            Then Floor 7: The Gravity Room. As is part of the tour, we each received a free pint of Guinness in a room with a 360 degree view of the whole of Dublin. At sunset, in our case. It was just incredible. The alchemy of Guinness brilliant.

            After taking our last disposable camera picture (of 39) in front of a sign just outside the storehouse, we met up with the rest of our seven near the Millennium Spire (officially ‘Spire of Dublin’, by the way) and we ate a quick Subway meal. It’s a €6 Footlong here, if you were curious.

            I couldn’t agree more with the consensus: it was to be a night-in, enchanting with more bonding and less taxi expenditures (generally €23 between the seven of us). I bonded with the taxi driver—his name is Vinnie Cowper, a likeable Irishman, and since I was in the front seat, I was able to ask if he knew where my last name came from. He narrowed down that ‘Tierney’ was not from the north, but from the east probably, yet that’s all he could figure. Still, it was good conversation. He complained of how fun it is to be a kid nowadays, but I immediately considered the less freedom involved in childhood. He agreed, recalling his mother yelling the names of his brothers and him to come home from the park at ten o’clock in the evening.

Once back, I snuck in 35 pages of reading Frankenstein while downstairs in the lobby, around the time I emailed that I was alive and had a taste of Dublin today (which is Guinness).  

            The nightly bonding was great. The seven of us played cards with genii bottles and I soon came to life in the spirit of the Energizer Bunny. I gave them good laughs with my silliness as the night went on. 

Day 71, 18 March: Walking Dublin

Bewleys Hotel, Dublin, Day 71. Walking Dublin

            
            This day could also be known as ‘Recovery Day’—a night of strong enchantment has consequences. But nothing beats arriving back in the city centre of Dublin and having an incredible traditional Guinness beef stew—yeah, I know, just like me, you’ll soon realize that this city lives on this stuff; Guinness, the water of Ireland.

            In walking around, our group met up with Alex and Lauren on Temple Bar street (Caitlin, Emma, and Bella relaxed and did their own thing today). Craving gelato, I bought it with Joseph and we shared a spoon. I’m kidding. But the mint chip was so amazing. Before this, we had all gone in a Disney-themed candy shoppe—I was craving Reese’s Cups and the others got sugary vines and dotted sweets.

After a passive debate on whether we should do the bus tour of Dublin, we decided to wait another day. Instead, we all followed Briar and Anna as they led us to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Most of the group stayed in the gardens outside, but Briar, Anna, Kat, and I all paid the €6 mandatory donation and entered inside.

            I viewed the inside, and the city of Dublin, cameraless—in a sense, liberating me from the obligation, as much as I craved for pictures. I told myself last night at Temple Bar the following: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words, but…which words?’ Somehow that justified a cameraless experience for me. In fact, I picked up a habit of another type of recording later on.

            The Cathedral was more a museum, a preservation of people’s memories on the walls, famous Biblical scenes in the series of stained glass, stone tombs and high arches, the dust of ages past and present. I touched the table that Jonathan Swift gave out the Eucharist on—after a short-lived political career, he became the Dean of St. Patrick’s (a prestigious position carried on even today) and wrote his political satires then. There was a small wall memoir of Swift’s servant—an ambitious move to honor a ‘lowly’ figure next to the greats, but that is the politically ambitious, light-of-liberty Swift for you. The grounds where the Cathedral was built is said to be where Saint Patrick baptized thousands.

            Once reunited with the whole group, I noticed a flowerbed that Vinnie was quoting. I went up to it and read ‘Here lie the seeds of peace to spread throughout the world’. Yellows, violets, reds, and indigos dotted the grass in an arrangement akin to a summer day pointillist painting.

            On our way back, Mo and I parted from the group to use the bathroom at Porterhouse Brewery Company pub. The name wouldn’t be mentioned if it wasn’t for what happened the second we stepped inside: a sound greeted our ears—a mix of flute, guitar, drums, and vocals far above us in an elevated alcove. After the restroom trip, we walked upstairs and heard the Irish group Sitar play live music to a lively pub crowd in the middle of the Sunday afternoon. It was so perfect, an ambience so intimate and alive I didn’t want to leave. A great Irish cultural vein pulsed all around me, the beat of the drum, of the bartender pulling down the Guinness tap, of the hum of conversation, the hum of dim lights, hummed, beat. The flute’s golden music—a siren keeping me there. But finally, this treasure of a moment had to fold back up and be absorbed in the rest of the day’s archive of events.

            Back on the Millennium Spire side of the city centre, passing over a bridge, I called Katya, as promised. The experience was stressful—not only was it international but my provider is British, so it’s doubly international to call and the first few attempts failed. During this time, I bought Irish souvenirs at a quality tourist shop. Then we got it to work and the call lasted six minutes—at that point both the taxi came to take us back to the hotel and the phone just ended the call. No text or call from my phone could be made for the rest of the trip. Not only cameraless, I was now phoneless.

            After Mo and Vinnie turned the lights off in the room and bolted off to the airport, I joined the girls in their room to watch the end of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then a series of MTV-esque music videos of boy bands came on—they’re…still around? Apparently. But the modern ones have these three-letter initials and that’s their name. So abstract, like the cubist video of one of them.

            Group Awesome (which really includes everyone on the trip, but in this case, the main 7 of us) made a return to the Temple Bar of Temptation—the taxi there was a hit. Party lights shined from the ceiling and it felt like a party limo. After that temple, in which again we forgot about Baby Dublin, we taxied off to Copper Faces club. I call this my least favourite night—dancing was congested, the rooms were underground, I got lost from the group a few times (there was a bit of panic when this happened, since I was phoneless).

            We returned to Bewleys Hotel at 3. I fell asleep first. Apparently Vinnie jumped over my sleeping body at some point. Oh well, it was a good sleep.

Day 70, 17 March: Dublin On St. Patrick's Day

Bewleys Hotel, Dublin. Day 70. Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day

            10 AM. Left. Two eight-person taxis to London Stansted Airport. Several toiletries confiscated by security due to quantity of liquid—Mo, robbed of all his toiletries but a toothbrush. Hour flight, started Frankenstein, noticed Joseph dozing next to me.

            [For the sake of convenience and retrospective narration perspective, I travelled with basically three groups: my main group (Vinnie, Joseph, Mo, Anna Cahn, Briar, and Kat—the last three were on the Cambridge tour with me), the two girls who stayed at a hotel near Temple Bar (Alex and Lauren), and the four Australian girls who went out with us the first night and then did their own thing (Caitlin—definitely a constant visitor to the guys’ room Saturday, then Fiona, Emma, and Bella). For only the first night, Haley joined us, but unfortunately had to get back early Sunday to do an essay she had accidentally erased.]

           D u b l i n, I r e l a n d. The airport was the foreshadow: green dotted and spiralled and soared every which way, three- and four-leaf cloves all over the place, balloons of the Irish flag (orange, white, and green) hovered above hallways. Little did we know that our bus transportation to and from the city centre would make us so familiar with the airport every day that it became way too much.

            After stocking up on genii bottles for the night, we took the free shuttle from the airport to our close-by hotel—we arrived at Bewleys Hotel by 3, just missing the parade in the city. A fish bowl of real three-leaf clovers sat on the receptionist desk, next to a sign: FREE. I took one, which shrivelled up almost instantly. Oh well. We all paid Joseph at front—such a good deal: 3 nights, 4 days and the cost for each of us was €55 for accommodations. (Yes, currency change! Now into euros.) …we all spent a lot more money on this trip than we expected, though.

            Elevators of glass and scenic view took us up to the second floor (we habitually were lazy). Two hallways down we found our rooms (that is, my main Group of Awesomeness): Room 240 and 241, guys’ and girls’ room. Mo and I took the middle double bed, Joseph got the single, Vinnie the couch bed.

The Guys (Vinnie, Guinness, Joseph, Mo,  and in front, me) 

            We spent two hours getting prepped for the night, excited as all get-out. Green hairspray, green fabric for bracelets, shamrock magic-glass necklaces, green crayon for face, Kat’s excellent face-painting skills for the forehead three-leaf clovers. This last one, the face paint, stayed on the longest amidst the heat of the Dublin temples of temptation in the night.

            We headed down to the lobby and had our first Guinness of Ireland. Astounding. For those of you of an unripe age, imagine stale, black liquid—then, by the alchemist powers of Dublin’s founding Guinness brewery, change that taste to one of a beautiful black glory, its bitterness sweet, its sweetness bitter. This is the milk and honey of the land of Ireland. In seeing the pouring of it, I witnessed the liquid beginning as pale brown, the colour of milked coffee, and slowly vertical waves move down the glass and by gradations, the brown transforms into a beautiful blackness.

AIRPLANE POSE (Kat, then Joseph and Mo--or 'Mojo')

            We were ready for the night. In our first stage of enchantment, we befriended the shuttle bus driver. His name, Paddy Senior. I am not kidding. He was no ordinary bus driver of 50 years of age—no, sir. He enjoyed our loud company and at some point, and as Mo adamantly admits, he did the moonwalk down the aisle in the centre of the bus, at one of the early stops.

            During our ridiculous photo sessions on the shuttle, Vinnie swiped my camera out of Mo’s hand, accidentally bringing it to the floor. The lens apparatus took the shape of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Though frustrated, I know this was not done on purpose and Vinnie paid Karma’s price: about halfway through the city centre on the bus, he had to get off. His enchantment took a sickening turn, shortening his first night to an early bedtime and late late night fun upon our group’s return.

This captures the moment before the
camera's gravity freefall.

            After parting ways with the legend that is Paddy, Fiona and Anna magically wound up with a large Irish flag. For the rest of the trip, the flag’s name was ‘Baby Dublin’. Unfortunately, due to his bulgy nature, Anna neglected her maternal duties to the flag and left him under the counter at Temple Bar.

            Getting off the hour-long bus ride (we soon resorted to taxis on upcoming days), we saw our first sight of the heart of Dublin: a 120-metre Millennium Spire burst from the centre of the street, encircled by a roundabout. The streetlight poles stretched upwards, then spiralled a little toward the street, each hanging onto a white drooping raindrop of light. The standard neon lights of Subway, McDonalds, Burger King, and more Dublin-esque restaurants took over the block. The city was alive. This was the night of green, of Leprechaun hats and Irish luck. We followed the herds making their way to the mecca of Dublin night life, Temple Bar street. Imagine New York City on New Years—but narrow the street and embellish in green all you can possibly imagine. It took us about an hour to walk four blocks, caught in a sea of people happy and enchanted with the night airs.

            Finally, we were admitted into Temple Bar. Kat and I clinked our first Guinness of Temple Bar. A statue in one of the seven cavernous, wooden rooms had a man with arms out in victory, each of his hands grasping a genii bottle. In another room were framed autographs decorating the walls and wooden pillars: I saw Sean Connery’s, dated ’97.

            Caitlin and I ended up at the platform end of the main room, cheering from high stools near the red neon sign ‘T E M P L E   B A R’. Epic night.

            All of us guys, minus the sleeping Vinnie—and Haley—took an aircoach back to the airport before midnight. We had left for the temples of temptation around 7, but after so many hours, we felt like leaving Temple Bar and head back—the music was getting old and there was Vinnie to go see. He woke up eventually and texted us as we returned.

            On the aircoach, Mo chatted it up with two French students heading back to the airport after a night of Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations. At one point, he broke out into Arabic, and one of the girls responded. He was born in Morocco, with an almond face of perpetual sunshine and friendship, but I didn’t anticipate multilingualism. As wth any multilingual surprise (most common in college when the Spanish or Japanese mother of your roommate calls and he goes fluently out of English), I definitely admired it.

            Shining the light now on Joseph, I want to speak of his character: with a rugged face, born of the mountainous New Zealand and weathered by the storms of ages, Joseph exudes a natural spring of leadership and confidence from life experience. Since we spoke on the topic of girls and relationships, it was discovered (truly, one look can give you this accurate impression) that he is a man of integrity: a night out is not for catching all the girls. The easy target is not the desire; the girl with the sharp wit and steady charm that lasts beyond a night’s appearance is Joseph’s choice.

            We parted from Haley, now off for her flight, and headed back to Vinnie at the hotel. Hours past and the night took a fun twist when the main group and Caitlin crowded into the guys’ room and watched infomercials: ‘It’s like a spaceship cleaning my floor.’ ‘7 in 1 cleaning thing….for ONLY €100! I think it’s the built-in fog machine that sells it.’ We laughed until we fell asleep.

Day 69, 16 March: Post Script: Breaking Free of Localized Love

Post Script: Breaking Free of Localized Love

[One of the flaws of writing an early blog is missing something. I missed a detail. And that detail evolved into a reflection.]

I called Katya today. On my £2 mobile phone. When I got to dialing, I stopped. It was a dreadful feeling to realize that I had forgotten my girlfriend’s phone number. I found it on my laptop, but in that moment of forgetting, there was a real sense of technological dependence and a lost touch with old forms of communication I used with friends and family back home. It was like I was forgetting part of her name. I was displaced in a different dialect of digits.

I heard her say ‘hi’, her naturally disarming tone she uses even when she doesn’t know who’s on the other line yet. I smiled to myself that she probably read the fifteen digit phone number and thought either wrong number or just maybe…me. It took maybe a second or several words between us to recognize each other’s voice. I want to say we recognized each other just before we said our names.

I felt an odd sense of freedom. I wasn’t in a chair. Or at a computer. Or at a desk—well, okay, I was standing up right next to the desk, but her voice was in my ear, not from earbuds or headphones, but from a tangible mobile phone. I could move around—and still hear her voice. It made me realize that our technological link of contact had been grounded for me in one spot for these months. I think of her, I see her, I talk to her at this same desk. Love has been localized, restricted, statically framed in a laptop monitor against the dynamic of her words and videos. Her memory is archived and recorded, her visual made of pixels, not cells. I talk to a moving picture on skype but I register the words, the gestures, the twirl of her hair, the laugh, the inflection and suddenly the composite can be no one other than Katya. The symphony of quirks is in harmony with the reality of her presence I can still call to mind.

      The phone call liberated me from the screen. From the localized love.

         I go to Dublin knowing the exact area codes to enable me to call her.

  And I will.

Day 69, 16 March: Fun Distractions, Still Essays

Norfolk T______, Day 69. Fun Distractions, Still Essays

            I was on a trampoline, or was it on a gigantious couch facing an elegant wall of crystal glass? Either way I find a mobile phone, feel it buzzing, and place it beside my pillow. The dream continues.

            8:57. The digits stared back at me like red ants intent on pinching me of my remaining minutes until 9. Groggy-eyed, I arose quickly and walked to class, only five minutes late. The seminar tutor introduced an activity dividing the class in two, discussing two separate juxtapositions: a poem from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads vs. a poem from Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (the plagiarized title was intentional, which was part of the reason why we compared the poems). The conclusion: Wordsworth allows for more opposition (i.e. difference of opinion) between the subject (narrator) and the object (the outcast, beggar, or child in the poem).

So this box actually came earlier this
week, but it's still making this week feel
as if  I'm connected to Trader Joe's
while in Britain (Thanks, Mom). 

            I bought my third hot sandwich roll this week. After weeks of preparing sandwiches, I felt like taking advantage of prepared food (ahem, First World laziness). I ‘close read’ a little of Great Expectations, pre-brainstorming stage for paper # 2. The rest of the day was mostly devoted to the first paper, still on Shelley but going through its second reincarnation. Three times from scratch is too much. I’m psyching myself out. New strategy: analytical stream of consciousness. The only rule is not stopping. Potentially disastrous but sounds so glorious to save time. (Okay, tempting…).

Research...there's no way around it:
It's just daunting sometimes.

(I'm the one with the salad.)

            How I Met Your Mother, hiding Charlie’s food, arguing with Jen, Charlie, Alvin, and Dan about the pronunciations of ‘herb’ (IT’S ‘ERB’!), ‘tomato’ (not tow-MAW-tow), and ‘pasta’ (PAH-sta, not Paa-sta),  cooking with Vinnie, and skyping Katya were definitely pleasant details to an otherwise academic desk-sitting day. I found today’s study approach, with the breaks, much more refreshing.

              Tomorrow until Tuesday night is Dublin. As recommended to me by various people, bringing a laptop might be a bad idea. And it’s Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. I apologize in advance that the next few days will be blogless. But hey, when there’s a trip, there are plenty of stories to tell…provided I remember them. Cheers! For St. Patrick’s Day!