Relocation.

I am now blogging at Games, Cake, Booze, Truth!.

It was time for another change.

Update! Update!

Right. So. After a long and somewhat exhaustive day, I decided to settle down and begin to make my way through a pile of DVDs that magically appeared on my bedside table earlier today (imagine! DVDs just falling out of the sky!). It would not be a night of film-watching on my computer without checking my e-mail first, so I did the usual plug in, dial up, wait for aqua blue light, go. Much to my chagrin, however, my super-awesome (and super-expensive) portable broadband modem decided to break, so I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone with tech support, trying to coax my modem/Internet back into submission. Everything is fine now, but it seems as if every time I'm forced to interact with tech support, the urge to take a gun and pump a wall full of bullets increases. This is usual for most, I'm sure, as tech support always seems to bring out the most irritated in people, but when it's me and the other person, who seems baffled by the fact that an answer to my problem might be nice, the notion of singularity and uniqueness in anger really sets in.

Once everything was back to normal, I treated myself to a trip to the music blogosphere, a journey I haven't made in a while. Along the way, I discovered some pretty good bands (Okay and We/Or/Me among them) and snagged a killer tune by CSS. Oh, and I learned that Aimee Mann and Ben Kweller just played a show at the Minnesota Zoo! If confronting lions and tigers and bears meant I could've gone to that, I would've done it in a heartbeat. No questions asked.

At the moment, life in Dublin is fairly low-key. Some craziness happened over the weekend, but that's cleared up, and my new flatmate is American (from California!), but he hasn't moved in yet, so the excitement has yet to begin. Other than that, just been cooking (teriyaki rice with egg and sautéed mushrooms and onions! yum!), thinking about how much washing I need to do, and drinking in moderation.

Oh, and I'm going to be producing a short film. I guess that's news of some sort.

Like Spinning Plates.

Look, I don't know if more than one or two people ever read this and I don't really care, but let me spin it how it should be spun:

My life is exciting. Finally. I feel like my eyes are no longer glued shut or glued to the wall or plain ol' glued. I feel like I can use that word, "exciting," and mean it with utter sincerity. I don't feel like a liar. I am sitting in my bed in a flat where my name is signed in hard-pressed ink on the lease (adulthood!), and I am thinking of all the things I've done since my study abroad program ended at the beginning of May (adventure!), and to recount it all would mean writing a book of some sort, which I may or may not do, perhaps in the near or distant future. Let's just take a moment, though, and revel in the fact that life is good. Life is this thing that bounces up and down and is constantly threatening to go anywhere, at any time. Life is...exciting. And to be able to say that, well, that's just exciting in and of itself, because of all the things I feel, I feel freer now than I've ever been. And maybe it's the distance between me and the Statue of Liberty, or me and the Sears Tower, or, more abstractly, me and the American flag, but my head is full of such clarity, and it's wonderful, joyous, a call to giddiness, to euphoria. I know I've said this before, but now, more than all the moments combined in the past few months, now I feel as though anything is possible. And that is just indescribably beautiful.

I am a girl of impulse, and sometimes my instincts are right, and sometimes they cause me to suffer debilitating consequences. But this time: I believe I have made the right choice. Living in Dublin for the summer. Living in a country that is not my own. Who knew? Who could predict this is where I'd be, right now, at this very minute, in the wee hours of the morning on Friday the 13th? And I can't spell it all out, and perhaps this is cheating (because I'm copying and pasting something I wrote to a friend not too long ago), but here are five things I've done within the past two weeks. A way, if you will, to show you I am not kidding about such excitement:

1. Went to a film quiz last night. My team, The Avid Shoe Wearers, came in third to last. We were given a prize, however, for Best Team Name (which was totally rigged, because the hosts, our friends, felt sorry for us losing so badly). After said film quiz, went out drinking. Had at least 5 Jameson & Coke's over the course of the night. Got home at 3 in the morning to find my flatmates more pissed than I was. Made sure The Enigmatic Dean, my roommate, got to bed all right. This, after watching him attempt to work and then ring friends (or enemies?) on his mobile. We tried to communicate with one another, but it was all gibberish on his end. This morning, his mobile rang loudly, and due to his still-drunken state, instead of switching it off, he just switched the ring tone. Normally I'd be mad, but it made me giggle in my half-awake state.

2. Went to Paris. Saw many famous sights. Saw Truffaut's gravestone. It was black and simple and that's how I want it done if I'm ever buried. A black cat crossed my path in the cemetery THREE TIMES. Dunno if this is actually good luck, or if these things are always ominous. Also went to the Sexodrome, which is three levels of neon and pure sex. Hanging out in the shop and looking at dildos and vibrators, all I wanted to do was burst out laughing. I felt like a child, but in the best of ways.

3. Got my immigration stuff sorted. Finally. But this has already been mentioned.

4. Saw Gone Baby Gone. It just opened in cinemas here, so it was nice to see it on a big screen. Mixed feelings about various elements, of course, but the acting and direction were solid overall, especially Amy Ryan, who grabs you by the throat with her intensity.

5. Went to arts & crafts night at Pantibar, a gay bar in Dublin. Arts & crafts night is formally called Make-A-Do-Do, and it's hosted by a drag queen who walks around and criticizes you while you're busy making art. The prompt of the night was as follows: "Your mam tries to go see the Sex and the City film, but it's sold out, so she comes home early. When she bursts into your bedroom without knocking, she is shocked beyond belief. What does she find?" We sculpted Barney The Dinosaur out of clay.

Title & Registration.

My computer's back and fixed, which means

My Internet's back and ready to be used, which means

I really am going to try to blog here every day, which means

Excitement?

Oh, and today, The Office of Immigration and Naturalisation stamped me through for the remainder of the 90 days I'm allowed to be here. So I will, as planned (and much to my happiness), be living in Dublin until late August. Big smile on that one.

The only absolutely irritating thing about my life right now is that all the burners on our stove top are completely fucked, which means the New Italian Flatmate and I can't cook. Oh bother!

Further Explanation.

In a little less than 2.5 hours, my laptop will run out of power, possibly for a very long time. In New York, I asked a Mac Genius what was wrong. He said, "It's not your adapter. Your computer just won't allow power to be supplied to it." I've been telling people my laptop is sick, which on many levels is true. It shuts itself down for inexplicably long periods of time. Its backlight goes out, forcing me to put it to sleep and wake it back up again. The screen buzzes like it wants something, anything. And now this. My laptop is sick, and I'm really hoping there is something the fine workers at Mactivate, Dublin's Apple care shop, can do for it.

This has happened at a bad time. I decided to spend the summer living in Ireland, mostly because I've made so many friends and I'd like to be in their company for as long as possible, but also because there's something about this place that makes me happier than I've been--at least on a consistent level--in my entire life. I've been taking care of business over the past few days, most of which has included visiting the Office of Immigration and Naturalisation, finding out how I can save myself from deportation once the 30 days the airport immigration officer decided to wave me in for (even though I can legally have 90) expires, and making myriad phone calls to my parents to get all this sorted. My life has, once again, become an alternation of sequences of events that are either emotionally taxing or emotionally freeing. Take your pick. Point is, it was bound to happen sooner or later, I just wish not here and definitely not now. For all intents and purposes, this is my last summer to relax, though I guess nothing comes for free.

Except food, when supplied at house parties and BBQs (one of which I'm going to tonight). And when supplied at dinner party birthday parties (one of which I'm going to tomorrow). It's funny, but since returning to Dublin from the States, I reckon I've become a bit of a social butterfly. Who knew this was even possible?

Everything's Gonna Be All Right.

This was never meant to be a platform for the kind of writing that could be labeled "emo" or even "emotionally exploitative," but for the record, I would like to say I am angry and frustrated and anxious about the following things:

1. My current legal status as an immigrant, tourist, and non-EU citizen in Ireland.
2. My housing situation, which is stable but dissatisfying, and too depressing to go into detail about.
3. The fact that my nearly-3-year-old computer is in bits. (For those of you alarmed at my use of the word "bits," it's meant in the Irish/British colloquial sense.)

All of these things will get sorted in time, but in an immediate sense, they are causing grave consternation.

Things, however, that are good:

1. I have the Internet again. It isn't unbelievably fast and sturdy, but it will do.
2. My housing situation for next school year has been sorted. I'll be living in one of the larger rooms in the house I lived in this past fall semester.
3. I've once again been given incentive and motivation to apply to grad school, though for a program completely outside of the MFA sphere of things. This line of thinking is completely independent of the hopes and desires of certain people who would like me to attend grad school for all the wrong reasons, which makes me feel capable of being able to make decisions for myself.

It's past 5 AM and light outside. Must be summer.

Such Is Life.

I don't want to say much, but my life is probably going to be far less cinematic from now on.

Even though I'm living in Dublin this summer. And I'm going to be filming a movie this weekend. And I'm in the process of revising a full-length play I somehow managed to write in a month. And I'm going to be writing extensive papers over the next week-and-a-half. And I'm going to Vienna at the beginning of next month. And back to the States for a brief hello-and-goodbye less than a week after that.

Things have happened that mean everything and nothing all at once, and while some of it's caused a bit of consternation, I wouldn't give any of it up for the world.

I Would Like This To Last Forever.

It’s the end of March. This is where I’m at right now:

On Easter Sunday, I arrived back in Dublin from a quick holiday in London. Over the course of two days, I saw my cousin (whom I hadn’t seen in about three months—a strange and surreal fact, considering we’re close on many literal levels), met my cousin’s friend Mara and her New Zealander husband Justin (and stayed in their lovely flat in Chiswick, the Park Slope of London), played with Mara and Justin’s baby, ate some of said baby’s gourmet food, watched In The Night Garden with said baby (and concluded that show is like being on drugs) and Green Wing with everyone else, and cavorted around London. I actually walked the expanse of Brick Lane and ate the best bagels of my life, finally made it to Hyde Park (which wasn’t nearly as cool as I’d imagined it to be), downed a Cadbury McFlurry (and walked into a McDonald’s for the first time in years), visited the Victoria & Albert Museum (which is now on my favorite museums list…it’s the equivalent of a candy store for adults, except you can’t buy or taste anything…during my visit, I had the pleasure of viewing this exhibit, which was so indescribably kick-ass), and went for high tea at The Orangery at Kensington Palace.

On Easter Monday, I went to back to Bray, where I walked along the coast, played air hockey at an arcade, and went bowling for the first time in months. I’m rusty. Go figure. (It was totally worth it, though, for reasons I can’t name here.)

Yesterday, during my day off, I went to Malahide. It was beautiful and sunny—a rare thing in Dublin—and so there was a walk through woods, a walk along the coast, and a walk up to the doorway of Malahide Castle, which did, as the person I was with said, look less like a castle and more like a mansion with turrets. Also, it cost money to go in, so I just looked at it and smiled.

Yesterday night, I finished the first act of my play. It’s due on Tuesday. I’m about to play a game. It’s called: Will This Abroad Student Make Her Deadline? Something tells me there will be much isolation from human folk and plenty of creative introspection within the next few days…

Oh, and to cap off this entry/prove just how cinematic my life has become as of late: on St. Paddy’s Day weekend (which was, in fact, one of the best weekends I’ve had here), I was evacuated from the now-infamous Whelan’s because of a fire next door! As I was with film fest folk, there was much adventuring around the rainy streets of Dublin and into a fest friend’s house, where drink and buttered toast were had and part of a stair railing was broken. Don’t ask. Just imagine laughter and craziness and debauchery, and the night I’m attempting to describe is pretty much summed up.

Fever Pitch.

Tonight, I went to a football match. An Irish football match. I don't think I've ever said "fuck" that many times in a 90-minute period. My life has been very cinematic as of late. Tonight, Tarantino was writing and directing. There were no visible guns, but there was a fight!

In Which I Say "I" A Lot.

Back in Dublin.

The weather has been spastic. (But I apparently control it, so go figure.)

The heat in our building's ceased to work. Which is grand, considering how cold and windy it's been. Hopefully, this problem will be remedied soon. At least the water pressure in my flat is fine. (Knock on wood.)

Tomorrow (today?) marks the beginning of St. Paddy's Day festivities. This essentially means that Dublin goes wild with drunken tourists and even drunker locals. Everyone has fun. Word on the street says it's pretty joyous.

The end of Oxford was the end of a very short era. Spent Sunday lazing about in my friend's flat, watching Anglo-Saxon nerds make weaponry, defensive gear, and costumes for their upcoming reenactment battle in York. Also drank a lot of orange mango juice. Spent the evening feasting on garbanzo and dill soup, pancakes, and spaghetti and meatballs (all homemade), and watching The Mighty Boosh.

Tonight, I went to see Be Kind Rewind, which, despite lukewarm reviews, was very funny, if not a little sentimental. As my film-going mate aptly pointed out, we laughed the loudest. If you love film, I think Michel Gondry's latest means a lot more.

I am in a nice place with my play right now, although writing today was emotionally draining. One day, I'll write a comedy, and everyone will be shocked, most of all myself.

Even though I enjoyed the UK, it feels good to be back.

This is not a lie: pictures coming soon.