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!