Look! A proper update!
And slightly GIP because Arthur amuses me.
Soooo back in Dublin and back to being human again! It's a nice feeling. I was mostly human at the start of the weekend but idiot housemates convinced me to not be for most of the weekend which is a bit of a story in and of itself that I won't get into because. Well because it's just not that terribly interesting.
So I missed every single class last week, but apparently didn't actually miss much outside of a bit of Joyce on account that it was mostly introduction all over again as its new option courses and the Joyce class is the only one that met twice so they got over that a bit. Which means I get thrown right into it now, but I don't mind so much, really. But! I got up and went today only to realize as I was ALMOST THERE that there had been an email. That might have said class was canceled today and moved to Wednesday at some time that I will have to look up again in a minute. I do not retain things read when ill, even vaguely important emails. But it was alright because I ALSO recalled on the journey there that I needed to pop in at the fees office and sign my financial aid checks. There are 3 of them, though I'm not really sure why. And the exchange is apparently better this go round which means I GET MORE MONEY IN EUROS! Huzzah! Roughly 2,000 to survive me til March and I DON'T have to buy ridiculous things like plates and shit this time around. Though I might buy a few because they like to grow legs and wander off, I've noticed.
But yes. Fees office! Where I spent ever-so-much time back in the beginning of Michaelmas term. Pure muscle memory that got be back up there. I don't recall if I mentioned before that it is a horribly confusing place to get to. Let me list the reasons (again, if I've done it before because I honestly don't recall if I did or not)
1. It's not on campus. Rather it's down a rather wide road that's annoying to cross and nestled sneakily beside Starbucks on the other side of what can only be described as a resting place for taxi cabs.
2. It has CRAZY HOURS. 10-4, but with a giant lunch break from 12-2 so you really just have to pay attention to the time.
3. You go in and go up to this little security booth thinger and say "Fees Office" like you know what you're doing (or rather, don't, as you are REQUIRED TO ASK) and then you plonk down in a queue for which you might manage a seat and wait until they give you the magic card.
(This is when it gets fun.)
4. You go through the door, to the left, up to the first floor, through another door, down a little hall to the right, wave the MAGIC CARD at this keypad that doesn't look like a card should be related to (I always find people confused at this point and lead them along), into a little room, onto an elevator to the THIRD floor and through another door where you get to ANOTHER desk, where, if you are lucky, the person you need to talk to recognizes you and knows what the hell you want so you don't have to just stare at this room full of people in half-wall boxes and hope you pick the right one.
5. All these little doors like to hide around corners.
So yes, the first foray into the Fees Office is a perilous thing and though the security guy will try to explain it, everyone still gets hopelessly lost. I am exceedingly lucky to have spent so much time there. And look! If you are ever trying to find the Fees Office at Trinity YOU HAVE A NICE LITTLE GUIDE. Unless they move it. Which they very well could. Not that it would help because I get lost locating offices on campus as well. Trinity was not meant for people who are navigationally challenged. Do not get me started on the library(ies) for I think I could be lost in the BLU complex for days upon days. They are all connected and I have no idea how. I know where the Irish Lit books are though and that's like, almost everything I need. Because I was led there and told "This is our section" or something along those lines. I rarely venture beyond those stacks. It's safer that way.
Okay I clearly need to update more often again because I have at least two three more points to expound upon and I am probably drowning you all in my verboseness on the subjects here. Oops. And clogging flists. Maybe I'll cut something.
Tangentially related to the fees office ramble (as I was up on campus at 1, not 2, when the damned thing opened again), I spent my free time walking into almost every bookshop I passed. There is one called "Books Upstairs" that is exceedingly cool and fun to wander in as it's like. Really tiny but really crammed with books and it goes up into a mezzanine section and they're all under hand-drawn headers of vague topics and I was very close to picking up a book on Nietzsche (why is his name so hard to spell) just because the shop was so cozy and I'd already picked up what I'd meant to buy over at Hodges Figgis (that being Ulysses, Eureka Street and What Are You Like?--the last of which I hadn't meant to buy but it was on sale and it is on my reading list for oh, several weeks away but I'm quite fond of Enright after reading The Gathering last spring. Woman has a way with words. There was this one little section that was talking about grief and how it was a bit sexual and a bit like excretion in the way it's this warm ball of despair somewhere south of your stomach-- "This grief that is almost genital" is definitely a line I'm remembering, thanks. Wow. Random. Moving on. (READ THE BOOK)) and nowhere I looked had Cromwell which is really a very long poem but there was a bit in it about the devil fucking Cromwell up the ass and giving him gas that later helped the Germans and it's just very bizarre and surreal and a bit like stumbling through a fever dream and I want to own it, if only it would ever jump to hang when I'm in the bookshops.
OKAY THERE WAS A POINT TO THIS I SWEAR AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STRANGE ALLUSIONS TO SEX IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH LIT.
Seriously.
But Muldoon's "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants" has some fun mentions of it too. And Alice in Wonderland and Gertrude Stein and a lot of apples and a dolphin from New Zealand. Er. Don't mind me, I am a crazy literature student with her mind permanently stuck in the gutter when it comes to literature. It's more fun that way.
THE POINT had rather a lot more to do with Dublin and Joyce and reading Ulysses on the bus and how it actually might almost be cooler than reading Deathly Hallows two blocks away from Tottenham Court Road and running down to the street in your night clothes to gape and go a bit starry eyed that the characters are within walking distance, fiction be damned!.
So I might be amending my view of Joyce to being a bit less of a pretentious and purposefully obtuse sort of person a bit because despite all that, it's a damn good read. I definitely just spent more time getting to the point than making it. And got OCD and went back and added appropriate HTML for titles. Sigh. (The only book I didn't manage to ramble about was Eureka Street, so for good measure I have to note that I was assigned to read an excerpt from it in undergrad and did so on the steps of the foreign language trailer-building-thing and proceeded to become entirely enthralled because it is entirely shocking. About the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the descriptions of a sandwich shop bomb and its after-effects in various kinds of people was absolutely haunting. I was almost late to German.)
The other thing I wanted to mention was this bizarre friendship that's sprung up between me and this undergrad who lives across the Halls and I've met face-to-face twice now. We mostly communicate via very, very random text messages but he asked me over for tea yesterday and I ended up staying and watching TV and exchanging very, very random questions throughout...well a lot of different things on the TV including The Simpsons, Southpark, City of Angels, part of Castaway and a few things I don't know the name of at all. I texted him about socks today. It's all very random and highly entertaining in a completely unexpected way.
Oh hell, one other thing. Merlin. This fandom has eaten my brain, chewed it up and spit it back out into pieces of insanity because I have the beginnings of an AU-But-Sort-of-Not sitting in Word right now that could be epic if I knew more about the workings of politics. I see pointless but entertaining research in my future. Hopefully after I've done something about that essay that's due next week.
Can I write my entire dissertation about sex in Irish lit and how it makes the best visual images? Because this entry shows that I seem to have a strange obsession in that direction.
Now to cut huge chunks of this. Holy god I'm sorry if you read all that.
[edit] oh god hahahaha cracking up at facebook because people from high school like to add me even though they are primarily uber-christian and conservative and all and I'm well, not like that and one of them was just trying to talk to me about having a boyfriend and I think I just completely scandalized her. I need to go laugh my ass off for a while now. [note: one reason for not being in a serious relationship is that I'm too flighty and don't want to get too tied down so I'm not starting anything unless for some weird reason I really MEAN it--which is unlikely. But that explanation just got a "take the man with you!" to which I responded that half the fun was the men in the new places. Not that I mean like, sex, though this entry is riddled with it, but just meeting new people, new experiences, but I don't think she got that as she promptly took her leave. lol just rolling laughing, man!]
Soooo back in Dublin and back to being human again! It's a nice feeling. I was mostly human at the start of the weekend but idiot housemates convinced me to not be for most of the weekend which is a bit of a story in and of itself that I won't get into because. Well because it's just not that terribly interesting.
So I missed every single class last week, but apparently didn't actually miss much outside of a bit of Joyce on account that it was mostly introduction all over again as its new option courses and the Joyce class is the only one that met twice so they got over that a bit. Which means I get thrown right into it now, but I don't mind so much, really. But! I got up and went today only to realize as I was ALMOST THERE that there had been an email. That might have said class was canceled today and moved to Wednesday at some time that I will have to look up again in a minute. I do not retain things read when ill, even vaguely important emails. But it was alright because I ALSO recalled on the journey there that I needed to pop in at the fees office and sign my financial aid checks. There are 3 of them, though I'm not really sure why. And the exchange is apparently better this go round which means I GET MORE MONEY IN EUROS! Huzzah! Roughly 2,000 to survive me til March and I DON'T have to buy ridiculous things like plates and shit this time around. Though I might buy a few because they like to grow legs and wander off, I've noticed.
But yes. Fees office! Where I spent ever-so-much time back in the beginning of Michaelmas term. Pure muscle memory that got be back up there. I don't recall if I mentioned before that it is a horribly confusing place to get to. Let me list the reasons (again, if I've done it before because I honestly don't recall if I did or not)
1. It's not on campus. Rather it's down a rather wide road that's annoying to cross and nestled sneakily beside Starbucks on the other side of what can only be described as a resting place for taxi cabs.
2. It has CRAZY HOURS. 10-4, but with a giant lunch break from 12-2 so you really just have to pay attention to the time.
3. You go in and go up to this little security booth thinger and say "Fees Office" like you know what you're doing (or rather, don't, as you are REQUIRED TO ASK) and then you plonk down in a queue for which you might manage a seat and wait until they give you the magic card.
(This is when it gets fun.)
4. You go through the door, to the left, up to the first floor, through another door, down a little hall to the right, wave the MAGIC CARD at this keypad that doesn't look like a card should be related to (I always find people confused at this point and lead them along), into a little room, onto an elevator to the THIRD floor and through another door where you get to ANOTHER desk, where, if you are lucky, the person you need to talk to recognizes you and knows what the hell you want so you don't have to just stare at this room full of people in half-wall boxes and hope you pick the right one.
5. All these little doors like to hide around corners.
So yes, the first foray into the Fees Office is a perilous thing and though the security guy will try to explain it, everyone still gets hopelessly lost. I am exceedingly lucky to have spent so much time there. And look! If you are ever trying to find the Fees Office at Trinity YOU HAVE A NICE LITTLE GUIDE. Unless they move it. Which they very well could. Not that it would help because I get lost locating offices on campus as well. Trinity was not meant for people who are navigationally challenged. Do not get me started on the library(ies) for I think I could be lost in the BLU complex for days upon days. They are all connected and I have no idea how. I know where the Irish Lit books are though and that's like, almost everything I need. Because I was led there and told "This is our section" or something along those lines. I rarely venture beyond those stacks. It's safer that way.
Okay I clearly need to update more often again because I have at least two three more points to expound upon and I am probably drowning you all in my verboseness on the subjects here. Oops. And clogging flists. Maybe I'll cut something.
Tangentially related to the fees office ramble (as I was up on campus at 1, not 2, when the damned thing opened again), I spent my free time walking into almost every bookshop I passed. There is one called "Books Upstairs" that is exceedingly cool and fun to wander in as it's like. Really tiny but really crammed with books and it goes up into a mezzanine section and they're all under hand-drawn headers of vague topics and I was very close to picking up a book on Nietzsche (why is his name so hard to spell) just because the shop was so cozy and I'd already picked up what I'd meant to buy over at Hodges Figgis (that being Ulysses, Eureka Street and What Are You Like?--the last of which I hadn't meant to buy but it was on sale and it is on my reading list for oh, several weeks away but I'm quite fond of Enright after reading The Gathering last spring. Woman has a way with words. There was this one little section that was talking about grief and how it was a bit sexual and a bit like excretion in the way it's this warm ball of despair somewhere south of your stomach-- "This grief that is almost genital" is definitely a line I'm remembering, thanks. Wow. Random. Moving on. (READ THE BOOK)) and nowhere I looked had Cromwell which is really a very long poem but there was a bit in it about the devil fucking Cromwell up the ass and giving him gas that later helped the Germans and it's just very bizarre and surreal and a bit like stumbling through a fever dream and I want to own it, if only it would ever jump to hang when I'm in the bookshops.
OKAY THERE WAS A POINT TO THIS I SWEAR AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STRANGE ALLUSIONS TO SEX IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH LIT.
Seriously.
But Muldoon's "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants" has some fun mentions of it too. And Alice in Wonderland and Gertrude Stein and a lot of apples and a dolphin from New Zealand. Er. Don't mind me, I am a crazy literature student with her mind permanently stuck in the gutter when it comes to literature. It's more fun that way.
THE POINT had rather a lot more to do with Dublin and Joyce and reading Ulysses on the bus and how it actually might almost be cooler than reading Deathly Hallows two blocks away from Tottenham Court Road and running down to the street in your night clothes to gape and go a bit starry eyed that the characters are within walking distance, fiction be damned!.
So I might be amending my view of Joyce to being a bit less of a pretentious and purposefully obtuse sort of person a bit because despite all that, it's a damn good read. I definitely just spent more time getting to the point than making it. And got OCD and went back and added appropriate HTML for titles. Sigh. (The only book I didn't manage to ramble about was Eureka Street, so for good measure I have to note that I was assigned to read an excerpt from it in undergrad and did so on the steps of the foreign language trailer-building-thing and proceeded to become entirely enthralled because it is entirely shocking. About the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the descriptions of a sandwich shop bomb and its after-effects in various kinds of people was absolutely haunting. I was almost late to German.)
The other thing I wanted to mention was this bizarre friendship that's sprung up between me and this undergrad who lives across the Halls and I've met face-to-face twice now. We mostly communicate via very, very random text messages but he asked me over for tea yesterday and I ended up staying and watching TV and exchanging very, very random questions throughout...well a lot of different things on the TV including The Simpsons, Southpark, City of Angels, part of Castaway and a few things I don't know the name of at all. I texted him about socks today. It's all very random and highly entertaining in a completely unexpected way.
Oh hell, one other thing. Merlin. This fandom has eaten my brain, chewed it up and spit it back out into pieces of insanity because I have the beginnings of an AU-But-Sort-of-Not sitting in Word right now that could be epic if I knew more about the workings of politics. I see pointless but entertaining research in my future. Hopefully after I've done something about that essay that's due next week.
Can I write my entire dissertation about sex in Irish lit and how it makes the best visual images? Because this entry shows that I seem to have a strange obsession in that direction.
Now to cut huge chunks of this. Holy god I'm sorry if you read all that.
[edit] oh god hahahaha cracking up at facebook because people from high school like to add me even though they are primarily uber-christian and conservative and all and I'm well, not like that and one of them was just trying to talk to me about having a boyfriend and I think I just completely scandalized her. I need to go laugh my ass off for a while now. [note: one reason for not being in a serious relationship is that I'm too flighty and don't want to get too tied down so I'm not starting anything unless for some weird reason I really MEAN it--which is unlikely. But that explanation just got a "take the man with you!" to which I responded that half the fun was the men in the new places. Not that I mean like, sex, though this entry is riddled with it, but just meeting new people, new experiences, but I don't think she got that as she promptly took her leave. lol just rolling laughing, man!]