is maith liom a bheith ag damhsa.

Dia duit, a chairde!  You know, it's funny, really, how blogging works.  It's a little like a routine work-out: tough to ease into at first, fun, and then it becomes a bit of a chore.  Back in the day when I actually cared about my upper-body strength, I used to delegate all the push-ups I didn't do one day onto the next day.  At this point, I've got about 4,815,162,342 to do, so the chance that I'll actually do them, at any rate, is negative.  But, let's not let blogging become like that, shall we?  Only two weekends have passed since my last entry, and I think I an at least let you know how much fun they were, you know?  Because if I didn't provide ample opportunity for you all to be jealous of my awesome adolescent life, I just wouldn't have any morals, you know?

I'll start with last weekend.  We were in Carraroe, aka: part of the Gaeltacht, last weekend to brush up on our language skills.  To be honest, it was a little comical, us being there and barely knowing how to say "hello," "how are you," "goodbye," and "thank you."  But I suppose that's how you learn any language.  No one knows how to say "hi" straight out of the womb.

A scenic fence.

Ah, but I digress.  Irish, as you can see from the subject line, and as you will see in words and phrases throughout this entry, is a funny little language.  Right now, it's about as cute as German was when I first started learning, full of fairy tales and catchy rhymes, children laughing, but that's all before you hit Die Verwandlung and see your entire life reflected back at you in that of a man-turned-Käfer.  Outside of the mind-numbing grammar and vocab work, which was literally like taking a giant ball of fuzz and shoving it into all the cracks of my fat brain, we did a lot of fun rhyming and singing.  Everything is pretty catchy, and here's the thing... Which do you remember more--a commercial with an annoying jingle, or one without?  I can't speak for you all, but the amount of times I've had the number for One Direct Insurance stuck in my head since I've been here is bordering on ridiculous.  (In case you were wondering: 1890 222222.)  Since literacy was (and in some ways still is) an elite movement, a lot of cultures stem from an deep oral tradition rather than a literate tradition, so these Irish rhymes, stories, and songs that can so consume your every waking (and dreaming!) moment hold a greater purpose than letting a bunch of dumb foreign kids pretend to be Irish and have fun butchering the language for a weekend.  They pass histories, customs, morals, heroes, enemies, politics, recipes, whatever down the ancestral lines.

don't believe me?  try listening to this a few times and we'll see who's singing in the morning.

We've been looking into the Irish language a lot during my history class, as well.  It was a came to be a rather intense statement of nationalism to speak Irish, so much that our old friend Jonathan Swift abhorred the language, and English was the language of the conquerors.  Little by little during the 18th Century, the Irish language began to fade (at the very least, it quit growing) as the linguisstic and cultural momentum of English became unstoppable.  Once a Catholic seminary school was allowed in Ireland (Maynooth), priests-to-be were taught only in English, so any attempts to bring Catholicism into the mainstream eventually hurt the language.  It certainly didn't help any that preaching in Irish wasn't even considered as a tactic to Protestantize the native Irish.  There was no niche in print culture either, Irish nationalists having little to no access to traditional printing means--and even if they did, they would have needed a whole other typeface from English, one more complicated and expensive to manufacture.  Irish servants working in English gentry households would need to learn English, naturally, and they would bring that learning (mostly through mimicry) beyond the walls of the plantation.  And beneath all of this ran an intense social discontinuity.  The native Gaelic elite had been replaced by the English, leaving a hefty 50-60% of the population still primarily Irish-speaking, but that 50-60% was not made up of higher-status, ambitious visionaries.  So, as oral culture began to die a largely self-imposed (much to my professor's chagrin) death at the hands of literacy, so too did the old oral Irish language begin to diminish in the face of literacy and modern,sleek, new English...

That was a huge chunk of text.  Here, have some more scenery.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that's what made last weekend so refreshing and fascinating.  I met a lot of awesome people and had an amazing time at An Chistin, I danced a lot, and I butchered the language, but, you know, the fact that every sign in the Republic of Ireland is bilingual, that there is a school in the college dedicated to the language, that there are regions where Irish continues to be the first language is encouraging.  I descend, unfortunately, from a colonizing race of people, dumbly intent on cultural normativity, but to know that cultures oppressed by dumbasses can survive and come back valued and embraced by the community is a nice thought.

These kids were brilliant.  They came and performed traditional poems, songs, and dances for us.  They just blew my mind.

Some phrases for your amusement:
Dia duit! Hello.
Dia is Muire duit! Hello to you, too.
Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú? How are you?
Níl mé rodhona anois.  Not too bad.
Tá mé go maith!  I'm great!
Ta mé tuirseach... I'm tired.
Go raibh maith agat!  Thank you!
Cén t-ainm ata ort? What's your name?
Is maith liom a bheith ag damhsa.  I like to dance.

Okay, well, seeing as it is midnight over here and I am falling asleep at the keyboard, this weekend is going to have to wait.  Sorry, but have a little teaser to hold you over:

I'm on a motte!

and i want them galvanized.

If there's one thing you should know about me, it's that I hate to make a scene.  If I'm brought the wrong order at a restaurant, I will quietly eat what was placed in front of me.  I take the time to street-view a new route on Google Maps before I leave the house so I don't look a spectacle getting lost.  And when I'm in a foreign country I long to be invisible, going out of my way to mumble so that no one can hear my accent, or I try my hardest to make everything go smoothly so as to promote the illusion that, even if I'm foreign, I know what I'm doing.  If there's anything I dislike more than eating eggs, it's feeling clueless and unprepared, and that's exactly the feeling that Belfast served up on Sunday.

Our Black Taxi tour began with the driver warning me that I needed to cover my Shanahan sweatshirt logo.  His Northern Ireland accent was a trifle difficult to understand, so at first all I heard was him asking me if I was an Irish dancer.  I smiled a bit and nodded, but he kept talking about my "jumper" and asking if I had anything else to wear.  Slowly, the reality of the situation began to dawn on me, full enlightenment descending when another driver came over and said (jokingly) that it'd be okay because he had a gun in his taxi.  If anyone bothered me... Well, feeling a tad uncomfortable and incredibly embarrassed, I announced that I had a big scarf that would cover the logo, and as I was wrapping it around my neck, I turned my Newman backpack towards the seat and wish I'd stayed home.

This is the sweater I was wearing, but flash back to me on the Antrim coast the day before I realized how dumb it was to wear this.

We were going to the Shankill, you see, and it's a place that was a little hard to believe at first.  Toni Morrison once wrote that all art is political, and I never really stopped to think about that until now.  There are gigantic political murals on almost all the houses in the Shankill, celebrating Protestantism (or in the case of most of them: anti-Catholicism) in the North.  The first one I saw featured your typical Protestant hero, King Billy on a rearing white horse, framed by the date 1690.  Look to your left and there's a memorial to Oliver Cromwell and his hatred of Catholics.  These are pretty standard fare, I'd say, and things I've encountered numerous times studying history.  So, in other words, as angry as Oliver Cromwell makes me, it's a lot like how I feel about Andrew Jackson.  I can distance myself and appreciate what they brought to the table, what they contributed to their times.  These two murals were nothing less than what I expected to see in Ulster.

When you turn around, though, you're confronted with a progression of hatred.  On one mural, a serial killer is celebrated on the side of his family's house for his success in murdering fifty-five Catholics.  Strangely enough, this is followed by a mural that features pastel-drawn children playing on a sunny day, which is followed by the most terrifying salute to the Ulster volunteers.  Our cab driver called it the Ulster Mona Lisa, and, no joke, this is where it gets really freaky, because no matter where you go, the rifle of the gunman follows you.  Up and down, side to side, forward and backward.  I had felt odd before, slightly uneasy, but once this mural was explained to me, I just felt one thing: targeted.

 Looks cheery, right?  In the background is the guy who killed 55 Catholics and who is now a hero for it.

I wish no one had told me about him.  I had nightmares that night.  He really does follow you everywhere.

Now, when someone mentions feeling "uncomfortable" in an OSCA discussion, you can usually count on a chorus of groans accompanied by eyerolls and mumbled annoyance.  This is where I usually get pissed off, get on stack, and yell at people for being disrespectful.  So, for those of you who are probably reading this and rolling your eyes, I would like to inform you that what I felt was real, regardless of how much or how little real danger there may have been (because, let's be honest, the painting was not going to shoot me down).  I am a privileged, white girl from suburbia Ohio, and, as such, I can say that I have never felt so... well... uncomfortable.  History has made me cry before, and I've been angry about injustices to the point of wanting to scream, but I have never experienced this before.  It's hard to describe, but I'm glad I had this experience.  Nothing bad happened, but I feel like I'm a little older after it's all been said and done.  It was really eye-opening, is what I'm trying to say,  and in a lot of different ways.  It brought me closer to my identity as a Catholic; it helped me realize how comfortable I actually do feel in Galway; and it helped me realize just how naive and ignorant I still am...

Moving on before I close out, how many of you have heard of the Berlin Wall?  Alright, well, how many of you knew that there are still walls dividing the Catholics and the Protestants in Belfast manned by British soldiers, covered in graffiti and the occasional burn mark, governed by curfews?  They say it's a little different than the Berlin Wall, and I'm willing to accept that, because it's not keeping people in against their wills, but rather a supposedly voluntary segregation to keep the peace.  It's too high for Molotov cocktails to make it over (hence, the burn marks).  But, on the other hand, the fact is that it's 2011 and I can't wear a sweatshirt without feeling uneasy, and we still need walls to keep the peace because we're so damned stuck in how we are that we can't see how ridiculous it all is.  Like I said, it's really eye-opening.

So, if art is political, what about the art on the other side of the wall around Falls Street?  It's still politicized, but, for some reason, it's less shocking, and, I'll admit that it's in part because I'm Catholic, but I don't think it's crazy to think a lot of you would agree.  Now, I'm not saying either side is right or wrong--they both killed people for reasons that depress me--but what the Catholic side chose to commemorate was easier to swallow.  There were beautiful murals supporting the underdogs in world conflicts--the Gaelic language, Cuba, Palestine, the Basque region--and memorials to the fallen, whether it was the innocent who died on Bombay Street in the 60s, or Bobby Sand's hunger strike.  Both sides committed atrocities, but the difference is in what they chose to celebrate... if that makes any sense?

So, now that I've been properly galvanized, I suppose it's time for me to get to bed.  I had a long weekend and I have a long week ahead.  Expect a more light-hearted entry on gallivanting across the Antrim coast and exploring Belfast City Center sometime soon.

G'night.

the crane.

I may not go out very often, and I may come in very early by normal standards, but I do have a favorite place in town that I have tried valiantly to make a frequent destination, with varied levels of success.  It's called The Crane, a modest-looking green and red building just past a popular, louder venue called The Róisín Dubh.  The walk isn't far, despite what it looks on Google Maps, and it's probably one of the most rewarding experiences to round a corner and hear just the faintest strains of a reel or a jig floating out from down the street, calling you ever so softly home from a long day.

2 Sea Road, Galway.

I wouldn't be lying if I said you can usually hear The Crane on a Tuesday night before you can spot it.  As a Trad enthusiast, it's difficult to keep myself from running up the stairs as soon as I get through the door.  It's a bit like a kid on Christmas morning in reverse.  The music comes in through my ears and, in no time at all, it infects every inch of my body to the point where I really start to have no say at all in where my feet decide to take me and how they'll take me there.  Whether it's a half-hidden treble-step or a more dramatic heel, slide, click, I can still get through a crowd pretty easily, even when I'm dancing, thanks to a year spent living and mobbing for my food in Keep Co-op.

 Yeah, I got my mob face on.

They say you're not supposed to pay attention to the musicians at a pub, that it's meant to be more like background music, but I really can't help myself.  First of all, it's pure magic to watch up to thirty people congregate with a plethora of instruments (violins, flutes, accordions, bodhrán, guitars...) and all mesh on the same tune.  It doesn't start right away either.  A lone instrument will begin, fighting its way through all the voices, and as more in the group begin to recognize the tune, the volume increases until everyone's swaying and head-bobbing together.  I don't think I've ever just sat down in a group, started with the dramatic opening of a symphony, had everyone recognize it, and then join in without hesitation until all the parts were represented.  It just doesn't happen.

 Talent.

Another reason I can't help but pay attention, even if it means being that creeper American in the corner, is that these tunes are so ingrained in my memory that they're like family.  If I could sing, I could sing them.  They have words and rhythms associated with dances that are so familiar to me I feel as if, should I pick up my viola, I could join in the session without breaking a sweat.  But, really, all I know about St. Anne's Reel is that it may (or may not) start on either an E, G, or B.  I can play a slip jig at an obnoxiously slow pace if I concentrate hard enough, and I know one hornpipe...maybe.  So the truth is, no matter how close I feel to these melodies, I still have to keep my distance, and this paradox fascinates me.  It's almost painful, but a good kind of pain, like when you're watching a really fantastic yet horrifying movie, that keeps me on the edge of my seat.  It's almost like all of these notes are trying to break out of my soul, but they have no idea what they'd do if they'd get down to my fingers and so they just sit inside screaming at me that I know them, or that I should know them...  It's very difficult to describe, but it just captivates me.

So, there you have it, folks.  The only place to be on a Tuesday night is The Crane.  It's totally worth it to lose an hour of sleep for the experience, and I only hope that it gets easier to convince people to join me on this crazy ride each week.

cookies & kodak moments.

Move out of the way awesome OSCA cooks, Jen Graham is in the oven now.  Now, before your jaws all drop to the floor and a sound resembling a baby fox in distress squeezes out of your lungs, let me say that I have successfully made lentil curry, broccoli, and mashed potatoes by myself since I've been here, and the triumph doesn't stop there.  This past Friday, to keep myself from eating Oreos & peanut butter, I decided to do some baking.  Yes, Jen baking.  No, house burning.  Here's the recipe (for 48 servings -- I cut it all in half to make 24):

2 3/4 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup of softened butter
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1 whole banana mushed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

You combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl, and in another bowl, you stir together the butter and the sugar.  Then you add the banana and stir/mash until it's mostly smooth.  Add the vanilla, and then slowly mix in the dry ingredients.  I like to use my hands for this part.  As I balled them up to set on a cookie tray, I rolled them around in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon.  They cook for about 7-10 minutes in an oven that's heated to 200 C.  Which might be something like 400 F?

And, yes, there are no eggs and no milk!  And you can use margarine for butter I assume, if you want to be super vegan!  (I just hate eggs because it makes me afraid to eat the dough...)  Eggs are a binding agent, and since bananas are sticky, they act the same way!  I didn't have any problems with the cookies with bananas in the place of eggs.  And they were a huge success!  Here is a picture!

Bananas to the right just to prove I did it.  They were really so delicious!

On Saturday, we went to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher with the International Students Society, and here are some pictures.  I'm really too lazy to say much about it, and I really do think that photos speak for themselves, but I do want to say something about our walking tour of the Burren.  The guy who took us around could tie an ancestor to that land as far back as 200 years.  That's ten times longer than I've been alive.  That's about how old the state of Ohio is, folks, and I certainly can't trace my family back that far, let alone connect them to a plot of land.  Think about how well you'd know a place.  Oh, man, it just blows my mind.

 Cow @ The Burren, which is the Land of the Fertile Rock.  Basically, a boatload of exposed limestone, which releases nutrients into the soil, and also stores water and heat, making this one of the most fertile regions in Ireland.

A little tower of rocks put up by the British so that they'd know where they were in the mountains.  Some people use them as meditation spots nowadays.  Fascinating how meanings adapt to generations.

 Teletubbie Land, or The Shire: 2011, or The Cliffs of Moher Visitors' Center.

 Poll na Brone, an Iron Age (?) portal tomb.

My goals for next week are pretty much the same as my goals for this week.  I didn't accomplish much, but, in my defense, I was catching a cold which has now settled comfortably in my nose.  New goal is to have done a considerable amount of reading, which probably won't happen, but a girl can dream, can't she?  Hope you enjoyed the pictures.  It's off to Belfast next weekend.

Cheers!

choices.

Like everyone, I've been faced with a lot of choices in my life.  Viola, cello, or violin?  Running or dance?  Spanish or German?  Push through, take a semester off, or transfer?  Work or play?  Ireland or Germany?  Even deciding in the morning whether to pack a lunch or try to go without is a choice I make, usually hurriedly, and, not surprisingly, all these choices and decisions I've made over the years have spawned an ocean of 'what if's.  You see, when I'm forced to make a decision in life, I usually freeze or, despite any intense longings for friendship, take the easy, familiar, safe (often lonely) way out.  I've been sure about very few things.  (Would you believe me if I said Oberlin was one of those sure things?)  Maybe I'm a chronic over-thinker to the point of being paralyzed by it, but these past few days have proved a few things to me that I'd like to enumerate below for future use.

Firstly: That, regardless of how many times I have cried, felt intellectually inadequate and lonely, Oberlin was the right choice.  Look at what I've learned about myself, what I've accomplished for myself.  I went in as a freshman with big dreams, no work experience, and no friends.  I left last semester as a junior with five jobs, a lovely group of best friends, and a whole new (free!!) wardrobe.  I feel comfortable in my skin (aka: cherished man-flannel) at Oberlin.  I can make people laugh and I have a family there, and, yes, that includes General Shurtleff.  It really is like home.  I didn't think I'd miss it, but I guess I do.


Secondly: That I picked the right major.  Sure, there are times when people will come up to me and ask me why on earth I'm not studying to be a field biologist, and there are times when I will stroke my chin and wonder that myself.  The truth is, I love plants and animals.  I love to know why they grow here and not there, what different kinds look like and sound like, what's this called, what's that called, how to take care of stuff, how things work, and I absolutely love finding things when I can manage it.  But, like I like my alcohol, so too do I prefer my science lite.  I like looking at pictures and petting animals and going on hikes.  I like making connections and memorizing things.  The truth is, I'm awful at everything else.

It's really hard for me to describe what I really like about history, but it's kind of for the same reasons I love biology.  I love making connections, flipping a page and finding someone else's character smeared all across it in little black type, telling stories.  Numbers and dates are important, but in the fact that they inform the story, lending dimension to the characters and their world.  When I can close my eyes and hear the soft rustle of fabric as cravats are tied, feel a sympathetic smear of ink on my fingers as I take notes on a primary source document... It all means the world to me to feel connected to something.  I couldn't tell you which I love more--biology or history--but I can tell you that I know I'm doing something right.

Do you all need tissues yet?  I'm not finished, but I'll stop being a sap for a second to tell you that I had my first Irish history tutorial on Friday, and I'd like to announce to the world that I participated.  It was fascinating, actually.  We're focusing on the 18th century, and we were assigned this piece on Jonathan Swift and the development of Anglo-Irish patriotism.  Last semester, as many of you know, I was in a pretty fantastic class on the American Revolution and the Early Republic, and the parallels!  Oh, I was practically drooling in my seat.  Does this sound familiar?  "Am I a Free-Man in England, and do I become a Slave in six hours, by crossing the Channel?" Swift was all for economic rebellion--boycotts, self-sufficiency, industriousness.  He hated being taxed and seeing all of Ireland's capital being used to develop England's economy, and he hated hated hated feeling like a second class citizen just because he happened to live in Ireland.  Really, basically, he sounds a hell of a lot like every self-proclaimed Patriot in the American colonies, and it was all brewing around the same time--1763...ish.

But here's the interesting part!  I wrote a paper in my last history class defending the Founding Fathers.  I agreed that they were probably, by our standards, land mongering freaks, but I also argued that it was unfair to apply these standards (and our innate distrust of eloquence) to their grand, sweeping, dripping-in-glitter-and-romance rhetoric, which really did mean a lot to them and everyone else, even if it excluded about 98% of the population.  In that paper, I was extremely lenient towards walking contradictions like Thomas Jefferson, but when discussing Jonathan Swift I just...couldn't...handle it.  I was angry that his reform ideas didn't include native Irish Catholics and the poor.  I turned into one of those cynical, I'm-only-a-history-major-so-I-can-say-you're-wrong people.  I was shocked by myself, squeezing all the romance out of Swift and giving him no free passes.  Why is it okay that Jefferson was a jerk and not okay that Swift was a jerk?  Is it because I grew up with Thomas Jefferson and I hate to see a hero die?  I need to think about this some more, but it's an interesting development...

One more thing I thought about on my walk home was what if (here are the 'what if's again) we had lost the Revolutionary War?  Would we have had a Great Famine?  Would we have been employed building useless walls up mountains, just so that we'd have something to do other than plan another rebellion?  (They didn't employ the Irish building useful things like good roads--no, no, that would be developing infrastructure, and might help future uprisings!)  Would it have been known as the American Rebellion instead?  Would we be a divided nation today rather than the freakish behemoth we became thanks to good ol' Manifest Destiny?  Would Jefferson and Henry and Franklin and all those guys have become disillusioned in failure and, like Swift, have faded into trite?  What thoughts!!  They really make my brain tingle with delight!

And now, before this entry stretches quite from Sea to shining Sea (haha, get it?), I'll hit you with one more realization.


Thirdly: That I made the right choice coming to Ireland.  I could have gone to Germany, and in an alternate universe, I'm probably writing a blog about how studying in Germany was the best choice ever.  I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I'm having a real real Robert Frost moment.  The ~*road less traveled by*~ didn't make all the difference because it was rugged and a path most people wouldn't take.  It made all the difference simply because it wasn't the other road.  I'm not learning things in Ireland because it's better than Germany or something weird and out-of-the-blue.  I'm learning things and making discoveries in Ireland because I'm here, not there, and it's time I make the most of it.