sa bhaile, zu hause, 在宅, at home

I've decided to keep up this travel blog.  I will always have a home in Hilliard, but as my friends graduate, marry, move, and as I begin to do some of the same, home starts to feel like another destination.  Of course, it's a destination where there are smiles and hugs, massages to be begged and meals to be shared.  It's one where I'll always come back and where I'll always be welcome.  But, at the same time, my room has almost become a dumping ground, a storage unit, a sentimental stuff-graveyard where I can spend the night and wander through my past and smile nostalgically. 

With that in mind, then, it would seem ridiculous that I should end this blog just because I'm back on my side of the Atlantic.  Like so many college students and people my age, with how much I move--from school to home to summer job to this new hostel, that new hostel--I start to feel displaced.  Displaced, but not lost.  I'm floating in the world and I've got no direction but where the winds of our generation will drag me (whether it be the path of an unemployed arts major or a rich, hot-shot lawyer, a mother, a dedicated partner in life).  I've begun to realize that life, itself, is a journey.  Where ever I go, where ever I decide to stay--be it for three hours, three days, or three months--it's an adventure worth documenting.

Which brings me to this weekend.  Saturday was Skate for Hope, a skating show founded by my mom's cousin Carolyn Bongirno, a survivor of breast cancer and skater.  This year, with help from the participants and ticket sales, they raised over $300,000 for breast cancer research.  With skaters like Johnny Weir, Ryan Bradley, Emily Hughes, and Rachael Flatt headlining, it was the reasons I came home from Europe when I did (and unfortunately missed Jamie Parker and Sam Barnett in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in London).  Let me tell you, it was worth every bit of longing for Ireland to be able to have gone to this show.  And this is why:

 what a beautiful human.  mom's cousin, kay, weasled me back stage and then somehow convinced tara to bring johnny back to meet me.  just me.  i wish i'd been more prepared.  when i met josh ritter, i had a bullet-point list.  when i met johnny, my brain went "...............................omg."

me and ryan bradley, our current national champion.  he's so fit.  and hilarious!  i kind of love him.

Afterwards, I went with a friend to meet my third cousin (?) at the Axis club in the Short North to celebrate Pride Week and to also maybe catch another glimpse of the Weirman.  (I don't think he made it out, and I don't blame him because wrestling with airports is tiresome, but he had a wristband when I met him, so it was worth a shot!)  I think that's when I changed my stance on the drinking age in the U.S.  As a quasi-teetoatler, I never had a problem with not being able to drink, because, well, I don't really.  But being less than two weeks away from my 21st birthday and being told that I can't is an absolutely torturous experience.

I have a friend at Oberlin that, whenever I would go into her room to paint nails or hang out, she would offer me a beer.  I always said no, but there are no words for how much I appreciated being included like that.  I don't know why I felt like I should start drinking in Ireland (okay, well, we all know why), but I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have reached a point in my young adult life where I actually enjoy a bit of drink with dinner or during a movie or out on the town.  I've never been drunk, but I've been delightfully beyond buzzed and I didn't do anything irresponsible (except for that time I tried to vault over a street pole in a skirt and almost fell on my face).  All I wanted was one fruity drink at the club last night, and the fact that I couldn't, twelve-or-so days before my 21st birthday, after six months of having the option open and legal, was decidedly unfun.  My friends are getting married, fighting in wars, raising children, paying bills, and I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that I am an adult.  It'd just be nice to be treated like one again, you know?

all lit up for pride on the short north.

And that's it for this entry.  Expect a few more about past European adventures in the future.  See you around the interwebs, folks!