Right yeah

Ok so it's been an absolute age since I wrote anything on this (and there I was thinking, oh great, blogging's the best thing ever and then I promptly abandoned things).  In the intervening time I finished undergrad university forever (well, unless I do something else) - this involved exam-induced stress but overall I was actually fairly calm about it.  I made pretty infographs to remember things like the state of the Dutch economy c1640 and so on... I love infographics!  Basically I'd make horizontal bar-charts using Microsoft Paint, with the various incidents and lifespans of different periods marked out in different colours.  Of course, this is where I realised that Microsoft Paint is pretty shitty for some things and that once the file gets too big it gets all pixellated and makes editing really tricky.

That's it there, the unfinished Dutch infograph.  Yeah it's kind of ugly but it helped.  Starting out, I wanted to make them out of watercolour paper and acrylic paint or ink, so that they'd be artworks in themselves and I could memorise them just by the fact that they'd be on the wall.  Also they'd look prettier, in fairness.  But digital technology won out.

I made charts for the other subjects as well - it was really useful for Romanesque because when you're discussing anything way-back-when it's obviously really important to pinpoint events and buildings and objects in relation to their lateness or earliness in a given century, but it's difficult enough to remember what makes, say, the 11th century all that different from the 12th (unless you're a medievalist I guess).

Anyway, what I learned was that the Dutch relied on herring processing and importing grain from Scandinavia (thereby freeing up more of their own land for more diverse agrarian use but ensuring a solid food supply)... There's this book by Michael North called Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age which I found and it was all interesting but I never used any of that in my exam.  But the bar charts were my best way of learning/revising, definitely.  The exams themselves.... I dunno, you'd go in there, sit at your desk, have a glance around to see where you were, hope your wobbling table wasn't being too irritating, and so on.  I guess I was way way more laid-back about the exams than about any other part or assignment of the year; I think the whole time I was in a bit of a panic because I was no longer used to their ways, was worried about not doing well, and in truth was fairly bored and then guilty about feeling bored.  Anyway.  Also the bits of art-writing I had done during the year made it really easy to write fairly coherently in the exams, and I think the American ways of teaching/learning (emphasising a thorough understanding, rather than memorisation, of material) really helped. 


Oh yeah and I meant to write an update about surfing.


Went to Lahinch for a week between my dissertation deadline and the beginning of my exams - best thing a final-year student could do, in my opinion. 

Being in the waves was absolutely fantastic, though seeing vastly more athletic peers advance way more rapidly in the surf stakes was a tad frustrating.  But anyway it was great; all swimming (obviously) and yoga lends itself so well to surfing - the first couple of days were lessons and the usual acclimatising-to-that-kind-of-thing had to be done, but it's so so addictive and by the third day I spent about four hours in the water (with my own rented board that time), sitting about on the board like the girls from Blue Crush (in my mind, in any case), bobbing along and steering my board appropriately and watching for the next promising-looking wave to climb and saying "YAY it's a goer, it's a goer!", and getting lifted up and rising and zooming towards the shore and (more often) rising and toppling off prematurely and ending up under the wave.  But you get really used to it, though the prospect and reality of being hit in the head with the board can be a bit disconcerting. 

Afterwords one of us and I wandered back in as the evening light was yellowing the sand (the tides that day had meant that we were out there when the tide was turning and it was beginning to come back in, which had made the water more weird and unpredictable) and it was so nice to just wander along the sand in a wetsuit, invigorated and salty and carrying a board like such a cool-dude and knowing that people around you possibly don't know that you're really actually terrible at it (but might get better, yeah?).

 Then after getting changed we were all in the car and we all got ninety-nines and good grief that evening I was more physically exhausted than I have ever been in my entire life (possibly); it took massive amounts of energy to even concentrate on things people were saying and my hands were red-raw and it looked like bits of flesh had been taken out of my palms, and the abrasion + salt combination stung a lot.  But I was proud of them all the same.

Lovely, yeah?  No-one else's palms were affected in the same way; I think it's cos I was so afraid of falling off every time I was swept to one side I'd grip really hard.  Also possibly because I had been living a fairly indoorsy life in the library and so on, and paper-cuts are one thing but hardly toughen skin surfaces in the same way a surfboard would. 

So that was the surfing.  And all the immense shoulder-stiffness that follows (raising your arms becomes a chore).  And I definitely did stand a few times later in the week; coming towards the shore I'd be kneeling and be like, oh I guess I should stand up and then would, trying to stay balanced but falling off immediately.  And I missed it so much when I got back to Dublin; it'd be so so nice to live near a surfery beach.

And then...

So after the surf there were finals, and after the finals I had to high-tail it out of my apartment (they make you leave the day after you finish, and you accumulate so much crap in one year it's ridiculous).  A kindly security guard adopted the plant I had been cultivating - an orchid I bought in October/November that I had never expected to live so long and spruced up the fairly industrial-looking kitchen space considerably, and which according to my sister I became increasingly obsessed with and would provide information about its welfare rather than mine when asked how I was. Also I had a tendency to introduce it to every guest.  It just seemed like the most interesting thing in the kitchen, apart from the view.  It was an interesting/pretty way of acknowledging that time was passing.

November 2010 

May 2011

Anyway it looks a bit spidery in that last picture and would have been extremely difficult to pack and would definitely never have made the last train extremely-last-minute the way I somehow managed to do with the rest of my luggage.  So there you are.

After all that I immediately went to Kerry with a bunch of lovely people which was very nice though I was still in a post-exam haze and possibly only became coherent in the last few hours there; the sky was all silvery-rainy and the slugs came out in hoards and there were lots of duvets and roses and fresh clean air and greenery and the palm trees out front made it all vaguely tropical. 

Ate yum chicken fillet rolls and for lunch and drank tea and then cider and also saw the sights - well, the local nightclub in any case which was filled with an unexpectedly diverse range of people and was quite large and modern-seeming, to be fair, and possibly only the usual amount of creeps but perhaps it was difficult to tell, so possibly there were more.   


THEN... 

Ok this was always a vague plan but basically a couple of days later my sister and I booked tickets to Vancouver because if we were going to actually do Canada (go over there, get jobs, make money etc), we had to make it happen there and then.  So um, that was that.  There were two options: go to the Rockies and get a job in a posh hotel that would also provide accommodation, or, go to Vancouver and sort something out.  Unemployment in an apparently lovely city seemed far less daunting than unemployment way up in the middle of nowhere, so we opted for that possibility.  Found our social insurance numbers, gradually packed our bags (including plenty of teabags and some Cadbury's chocolate), and found ourselves on flights across the Atlantic and across the U.S., where I devoured A Thousand Splendid Suns and then got bored and agitated by the annoying pay-per-view-ness of the films on the domestic flight.  Then in Seattle we hopped on a propellor plane with about five other passengers and an older, extremely glamorous air-hostess (like a silver-haired Barbie, perhaps) and took off north, into an evening of bright sunlight glinting on the slowly rippling sea-surfaces and the soft island-grasses below.

So that was that, and then we were landing in Vancouver.  

We stayed at a hostel for the first while.  They had free breakfasts of bagels and cream cheese - the first morning felt like a beautiful luxury; the jet-lag meant that we were starving at dawn, and so the sight of a massive basket of warm bagels and huge bowls of cream-cheese and jam and butter, and glass kegs of orange juice or apple juice, and whole massive tea/coffee-dispensers and "The Suburbs" playing... it was good.  Especially as the bagels were cinnamon-flavoured (the smell of North America, possibly).  But after a few days of creaky bunkbeds and extremely close proximity to strangers, along with all the ice-hockey fanaticism right outside our window (hoards of blue-clad fans yelling and yelling and yelling), we were ready to leave.

And in spite of the horribly high rent involved in living in this lovely city we managed, somehow, to luck out. We followed up a promising-looking ad and now live in the loft of a beautiful awesome old disintegrating minty-blue/green house in a beautiful area, so that's great.  The house was owned by a Japanese family for like fifty years and has loads of shelving and random spaces which seem to have just been gradually added on.  We have a balcony with built-in seats and I'm slightly terrified it'll crumble if I stay out on it too long, and from it you can see a matching minty shed and it's all very lovely.  Apparently there are vaguely creepy paintings in on of the attic cupboards but we've been too afraid to look.  Also there's a large black cat who keeps trying to get in who might be the cat of the previous owner.  And there are massive raccoons and we're all a bit afraid that someday they'll invade.  Also, the house is going to be demolished in the autumn so that means... that we can write and paint and draw all over it.  And there are beautiful overgrown gardens full of flowers which is so so pretty, and large wooden oriental gateways at every turn (well I've counted at least three around the perimeter).  And there's a verandah, and also ten other Irish people in the house who are very lovely so far.  So far on my wall I've drawn a vaguely geometric thing similar enough to the paint-file I uploaded a while ago, but this time with glitter cos we have glitter pens but can't afford to invest in any art materials just yet.

Melted candle by the steps

The matching minty shed

More flowers

Also I got my exam-result!  Turns out that the entire panic and stress of the year was just a complete waste of time and energy, because my grade from last year epically compensated for any anxiety-induced mess-ups or eejitry or underperforming I might have done this year... damn I should have just done the calculations at the beginning of the year and slacked off!