Alas, Poor Plant!

In my office, we have a plant that is crippled by its incomprehensible addiction to coffee. It is a fern, with bright green leafy fronds, but every morning when we get into the office, the poor plant greets us with drooping, shadowed leaves that look haggard and tired. Since my entrance to my office is typically accompanied by a strong cup of coffee from the Science Gallery (and Lord only knows what THEY are putting into the coffee...), the plant perks up as soon as I get to my desk.

Such behavior is already a bit suspect, coming as is does from a fern, but as soon as my coffee comes within 3 feet of this plant, the plant starts getting cranky, tapping its fronds quickly on the pot and snapping at people who try to water it. Most of the time, the plant won't even drink the water it is given, and thus, we have been forced to sustain it by actually giving it coffee. Yes, it's true: our little fern is a right Audrey Two, demanding caffeine and promising to behave like a proper plant when satiated.

And when we have poured a good liter of coffee into the plant's pot, the leaves perk up, and the fronds wave energetically in the non-existent breeze. The fern becomes quite efficient, converting CO2 to Oxygen at a brisk rate, filling the office with pure clean air. This productivity only lasts until about noon, however, and then the fern crashes. Again, it becomes moody and irritable, tossing dirt onto the desk and falling over whenever a person comes too close to it. By one o'clock, the whole fern is shaking madly and begging the office for another cup of joe. It has gotten to the point where we can't leave half-filled cups of coffee unsupervised, or the plant will drink them and try to pretend like it can't move. Don't be fooled- our fern possesses at least 500 times the mobility of normal plants.

We are thinking of scheduling an intervention, but with little hope of success. We tried to give it decaf once, but I swear, all the liquid just ended up in the dish below the pot. Poor, addicted plant.

My New House!

Finally, after months of searching, I have found and paid for a place of my own. I'm relieved, because as I previously related, most of the living available in Dublin is either outrageously expensive or 'styish'. You will be happy to see then, this picture of my new house:


Or perhaps not. As you can probably tell, that is not actually my house, it is the residence of the American Ambassador to Ireland, as you can clearly see by this sign:


My house looks like this:

Don't be alarmed by the square foot of front garden, the house is actually in a great location. And by great location, I mean it is next door to the off license, which is Irish for 'liquor store.' On the other side of the off license is Farrell and Sons, a stonework shop which makes primarily grave markers. I feel like it is a subtle warning, placing these mementi mori next to the liquor store...

Despite the size of the garden and the facade of the house, my room is actually quite... roomy... It is cheery orange, and already a mess, thanks to my current paper filing-laundry combination scheme. However, the color of the walls is pretty much the only warm thing about my room. There is a window in my room (yay!), but it doesn't close (boo!). This makes my room more like a happy orange igloo than anything else. I do have a radiator in my room, but the presence of this heating device is pretty much negated by my roommate Matt, who must have heavily invested in Ireland's sweater industry, because he keeps turning off the heat in the whole house. I see him sitting in our front room wearing three or four jumpers (Irish code for 'sweater'), thermal long johns, and wool socks. Somtimes I join him, dressed in all of my clothing, including my winter coat and two pairs of boots, with the duvet from my bed as a cape/hat. If Sinead and Laura are in, Matt lets us build a fire in the front room using newspapers and peat, which we dig from the front garden. No wonder it is so small.

Styish City Living

Since my first (and to date, only) payday on October 20th, my number one goal has been to find a place to live. Currently, I am relying on the kindness of friends, but I need a place of my own to cover with my laundry and impressive shoe collection. To that end, I have been spending my evenings viewing rooms all over Dublin. I had thought that Italian landlords were leagues beyond their international counterparts in terms of wiliness and creative advertising, but I have to give proper recognition to the Irish landlords, who are making the most of mankind's need for shelter.

The vast majority of the rooms I have seen are approximately the size of a broom closet, or if they are advertised as "spacious," roughly 4 x 6 feet. These are typical decorated in the same (obviously popular) style that I like to call "bomb shelter:" peeling paint in some shade of formerly-white, a window too small for a cat to squeeze through in a frame constructed during the Famine, and a bed like a plank, suspended only 2 feet above the dirt floor. And all this, for 500 Euro a month! Somewhere along my search for the right place, I found a billboard that really conveys the Irish building style:


I wonder if they actually meant "stylish," or if these are the most honest landlords in Dublin.

Exercising my Trans-Atlantic Constitutional Rights

I voted today! Well, actually, I voted last week so that my vote could be counted today, but nonetheless, I voted!

Note the excessive number of stamps...

Bond, James Bond

Last night, I went to the cinema (or as I like to call it, the movie theater) to see the new Bond movie. I am what you might call a "Bond Fan," if that is what you call people who have spent a solid month watching each of the Bond films in order, and can wax poetic on the pros and cons of each Bond Girl (Dr. Christmas Jones? You must be joking...). In my nearly professional opinion, there will never be a Bond that surpasses Sean Connery's portrayal of the man, but I find it hard to have a solid opinion of Daniel Craig. He is a departure from the tall, dark, and handsome actors who have recently been Bond, and thank Fleming, is not 1/145784379 as campy as Roger Moore. Still, I can't decide whether I like him or not.

I certainly like the movies, and this one was better than Casino Royale. Still, it seems like the producers are trying to make Bond in Jason Bourne, which is somewhat too bad. I like the Bourne films, and I can't say that the gadgets have always been the best of Bond (that invisible car was laughable, at best). But Bond without Q? And while we're at it, where is Moneypenny?! In this age of technology, of iPhones and Segways and robotic limbs, I'm sure some movie mind could come up with something suitable. Hey, a return of Oddjob's deadly bowler hat wouldn't be amiss...

Both of the Bond girls in this film failed to impress, as well. Both were pretty, and I particularly liked Fields and her Goldfinger-esque demise, but there was no sizzle, and no hint of Bond's famous libido. Craig's Bond is far too serious. I liked Vesper Lynd a lot, but she was not THAT great... I am hoping that once his revenge is complete, Bond will remeber the finer things in life. (ONE martini in Quantum of Solace?! And not even a shaken one, at that.)

For all that criticism, however, I really enjoyed watching the film, so I can't speak too harshly of it. After leaving the cinema, I did my best not to beat up any badguys, and got into my Cleopatra costume for the Halloween celebrations.

The Deep Blue Sea

For the past three weekends (during my long absence from blog posts), I have been exploring the coastline around Dublin. Dublin has some of the most spectacular and strange geography I have ever encountered; it is positioned on a river, but within 20 minutes of both the sea and the mountains, which makes it, frankly, beautiful. The Irish Sea is also lovely, and I have explored it from both sides of the bay, Clontarf in the north and Dun Laoghaire in the south (more on pronunciation later...)

The first weekend of my explorations was warm enough for me to venture ankle deep into the sea. My Irish companions on this journey did not join me in the water, chalking my frigid wading up to some strange American gene that clearly never made it to Ireland. After about 25 minutes, however, I found myself unable to continue wading. Suddenly, I felt great sympathy for the passengers of the Titanic. Now, however: Pictures!




This is the beach at low tide in Clontarf, the site of a very important battle in AD 1014. It is still a beachfront town, although this picture is a bit confusing, because of the land mass in the background. That is actually the island of Howth, and there is open sea between Clontarf and Howth.








This photo shows the same area, but it is slightly easier to see that Howth is an island, and that all that green-looking area in the middle is actually just the sea bed at low tide. This is also close to a park that I visited, but I have too many pictures of that to put them all here...






The middle weekend, I went to Clontarf again, but the following weekend I went to Dun Laoghaire, which (in that wonderful Irish way) is actually pronounced "Dun Leary." Of course. Nevertheless, Dun Laoghaire was even more gorgeous than Clontarf, if only because it is the site of the main harbor for Dublin city, and I do love boats. Pictures!



Obviously, I found the yacht club.

And there were yachts there:


I also took a whole bunch of really lovely photos of the pier at Dun Laoghaire, which you can see in the background of the picture to the left. These are again too numerous to put on this blog, but maybe I will pop them in to a later post. For now, I am getting hungry, so I will end this post with another apology for the latency between posts, and promise that it won't happen again!

Freshers Week

Trinity College Dublin must have one of the latest start dates of any university, given that it is only now that students are once again gracing the fantastically Neoclassical halls. One unforseen side effect of this academic influx is the strange and magical (and sometimes frightening) period of time known as: Freshers Week.

A Fresher, as you might have guessed, is a first year student, or for you less PC people, a freshman. They are invited back to campus a week before the rest of the students, so that they can be properly orientated, introduced, and intoxicated before being thrown into the arena of death. I mean, the Student Societies and Organizations Fair.

Every afternoon for the past week, the front courtyard of the campus, known as Parliament Square, has been innundated with people setting up and then manning booths offering a bevy of delights from philosphy to rifle shooting to surfing. I can only hope that the surfing club has rather a large budget for wetsuits, because I have been in the Irish sea, and as far as I can tell, the only reason it isn't the Irish Glacier is because there is a whole lot of salt in it.

In any case, there is something intoxicating about the Fair, although this effect could be put down the presence of a vast multitude of freshers, who seem to release alcohol from their very pores. Perhaps it was this airborne drunkenness that overcame me yesterday, because I found myself stumbling into the midst of the booths and stands, in all likelihood looking like a seriously overdressed fresher. It was at this most vulnerable moment that a young man in a painfully bright green shirt attempted to enlist me in the Fencing Club. After this, the memories are a bit fuzzy. Buffeted down the gauntlet of club members advertising and recruiting at the top of their lungs, I can only recall a blur of papers and signs and words I have never seen before (I assume they were in Irish), but I think I might have accidentally joined the Japanese Students Society somewhere along the way. I can't imagine how this would have happened, given my distinctly non-Japanese heritage, but then again, I think there was something in the air...

I emerged on the far side of the Fair looking disheveled and grasping a pile of flyers, a clear cue for the enterprising banker from Bank of Ireland lurking at the gate to pounce on me. After assuring him in the most forceful tone I could muster after my recent drugging that I was not, in fact, a student, I escaped Parliament Square and headed, resolutely, for the hills.

Europeans are no mugs...

Now that I work in Ireland, I am entitled to take 'tea breaks'. While every one of the neuroscientists working here will tell you that tea, as it contains caffeine, is a sort of addicitive substance, I get the feeling that the rush to the staff room at 10 and 3 every day is actually more of an excuse to stand around and chat than it is a caffeine fix. Not that I am complaining.

Since I am new to the whole tea culture, I don't have my own mug, and am therefore obligated to borrow one from the Greenland-sized store of them kept in one of the cabinets. (Honestly, I had no idea it was possible to put so many mugs into such a small cabinet.) Today, I noticed that my randomly-selected mug had words on it, and when I read them closely, I decided that I needed to share them with you.

This mug purports to list the things that are great about Europe, which, according to my tea cup, are (in this order):

1. Protecting consumer rights

2. The Euro

3. Work and study abroad

4. European health insurance

5. Irish Beef

6. Cleaner environment

7. Lower call charges

8. James Joyce

Now, you might be able to tell that this is a teacup made in Ireland, as they have given due acknowledgment to Joyce and beef, but the rest of the list is a bit confusing. I am also worried that they could only come up with a list of 8 good things about Europe (none of which is the EU, you'll notice), since there is definitely space for two more things on the mug...

Ye Moste Officiall Documente

Part of becoming a new staff member at a university older than my native country is participating in the similarly archaic traditions and requirements of that most noble institution. Now, I get a big kick out of walking across the campus here at Trinity, mostly because the entire place is basically a Neoclassical paradise. More on this in a later post. For now, I would like to relate the story of Ye Moste Officiall Documente, or, as it is more commonly known, my new library card.

There are a few libraries on Trinity's campus (again, more on this in a later post), but in order to use any of them, new staff members are required to go to the office of the main library and (I'm not kidding) declare their library rights. I had a bit of a chuckle when my boss, Katherine, told me I needed to do such a thing, but when Wouter, my Belgian coworker, assured me that it was a very serious proceeding for the college, I resolved to present myself at the library in a proper state of gravitas.

I arrived at the library, having made an appointment with the Provost (whatever that is), and prepared to declare my library rights. It was every bit as solemn as I had been warned. First, I had to stand and quite literally (and loudly) proclaim my rights, in language definitely not used since before America was known to Europeans. Maybe even before that. I was then presented with the following document:


You will notice that this document is quite old, and in fact, basically unintelligible. Being a wary Yank, I asked the Provost to translate this for me. Here is what it says:

Know all men by these presents that I, (and here I signed my name using a feather quill) am bound unto the Provost , Fellows, and Scholars of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, in the sum of six hundred and fifty euro (and here is where I wondered how Queen Elizabeth could possibly have predicted the euro), for which sum well and truly to be paid I do bind myself, my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns, firmly by these presents. Sealed with my seal and dated this day of the year two thousand and eight.

Whereas the Provost and Senior Fellows of the said College have agreed to lend to the said person (I'm pretty sure at this point they mean me) the twenty printed books now in the library of the said College.

Now the condition of the foregoing obligation is such that if the said person shall return the said twenty printed books to the said Library on or before the agreed day in the same plight and condition in which he receives the same, that then and in such case the foregoing obligation shall be null and void, otherwise to remain in full force and virtue in law.

At this point, I was obliged to make a sketch of my heraldic crest at the bottom of the page, since I had not brought my official scribe with me. I did, however, impress my initials in wax beside the (obviously well drawn) crest, using my handy signet ring.

Altogether, it seemed like an awful lot of trouble, if there are only twenty books in the library...

Battle Royale, or, Getting a PPS Number

My struggle with Irish beaurocracy has reached the 'epic battle' stage, given the past week's 4 aborted attempts to attain any sort of legal document. Having spent fruitless hours sitting in a room with other wannabe Irish employees, watching the grass grow faster than the numbers were called, I decided to bite the bullet, and arrive at the office BEFORE it opened, thereby being the first person in the building and the first to receive official attention.

So this morning, I climbed out of bed long before the appointed hour. I should mention that, for reasons that are still very unclear, the office does not open until 9.30 am, making it challenging for us working types to visit it at all. However, I got myself ready, hopped on the bus, and was standing in front of the office at 8.30, a full hour before any doors would open. You will imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered a small mass of people already milling about in front of the doors. Nor were these people in any sort of order; I have experienced the British/Irish obsession with 'queueing', but my fellow document-seekers seemed to be taking a leaf out of the Italian playbook. I suppose that makes sense, as not a one of us was Irish, but the small mass of people was a full scale mob by 9.15, and tensions were running high.

At 9.30 on the dot, a man appeared on the opposite side of the glass, and his unlocking of the doors was akin to the firing of a starter pistol. As soon as that door opened, every member of the now sizable crowd tried to be the first person through it, regardless of how far away they stood. A big Russian man barreled his way towards the doors, only to be stopped cold by a very fashionably dressed Japanese woman, who drove one of her stilettos into his foot. An Indian man, trapped at the back of the melee, hoisted his wife on his shoulders and prepared to launch her over the heads of the crowd. Two Chinese women were delivering an onslaught of kung fu to a very tall Malawian man, who was trying to fend them off while still holding a smaller man back from the doors by the scruff of his collar. Trying to stay aloof from the fracas (while still trying to get through the doors as quickly as possible), I trod carefully among the battling groups. I saw the Indian woman, having vaulted to the front, now held in a headlock by a woman in a headscarf. The only other American besides myself was dishing out Chuck Norris-style roundhouse kicks, and I utilized his circle of destruction to squeeze myself between two Polish women and throw myself inside the building.

Yet the contest was far from over. Once inside the building, I had to join the 10 kilometer sprint to the desk handing out numbers. It was at this point that I gave up on any sort of sportsmanship, and elbowed the man next to me in the liver. The tiny woman who somehow managed to beat me to the desk had managed to break the number-dispenser, so I had to repair it while fending off other rabid PPS-seekers. At the end of all this, I managed to emerge with number 5, not a bad showing considering that there were still people outside the doors fighting to get in.

Once I had the number and was properly seated in the wounded tent- I mean, waiting area, it took all of 7 minutes to apply for the number. Grand! I thought, but it turns out I still have to wait 6 to 10 days to get the number itself. That is, unless I want to go back to pick it up...

The Employment Duel

Today marked my first day as an employee of yet another Irish university, this time Trinity College Dublin. Like UCD, Trinity has chosen to entrust me with the minds of young people. These people, however, are a bit younger than my students at UCD. Mainly because they are 12. This job is not in the classroom, but in the lab, specifically, the neuroscience lab at the Lloyd Institute. I am working on a study that looks at cross-hemispheric attention in children with and without ADHD, using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

TMS is probably one of the coolest neurotechnologies, and is fast on its way to joining fMRI as one of my personal favorites. It works by stimulating the neurons in a specific location to fire, allowing the researcher to see the direct behavioral correlate to a specific brain region. We are looking at the motor cortex, so when we hold the coils to anyone's head, we are looking to make his or her fingers twitch. (One side effect of attempting to stimulate this area is uncontrollable blinking every time the machine pulses, due to the proximity of those neural regions. I know, having been a willing test subject myself...)

My first day was a long one, and I left the lab at quarter to 7 this evening, heading home to an evening of translation and correction for the UCD job. Tomorrow, I am off to try my luck (once again) with the Gardai, who (for the small sum of 150 euro) will give me a stamp officially welcoming me as a legal worker in Ireland. I don't know why I can't just pull the same stunt I did in Rome, and opt NOT to have a Permesso di Soggiorno...

Ah, University...

I'm in the middle of my second day of my teaching position at UCD, and thankfully past the beginner's anxiety. Mostly. This morning, at 9am (which forced a very early commute, just in case the buses were running late), I began with Virgil's Aeneid. My class is all male, with the exception of me, which made our discussion of Virgil's presentation of women VERY interesting. I was thrilled, however, because they all participated in the discussion. This is a marked difference from yesterday's class, which saw me facing 15 first years, only one of whom had done the assigned reading...

My second class today was the second-year Latin course. We translated a letter of Cicero, and it is clear that the levels of comprehension are widely varied. Two of the women in the Latin course are actually sisters, and both are doing MAs. They are in their mid to late 50s, and neither told me that they were sisters until the end of class. Thus, when they were bickering during the middle of translating, I was wondering what kind of animosity I would have to mediate in the rest of the semester. Both of them are very nice, though, and I'm actually excited to be doing more translation with this class.

It is wonderful to be back on a college campus. Even half a world away from my own higher institution of learning, the feeling of the campus is the same.

Is ait an mac an saol

This phrase, which I cannot even begin to write phonetically, is an Irish/Gaelic saying that basically means, "Life is strange," and I could think of no better way to christen my chronicle of life in the Hibernian Land than to give it this title.

Originally, I had thought to rely once again on my favorite language, Latin, to title this blog, but given that the Romans never made it to Ireland (a country so cold and miserable that they called it "the winter land," and never bothered to invade), it didn't seem fitting. Now, having very VERY recently arrived in Dublin Airport, I am looking out at the drenched green landscape, getting ready for my first day of work, and thinking how unexpected it is to be here. So searching for an Irish phrase to describe the coming months, I found "Is ait an mac an saol," and knew that it is that sentiment exactly that keeps my eyes smiling, however Irish (or not) they may be...