Loose Cans

This is sorta sad. I liked Brian (one of the flatmates). He was a Pharmacology student, but not on purpose. He had no interest in it, so he decided to drop this year, take it off, and try to come back as a law student. Mostly, he spent the last month going to movies. I think he saw something like 15. He just got on the bus to go back home, but he'll come back down to Dublin every so often and chill with us. He was a lovely fella, and even though his bedroom just became the official guest room, he will be sorely missed.

Yes, I did just say we have a guest room. Hint hint.

D-Man, one of the ultimate frisbee chieftains in Dublin, just sent out to all the disketeers this letter he received from a rather interesting place...

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Claim ID: 77227
Membership Number: 71938

05 December 2003

Dear Mr Doyle

Thank you for sending us the details of your recent record attempt for 'Male adults in a phone box'. We are  afraid to say that we are unable to accept this as a Guinness World Record.

We receive over 60,000 enquiries a year from which a small proportion are approved by our experienced researchers to establish new categories.  These are not 'made up' to suit an individual proposal, but rather 'evolve' as a result of international competition in a field, which naturally accommodates superlatives of the sort that we are interested in. We think you will appreciate that we are bound to favor those that reflect the greatest interest.

We appreciate that this may be disappointing to you. We are always keen to hear from people who wish to set a Guinness World Record.  If you should need any advice regarding record breaking in the future, please do not hesitate to contact us, quoting the above membership number.

Once again thank you for your interest in Guinness World Records.

Yours sincerely,

Anna-Luisa Fatti
Records Research Services

DONE. Michaelmas term done. All done. A few hours ago, I finally handed in my second essay, after two solid hours of tearing all over campus with Duncan trying to find a fucking printer that worked. It was unbelievable. One had a phantom paper jam. One had no toner. One refused to respond, even when threatened with a hot iron, and another just happily printed blank pages. Furthermore, we can't access a quarter of the damn machines in this college, because they're reserved for compsci people because they're sooo much better than us and so our passwords don't work. It's infuriating. We finally found this miniscule computer room in a science building we had no business entering, printed out this one stupid bibliography, headed over to the freshman office, slapped it down on the table, and went to Marks and Spencer to buy some fucking cookies.

Mike, you bastard, some of don't have the luxury of the internet in our rooms. Which severely fucking complicates matters when one would like to edit one's essay at college, where all the resources are. I was going a little nuts this morning, when I realized I hadn't finished editing--had hardly begun editing, really--the Dorian Gray essay, which I had written in three hours the previous night. Eight pages this time. The poetry essay, which was of course the one I cared about, was thoroughly edited, but poor old Wilde is up shit creek here. See, the thing is, it was 9:30am. I had my last poetry lecture, which I had no intention of missing, in half an hour. And I didn't have a bibliography. Most of my quotations, with the exception of this one huge block quotation from Kundera, came off the top of my head. But, like any college, these people are hard-ons about citing sources properly. Not having the internet in my room, I couldn't just type the quotes into Google and claim I got them off websites. So of course I was going to have to do all my research at college. I would have to got to the library, find the books that aren't there, flip through them until I found the page the quotation came from, take down the bibliographical information, and run back to the damn computer lab and type it all up. And of course there's a nice 10-minute wait for the lab on top of that. I can't even bring in my laptop and hook it up to the network myself; that, apparently, just isn't allowed. This is BULLSHIT, man.

Oh, by the way. More brilliance from our world-famous humongo vaunted copyright library with 4.25 million books: they own three copies of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, oho yes. But none of them are on the shelves. They can get it in for you tomorrow, or a week from now, if you like. No, I need it for today, you feckers. So off I go to Hodges bloody Figgis (mentioned in Ulysses, by the way) bookstore, because I use them as a lending library ever since I found out they have a 21-day return policy. I have to return A Room of One's Own anyway, because guess what? That wasn't at the library either.

I also feel terrible every time I do this thing at HF. Yesterday when I returned Room the guy asked, very innocently, if there was something wrong with it. I shook my head and mumbled something about having found it in a library. But he gave me my €8.50 back. And then I handed him the Kundera, and very nearly said, "I'd like to take this out, please." Fortunately I caught myself, but when I go back today to give it back, I think I'm going to get a very nasty look. Maybe I'll get someone else to do it.

I, Sam Ashworth, can ride a bike with no hands. And we are not talking your timid, quick-hands-off-hands-on, wobbly thing. No, we are talking whole blocks, switching between pedaling and coasting at our leisure, zipping our coat, unzipping our coat. It's lovely. Next, we have to try fiddling with the iPod as we whiz past St. Stephen's Green. Or we may just wait on that.

Tonight, it's out for a nice dinner with amici at Milano in Temple Bar. Sort of a Christmas dinner, see-you-in-a-month sort of thing. It occurs to me that I have a solid month of Xmas break.

I hate to deprive you of the rest of your daily fix, but I have an essay to write, and it's already almost noon. Also, I'm sitting in this ghastly computer room back at halls because the stupid-ass stone age server at college went down AGAIN. It's like every other goddamn day now. But anyway the computer I'm working on is a not-at-all-tricked-out PowerMac 4400 with a whopping 200mhz. Which is to say, a dinosaur. And the keyboard is of course lined with glue and my thumbs, as ever, have blisters from the damn spacebar. So now I have to go back to me romb and write an essay on Kundera's conception of Kitsch (basically he sees it as the denial and/or ignorance of "shit." It's very strange and brilliant but it doesn't make much sense in a one-sentence summary) and Wilde's artifice of superfice. The essay question, by the way, was just Discuss representation and reality in Dorian Gray. Uh huh. Right. I figured it was broad enough to be a catch-all. I'll post both essays elsewhere when they're done. The poetry one is especially a gas.

Lord. You can't imagine how I hate not having the internet. It's one of those allconsuming hatreds that occupies your consciousness every moment of the day. It makes blogging really hard, but it makes working totally impossible. I have to find all these sources now, because looking for them in the library which doesn't have your book and wouldn't let you take it out anyway is frankly a waste of time. But first, Headlines:

Went caroling yesterday with around 30 people from Halls (for the homeless). Good times. We stood on Grafton street for a good two hours and abused our poor vocal cords by singing, for all intents and purposes, a capella (one hadn't a prayer of hearing the guitars), without a break. But, with the exceptions of the carols I hate (I won't name them all--just a few--because a) the list would be too long, and b) I'll let you imagine your own) like Rocking around the Christmas Tree and Santa Claus is Coming to Fuck You Up (as Calvin says, "Santa Claus: Kindly old elf or CIA spook?"), it was good craic. Except that I do sincerely hate Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, and of course we sang that one about a hundred time. Complete with choreography. On the other hand, we got to do the Pogues's Fairytale of New York, which is the greatest contemporary Xmas carol, full stop, and which, if you don't know it already, I will have to sit you down and make you listen to it, or, lacking a stereo, sing it to you. It's brilliant.

The night before last, I finally wrote an essay. Sort of set a personal land speed record, too: five surprisingly coherent pages in three hours (not counting the half hour I took out to watch the Simpsons and eat). That was Poetry and Emotion, our favorite topic. I wished to God I'd had the damn net; I could have just taken most of the stuff I posted here, pasted it, and finished the essay in no time. Because these essays aren't worth bollocks (6-11% of the final grade; all that matters is the exams at the end). I had a lot of fun. I also included the line about cummings being a dirty lying bastard. I'll post it once it's finished. I find it very sound.

Today, I put on me protestin' togs and went over to the Dáil (Irish Parliament, pronounced Doyl) for some good-old fashioned rallying. The subject at hand was major cutbacks in third-level (university-level) funding, which would seriously affect all students and faculty at Irish Unis. Dublin Institute of Technology, I believe, has already had to sack a few dozen lecturers because they couldn't afford to keep them on. The facilities at TCD, as I've said many times, flat-out suck. The possibility of their getting any worse, inconceivable as that might be, was enough to get me to take to the streets. We were also, I was told on the way, fighting the gummint's attempts to jack up fees pretty severely, though this is where my sense of sympathy slackened a little; the indignation at the prospect of having to pay fees totaling €1300 (around $1600) was, to my eyes, a little excessive, because already I, and all Americans, are paying nearly 20 times what the EU student pays. And that, of course, is way under half of what the American student has to cough up. So I'm sure you're just suffocating with sympathy right now, huh?

But it was interesting because it turns out that this government, as I will no doubt someday detail at length on this blog when I have the fucking time, is generally agreed to be the worst they've had since the English (I didn't just get this impression from the protest, though never have I heard a government--not even ours--called so many filthy names; it's more of a sense that's been growing on me since I got here). The general attitude towards the ruling party, Fianna Fáil (pronounced Fol, yes, I know it looks like Dáil, don't ask me, I didn't invent the damn language), is basically summed up in this one brilliant sign that read: "YOU INCOMPETENT ASSHOLES. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" Because they are assholes, and they are, quite frankly, spectacularly incompetent. And yet for some reason, people just keep voting them back in. I've decided not to take that as a bad omen for the states. You poor, poor bastards. Well, at least you don't get told you're a horrible person every day. Sometime I'll post a big ol' thing about anti-Bush sentiment here. Maybe when I get back home. I figure I'll have a lot of time then.

So this protest. Shortest ever. Also smallest ever. We barely took up a city block. Maybe 1000 students max. It went on for 45 minutes to an hour, with all the heads of the students' unions from all the Dublin Unis getting up to scream their heads off, and then a couple of MP's and whatnot, and then we left. Oh, well. I had been telling Sadie yesterday just how unimpressed I was with the level of activism at this college. At least people showed up today. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't impressive. Not really worth my writing more about.