Anger comes and goes,
ebbs and flows,
like a tide of bile.
It washes over my stomach,
burns over my mind,
and consumes by acid erosion
that most precious of resources:
time with others.

At times, it hurts to be reminded of your place in someone's life: surrogate. Never get too close (again).

Do you ever miss me ever?
And if you did, would it matter?

That moment of delirious exhaustion,
potentially complete failure,
and all I can do is smile stupidly.
And write about it.

Sometimes I wish I could rewind to a less complicated minute
and decide to do the things that were momentarily easier.
Integrity is an overrated virtue,
an artifice of identity
that leaves
no room
for the push and pull of the relationships that compose me,
of which I am composed.
Integrity perhaps mattered more in another time,
when people were less mobile,
faster tied to the few they knew.
I am guilty of nostalgia.
I seek truth and consistency that I know are impossible,
and that matter less when I’ll soon just be picking up and going
anyway.

I am likely the worst travel blogger who ever existed. Alas. I’ve been so caught up in being a boring, ordinary person that I didn’t take the time to write about the boring, ordinary things I’ve been doing. In any case, rather than try to catch up on all I’ve fallen behind with, I should maybe just write about last night—one of the best nights I’ve had in Ireland since my arrival.

Rachel, her visiting friend Kirsten, and I decided to head out to our favorite little pub, The Crane, for a few drinks and the live trad played there most nights. We got there quite early and sat downstairs, nursing some Guinness and Bulmers. We’d probably been sitting together five minutes when a youngish man (mid-twenties?) approached us with the phrase, “Hi girls, you know, I’m tryin’ really hard….” He never finished the sentence and instead pulled up a stool and started talking with us. Brian had two friends with him, Taigh and Stephen, Taigh being too far gone to last long with us and Stephen being incredibly shy, but sweet and apologetic (on Taigh’s behalf).

More friends came and went, until the girls and I headed upstairs for the music. It was a fantastic set of players, and since it was a bank holiday weekend, the place was fairly crowded with all sorts of people—the old regulars, the young semi-regulars, some tourists, friends of the musicians, young people in various levels of dress…. Brian and Stephen joined us after a while, managing to entertain the couple sitting with us who happened to be from Chicago (both biology Ph.D. students at the University of Chicago). Another friend, Aidan, joined the group within the hour, an understatedly handsome guy who conversed a bit reluctantly with us (I think I could tell he had a girlfriend, but of course that didn’t stop me from briefly crushing).

Our conversation wandered everywhere from their elaborate tale of the drummer who “hated his Guinness” (in fact, the guy was particularly large and had downed more than we counted over the course of the night) to the depressing subjects of the American education and healthcare systems. We made book and music recommendations to one another—I of course had to tell Brian about “The Belle of Kilronan” by the Magnetic Fields, since that’s where he’s from—and downed round after round that they insisted on buying. When The Crane close, the six of us headed first to an overcrowded, overdressed bar, from which we quickly exited to the more laidback, but still crowded, Roisin Dubh (“roo-sheen dove,” meaning “black rose”). There was a deejay playing all sorts of music and we all just had so much fun dancing for a while. Rachel and I make great dance partners because we’re both just ridiculous and have too much fun.

Well, then the Roisin Dubh closed, so the six of us made our way outside. It was probably a little after two and I figured the girls and I would head home. But the guys asked if we wanted to just go hang with them for a while at Brian’s house in Salthill (a really close suburb). I didn’t think we would go—we were fairly tired and we didn’t want to give a weird impression—but we finally agreed to. After a quick stop-off at Aidan’s to pick up his guitar and some wine, we made our way to Brian’s and settled into the comfy couch and armchairs of his living room. Aidan brought out his guitar and sang—really well—for a few hours, with breaks here and there to ask requests or joke around or speak Irish (they could all speak it comfortably, Brian best of all, being from the Aran Islands).

There was never any weird pressure or discomfort as I might have looked out for with most guys. Somehow we’d stumbled upon a really cool group of guys, really interesting and engaging in a way I’m embarrassed to admit it took me this long to experience. I was just so cautious for so long, and unsure of what I should be doing or finding here (good god…) that I forgot to just let go for a while, let someone or ones, somethings play the active role. Anyway, we knew some of the same songs and there were all these generational pieces of knowledge that we shared despite our different origins. But then there were also all these missed connections or linguistic novelties, bands we didn’t know or allusions we didn’t pick up on, and it seemed more on their end than on ours. Their quipping back and forth with one another, their fluid, jocular artfulness in speech, sometimes made me feel like I spoke the Dick and Jane version of English, while they spoke poetry.

The sun was rising on a still blue sky as we caught a taxi out close to six a.m., having given to Brian our email addresses (he was traveling to the States in a week for a month, then to Australia for at least a year). Stephen had left earlier and Aidan got the taxi with us. I don’t know whether we’ll see them again, but I had just the most satisfying feeling leaving the house. I am so grateful that Brian moseyed up to us early in the night.

This was a terribly ungraceful entry to my sporadic log, and I will try to make the excuses that I am running on four hours of sleep and that I am especially self-conscious after having had my speech capacity palpably downgraded yesterday night. They’re just excuses, though. I am not ready to leave here and I dread the approaching 27th of May. I can’t possibly have expressed what yesterday felt like, how much I was coming to realize about the nature of travel and the abused concept of cross-cultural interaction. When two kids thousands of miles apart can both grow up knowing the lyrics to a song produced islands away; when they can talk knowledgably about one another’s political systems and prospects; when they can recognize the statements made by the clothing they wear on a night out; when they can do all these things and yet still find themselves separated by gulfs of experience and knowledge… I don’t know, it demonstrates that despite the idea that the widely condemned behemoth we term globalization has supposedly made us all the same, left nothing distinctive or novel between us, there are yet vast volumes between people that such whitewashing forces can never touch. And it’s not just between people of different countries, but between neighbors and family as well. The idea that travel is some totally new experience, something invariably more thrilling and enriching than what one could cultivate in a more sedentary life, strips from travel the possibility of intimacy. It did so for me, at least, for months too long, and it’s proven a slow and complicated matter resurrecting something so delicate.