Coffee on the Keyboard

So Long, Fare Well, Auf…

So I am in an internet cafe in Dublin already! I completely forgot to do a fare-well post. Well, not forgot, here’s the story: Tuesday was my 21st birthday, Wednesday was my flight out. My old teacher decided it was important I get completely trashed on Tuesday–I don’t necessarily agree, but by that point it was out of my hands. So, yeah, I drink way more of way more different things than I should. My friend Joe, a great friend, drives me home, and on the way I end up lying on the grass by his car continually rolling backwards so I don’t lie in my own vomit. Then I get home, sit on the toilet for a while, more vomit. Sit down on the couch, sometime around 2am. Wake up, still sitting, at about 7. Crawl into bed for hopefully 2 hours. I feel like shit, so I don’t sleep. My dad wakes me up so I can finish packing and take off, which his painfully slow. Plus I keep drinking water to, you know, lessen the horrible hangover I’ve got going on. So I struggle with that for a while, then get in the car and leave. We’re not even out of town yet when I make my dad pull over, open the door and throw up all the water I’ve been drinking. But after that I started to feel a lot better, I ate a sandwich, etc. However, now I’ve been up for about 25 hours straight (after 5 hours of passed-out sleeping sitting up) and eating what food I could scrounge in airports and bus stations. My stomach feels like shit, I haven’t showered in days already–and this is day 1 of the trip–and I can’t really focus on far off objects, which makes wandering the streets of Dublin particularly dangerous. So I hope to get in some sleep and maybe a shower before too long, and try to get some real food and some water in my gut.

So that was a long paragraph. Long-story-short: I’m in Dublin, sorry I didn’t say goodbye before I left, but I’m saying it now, and I’ll try to post some updates as I’m able. Ciao all!

Tags: Travel
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Happy Birthday

To me! It’s my 21st birthday, and rather than be at a bar at midnight, I strapped on my boots and walked out to the fields behind my house. That’s right, the first thing I did on my birthday was kick a soccer ball.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the “orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us…” But what did he mean by that; how can the future recede before us? In the book, Gatsby is driven by his desire to rekindle the past; to create a future that is no longer possible.

It is said that when we are born, for roughly the first year of our lives, humans have the ability to hear and distinguish all possible sounds, but at some point, those sounds become more limited to what we hear regularly. Hence, constantly expose a newborn to music, they will retain a better “ear” for it than others; expose a child to several languages, they will be more able to learn and understand them, simply because they can hear all the tones–like African “click”
languages or Chinese’s four intonation. We are all born with the ability to learn any language, but we lose if it we do not use it: the ability to learn new sounds “year by year recedes before us.”

I would give anything to talk to myself at five–as I’m sure we all would.

I am a shallow person: I want to be great at something–successful–in a way that people remember me and I compete at the top level. More than that, I just want to be good at something. Really good. I want to excel at one thing. Not to be the best in the world, but among the best.

That future is rapidly receding before me. At 21, if I were going to be really exceptional, I would be already. If I were going to be a professional musician, I would be in a conservatory practicing and writing. If I were going to play football professionally–even semi-professionally–I would either be on a team or a starter on my college’s varsity team. These are the only two things that have really managed to hold my interest.

Teaching is a consolation prize. It’s a way I can hope to help a few people, hope to coach some high school football, hope to be remembered by an old student or two. There is still time to be an exceptional mathematician, but I think I would have already shown some signs, and I am too glad to be done with math at the end of the day/week/semester.

So today I am 21, 5 months and 8 days older than Wayne Rooney, and watching my orgiastic future recede just a little farther as I “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Tags: Life
Posted in Uncategorized

8 Days and Counting

I just went over my budget estimates again and it looks like I’m on track, even with the damn dollar sliding faster than a California house in an earthquake. Flights are booked, I’m in some great-looking hostels on the ways in and out, everything looks good. I just have a few things left to pick up, mostly clothes and the like, and then all that’s between me and Europe are a few days of anticipation and my 21st birthday.

I’m starting to actually feel a little nervous, a little excited. The days just tick away, faster than I expected, and every day I’m a little closer to Dublin.

Also, this weekend turned out almost perfect in the Premiership. Arsenal takes fourth from Tottenham in a brilliant display from Pires and Henry (hat trick!) who kisses Highbury goodbye, while Newcastle holds off Chelsea with a man down to qualify for the Intertoto Cup. The only thing that could’ve made it better would have been Manchester United drawing Charlton to put Liverpool in second. But, as they say, “We have the moon, let’s not wish for the stars.”

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Stephen Colbert

Big brass ones. This guy ripped into the President and FOX News at the White House Correspondence dinner - from 5 feet away from them. Pretty much called the President of the United States an idiot to his face, and did it all with a big grin! Check it out: (the videos were removed for copyright reasons)

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