2011/11/03 - November, November

This year is going by so fast. Next thing I know, I'll probably be crying at my desk as I try to write my dissertation next May. What a sad thought for the future, huh?

Good thing I'm studying history. I don't have to think too much about that future. /joke.

But in more fun news:
Happy November birthday to Will and Josie! I hope you had/will have awesome celebrations, whether you're a homebody or a party animal. : )

Oh! It gets pitch black at 520pm now. And it's only gonna get darker earlier. Boohiss.



This past week hasn't been that exciting. I finished my bibliography and turned that sucker in early; that was a nice weight off my chest. Now I can concentrate on my next, bigger assignment. I get to write an essay based on a question asked during Part I of my Historiography class. I think I am going to do mine on Nationalism - a lot of what we talked about in class actually relates to what I wanna write my dissertation on! Nationalism is a fairly modern phenomenon, really kick-starting after the French Revolution. The idea of a sovereign state for the people, a nation to be proud of, came out of the new republic movement in the late 18th-early 19th Century. Now I just got to figure out how the hell I'm gonna write my paper. Isn't that always the hard part?

Monday was Halloween - and oh boy, do they love Halloween here. I thought it was a big deal in America, but I was proven wrong. I heard that it's practically a public holiday in the Republic (or at least, people treat it that way) and that the place to be is Derry. Well, I didn't get to Derry, but I did get to see a pretty sweet fireworks display on Sunday (oh yeah, fireworks for about a week and a half before the actual day). My flatmates, Natasha and Sinead, two of Natasha's friends, and our mutual friend Aarti, went down to the river for a family-oriented celebration. It was awesome. I brought my camera, only to find out that I left my stupid SD card back home. Durr, this is why I'm in school - I'm so smart. Good thing I had my mobile on me! I was able to capture a few (surprisingly) decent pictures and took a short video of the event.

And of course, I did celebrate the actual day of Halloween. There was a party up the street from where I live . We played flip cup. Only four players actually knew the rules. So every time a new player joined, I had to explain everything over and over again. And you know how drunk people get - inattentive. It's like trying to get a cat to pay any attention to you; hilariously sad. Oh. In case you wanted to know: my team won every game. Around 11pm though, a lot more people started showing up - I didn't recognize any of them, but quickly figured out that they were from the undergrad dorms.

Things got out of hand really fast; I knew it was gonna be a crazy night when I saw a security guard interrogating some friends of mine outside. Then he went inside the house! I decided that I didn't want or need the trouble and went to hang out at the other end of the block with other post-grads. I eventually went to bed around 1am. An hour later, some undergrads magically got lost behind all of the houses and decided that they would park it between my house and another. They were yelling, singing, banging on windows and doors, being stupid drunk. For thirty minutes, I listened to them be obnoxious as I tried to find security's number. As I found out later, a flatmate got to the number first.

The next day, I talked with a girl from one of the neighboring houses to the party - she said that there were about 70 people outside with an additional 70 inside. These houses are not meant for that many people. Hell, there's barely enough space for the nine that live in them! haha. She also said that everyone got kicked out at 3am by security. We both agreed: thank spaghetti monster.

Tuesdays are D&D nights. In case you didn't know, I'm a huge nerd. Deal with it. My friends Kristy, Hannah, and I are at the mercy of DM Mike. I missed last week because I had homework and stuff to do. I learned that Kristy and Hannah got all their characters killed. All six of them. I don't even... They left my characters behind and in the "twenty minutes" that passed in the game, died. Mike felt so bad that he let them make four characters each, since they keep killing themselves and each other. I managed to not only get out of the dungeon, I managed to save their new characters, convince the kobolds that we killed a 9ft tall minotaur (which is not true at all, wahaha), and got a sweet spell book out of the whole thing. We made it to lvl 1 thanks to me. Can't let them play by themselves ever again. hahaha

That's been my excitement. I finished my first full week at the gym. My shirts are becoming too big for me. That's pretty cool, if you ask me. I can also run now! There's an improvement. My cardio will be perfect for the oncoming zombie apocalypse. Gotta be prepared.

On that note, I have some homework to do before I go to Dublin next week (yaaaay!). So here's a video I took of the rain today. My life.