Zonks

As far as places go, I have found that Ireland is very easy to adjust to. I wake up in this house, I walk along the Burren Way, I go to a school that has it's own castle, and I get to spend all day seeing where my creativity will go. Despite the uniqueness of the situation I am experiencing, there are moments where the question really hits me. Why am I here? Why am I sitting in an Irish living room, watching a movie about a precocious 10 year old boy trapped in a Japanese POW camp? At the moment he's dancing atop a derelict building as Allied forces bomb the bejeezus out of the nearby Japanese bunkers. His friend just died :(

Commercial break, the credit-crunch-brand-piggy bank is distributing lower prices on his magic flying Euro. I particularly like the No Nonsense Car Insurance commercial that involves zombie coverage. If I owned a car I would want zombie coverage. Dear God I hope I'd never actually need it, but it would be nice to have.

I've enjoyed the commercials in Ireland so far, but back to the question at hand. I didn't come here for the commercials. I knew that coming here would mean leaving the people I'm comfortable with. They are people I've known for years and with whom I have overcome that awkward dance of being an acquaintance. I think that is the biggest challenge I'm facing here. When I spent two weeks in Japan, it was the over all culture shock that really got me down. I detest nori, the humidity came from the depths of hell itself, but at least having the language barrier allowed us to embrace being awkward and we were able to bumble about happily. When I'm faced with peers who speak the same language, that come from the same country, the pressure is on. I tend to over think things to the extent that something zonks behind my eyeballs and an acrid smoke puffs out of my ears. This dreadful over thinking causes my words to get trapped somewhere between my brain and vocal cords. My solution to this is to remain quiet. I stay quiet and I go off and do my own thing, but this leaves too many things unsaid and too many chances untouched.

(I'm watching a cop drama now. This detective has a weird lip/tongue twitch that he does occasionally. That, sir, is very distracting.)

I'm trying to approach this introverted habit in my art work. If I crack it open and dissect it, perhaps I can break myself of it. This reminds me of a performance piece I put together last semester. I wrote down everything I wished I could have said onto strips of paper. I then sat with a male friend, side by side. I faced the audience while he had his back turned. I then proceeded to put all the strips into my mouth and held them there. One by one I pulled the strips out and handed them to my friend for him to read aloud. My face, my words, but his voice. Despite physically extracting the words from my body, I was still unable to utter them myself and this reinforced the idea that I found such behavior to be a personal taboo.

Hmmmm. A movie called Taboo just came on... I'm beginning to worry that it's a horror movie :(