Do I wake or sleep?

So I came across this site called discoverireland.com and in poking about it, I saw that they have themed vacations, including riding vacations. As in horseback riding. I have heard of such things--Kelly's friend Nicole Greevy mentioned them to me when the three of us (with Letham) hacked in Forest Hills once, but the one she mentioned was in Argentina (lotta good equestrians there). The idea is that you spend four or five days hacking through the countryside, stopping at sites and B&Bs and whatnot--a very picturesque tour of whichever country you choose. I wasn't aware of this, but Ireland has a long and proud equestrian tradition--I can't imagine how I didn't know this, but when I think of British equestrianship, I think of fox hunting in England. (And when I think of horse farms, I think of Kentucky.) I mean, outsiders do refer to non-western, American-style riding as English. ANYWAY. It is silly of me not to assume this--Ireland's topography is perfect for riding, not too smooth (and hence boring) and not too sheer like, say, Scotland. All those beautiful green rolling hills...

At any rate, I can't do a 4-5 day thing, obviously, but I would like to see if I can do a day or half-day trail ride or something. So I've started emailing these riding centers over there to see if they offer anything like this--it shouldn't be too late, I've ridden in colder weather than Dublin in November, certainly. January in Virgina can be brutal--I remember one time we hacked outside and the entire time, I was flexing my hands in my gloves, trying to warm them up. Maybe I can invest in some self-heating motorcycle gloves like my Dad has. And I think it's probably best to schedule this for later in the week, perhaps the day before I return, so if I'm in agony the next day, I'll just be on the plane anyway.

But what a perfect way to experience the Irish countryside, huh? Hopefully I can convince them to let me take a few jumps :> And I will definitely bring my camera!

First off, apologies for the spammage--I've changed my password and will run a virus scan as soon as I get home.  Weird how this has been happening to so many of us lately--I seem to have received several of these in the past few months.

I went to the doctor this afternoon who took x-rays and gave me a couple of prescriptions, including one for a muscle relaxant.  Woo ho!  I feel like the older sister in Sixteen Candles, it is hitting me a little hard. yerble burble boo

Alors, hier soir Elizabeth et Andy ont venir a ma maison (actuellement, mon appartement) et nous avons parler en français autant que possible. C'était tres interessant--je comprends plus français que je crois. J'étais pouvoir sequitur la pluspart de la conversation d'Andy, meme pendant l'histoire de les tres petits cochons. (Par example: "Le Grand Loup a dit: Petit cochon, permettez-moi d'entrer!...ou je hufferai et je pufferai et je vais faire tomber sa maison!") Je ne comprends pas l'histoire immediatement, mais apres quelques mots.

Maintenant, je lis des autres sites en français, comme Yahoo!France, etc. Je crois que l'idée est de me plonger en français autant que possible.

Anya avait un ami qui habite en France--it vient de Paris et il s'appelle Arno.  Il visite les Etats-Unis ce semaine et hier, il arrivé a notre apartment et j'ai lui rencontrer.  C'était une chance idéale pour moi de practicer my français conversationale, et j'ai faire mieux que j'ai anticipate.  Et maintenant je voudrais étudier ma français plus beaucoup, alors je puis devenir fluent.  Eh--plus facile, je ne suis pas assez bien être fluent.  Pas maintenant, quand même.  Je suis desolée profondément pour les erreurs!

Did any of y'all lend me the James Michener book The Source?  I"m trying to clean up and I know someone passed that on to me a while back.

I am beginning the process of renewing my passport--I had actually already planned to do a few weeks ago, before I even had in mind the Dublin trip, since my passport expires in a few months. And you just never know when you're gonna want to pick up and trip the lights Atlantic--breakfast in Dublin, déjeuner en Paris, caffe brasiliano in Naples.  Europe is my conch.  Anyway so I got some new headshots 2x2 photos taken and am now filling out the DS-82, the renewal by mail form.  And checking out the fees--HOLY CRAP.  They've darn near doubled passport fees 0_o, they've gone from $75 to $110.  *shakes fist impotently*

I'm also checking out accomodations in Dublin--this looks delightfully cozy.



And also researching the climate in November--Ireland is on the Gulf Stream (parts of Ireland, like Cornwall, actually have palm trees) so it is much more moderate than you'd think for a country along such a high latitude. However it IS very far north, and the Gulf Stream certainly doesn't affect daylight--sunset comes around 4:20 at that time of year in Dublin. But I can handle that. In New Hampshire in the winter, it was pitch black outside at 5 pm. I used to walk home from basketball practice in the dark. There's a section in Stephen's King's It (for which my personal sobriquet is Shit) where Ben Hanscomb's teacher asks him to stay to clean erasers, and when he's getting ready to leave it's almost dark and she tells him to hurry home. Looking out the window at the dying sun, she says she doesn't think we were meant to live so far North. After several winters in New Hampshire, believe me, I know what she means!

The other day I was reading one of those little subway newspapers that they hand out and an ad jumped out at me: Aer Lingus, one-way fares to Dublin from $199. I went onto the website and checked it out--you have to buy the tickets by July 20, but the travel window is November through the end of March. WITH NO BLACKOUT PERIODS, apparently. For an additional fee you can extend the window to October, but I don't think I'll be needing that--between the considerations of school, the weather (I can't imagine Dublin is that great in January) and everything else, I'm looking at Thanksgiving. or maybe even Christmas. So yeah, I think I definitely want to to this--and now I'm looking at hotels and hostels and all sorts of tourist information. And I have to finish Ulysses for sure! Dublin! Land of writers and pubs and friendly people and the lilting speech of my fellow Celts--Dublin!

Interesting article on cheating methods in college, and how colleges have evolved to try to catch the cheaters--I read it with something of a professional interest, since I now proctor exams at Columbia. The whole proctor training session at CU was a paradigm shift for me, since both my undergrad colleges (Mount Holyoke and Sweet Briar) had honor codes, and hence unproctored, unscheduled exams. At CU the proctor has to be aware of how many times a student leaves to use the bathroom--they're allowed two, maybe three, visits. Man, my junior year I left my hardest exam (advanced music theory) for the last exam period--I'd brought home a bunch of books from the library to go over stuff but when I walked in, my roommate was having a mini-party, and then my Mom called. One thing led to another and I did not crack those books once--I drank quite a bit of peppermint schnappes and then woke up the next morning right before the exam. I ran down to the center and sat down, and for the next three hours I alternated between scribbling out complicated analyses of Mozart, Bach and Haydn in blue books with impromptu bolts for the bathroom. (I got an A, by the way :) But you can see how this would've been suspicious at Columbia! Mem'rieeees....I haven't been able to stomach the taste of peppermint schnappes since ;)

So I'm reading several very interesting books right now.  One is about the Lehman Brothers collapse in '08, called A Colossal Failure of Common Sense.  It is really very dense going so after getting a concentrated lesson on convertible bonds and securitization, I literally have to stop reading for a little while to let it sink in.  But I am following most of it thanks to the book's readibility.  Ghost-written or not, it's still fascinating, although apparently somewhat polarizing among the cogniscenti. 

Also, via the ever-helpful Columbia library system (A Thing of Beauty), I got my hot little historian hands on a copy of James W. Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society.  I read this book back in college--Silver was a professor of history at Ole Miss and personally witnessed the riot the night James Meredith (the first black student at Ole Miss) arrived on campus.  He wrote this book in response, a book-length treatment of a speech he made when stepping down from Ole Miss.  And so (like the Michener book below) it's very much of the time, which is fantastic.  When he wrote it, the Civil Rights bill hadn't yet been passed so he didn't yet know how things would turn out.  This is why I love reading contemporary accounts--it's great to read people's thoughtful analysis of what HAS happened, and very useful, but it is genuinely thrilling to read a running account of what IS happening.  Some fascinating, and relevant, analysis of the political insanity and the lengths to which people will go to justify their positions.  Of course we see some of the same thing today, only it's more coded and covert.

It occurs to me that Silver must've been at Ole Miss when Florence King was there, and I think her Master's was in history.  I wonder if she worked with him?

I also bought a great copy of James Michener's Kent State: What Happened and Why on Amazon Marketplace.  Such an excellent book--this is another book I read back in college that sparked my interest in Kent State.  KS is one of those historical incidents that, as shocking as it was, people seem to have closed the door on.  And this was indeed truly shocking--four students were murdered, shot dead during a peaceful protest (and two of them weren't even involved in the protest, they were walking to class).  My theory is that it was so terrible and unexpected, there was a kind of sea change of consciousness--students and activists decided that if that was the potential price for activism, it wasn't worth it.  So terribly sad. I find the opinions posted on Amazon interesting--most people who are still interested in KS tend to be (in my experience) liberal, probably because of what I said above, that KS hasn't been meaningfully addressed in our national history, it is still unresolved.  And a great many Amazon posters see the Michener book is conservative and therefore biased--I'm not sure I agree.  He sure doesn't have much regard for the SDS but the last part of his book is taken up by a kind of "where do we go from here?" manifesto and it is very sympathetic to the counter-culture. He also lists numerous examples of how badly the "other side" (non-hippies, conservatives) acted in the wake of the massacre, spreading all sorts of terrible stories about the dead, and sending "you should've died" cards to the wounded and even saying things like "the score is four/and next time more."  Just unbelievable.  Reading that book radicalized me to some extent (well, as far as Kent State is concerned--radical is always a relative term with me!); I don't see it as particularly conservative.  One thing I'm enjoying is the historically coded language--early on in the book he talks about people who'd appeared in the KS campus, non-students (in the contemporary lingo, outside agitators--no one's son or daughter ever came up with anything bad on their own, it was always blamed on outside agitators).  He describes them, and says something kind of throwaway about how they resembled "those monsters in California."  And that's it.  Of course he was talking about the Manson murderers--that casual reference, which apparently needed no explanation, tells how much the Manson killings two years before terrified the nation.  They killed the counter-culture as much as anybody.

Another book, also a contemporary piece--The Summer That Didn't End: The Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Project of 1964.  This is a first-hand account of Freedom Summer, when a large group of trained activists, black and white, went down to the Magnolia State for a multi-pronged offensive:  to register more blacks to vote, to educate black kids and generally to raise consciousness--all without protection from the federal givernment.  This is of course the setting for the notorious murders in Neshoba County, when the sheriff and his hee haw thug deputy and their ilk, arrested three civil rights workers, jailed them and beat them, set them loose and then followed them out of town and murdered them and hid the bodies.  Undoubtedly because two of them were white, the case aroused an enormous amount of attention and the Feds came down (FINALLY), combed the area, finally found the bodies due to a tipster, and prosecuted the case.  The case inspired the (somewhat romanticized) movie Mississippi Burning and also a poster (this image is from their trial) with the sardonic slogan "Support Your Local Sheriff."

As you can see by the books, I've really been immersing myself in the history of the '50s/'60s/'70s.  It's riveting.  We post-Civil Rights babies take for granted what an amazing thing took place--when you read about pre-civil rights Missiissippi and Alabama, how utterly hostile and awful those societies were towards blacks and anyone who wasn't absolutely conformist to a specific orthodoxy, how literally savagely they behaved towards those who challenged the orthodoxy in any way--you start to comprehend what an incredible sea change happened--and in less than a generation.