Gobshites

As I may have mentioned earlier, it doesn't get dark until very late here. The sun sets at around 11 with twilight until midnight. No one ever told me that. You'd think that it would make it difficult to sleep, but I have great shades and I sleep like a baby.

So as I write this at about ten thirty at night, it's twilights and in the distance on the hills outside my window, I can see the shadowed houses and their streetlights. For some reason, many of the lights are red. So in the darkening shadows you see all these spooky red lights. Perhaps they are only red when they first turn on, but it's still eerie.

Yes, they are all orange now. Mystery solved.

Today, in the morning we had a guest speaker who taught us about the origin of the Modern Irish Theater. He was really interesting and animated, which always helps. He was fun to watch. Then, we had a two hour break, as all Irish seem to do in the middle of the day for lunch. I had my 15,000 peanut butter jelly of the week and then did some reading for class. There's alot of reading, but it's all interesting and contemporary, so it's not bad.

Then we had our poetry workshop. The first part of it was mostly a lecture and a discussion, which I am not sure counts as workshop. We got through two poems and we are going to have to speed things up to get through everyone's five poems. I'm no mathematician or anything, but 30 multiplied by five equals more than twenty. The problem is, in my class there are some genuinely dumb people by practical standards. They may be literary genuises, but when it comes to practicality, they are a few bricks shy of a load. Then there are the people who are blowbags, or what the Irish call "gobshites." Anyone who knows me knows I love the term blowbag, or blowbagging... to refer to someone who talks and talks just to hear themselves talk when a sentence would suffice. I love that the Irish have their own term for it. Gob equals mouth, and shite equals, well, you know... so it's someone that talks garbage.

Tonight, I made my speciality for my roommates... we're trading days as to cut down on meals that make us cry. Ireland's chocolate is glorious though. It's mostly Cadberry, which is big in England as well... They call it Dairy Milk and it's heaven and Nestle. So good. I will need an extra suitcase to bring things home! Every day I get a new kind to try. This, I think makes up for the calories I am losing by not eating real food and by walking 5 miles a day, at least.

Tomorrow after a guest speaker and a lecture, NIU is having a 4th of July picnic for all American students in the programs, which I think is nice. It's great how Ireland can band together with the Americans to celebrate their independance from a country we both loathed.

God Bless America.