Paddy K and the Leaving.

I wrote this around Christmas time and for some reason it stayed stagnant in my drafts. I don't know why. I think it's quite a nice post. In the spirit of today being my second last day as a Leaving Cert. student, I think I'll post it. I promise stuff that isn't about exams as soon as I finish!

We studied Patrick Kavanagh in English class in sixth year, and while I wasn't enchanted with him like I was with Heaney or Rich, I did love the poem "Advent". In the poem, he talks about self-denial and other lovely Catholic ideas (no), but he does open with this charming and wise couplet:

"We have tested and tasted too much, lover/Through a chink through wide, there comes in no wonder"

When we did this poem in class, racist jokes were made, but that's not the point. I hate the idea of Catholic guilt but Kavanagh was onto something here. A chink too wide, comes in no wonder. Life gets very dull and monotonous very quickly if you're exposed to the crazy stuff all the time. Take this school year: Leaving Certificate year. The chink has become too wide, forced open by Home Economics notes, maths equations and Irish essays. Nothing I learn surprises me or interests me because the chink has been blown open, creating a huge chasm which I have to fill with really boring knowledge, like the Modh Conniollach and Simpson's Rule.

I tried to cram it all into my head (well, more or less. Thank you Biology.) and thus, there was  no room for wonder this year thanks to the unwieldy behemoth of the Leaving. I needed big things - a week off school, a party, way too much blue WKD - to cancel out the relentless slog of this year. Unfortunately, that sort of thing was thin on the ground, particularly when I got used to the Blue WKD. The little things that make me happy - or used to - no longer do so. Which is a bummer, because I used to be the sort of person who loved little things. A free class used to mean chatting and not cramming. A clean room used to matter because I got to stay in there. A phonecall used to make me happy, instead of an excuse to bitch and moan about the breadth of the History course. Little things are now met with a kind of "okay...great..." radiating from my very being.

Unless you count the wonder of a new refill pad or finding your purple biro after a three month absence. Or actually being able to do my maths homework - this happened last week, and hasn't since October. Or a particularly funny history class. A good speaker for Religion. No study on a weekday. Maybe the little things that make me happy haven't vanished, they've just...shifted slightly. Changed. School-related little things for a school related life. I miss normality, though. That might sound self pitying and over dramatic, but life hasn't been normal this year, not with friends telling me just how close exams are on a regular basis. Not with more rows chez-moi than ever before. But I guess I can't complain, considering how near the end I am. I'll probably look back on these posts from my wonder-filled life and wonder what the hell I'm on about.

Or at least that was the case. As of writing, it's the 19th June, and my summer holidays are just around the corner. Life has a funny way or surprising you - I looked at that paragraph up there, nose wrinkled, and went "really? REALLY, Áine? Life was that bad, was it? Grow up!" but the fact is that it sucked. I couldn't see the little things because the big things (aka exams) took over my life. With this sage knowledge, I look forward to a summer filled with little things that make a big difference. Big things have small beginnings, to quote Prometheus. But that's another blogpost.

Maybe the trick with wonder is to look for it. Maybe I have to stop passively noticing and start working at happiness. Go out and find things to marvel at. Have adventures. Through a chink through wide there comes in no wonder - but through a chink too narrow there comes in none, either. In lieu of that, here is my list of small things that made me happy throughout the last year: 

• Phonecalls with David.
• Going to the gym.
• Lemon traybake.
• Zoe's baking.
• Red and cream spotted underwear sets.
• White Apple earphones.
• The Hunger Games.
• Swimming.
• Doctor Who.
• Sunlight freckling my face at the bus stop.
• Going without a jacket.
• New friends.
• Seamus Heaney's love poetry.
• Writing something really good in class.
• The Big Lebowski.
• Sunday evenings in my granny's house.
• Babysitting a three year old.
• Long hair.
• Rum.
• My history research project. That was fun.
• iPhones.
• Sporadic blogging.
• Caitlin Moran's twitter.
• Twitter in general, and my little bunch of LC themed followers. 

And above all...

• Knowing that someday soon, the Leaving will be over. And real life cthe day after tomorrow at 12.30pm.
• Just around the corner.

Have some LCD Soundsystem. Party music.

Poetry: Iniskeen Road, July Evening by Patrick Kavanagh.

I realize it's something of a cop-out to post Leaving Cert. poetry here, but hey, poetry is poetry. We've just finished Kavanagh in school, and while I didn't really enjoy his stuff on the whole (blah blah blah ordinary blah extraordinary BLAH) I really liked this poem. It's the first poem we covered, set in Monaghan in the 1930's when Kavanagh was young. It's about being lonely, frustrated, isolated and never being able to go to the dance. Fun stuff, you can imagine.

The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

Nomz.

I just ate four slices of pizza without really thinking about it. Yes, I'm disgusting, but I've also eaten little else today. Pizza is the most horribly addictive food, with the noble exception of cheese & crackers. But hell, I really, really adore food, particularly when it's cold and when RTE News is on in my living room for the third time today. I do things without thinking a lot of the time nowadays, often things that aren't particularly good for me. More often, it involves pizza, actually.

However, some things are better than food, though largely because they don't evoke a sense of guilt regarding the eating of pizza. Some things, however, are out of my reach because of the bloody year that's in it. Sigh.

Some things make sixth year survivable.

I am terribly cheesy.

Madeira cake and a length of copper pipe

This is a blogpost brought to you by two things: my stress and my brother's taste in music.

I get stressed because I'm doing my Leaving Cert. When I'm stressed, I like to bake - but I'm not good at baking by any means. My best friend Zoe makes the greatest cake in the world - it's science - but I'm more of a "sure toss it in, it'll be fine!" kind of person.

This has occasionally gone very, very well (cinnamon and chocolate cupcakes, anyone?) but more often than not ends up in me feeding the mixture to Marley, our dog. I don't bake for the cake, though - it's a wonderfully de-stressing experience, like taking a bath or going for a walk. The mixing, the scooping, the measuring, and the deliciousness of a warm cupcake are just brilliant for chilling me out.

Madeira buns are the single greatest thing to make when you feel like something sweet and you've got feck all in the house, which I nearly always do. Sometimes, I make my granny's wonderful marbled madeira cake: it's plain madeira with chocolate swirled in and it's absolutely to die for. I'd give you the recipe, but I'll leave that to part two of the post...

My younger brother is quite the accent whizzkid, and lately, he can't stop singing songs by The Rubberbandits Spastic Hawk ("Spastic Haaaaawwwk") is his most recent find, and he will not stop singing it...at dinner, doing homework, playing football, he never stops!

He also showed me this recently enough, and I was in stitches laughing at it! I never normally go in for Irish comedy - particularly novelty-ish acts like these guys, but my god, this is perfect. Though it's ten times funnier when Enda does it.

"Keeping my options open" and nostalgia overload.

I'm just back from the DCU Open Day, which I went along to with a few friends solely because I had an Irish test toda-...I mean, I wanted to keep my options open for myself. The CAO application has been open for a few weeks now, and to be honest, I can't think about much else until I finally fill out that form. I'm fairly sure where I want to go, but it's no harm to have a look around, as my mum would say.

As previous readers know, I attended CTYI in DCU for three weeks in the summer of 2009 & 10. I loved it at the time - however I may feel now - and arriving into DCU today was a really confusing experience. Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely college, and it was much friendlier than the UCD open day - there were helpful studenty types everywhere, we were given bags of free stuff and it had a really nice atmosphere of student-ness. DCU is forever intertwined with the CTYI experience for me, and even the smallest things caused a wave of nostalgia.

For instance, the restaurant smells the same as it did, and the revolving trays for food are still in place. The Quad is still the Quad - just with a good deal more smoking. Spar is still horribly expensive and I felt nervous sitting in The Street, despite being a prospective studnet and completely allowed to. It's really weird to think that all I have to do is get 400 points and I could be living permanently in the Larkfield apratments and hanging out in the same places I did two summers ago.

Though they really are the smallest student apartments on Earth.

My problem with open days is that I'm generally too busy running around seeing my friends from outside school to really get a proper look at the place. Today was no different - Franki and I left the Communications lecture before it started and looked at make-up instead. Then I met Conor, but that's beside the point - my point is that I seem to get very little DONE at Open Days, particularly at DCU's today. It just...didn't appeal to me though! Now that I think about it, it's probably the fault of CTYI that I never considered DCU as the university for me, and today I was proved correct in thinking that going back as a student would just be too weird. As I said earlier, it's a damned cool university, just not the right one for me. The right one for me is currently way up in the air and causing quite a bit of stress, but hey, it'll be fine.

One thing I will say, though: student food? Deadly. I got curry chips, a Snack bar, soup and juice for a fiver!