Hey sunshine.

No "hey sunshine" when I wake up anymore.

My mom and I made a 6 city tour around Ireland, making stops at the Giant's Causeway, Sligo, Galway, Adare, Dingle and the Wicklow Mountains, and we rocked it like the rockstars we are. We drank wine every night. We were followed by crazy men. We smoked Camels and trashed castle rooms.



No but seriously.



My mom should hire herself out as a travel buddy because exploring with her is to exploring alone what Murphy's dark chocolate ice cream is to actual poop.



I've posted some pics here...

Rockstars I tell you.

I love spring coming.

The bluest sky and an Irish songbird. How do I know the bird is Irish? Because when I took this picture it told me to "feck off."

Thankful book.

I've been keeping a "what I'm thankful for" book bedside for about three months now. It is a moleskine bought for me by my sister at Christmas, which is the first thanks in the book, "That Linds bought me a spare moleskine for Christmas." Every night I try to think of two or three things I'm happy about since I normally have two or three HUNDRED reasons perpetually running through my head as to why I should punch myself in the face and stop talking forever.

I know I replay all my conversations and beat myself up too much about things that probably don't matter. I know. But seriously, I also know it's bad for my system to eat an entire bag of crumbly, oaty, British HobNobs and yet...

Type II diabetes here I come.

This "thankful" book has evolved into a "thankful/ awesome things I want to remember" book. Why? Because I'm encountering way too many awesome things I want to remember. For instance, I'm reading two books together and they are amazing, very similar and current all-time faves. One is by the best lecturer of all time, Hugo Hamilton and it's called "The Speckled People." The other is Thomas Bernhard's memoir. Very good. So so good.

In Hugo's, there is a scene with my favorite food. It goes as such: Hugo and his little brother take a bowl of mashed potatoes and cover a room with it for various reasons, mainly, I think, as a small rebellion against their abusive, controlling father. Soon, Hugo's mom and father walk in the room and Hugo writes, "My father looked at bits of mashed potato on the ceiling and said they would never come off. They would be there for ever. We were in real trouble. But my mother wouldn't let him hit us. Instead of getting angry, she said you couldn't punish a thing like that because it happened only once in a lifetime. My father was still frowning, but then she put her arm around him and said it didnt matter going without mashed potato for one day. She said they were lucky to have children with such imagination. She smiled and said you had to have an imagination to do something as mad as that." And that's an awesome thing I want to remember.

Similarly, in Thomas Bernhard's memoir, he recounts stealing a bicycle at 8 years old from his step-father and riding it (successfully riding it, the first time he tried!) to his aunt's house. He ends up getting slightly lost and hitches a ride back to his town in the middle of the night. His mom seethes and rages, but his grandfather says something like, "Holy crap!! You can ride a bike now. Just think, if you hadn't taken it, you would never know that. The only thing you did wrong was to not tell anyone where you were going."

So, I wrote the quotes in my book and then, "be like this for people."

I also want to remember to have an old fashioned pencil sharperner on a desk in my future house and the branches wall sticker from this site in one of my rooms. Also, to copy a page from a favorite book or a poem in a cool artsy way and frame it as a decoration. I want to remember how yesterday Sean quoted Hot Fuzz the whole bus ride home instead of talking about Justice Scalia or the gripes he has with Fair Trade coffee. Awesome. And how lovely the rain sounds on a Friday when I don't have to go anywhere.

I'm a happier person this month, I really am. It's getting easier to see good and it looks like another moleskine will be in order fairly, (awesomely!) soon.

THIS AMERICAN LIFE IS GOING TO BE A TV SHOW?

At first I didn't know what to think about this because taking the radio out of This American Life seems like taking the red out of ketchup, but then I thought, "more TAL? Bring it!" And indeed, they shall.

Couldn't we all do with a little more of this fella?

Two of many conversations had at a party on Saturday that make eye contact for all involved difficult on Monday.

1.
Devin: Hiya.
You know I met Sean like 7 minutes ago and there are few people I've liked more immediately.

Me: Yeah, a lot of people say that. Sometimes I catch him rehearsing for first impressions in the mirror. That's why.

Devin: Nooooo. I read his email you forwarded for the party and he's so funny and wordy. I like his wordiness, he uses big words and he's so FUNny! Like it almost makes me think, "is Jess really funny or is she just around Sean a lot?"

Me: Thanks, Devin.

Devin: And, well, he was telling me he's trying to get you to marry him. SO DO IT! Jess. Do it. I'm not kidding, Jess. Seriously. Marry Sean. ASAP! I just totally know you should do it.

Me: Yeah, I'm thinking about it. Just like I've been thinking about the same tatoo for the past 4 years. If I married him, he'd be around for a long time. Like a tatoo. Or Herpes. All chronic things, really. But he does make me laugh every day. Meg (his wife) was saying the same thing about you.

Devin: I know. Did you see Meg has a tatoo? I never thought I'd marry a girl with a tattoo. I don't know why. Anyway...

pause.

pause.

ok, pausing still because that was kind of a serious heart-to-heart.

Me: Ok, thanks Devin.

Devin: No prob. Later.

2.
Jeremy: Never have I ever (insert wildly raunchy act illegal in 12 states and possibly only documented in German porn...not that I've seen it, but I'm sure it's "wonderbar").

Me: (drinks absent mindedly while everyone hoots and points. I try to explain) No! I was just thirsty right then! I wasn't thinking! No!

Everyone else at the Kings card table: Suuuuuure.

How to keep things from getting old versus how to indisputably suck.

How to keep things from getting old:

just enough mystery
sunscreen and/or wide brimmed hats
truthiness Colbert ice cream


How to indisputably suck:

kill Mr. Eko
get Kate out of her shirt for longer than usual
add lots of guns
and cages
bash skulls and bloody noses



What is happening to my world? Lost is serving it up piping suck with a side of boring. Thank God for Heroes.

Dooce and champagne!

About three years ago, this friend of mine introduced me to this website. Since then, and mostly on company time, I've systematically worked my way through every post on Dooce.

Why? Because Heather's funny like Tina Fey is funny, she's in love with things, painfully self-questioning and very pretty. Some posts grab me and some posts maybe grab other people...who knows how these things work. This one grabbed me today and, as per usual, made me love Heather and her life in a way not too far from totes weird. I'm not used to knowing so much about a person who's not my friend, and sometimes I don't know what to do with the antsy impulses I get from reading her blog and feeling like her peer--the impulse to embrace her, react to her, try to find her phone number to tell her a few jokes and ask nagging questions about her awesome hair, the impulse to propose to Sean and buy property...as I said, totes weird. Maybe head over to the site if you're bored and see what you think. Is she as awesome as I think she is? Does she make you want a tire swing and a dog?



P.S. Sean and I got drunk on champagne at 3:30 in the P.M. to celebrate 4 years. 4 years? 4 years. And in apt Irish fashion we were then too lazy to do anything but lay around and snicker and giggle, which we did for a few perfect hours before he left me for his own single bed. 4 years!

Valentimes part II.

If you go here you can download awesome love songs for free. I found out via newsletter from the weepies who made a new cute video you can find on myspace or here.

Happy ValentiMes!

I love this show.

And this guy.


















.

Hello, my name's Jess and I'm a...well...I'm a...I'm a hypochondriac, okay?

Once I was driving on a dark night. I felt the pain pitchforks (also commonly known as headlights) of oncoming traffic in my temples even though I'd taken Advil. I was trying to sooth my temples with public radio and it almost worked, but then, right as a pretty song of love requited finished, BAM came Belle and Sebastian singing, "He had a stroke at the age of 24." Please find and judge a snippet of my internal dialogue below.

How old am I?
Check.
Headache?
Check.
Despite the Advil?
Check.
Does Advil enlarge the veins or thin the blood?
Blast! I'm done for.

I don't know why this happens so often. When it does, I ask Sean what I think are a line of logical questions, I check Web MD and then I become convinced- I never feel like I'm convincing myself- that several serious illnesses find me too attractive not to share and eat my organs.

Beyond how exhausting it is to use Purell after touching anything that's not Purell, and beyond how much it must suck to be my boyfriend sometimes, beyond all that, I am realizing that the worst part of this constant worrying is the preoccupation with myself that it demands. I read a Real Simple article a while ago that sort of brought this up. The author listed a bunch of "ridiculous" things she does that I do too (of course I stop breathing when I pass someone who just coughed...sorry I'm intelligent). Then she said she was tired of looking inwards instead of outwards. I thought, well, I'm on board. 100%. I don't want to be self-involved! I don't like that idea, even though I have a blog, at all. No way. No how.

But then I see this and my fear of brain tumors/aneurysms lands in the brain like a tumor or aneurysm. This is one of the reasons I will always fear brain tumors/aneurysms. Because this is what happens...when you're LUCKY.

Stacie and miscelena

I've had a hard time describing my time with Stacie to wondering classmates. I want to say, "you know when I make a hilarious joke in front of 30 Irish people and one of them maybe, sometimes, cracks a slanting smile? Well Stacie was opposite; she was opposite of that crap." *










I think my favorite part of our time together was talking loudly before bed and then exhaustedly exhaling and turning out the light. Oh and the time the cracked-tooth Brit hit on her so hard we had to run away while he was in the bathroom blowing his runny nose.

Really, I've had a hard time describing lots of things lately, which might explain the sparse updates. It's weird what disappears from my personality when I get so busy, namely, my ability to really judge how I'm feeling about things instead of just putting my head down and "powering through" as an old cube-mate used to say. My head is so down right now.

I try to bring it back up with these things every so sometimes...
Things I'm eating/looking at/ listening to/doing against my better judgment:

olives and hazelnuts
snow on the Wicklow mountains
Whitman reading "America"
jenny owen youngs
my neighbor killing birds?
Bulmers with classmates.
Yes, I said Bulmers.
I know I said it smelled like pee.
Um-hmm. It still does. Yes.
Well, I look past it in the light of camaraderie.
So what if I do only have one yellow tooth now?

*Pictures of her being opposite are up at flickr. If you go there, please note the offense of the third child in the eighth photo. This page came from a book aiming to highlight the atrocity of placing a child in jail for minor misdemeanors.

I miss this lady.

Jessica Farris 1/25/07 2:52 PM
i just heated up the cat
Karen Farris 1/25/07 2:52 PM
that sounds so awful

If I ever got a nose job, I would not ask for Nicole Kidman's.

I'd ask for the perky little ray of carmel polkadotted sunshine on Sean's face.

The best part of my day...

Sometimes you read things that crack bad days apart and blow away the pieces. I did today.

From Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees and rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prism, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water-- peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is to all but feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries



I know, I could do without all the "for"s too, but seriously, doesn't that make you want to call someone you love and read it out loud?

La la la la la la laaaaaa (to be sung like a corpse) or Sure, parts were pretty, but maybe I should have read a synopsis first.

Hey do you want to see a guy's face get smashed to pieces with a wine bottle while he's standing next to his poor dad? What about a smattering of people getting shot about the head and neck? Are you aching for a creepy-ass lullaby to stay in your head for hours? Good news! El Laberinto del Fauno is out now. Run to the theaters, everyone. Now you know what to expect.

I will love and have pity, he says.

I found a book of Michael Hatnett's poems, finally, on sale in the basement of a Dublin bookstore. I brought it to Cornucopia where I ate a plate of fantasticicity as usual and read the first 20 pages. He reminds me of Neruda in that he aches to be accounted for romantically, but then he reminds me of nothing but what I want more than anything to be reading right there, in Cornucopia on a Thursday, when nothing else would suit the happenings of the day, my mood, the food or the weather so perfectly. I was in there for too long, I thought, and rushed out to catch a bus when I realized I had nothing to do. This delicious gift-received feeling came into me, like when you think it's 4 PM then find out it's only 2:30. I bought a french pear tartlet and watched people walk by at a cafe in between more pages of poems.

I turned in Yeats today. Sean will turn in his paper too and we will both be free at last, free at last, hallelujah, free at last for the 10 days before classes start.

Going through the travel journal...

We consume Utrecht and Amsterdam. Our noses feast on the lilies in the flower market. Our mouths chomp Oliebollen. Our eyes cover and devour the canals. The Netherlands is in our bellies and shooting from our pores. We're still filled with it, alive with it, living off the memories it provided. We're in a deep love affair. Deep. Poor Ireland will never be enough.

In Girona everything is quirky, from the train car in which we eat our crepes to the long stairs up and up and up to nowhere. People drop things 50 feet from their windows to waiting hands below. A man sells me the most beautiful necklace for 8 euros. The Romans built a wall around this city to protect it but Sean and I jumped on and above and through the wall and ransacked Girona of her goods and memories.

On the road to Barcelona we buy prosciutto, crusty bread, cheese, crackers, spicy sausage for Sean's ill throat and airy cookies with coconut, walnuts and tiny bits of chocolate. Sean communicates his head cold in charming Spanish to a woman at the Farmacia and receives a box of orange effervescence for his efforts and money. Once in the car, I rip the chorizo with my teeth into pieces and set them on cheese and crackers for the sick driver. We arrive and drink sangria and drink sangria and drink sangria and arrive.

Valencia clementines. My favorite food? Yes. A man my dad works with left a box in our hotel room. We simply happen upon everything here- the street our hotel is on, the Mercado Central, the silk market, the most delicious candied popcorn. A serendipitous city for Sean and me, though it fails to take his sickness away. He has no color in his cheeks for two days.

No color still in Pisa, but we eat ravioli and rabbit, sleep well and in the morning Sean tells me he wants to climb the Tower. We do. And from the air and view he gets his color back. I take pictures of it. The camera loves you, Sean.

All the pics are at the flickr site, so go on and click that link to the right. Go on.

I've been away.

I'll be away some more...until Jan. 12th or so. Cool things are happening.





Because I'm excited about it, look at this present from Sean. That's a Eucalyptus leaf bracelet yes it is.



So, until the 12th, my friends, when I'll come at you with pics of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Padua and places in between.

10 tid bits on my mind

1. My mom calls my life in Ireland cerebral slapstick. How'd she get so quick and alliterative?

2. Today I laughed out loud in public for the first time in about a month. It was a tee-shirt that did it.

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator!

3. I was paid money for a published piece. I have just tasted virgin blood and my wig is askew. I won't go back to eating rats, Louis!

4. I watched part of Interview with the Vampire today while I made lunch.

5. I made a pita pizza with mozzarella, basil and tomatoes, but then I wanted to puke when I saw the cooked tomatoes.

6. All I eat are pita pizzas and clementines, or "mandarins," as in, "12 mandarins for 1 Euro, love. I see you looking; come buy me mandarins, love. One Euro. Thank you, love. Good day, love. Come back."

7. Playing fast on the mandolin is very hard.

8. Part of me feels claustrophobic, conflicted and awful when reading Beckett. Why? Because he builds a house with sentences like, "he had expressed the wish to get up and go out into the fresh air, but timidly, as when one asks for the moon,"-- beautiful bricks-- and right next to them he places, "our concern here is not with Moll, who after all is only a female." It's because he hates women worse than death. He says so over and over and then over again.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
IIIIIIIIIIIIReally.Hedoesreallysaythat.IIIIIIIIIIIII
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

9. My sleeping, drunk professor across the way didn't open his blinds last week. Where is he? Where is he!

10. West coast or east coast?

Mom giving me updates from home on Skype

Karen Farris 08/11/2006 07:37
scofie ate a spider yesterday and I thought Lindsay was going to throw up