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clarenecessities · 7 years

Text

5/1/17

son i have just had the most delightful day of my got damn life. i know a daily clare post where i’m not just complaining about my life in unnecessary detail is unusual but honestly i just had a swell time

we had language class this morning & admittedly i did ask way too many questions and tell a girl she was pretty bc i have no filter when i’m tired (she is pretty, it was just a weird time to say it) but i learned a whole bunch! sean has been good with like, maidin mhaith and such but most of it is in one ear and out the other (except conjugation, which is blessedly simple) but we have a new teacher up from teelin & she has us repeat stuff like, excessively. it’s actually pretty reassuring. icr what she was having us chant but at one point we were just going in like gregorian style.

only complaint about anna (the new teacher) is that her accent is different from sean’s so she says ‘dh’ as a [Ghy] instead of a [dJ] so simple shit like “god” and “second” is absolutely fucked. i’m hoping she’ll give us some leeway bc i learned from the Horslips if we’re being quite honest. she’s really adorable though--she taught us how to say we were tired (thank god; a sentence i can use) and she was like miming falling asleep. Ta.. tuirseach oram, i think? she didn’t spell it for us but sean said she’ll teach me on wednesday how to spell everything so i’m flying blind for a while.

we went up the cliffs to look at the napoleon-watch tower--it was pretty chill but the journey nearly killed me. between classes i went up to the store & got some deodorant and a popsicle-thing (it sucked, it was like unsweetened frozen orange juice) and the deodorant here is weird it’s all either spray on or roll-on liquid, so it feels like you’ve just put mosquito repellent on your armpits lmao. anyway yeah it was about four miles but it was a little too steep for a malnourished cripple such as myself to tackle on pepsi & popsicle alone. only fell once though, and saw a load of sheep. the girl who i inadvertently complimented taught me about flowers (i asked the name for harebell because i’d forgotten it, and then i was like “hey what’s this one! what’s this one) which made me feel better bc i’d been a bit worried i’d made her uncomfortable. she was singing a song from the last unicorn at one point & we ended up gushing about that for a bit.

up at the top, when we got to the tower, a small parade of our classmates attempted to scale the side & get up to the door (about ten feet) while our guide was distracted--he hadn’t told us not to do it, he just went back for stragglers and didn’t see. we were all sort of standing around speculating & saying it looked like reasonable holds but nobody really wanted to try after the hike, except, cue hunter, the oft-pseudo-offensive manchild i grow less fond of every day (yesterday he was saying sauron was the good guy & like while it was clearly to ‘troll’ people he was also saying some straight up fascist shit in his too-well-assembled arguments). anyway hunter got up onto the pile of rocks, reached the handholds, and immediately surrendered, saying he’d do it the day he could do two chinups. next up was ben, who was volunteered by a few of us because he’s tall and relatively strong--he also got his hands in the holds, but retired immediately on the basis of being too lazy to actually haul himself up. third was chris, who (if you ask me) saw it as a sort of challenge and just went through the effort to show off, which was what hunter was trying to do but couldn’t back up. frankly i’d have been more impressed if i wasn’t a bit leery of chris--he’s not said anything bad to me, he just has a very condescending vibe that i find Incredibly Irritating.

hmm but then we looked out over the cliffs, and our guide told us a story about a sea stack called “the devil’s dick” and we found our way back down about an hour after it was supposed to have taken. idt he was counting on so many of us being so slow, but he had about five of us lagging for various immutable reasons.

class was supposed to start up again at 7 but we’d only gotten down the mountain at about 6, so i decided to forgo the half hour line for the chipper & grab something from the shop (ultimately some pound cake, bc i’m so healthy). outside the shop, who should turn up, but the black cat i’ve been trying to impress for three days!! she was waiting outside the cafe for food (despite having already been fed) so she didn’t run away, but she wouldn’t let me pet her until ashley--one of the workers i met yesterday--came out to smoke, and sort of.. cat-vouched for me? the cat was wary but she clicked to it, and since she’s the one feeding it i think it trusts her opinion heheh. she advised me not to pet it since it was probably covered in fleas but i was like God Himself cannot stop me from petting this cat.

it was wonderful, she just laid down and rusted in the sun, and she looked so happy and peaceful. i hope this means she’ll let me pet her in the future bc i think i love her

she went off back to the shop after a while, so i headed back down the road for class & ran into kelly and matt waiting for their chipper food, and they were like “hey come hang” which i was thrilled to accept. kelly may be the only one who understands how incredible the cat situation was heheh. we decided to call her heather--kelly had been considering matilda but she’s saving that for her own black cat. chris came out the pub & joined us around then, and he and kelly have this sort of pseudo-aggressive banter going where like they’re both clearly not crazy about each other but neither is offended so much as annoyed, and they play it off like a comedic rivalry. it’s actually an interesting dynamic lmao--it’s like the ways that people cope with each other & the things we’ll do automatically you know? interesting.

ben and adrionna came up around then, i think they’d been in the pub too, and they were sweet as always. adrionna and i talked some more about the last unicorn, but were sidetracked by the arrival of: another cat. This one’s a tuxedo tom with crusty eyes and dandruff but he’s so sweet, he’s so good. he was clearly angling to get some of kelly and matt’s fish and chips, but i didn’t mind. we didn’t name him bc we weren’t sure if he was the one named tinkerbell or if it was the other black and white cat, who lives up by our cottages.

we had to head back down bc class was supposed to start at seven, only come to find out it was seven thirty now, so we just sat out front and waited. the black and white cat who may or may not be named tinkerbell made a brief appearance, but took off down a sheep field before i could approach her. on the way down kelly and i went over our beeves w people, which is probably the oldest and fastest bonding method known to man--we agree on people for the most part, which isn’t too surprising given our mutual affinities for cats & communism

while we were sitting out front we were blessed by a visit from--get this--a fourth cat. at first i thought it was heather bc it’s also black with green eyes, but as it got nearer it was clearer it wasn’t. he’s a tom, older, bigger than her, with a square jaw and less rust in his coat but much more in his purr. we decided to call him gorse to keep up the theme. there’s some speculation that he’s heather’s father, as she’s still quite young, but i expect we’ll find out. if the crusty-eyed potential-tinkerbell isn’t in fact a tom, they may be the mother, and then heather and smaller-potential-tinkerbell would make good sense as their offspring. a black and white cat and a black cat birthing a black and white kitten and a black kitten? almost poetic, in a way.

evening class was awesome, not the least of which because i’d gotten to pet three cats by that point. we had a professor out from galway who’s co-writing a book with sean about joe heaney, and he’s an o’leary himself (well; an o laoire) so i kept joking he was my grandson (sean was the only one who laughed but it may have been pity). he talked for a long while about folklore and living traditions, and bealoideas and etymology and poetry--he recited the Planter’s Daughter, which i’d never heard before--it’s really good tbh. he also said at one point that folklore was sort of viewed as the domain of “slightly deranged maiden aunts” & i was like finally, a calling for me!

we learned the first few stanzas of a song--it was really nice because he took us through the lyrics talking first, instead of jumping right to singing like sean (yes we learn it faster, but we learn it wrong bc we don’t know what we’re saying). as i was looking over the lyrics i realized ONE of the words looked FAMILIAR--a gconra chlair. i was like hey,,,,, that can’t mean what i think it means can it, so i flipped it over and the translation was “coffin”.

heheh so i asked him about it and i was, in fact, right--it’s a coffin of boards. a wooden coffin, really, a poetic device, but there it is, folks--the etymological origin of my name put to practical use!

my first time seeing it in a sentence and it’s about a coffin. what’s better than that honestly

he also told me there’s a different pronunciation of “gconra” down in Cork (i had mentioned my people were from Cork (he laughed and said mine too--i told him they were the same people but tbqh i don’t think he heard me)), so whereas in Galway they’d say it like “groan-rah” in Cork it’d be “G-cone-ah”

so of course, me being the tremendous nerd i am, i asked him about cnudanai, which i happened o have written on the back of my notebook (see: tremendous nerd) and he taught me the cork pronunciation as a counter to sean’s donegal/connemara blend of “croo-dah-nai”. in Cork it’s “c‘noe-daw-nai” like the word canoe’s been truncated. good shit grandson. good shit.

mm and aftter that i just came on back up to the house! we got off at 9:30 so i’ve been slacking off since then tbh. i got a bit of planning done on the hike for my spooky fic, but i’ve not written it down yet. got weirdly sidetracked by fanart of inuyasha’s parents haha

but now it’s 1 am here so i’m out. pray for my muscles to heal miraculously in the night, please

#daily clare #long posts #clare goes to ireland

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