"nothing"

When someone asks what I've been doing lately, my response is always likely to be, "Nothing." Or if I'm feeling more communicative than normal, "Writing," which is still as close to a non-answer as possible. I can think of a thousand reasons why I do this: because I genuinely do spend about 90% of my waking time at work and the other 10% watching TV; because I've got a self-deprecating streak a mile wide and rarely think anything in my life is especially interesting (not an attitude particularly conducive to keeping a blog); but mostly because it's the easiest possible response and that's how I do conversations.

But, within the walls of my own mind at least, I don't actually think I do "nothing." In recompense, then, for all the non-answers I've given - or implied, with my radio silence - here's my attempt at an actual response. I've (surprisingly incompletely) photo-chronicled two average days, this past Sunday and Tuesday, days about which I might ordinarily have said "nothing" happened. Here goes nothing...

Sunday
Jason and I went to an early matinee showing of the new Captain America movie in IMAX 3D. Captain America is... how shall we say, not my typical movie preference, but I actually really enjoyed this one. Probably thanks to the fact that the movie was almost equally about Black Widow, who is much more interesting in my opinion. I'll also say that, contrary to my expectations, IMAX can make almost any movie more entertaining.

I took all of these pictures on the roughly half hour walk from our apartment to the movie theatre (so yeah, didn't exactly photo-chronicle the whole day as I intended).

One of the best parts about our "neighborhood" is that it's almost completely empty on weekends. #antisocial

Not that it's ever *crowded*, but zero people on the sidewalk feels a little apocalyptic.

Here, too. St. Stephen's Green pleasantly empty on a cloudy Sunday morning.

Spring flowers!

Even the swans are unusually demure at this hour; I think they like showing off for the crowds. No, seriously, I once saw a whole bunch of swans fly, one by one, towards this bridge then stick their wings out and their feet into the water like brakes, turn around, and do the whole thing again. Bunch of show-offs. ;)

The corner of Dame Street / College Green and Grafton Street, which always feels like the literal centre of Dublin to me, because our hotel was just down the road from here when I first came to Ireland with the Honors College group in 2008, and the proximity to Trinity College (just out of frame to the right) was how I oriented myself in the city.

Cloudy view of the Liffey. It didn't feel this dark / cloudy at the time. You get used to it, I suppose. We were mostly just glad it wasn't raining. :)

After the movie, we had brunch at Lemon Jelly.  They make such good crepes, and beautifully plated - I would have taken a picture, but I'm not ready to be one of those people. It's one step away from selfies, and I just... no. ;)

Then we went to the food hall at Marks & Spencer (probably the closest thing to a Publix I've been to since I left SC) for the week's groceries. We don't usually shop with a list here - we buy what's on sale, come up with a menu to incorporate those items, then I go to Tesco some time during the week and get whatever else we need. Because we're such adults, we left the store with an apple pie, a key lime pie, a stack of profiteroles, and not much else, because that's what was on sale and it's okay to have pie for dinner. (We did end up eating real food this week, I swear. Just real food + lots of desserts. :D ) 

Tuesday

Tuesday was one of those work days that don't feel like work at all: I went to a workshop/seminar in the morning and a lecture in the afternoon, as part of the Irish Memory Studies Network. It's thrilling to be at a university where "memory studies" is not only something people have actually heard of, but a real community of scholars and students from literature, history, politics, social sciences, visual arts - and that's just the participants of the small workshop Tuesday morning. Events like this make me ridiculously happy to be doing what I'm doing, and so, so pleased that I decided to follow my personal interests in choosing an area of research.

Out of nowhere, we had this gorgeous weather! I sat by the lake outside the library eating my lunch (sushi from Marks & Spencer!), enjoying the sunlight and the circa-57°F temperatures. Sunny days are always nice, but they're luxurious when you're used to near-total cloud cover.

I took advantage of the 2-hour lunch break by going on a long walk around, and outside, campus. These are the playing fields on the edge of campus.

The one quality that I think most marks someone who genuinely loves to travel is the euphoric sense of being somewhere new. I'm only walking around the suburbs here - there's genuinely nothing in particular to cause excitement - and I'm nearly skipping down the sidewalk because I haven't seen this before, and I don't even notice that after an hour of walking around in cheap, uncomfortable shoes, I'm starting to get leg cramps. That sad realisation comes later. :P For now, I'm some kind of urban explorer - the safe, non-trespassing type - and I cannot get enough. If I were cynical, I'd say I were "easily amused," but I'm more inclined to believe that most people simply aren't curious / observant enough.

I came back from the walk and sat by the lake again, this time with a library book on trauma studies (sounds like a depressing time, but in my optimism it's actually uplifting...? I mean, the recovery part.) Even though the afternoon lecture was immensely interesting, I'm fighting off taking a nap by this point - "excessive" sunlight and physical activity will do that; I'm becoming more and more like my cat. I came home to a latte and a Ladurée caramel macaron that Jason surprised me with the other day. (Did NOT know you could buy these at Brown Thomas - this is dangerous information for me to have. ^.^ )

So this, in a nutshell, is an elaboration of "nothing." What did I do today, though? Spent the morning hours editing my thesis chapter, and the afternoon hours writing this. In other words, "writing," or, you know, "nothing." ;) I can't actually turn just any day into a blog post.