The world has changed...

That's the only way I feel like I can explain the last three weeks. I'm regularly feeling a peace I have not known, certainly not for a while anyway.

Ireland...so magical. It was so wonderful being in this new place with a whole different feel. I got my usual European willies at being at a place so much older than America will ever feel. Dublin was the epitome of a modern city that at the same time will never lose a certain Victorian sensibility. Thus, it was like the city, the buildings themselves, frowned down upon any modern frivolities and was only soothed by the age-old pastime of "Let's go drink."

Pubs are heavenly. It's not just the booze. It's the warmth, the music. Drinking, not drunkenness, as a pastime. About being in a dim room full of people without feeling predatory vibes. We sat, night after night, with our heavy, filling Guinnesses, a drink you can really feel complete holding, and just chatted and listened to Irish music and ignored whatever world started outside of the pub's threshold.

I rode a horse on an Irish beach. I had a monstrous beast of a Budweiser horse handed over to me, an Irish Draft horse, name o' Fionn. He was honestly the most majestic animal I've ever seen and I fulfilled a movie moment I didn't even know I wanted to fulfill by riding him into the muddy fields and then down the said into the high tide of the Atlantic Ocean. Then, while I looked out, feeling the rhythmic jostle of the horse, watching the sun flick over the ocean, blocked partially by a sleeping hulk of rock in the bay, I reached beyond. I forgot who I was there with, if anyone, where I came from, both geographically and personally. My heart felt ready to burst out of my chest, my happiness with that moment was so powerful.

And then came Dun Aonghasa, the cliffside fort on the tiny island of Inishmore, where a 5 hour bike ride brought us after many a frustrated moment, looking over a dismally beautiful landscape of stone wall after stone wall. Tired, sore and very punchy, four of us ascended the last stretch by foot, up a hill of scattered rocks that led to a fort wall built 4000 years ago, through which the sun blared. When I made it to the door, having pushed my body in order to race up the final incline, I walked into the closest thing to Elysium this world may have to offer. Quiet...unbelievable quiet on a football field sized expanse of walled in land, with the edge of the cliffs on the other side of the field. It was like walking toward the horizon and suddenly attaining it, the way land just ended on that edge, and as I walked toward it, the sky and the Atlantic Ocean before me began to grow, until I saw more sky than I ever believed I had vision. I hit my stomach and crawled forward the last few feet and looked over. Beneath me, the Atlantic's emerald water was crashing into the cliffs, which dropped sheerly from my very face.

I don't know if I will ever feel so powerfully moved in my life. It was so unbelievably beautiful, so perfectly majestic. That's exactly it. Words I don't use regularly, except in talks about ancient kings and ancient courts and everything ancient, nothing modern. It was so fantastically epic to be there, seeing the land slope down to the left to the tiny villages and smaller crashing waves, while the cliffs to the right, more jagged and rocky, seemed to indicate an even further place whose terrible, beautiful violence was not for human experience or perhaps that they were there just to be seen from where we were, so we could watch the surf crash two stories high against them, the thundering sound a part of the aforementioned silence, as though any natural sound IS silence. I don't like pictures of me from those 30 minutes or so, because I don't like to think "Oh, I was standing there...I was wearing that shirt...I looked like that" I was spiritual from the moment we entered, I left my body, my age, my experience at the rocky entrance and glided over that ancient ground, which existed in no time but its own, which I became a part of, albeit briefly.

Things like that will change you. It changed me.

More later...

This one's for you Ali-girl...I have way too much work tonight, but I'm also at a good halfway point.

I'm FREEEEEEEEE!!! Winter's Tale is over and I would like to say it is the single most fulfilling thing I have EVER been a part of. I would apologize to people involved in my other shows, but this just felt so much more epic than anything else I've been in. It's not because of the Gonda. It's not because of the Gonda. It's not because of the Gonda.

It's because of the Gonda.

I'm sorry, but having a "real" theater is an amazing addition to campus and I really think it was that ability to walk onto the apron of a stage and deliver a soliloquy that really just took me to a whole new level. It made me think of Milton and that undeniable rush we all got when we walked out in green tights on our legs and grins on our faces. In fact...that moment might tip the fulfillment scales. But we sense a theme, no?

The life plan question gets harder...and yet not.

The Winter's Tale cast really got to me. I think doing karoake and two champagne parties and having a set post-show song ("millennium" by robbie williams) just put me in such a happy place when I went to calls. I miss it, but I'm glad it was temporary, because a) I'm free! and b) I like memories. We know this.

I'm single again. Cat and I are fine and actually wonderful friends again. That's all that's fit to print. Actually, I just want to say, I'm very happy to have someone to be that honest with.

I have a position and title in the world! I am now the Associate Producer of the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society, which makes me somewhat of a Vice President and in charge of club morale. I plan parties, I plan the Orientation Show, I plan the club events. I basically make people happy, which is what I love.

With my hot little passport now in hand, I am ready to go to Ireland. I'm so excited to let go of things around here for a while because this last month has been INTENSE. So here's to getting the last of this work done and spending next week reveling in the wonders of a Magical Isle.

Follow Sterling's lead, take road trips. Not to me necessarily (though that's also TOTALLY acceptable), but definitely take them. I loved mine last year and if I didn't want to try something new, I'd be surfing Southern couches all next week myself.

And so Good Night...