an ocean and a rock
If my friend had notified me that she had decided to abandon AmericaLand for somewhere-across-the-sea-in-Europe, I would have sent my eyebrows to the roof in doubt. Moving abroad is difficult and involves many a grouchy embassy secretary, foreign bureaucratic paperwork and Catch-22s. In other words, picking up your life and moving it to a foreign land is a pain in the ass and one that most people wouldn’t wish to endure. Usually grand gestures of adventure fall flat in excuses filled with ‘woulda-coulda-shouldas’ and ‘if only…’ Big plans take big sacrifices. And - depending on the person - I may have even advised against it.
Sequences of ill-advised life choices based on romanticized notions of Brand New Starts sometimes disappoint and break hearts. And sometimes the next step is a memoir where you talk about how it all went wrong and then moved to a strange land and it all still went wrong, but you survived on bags of potatoes and boxes of Jaffa Cakes and found the independent woman within. Or something like that.
So I guess a progress report is due here.
I moved to Dublin on Friday (11/11/11) and am becoming more confident in the fact that this is the best decision I’ve made at this point in my life. And no, I’m not kidding and I realize how lucky I am to have the support system I do here. Our group is all a little mad here, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There are - and will be - shitty times. In the depths of my despair, I miss my American comrades, my family, going to weddings, spending long hours at Anthropologie, and working with Jen and Sam. No, I don’t have a place to my own yet and I’m still crashing (read: mooching) off Jenn. No, I haven’t started working. Instead I’ve kept busy by scrambling around the city on a bum ankle trying to figure out how in the hell to get all my paperwork done so I can actually begin making money in fair Baile Atha Cliath. And do I have a cell phone? No. Because I still have not jail-broken my iPhone 4. But I have top men on the case and all that business should be settled within a few days.
But the rest of it is good, and it’s a whole new beast. And I want to say another million girly happy things about being here and ‘Dear Diary’ the eff out of this post. But I won’t. Because I’ll probably get angry and angsty and start missing everyone. And in the midst of a mad BBQ crave-rage I’ll beg my friends to snail-mail themselves inside crates of Mexicoke. And then - when that fails - I’ll come and bitch on Tumblr about how I was so naive to think that moving to Ireland was a good idea. And then. AND THEN I’ll have material for my memoir.
