throw a stone and watch the ripples flow…

tuesday was spontaneous and i was glad for it. surprise relief from the monotony of studying in the form of killiney beach.
and it was so beautiful down there too. the sky was shades and textures and layers of grey, with flecks of pearly purple and white here and there; the sea grey and silver and faded navy blue, rippling with small waves even with the fifteen minutes of misting we got; bray head green and purple and brown – the gorse hasn’t quite burst into flame yet; and then the pebbly sand itself brown, and yet so many different colours at once when you look straight down at it.

and then yesterday the sea was such a pure, bright, shimmering blue that i couldn’t help but grin every time i looked at it, so brilliant that i could hardly keep my eyes on it for more than a few seconds without them burning.

it was so wonderful to sit behind the desk and, when there was too much murmuring amongst the delegates in my committee and again in ga, call,
order on the floor, order on the floor
and hear the low noise immediately subside.
dead quiet. people listening. respect for the speaker.
sometimes i only wish that it didn’t just apply to mun.

and instead at the end of the day, i’m juggling to the french national anthem or scraping the coffee grounds from the french press into the bin. don’t ask me about the whole french thing. i don’t know.

and maybe i’m still a little angry that the delegate representing russia never received justice for what he did. i think i may have been the only one burning, seething with anger that nothing was ever done. oh, plenty of people were angry at what he did. but most just sat back and said, you know, it’s the second to last resolution of the conference. there’s really no time to do anything now…
maybe i’m just dreading that maybe possibly be a time where i lapse into feeling the same thing. when i no longer will care. and maybe i’m just a little disgusted that time is being put over justice.

this evening we’d to attend an advisor’s meeting…which basically meant just mingling at the bar with all of the advisors…we’d to wait around two hours after everyone else was done for the day, which none of us were too thrilled about, but in the last half an hour before the ‘meeting’ began we sat in the bar listening to eimear playing piano -
i sat next to her and watched her fingers flowing over the keys, swift, then slow, but always gentle, always graceful.

later i noticed one of the advisors standing a little awkwardly on his own, so i went to go speak to him and mel followed me. so we stood and had quite an interesting conversation – talked about the time he’d spent in kazakhstan and italy - and before we moved on he asked us a little about ourselves. asked us where we wanted to go next year. mel told him where she planned to go immediately, he turned to me. i shrugged a little, said ‘i’m not quite sure yet.’
‘good for you, girl,’ he said, which surprised me. a lot. especially since most people seem a little disapproving when i say that. haha.
and then mallen interrupted briefly – after that we sort of said goodbye to him, but before we moved on he leaned in a little closer and said to me,
‘you go where you want to next year. not where anyone else wants you to go. understand? where you want to go.’
which also surprised me. and which also encouraged me, oddly enough, and which i appreciated, even though i barely, barely knew/know him.

walked mel tim and catriona to the dart station afterwards, and then once they’d gone in took off running – i figured to stop after a few metres or so – but i didn’t – i couldn’t – just kept going and
going and
going
and i ran all the way home, from dun laoghaire. in high heels too.
sometimes there’s nothing like spontaneous running in cold, march weather under a mottled sky to burn away mild depression, disappointment, bitterness. sometimes there’s just nothing like it.

…but i did manage several times to avoid being interviewed by the fifty million little press people running around…that’s definitely a bonus…

*title: psycho killer//talking heads

one of the most depressing things that happens when you’re chairing is when everyone refuses to speak. so today when when helena opened herself to points of information and a grand total of one placard went up, i thought, this is going to be a long, long hour…
but it ended up being grand – after the initial one placard there were no problems with no-one wanting to speak. i think mel and i got the best room today - we barely had to call for order on the floor, everyone spoke without being asked/forced to, everyone used parliamentary language, and there was only one point of order. and it was actually an intelligent debate, which i was very grateful for, especially today, and i think mel was too.

today, and yesterday, i felt a growing sense of despair when i realised that after tomorrow, and after break, we have two more weeks of classes and then we are off before exams start. it’s not so much the oh-no-only-a-short-time-before-exams, i’ve already panicked enough about that. now it’s more inherent dread of people leaving again.
and it’s so hard to enjoy the time i still have with people, instead of wasting that time feeling miserable about how after may, i may or may not see some people ever again.

this evening the clouds were mottled and the sea stripes of deep blue, purple, aquamarine, and teal. converging stripes, like energy levels. i walked through the park, walking on the edge of the pond – first out onto the dais and then around the ribboning edge. looking at the water facing away from the sea, the water was brown and green, with grey reflected on the edges of the tiny waves rippling across the surface. but when i rounded the edge of the ribbon and came about to face out towards the sea over the pond, the grey disappeared; the tiny waves rippled up in green and brown and dipped gently down in sky blue, with the wave’s ridge the fine line between greenbrown and blue.

ah no. biology write-ups’re due in tomorrow and we’ve to submit the ones with the highest marks – one of mine happens to be an experiment we did with elodea, and which april and i did together….we had a little star of an elodea plant, it was a bit of a freak, actually, but anyway we were quite fond of it and named it the little elodea that could. and when i turned in my write up…i still had the title as the little elodea that could. i don’t know why our teacher didn’t comment on it – but anyways, if my write-ups end up getting sent to the ib…well…awkward? interesting? hopefully the examiner will have a sense of humour..?

a few minutes ago sarah was still here and we were in the kitchen, making chai and lefse and talking, and now she’s gone to cooking class, and i can’t remember what i was going to post about for the life of me.

have you ever looked inside another car and really wanted to be in on the conversation? yesterday sarah chrissy and i were on our way to powerscourt and the person in the passenger seat in front of us was gesturing wildly with their hands over and over again – it was so bizarre to watch – and i thought it would be so interesting to be in on that conversation. maybe he was telling a story? maybe he was feeling strong about a song playing?

saturday morning it’d just stopped sprinkling when i got out of training – and the sky was such a pure, ice cold blue, it was gorgeous! cycled home, put the bike away, started walking to school for mun – and just as i was arriving on school grounds – there, framing the school building perfectly – was the most perfect rainbow i’ve ever seen in my life. it was bold and strong and you could see the full arc – red orange yellow green blue indigo violet. it was striking – and as i stood admiring it the sun came up just that wee bit further and cast a beautiful golden glow over everything – and it sparkled too – i know that glows don’t really sparkle and that’s why they’re glows – but this glow did sparkle. kind of like waves of particles. and it was amazing.

it’s funny, watching more and more navy jumpers acquire splashes of yellow as the day progresses. maybe it’s the small, yellow, cloth daffodil pin, maybe it’s the soft yellow and baby blue of the metal pins. or maybe the pins are forgone and instead a small bouquet of about five daffodils has been opted for instead.

our school’s ib head came into double biology today to talk to our teacher, bearing two of the small bouquets. we were in the middle of a practical and so were all moving around the lab – and i was closest to him -
‘daffodils are extraordinary flowers,’ he remarked to me, ‘they’re beautiful. and they represent such wonderful, important concepts…spring, new life…an apt choice of representation for fighting cancer…’

the gardener walked past me in the sixth year centre wearing one of the small cloth pins; kathryn in the library had a metal one and had arranged what looked like hundreds of the bouquets in a vase on her desk. walking home, one of the janitors cycled by, a bouquet with the stems nestled into a cloth tied to the basket on the back of his bike.