OBAMA!

What an amazing day! What a victory and huge step forward for our country. I stayed up until 5:30 this morning eating popcorn and chocolate cake watching the night unfold. When they finally called it, I wept in relief and joy at the announcement of our 44th president who promises to bridge many of the social and economic gaps in our country and who has given us immense hope for the future. The whole world was watching America's every move last night and now the world will be forever changed.

For the first time in a long time I actually feel proud to be American. I feel so very proud.

Thanks to all who campaigned and counted votes and spread the word. Even though I'm in Belfast, I still feel a part of the larger community of Americans, and it's so exciting to see how pleased the rest of the world is as well. We've made a great decision and I hope we're ready to work and do what needs to be done to move forward.

Go OBAMA!

A weekend at the farm

A few weekends ago I went to Lauren's house situated on a farm in Donegal in the Republic. (By the way, in Northern Ireland you either live in "The North" or "The Republic," meaning the Republic of Ireland. The two countries are actually quite different from what I gather. ) We left Friday night, and two hours later I crawled into my electric blanket-warmed bed for a long deep sleep. I woke up Saturday morning to a brightly slanted sun magnifying itself in the dew on the hillside. The earth was still. Lauren had brought back to life the fire started the night before in her tiny, black wood-burning stove, and I made us our favorite egg-in-the-bread-hole breakfast complete with local eggs and bread from the early morning market. Even though we spent the majority of the weekend curled up by the fire reading scientific journal articles for class, we did manage to get out and explore a little.

Lauren's family has been on their land for six generations, and Lauren is the primary caretaker of the property. When she's not involved with school, she's plotting how best to use the land and what types of trees, food and animals she should acquire for the future. The land borders on a lake where blackberry and raspberry bushes grow wild. We spent some time between rain showers exploring the land and the lake and avoiding the cow patties. The weather was often crazy with gale-force winds, sporadic rain showers, and plenty of rainbows. I've seen more rainbows in this country in one month than I have in my whole life, mostly because rain and sun seem to frequently hang out together. All those postcards you've seen of Ireland with a giant sized rainbow over the rolling green farms are not just the stereotype, although I have yet to find the pot of gold (or even a box of Lucky Charms for that matter).

On Sunday, we drove 10 minutes north past fields of sheep and chickens to a bay on the coast. We had come to collect dinner. The tide was half a mile out, which gave us plenty of room to search. I knew what mussels looked like, but finding oysters and scallops proved to be a bit more challenging as they tend to blend in better with the sand and seaweed. Lauren showed me how to identify a native oyster and scallop while being careful to throw the smallest shells back to let them mature. All of the shellfish grow near the seabed and some attach themselves to seaweed, rocks, crabs, or whatever else they can find. Digging them up just requires a good pair of eyes and a willingness to stick your hand in cold water and muck. We started filling our bags with the biggest and least barnacle encrusted, seaweedy creatures we could find. I was quite proud of the giant rock oyster I found that was the size of my hand! My excitement was slowly replaced, however, by the realization that one of my Wellington boots was slowly leaking. We quickly finished filling our bags up with as much as we could carry and headed back home to admire (and eat) our work.

Raw, fresh salt water oysters and scallops are one my absolute favorite things. There's not much better than cracking open an oyster shell, drinking the salt water inside, and eating the smooth, slightly chewy oyster. Finding and collecting them myself was quite a treat. I was less familiar, however, with eating raw scallops. You know scallops are super fresh when the interior slime is still pulsating like an electric current when the shell is opened. Even after the little edible part was taken out of the shell, a few of them continued to do flips on the plate! We quickly dipped them in a tiny bit of soy sauce and gobbled them up before they managed to escape. They were absolutely delicious. Fantastic. They were much tastier than the mussels we cooked. After having worked hard to prepare them (you have to scrape off as much seaweed and barnacle as possible before preparing a sauce to steam them in), we found that in almost every shell tiny pea crabs had crawled into the mussel flesh to mate leaving their hard bodies as a hidden crunchy surprises.

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Apart from adventures on the farm, life is good. I'm loving school. I'm cramming my brain full of scientific theory and philosophical debates and general craziness. Currently we're studying Evolutionary Psychology and looking at theories of the possible evolution of cognition (what our brains do) by a process of natural selection. A lot of what we're reading is in the genre of philosophy of science (a field I didn't know existed) and consists of philosophers arguing over the definition of certain scientific vocabulary and theory. It can be a bit complicated. Sometimes I hang on by a little thread, but most of the time it's pretty interesting. I can't believe that in the next few years I will be able to call myself a researcher. A real, live researcher. What exactly I'll be researching will be determined in the next year or so. If you want an accessible, interesting account of some aspects of research in this field, look to Steven Pinker's books: How the Mind Works; The Blank Slate; or The Stuff of Thought.

Otherwise, Belfast is pretty interesting/strange. I bought a bag of peat to burn in the wood burner to later discover that peat is fossilized animal/plant matter and burning it is like, in the words of Lauren, "eating tiny, rare, almost extinct hummingbirds for dinner." Maybe that's not exactly what she said (you can mentally erase the quotation marks), but I do feel a twinge of guilt as I watch the peat burn. But I bought a 70 lbs bag of it. I can't just shove it back in the earth. So. Burn peat, burn.

The first day of the rest of my life

I could start by telling you that in my new home there are thirty-one steps up to my converted attic room on the third floor where a single skylight frames direct sunlight for 15 minutes at 3pm, and where my bed with its white linens lies against the soft white walls on the dull wood-slated floor. Or how, in Belfast, the sky is a perpetual whirl of black and rain and gray and shocking blue and blinding sun. Or maybe I could tell you about the time that the terrorist group the UVF dressed in sharp red uniforms beating drums and blowing horns marched through our neighborhood while children walked alongside mimicking the loyalists' gun twirls with their toy flutes. But really maybe I should focus on the abundant garden in our backyard overgrown with heavy sunflowers and empty strawberry greens and prickly borage leaves where I found a dozen potatoes the size of my hand hiding just below the earth between leaves of spicy arugula. Or how on my birthday my flatmate Lauren and I sat down to watch a cooking show featuring her friend before she surprised me with a copy of his cookbook and a chocolate ginger cake featuring 10 eggs and a pound of butter. But if I start talking about Lauren and her stories of raising and butchering her own chickens and pigs or of collecting shellfish for a massive paella on the rocky coast of Donegal, then I'll never get to tell you about my very first class at Queen's University Belfast that threw me into a blur of philosophical debates over the evolutionary cause and nature of consciousness. And if I start off on a tangent about class and lectures and professors with British accents I'll inevitably skip over the part about our 3-month old black and white cat that incessantly drinks out of the glass on the table vasing the purple chive flowers. But I would hate to waste time on cats and risk losing the chance to tell you about my neighborhood in protestant east Belfast where the flags fly British and I have my choice between three butchers, three bakers, and three..vegetable makers. But focusing on my neighborhood would only lead me back up the thirty-one wooden stairs, back to my attic room with the slanted ceiling and the single skylight, back to that patch of 3 'o clock sun.