Please Contact My Next of KINSALE

By the way, I write these throughout the week and then upload them when I get the chance. Hopefully that explains any weird time discrepancies you may notice – such as “today” referring to two different days in the same post.

Thursday – after a full week on the farm – I got my first rain worth speaking of. It…was kind of nice. The land in the distance was all misty-looking and made me feel kind of poetical. And luckily for me, it was only misting until I finished my job (clearing weeds from around the fruit trees and re-mulching the bare spots) and went inside, at which point it picked up.

For dinner I got lazy and ate baked beans – some of them right out of the pot they were cooking in – and I also happened to have soot all over my fingers from setting up the heating fire. I felt kind of like a hobo. But don’t worry! The rest of the time I’m eating fairly well, with fresh “veg” (as my hosts invariably say) straight from the garden.

…I am having some issues, though. Loneliness and such. I feel very isolated from, well, everything. The only people I have to talk to are the husband and wife who own the farm and their two-and-a-half-year-old twin boys. That, plus I don’t have the constant on-demand internet access that I’m accustomed to. The net result is that I’m kind of trapped inside my own head. Sometimes when I’m doing menial tasks (for some reason, sitting down and digging weeds was particularly bad for this) my mind is totally unoccupied and it begins going places that I’d rather it not be going. I start thinking about how far away from all my friends I am right now, and the fact that I may never see some of them again. Even weirder is how I’ll sometimes start thinking about high school, and about how I might have missed out on some vital experiences or about mistakes I made. Is that weird? Also: I am terrified about the real world.

In conclusion, I think that three weeks per farm was perhaps biting off a bit more than I care to chew. But we’ll see how I feel by the end of May, whether or not I think it was ultimately worth it to spend that much time. Right now two more weeks seems like a VERY long time, but on the other hand, it hardly feels like I’ve already been here a week, so maybe it’ll go quickly.

Saturday I got a free Tai Chi lesson from Mark. It was nice, invigorating, relaxing. Probably with repeated practice it’s even better – I’m not entirely sure what the benefits of it are, as I didn’t feel “worked out” afterward, but maybe it improves your flexibility and lowers stress and such. I felt kinda out-of-place since everyone else knew a bit about what they were doing (it was one of his regular lessons that I was just sitting in on). He said I did well for a beginner, which is always good to hear! For those few who will know what the hell I’m talking about: the whole time I was doing it I had waterbending in the back of my mind, and it was totally awesome. I even found myself noticing specific moves that overlapped the two!

Sunday – my day off – I was invited to go to Kinsale with the Van Dams. Mark plays saxophone in a latin-fusion band and they were playing a gig and wondered if I wanted to come along. Since I would have otherwise just lounged around the caravan, maybe taken a walk, I eagerly agreed. Kinsale is a charming (as all small Irish towns seem to be) town about an hour’s drive from Conakilty, with a thriving water-based community. That is to say, fishing and yachting are the biggest pastimes. When we arrived, we witnessed some kind of a boat race consisting of dozens upon dozens of young-teenaged kids racing little sailboats (maybe six feet long) surprisingly quickly down the river. I wandered around town, got a few nice pictures, listened to a busker play accordion while I ate a sandwich for lunch. I once again regret not being more confident and straightforward in general; there was this really cool-looking hippie girl sitting on a wall eating lunch who smiled at me when I walked past. I wanted to take a picture of her, but I felt awkward just asking a stranger something like that (though obviously professional street photographers must do the same thing all the time). By the time I’d made up my mind to go back and talk to her she had already disappeared. C’est la vie, I guess!

P.S.: I am not becoming as ripped as I was kind of hoping to. This has not been the kind of farm work I anticipated – less bucking bales of hay and more crouching and digging. Not terribly muscle-intensive. Perhaps this will change over the next two weeks.

P.P.S.: I am delighted to announce that, given my prodigious free time without internet access, I have finally slogged through my four-hundred-plus playlist of “songs to listen to” that I had torrented/been given but never actually tried out for myself. Phew.