Well Sturgeon, you asked for some of this literary garbage, so here goes. I said I’d post when I’m less stressed, but I’m actually really, really stressed right now. I just feel like procrastinating in a new format.
Oh, and one more thing: this is the first time I’ve ever “blogged”… listen for the sound of a popping cherry.

Elle.

Heads bob through the aluminum tunnel like gulls on the bay (bay-gulls), some moving faster than others—moving on a moving sidewalk, wary of the sudden deceleration of stationary ground after their double-time progress halves to mortal speed—and a dull rumble forces its way through the din of bags on wheels, cell phones, and muffled, incoherent public announcements. Anonymity is near-assured, John Does all face down in their newspapers, unless a chance collision with another personality-free pedestrian produces a familiar, somewhat peeved face and a few muttered words of destination and time-frame. Meeting someone there is like walking into an occupied restroom stall.

This is not a place to spend five hours, watching seven shifts of diners gorge themselves on Legal Sea Food, the enticing smell of lobster growing repulsive after thirty minutes of exposure, butter dripping down hands staining thin paper napkins translucent like the sheen of an onion. Five hours here will treat you to a barrage of sleeping travelers, tossing on awkward rows of chairs, rolling into their slightly uncomfortable corners. You’ll count fifteen Discmen, headphones adding another layer of “don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, don’t think about who I am” to the already impenetrable furrowed newspaper brow. For five hours, you’ll dream of your impossible destination, imagining the Purgatory of seat 37E as inconceivably better than this seafoodstinking Gate 4 Hell. And then you’ll go.

Slowly.

Into the pub.

To lobster replaced by Irish pizza (PIZZA in IRELAND?!?). You’ll ask for Harp and the barkeep’ll scoff like you’ve declared the Irish national football team inferior to that of England.

“Tha’s me grandda’s fav’rite drank, son. Arr yeh to-tally sure it’s what you’ll be havin’?” You’ll only need a half-second to come up with your response.

“Well, I s’pose not then. I’ll have a pint of Guinness.”

“Yeh, tha’s better. One point, cumin’ up.”

The Breakfast pizza has blood sausage, baked beans, and fried eggs on top. The desserts include deep-fried Mars bars and Twinkies, and all you’ll think is “I knew Ireland was the ‘fastest growing country in the EU’ but I didn’t think they meant waistlines.”

To later a few pints deeper and hearing other American voices, this time not from the uncomfortable, bloated family sitting down around a Breakfast Pizza but from the slender girls standing around a higher table laughing. The blonde, the redhead, and the brunette walked into the bar and…

They’ll look like college students, and you’ll look like college students, and only one group will be honest about whether they are actually college students, but your pulse will quicken because the prettiest one, the taller blonde one (Have I ever been with a blonde? Do I like blondes? Should I?) will stride over to your Guinness-soaked table and ask where you’re from.

To later, when you offer to buy Elle a drink because that’s what college students do when they want to pick up chicks, and she’ll laugh and say yeah, I’ll take a Smirnoff Ice, and your Guinness will be dregged so when you get to the bar, four-deep in Galwegians, what a weird name for people from Galway, when you get to the bar you’ll ask for both and get both, Guinness Three Euro, Smirnoff Seven, and your heart will sink into your wallet as you wonder why, in God’s green earth, on this Green Isle, does the synthetic, sickening crap cost twice as much as the whitefoamed, dark manna.

And then you’ll have a long, long talk with her about nothing, about Purdue and America and her classes in Galway, and how much you like Joyce and then how much she hates him and then how it’s really just because your parents loved him, that you were probably just influenced by them eventhoughyouweren’t and you reallyreallyloveJoyce. And how you’re a rising junior at Brown, and she’ll know of it, and you’ll have a moment of horror when you imagine the questions she might ask and which will make you betray your terrified inner-high-schooler but she doesn’t and it passes.

And the night out will end soon because you all have to wake up early to do separate things—they have class, you have a boat to the Aerin islands—so she’ll scribble her name and email onto a torn Guinness coaster, and you’ll part, finally, terribly. Back to the hostel which prevented you from “hanging out” more, because who wants to “hang out” when your two friends are sleeping above and beside you in the bunkbeds and a large Frenchman snores down the row.

And the coaster will still reside in your wallet, Guinness-stained and glorious.