Caffeinated Crackdown

Q: What are you doing for the Haitian children?

A: Poppin’ champagne, oh ho.  

Monday of Reading Week has come and almost gone, thus my procrastination has reached its saturation point. I have discovered most concretely something that I have subconciously known about myself for a long time now - I am completely incapable of keeping to a healthy work timetable. I know this is true of most students, but its more than that I am unable to wrap my mind around the fact that my stress levels would be more bearable if I just started my work earlier and proceeded slowly forward in small increments of dedicated study time. I find it actually much more enjoyable to not think about school at all for weeks on end, and then seclude myself in the library for days on end on some kind of masochistic study binge. 

There is just something so satisfying about jacking yourself up on coffee and having a days long academic bender. I’m sickly looking forward to this week of all out hellish work ethic and seclusion. I love letting my whole world revolve around the inner workings of one nine page paper. Staring at the horrible fake wood table having a slight panic attack about the phenomenology of faith or whatever ridiculously self-indulgent topic the philosopher kings at Trinity set us off on. 

Side note: Somebody in the library is wearing a vintage Chicago Blackhawks shirt - what are the chances that he’s actually a fan, and didn’t purchase the shirt at some ridiculously marked up price because its got that soft, worn, vintage thing going on? Sadly, slim to none. 

Then again, I’ve never seen a Chicago Blackhawks game in my life, so who am I to judge. 

Anyway, point is - In the library, too jacked up on coffee to even start to contemplate the differences between Rawls and Cohen’s theories of justice. At some point I’ll start the slow process of slipping into my self-induced coma of academia and saturate myself with this nonsense, but there is no forcing it. Therefore, I’ll write up my weekend. 

I decided a week or two ago that I needed to get out of Dublin, and have some girl time with my cousin Patsy, my sister in this world, because, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this - besides my wonderful roommate Julia, all my friends in Dublin are men. This is not that different from my life in the States, but it is almost without exception here. Given the ratio at SLC, I have way more than my fair share of male friends, but I also have an amazing group of ladies that I just could not live without . 

For some reason, and this has been true for my entire life, I just find it much easier to become friends with men than with women. I’ll spare anybody reading this an attempt to delve into the psychology of such a pattern, but suffice it to say that the friendships I have with my women friends have been the product of years of intense community in small high school environments and the X-chromosome ridden campus of SLC. 

Trinity is the opposite of such an environment, being the sprawling, socially diluted experience that I have found it to be - Thus, all my friends are guys. Which I have never had a problem with, but when it is to such extreme levels as it is here, I found myself craving time to just bitch about life and embarrassments and bowel movements.  And so it was had!

I flew Ryanair (a hellish experience that every student in Europe is bound to have at some point, involving a cornucopia of elbows and smells and big jackets and luggage restrictions and hair that isn’t yours - also the feeling that you are flying in a coffin to your premature death) to Edinburgh. 

This being my third trip to visit my cousin at St. Andrew’s, and having yet to really spend any time in Edinburgh, when my flight arrived at 7:30 AM I was determined to stick out the day in the city visiting castles and little pubs and shops. But, it was raining, and I had gotten up at 3:30 that morning and seriously, what is there to do in a city at 8AM besides drink too much coffee and hate yourself for being awake - so I accepted my personal failures and fell asleep on the train out to Leuchars (LOOH-CHers, I’ve learned).  

The big event for the semester at St. Andrews is the FS:X Charity Fashion Show. It’s completely student-run, with student models and student designers in addition to the fairly big name labels that they get to sponsor the event. Coming from SLC, I was complete bowled over by the lavishness of the thing. The venue was this old paper mill warehouse that was scheduled to be demolished the next week, so the whole thing had a very edgy/we’re-freezing-to-death-in-a-warehouse-for-fashion-feel to it. 

I’m having trouble deciding how to accurately represent the sheer ridiculously lavish nature of this event. For a staggeringly high price-per-head, a group of friends could secure a table decked out with “free” champagne, vodka, red bull and vitamin water, and gift-bags filled with free D+G perfume and designer condoms.  Suffice it to say, I was completely out of my element. My crippling five-inch heels weren’t helping, but I found that whiskey helped dull the intensity of the situation a bit. 

When I was thinking about the guests of the event on my way home, I just thought “trollops”. I have no idea what that word means in any specific way, but that’s exactly the kind of girls that were stumbling around me. For having obviously put a lot of effort into their attire and general look, these girls just looked, well, messy. Their profanely-expensive dresses sliding off their malnourished shoulders, they were a gaggle of tottering trollops. Tottering trollops. I don’t really understand this trend of looking like you are hanging onto life by shoestrings. It’s not just the skinniness, that’s been around for forever, and not worth commenting on. It’s this look of morning-after chic. All my cousin’s friends looked classy and beautiful, put-together and having a great time, without looking like they were falling apart at their thousand-dollar seams. 

I guess the word I am looking for here is reckless. This has nothing to do with the liquor or drugs that were being consumed with urgency throughout the night by everyone and their Mom (literally. Fifty and having a 20-year-old help you vomit in a portapotty is not a good look), it had more to do with the money being almost quite literally thrown around. There was an auction in the middle of the event that had students dropping money that rivaled in quantity the amount I paid to go to Trinity this semester. Guys were buying champagne for 35 pounds a bottle, and popping it in the middle of the show, spraying everybody within 30 feet (thanks to Jay-Z, or whoever that was, for making “poppin’ champagne” a symbol of status). 

One of the most hilarious moments of the night came, when we were standing next to probably the most insane looking woman I’ve ever seen in real life. She was a caricature of one of the assistants in that movie The Devil Wears Prada. She was wearing this long black cape/jacket thing, with elbow length gloves, and the most severe, blonde bangs I’d ever experienced. She had this reporters notebook that she was writing in with this pencil that was just slightly overly sized.  She turned to my cousin, who was wearing this fabulous black and white blazer, and asked her “who she was wearing”. My cousin answered her, and then she went back to watching the show like she was analyzing the incoming stock prices from the Japan Market or something. The tone she used to ask who made my cousins blazer was pretty much the same tone somebody would use to ask, “what are you doing for the Haitian children”? 

Despite the incredibly self-indulgent nature of the scene, I had a great time just getting rowdy and dancing to electronica . It was fun to, if not be a part of, but experience that kind of lavish social scene without having any concern for my own place in it.