Ireland Kicked Our Asses (and Not in a Good Way)

Well friends, I am writing to you today from Dublin, Ireland at 12:36am. And today was really rough.  I'm going to apologize preemptively in case I sound like I'm whining in this post. I also am going to apologize for this post not sounding particular coherent.

The trip started out with me oversleeping a bit, which I've never done on an important wake-up day.  We got out in record time though and had an uneventful drive to Denver.  I'll go ahead and fast forward through air travel because that's universally boring and also soul-crushing, so I'll just say that we landed in Dublin at 5 a.m. or so.

The first discovery we had was that Logan Airport had fucked up our luggage transfer and our baggage won't be arriving until tomorrow. That bag had a lot of our warm clothes and my nice camera.  This isn't a huge deal--at least as far as I assume right now--but at 5am I had absolutely no patience for it.

When we picked up the rental car we found out that apparently Ireland is one of 3 countries in the world which doesn't allow you to transfer your own car insurance to a rental, meaning the price of our car was just about doubled because we had to buy some half-baked insurance.

We drove to the hotel and, as a side note, Rob did really well driving on the left side of the road.  It's a good thing he was responsible for driving because I almost lost it just watching him.  Anyway we couldn't check into the hotel until 3pm so we had breakfast and decided to check out Dublin via the train (keep in mind at this point we hadn't slept in any significant way since we'd woken up at 2am the previous morning).

After waiting for the train outside in the rain, we ended up in Dublin where it--you guessed it--rained even more.  My feet were numb because my warmer shoes were in our lost luggage and BIG SURPRISE I guess that Chuck Taylors don't work in a rain-heavy city.  Prety much everything in Dublin was closed because it was Sunday morning, so we walked around fruitlessly in the rain and cold.  Neither Rob nor I are big city people, so hanging out in an urban environment is totally exhausting for us and this was no exception, especially since we were exhausted, hungry, wet and cold. We trudged our way back to the train station, where we waited for an hour in (GASP) the rain.  When we got back to the hotel our room was still not ready, so we spent two hours sleeping in the car before we finally checked in and totally fucking crashed for like 6 hours.  Then I had yogurt and rice cakes for dinner.

Before we finally got to our room we were both feeling incredibly discouraged but somehow closer to one another even despite (or perhaps because of) the annoyances we dealt with today.  I said repeatedly that I didn't care if the whole vacation was horrible because having Robbie with me genuinely made it all okay.

Now that we've slept and eaten and dried off and are snuggling in bed watching Hulu and Netflix together, we're excited for the next leg of our trip in a much smaller town which I think will be much closer to "our scene."  Vacations can't all go according to plan, but really, how boring would it be if they did?

I hope you all had a great weekend, and thanks as always for your super-sweet comments.

I Annoy Myself & Here's Why!

I know I've been really into these "Things That..." posts lately but what can I say, they're fun to write.  This one will be pretty easy to write, since it's about my awkward self, something that I am constantly and painfully aware of.

I got the idea to write a "Things That Annoy Me About Myself" (yeah, that's great syntax, I know) from Lauren, who is a lovely person.

1. My tendency to take constructive criticism extremely personally.  Be it "your writing could use some work," "make sure to include a subject with that work email you sent," or "please stop asking me if I still love you," I automatically and unquestioningly take it as a deep, cutting remark against who I am as a person.  I'm a bad person, I'm annoying, I'm obnoxious, you get the point.  I then assume that the other person, who of course always has the moral high ground over me, is also thinking non-stop about how awful I am because of that one indiscretion and that they have made a final, permanent judgement on me. This is why in my blog posts you'll always see apologies and "scare quotes" and endless qualifications: I try, as much as possible, to preempt the stream of criticism that may fall upon my head.

2. My inability to do anything creative correctly.  This is hard to explain, but I feel like whenever I've tried to copy something creative, like a clothing style for example, it always winds up looking like a "poor man's" version of that thing.  Take my blog, for example.  I try to make it look like all of your well-structured and matching blogs, but it just doesn't.  Apart from my awesome header made by Jess, my blog looks like Cypress ate Photoshop and dafont.com and vomited them up onto your screen. Shit doesn't line up, the fonts aren't interesting, and I have no idea what colors to use aside from the very obvious ones, no matter how hard I try. I visit friends and they have lovely coordinated bathrooms, but our bathroom is a hodgepodge of hand-me-down towels of various colors, whatever handsoap was cheapest, and the shower curtain that came with the place.  I just don't get complementary colors or how people can just do shit and it looks awesome.

 

Gratuitous love photo because the blogs tell me that people don't like too much text and what can I say, I live to serve.

3. My total lack of impulse control.  If I want something and I have the money, it's mine. If I have an itch, I scratch it, even if scratching it isn't what's best for me (interestingly I can resist scratching when I'm dealing with a tattoo that's healing, but Rob will still tell you that I act totally nuts).

4. I pull away when I'm upset.  Whenever I'm anticipating feeling hurt or lonely, I pull away, but not subtly or nobly or humbly; I do it in a really stupid, passive aggressive way that is totally noticeable to anyone who knows me even halfway decently.  I can't even do emotional distance correctly.

5. I don't drink water enough. I really like juice. And chocolate milk.  Water is fucking boring.

6. My talent(?) for taking any compliment and finding a negative in it.  This one's pretty self-explanatory.  You like my writing? You'll probably hate my next 5 posts because I'm trying too hard.  My shirt is nice? You wouldn't think so if you saw me in real life.

7. I hate leftovers.  My dad also hates leftovers so as a kid we didn't eat them all that much.  Even the smell of leftovers--despite the fact that they generally smell the same as they did the night before--can make me physically sick.  I must just be a picky, privileged asshole since I've only had a few people agree with me that microwaved chicken and turkey are straight-up disgusting.

Wishing you all an awesome week free of negativity* and hard water.

*Rob just pointed out the irony of wishing you a non-negative week whilst simultaneously starting your Tuesday with a negative post.  Touché, husband-man. To make up for it, here's an picture of Cypress being adorable. You're welcome.