my therapist said not to see you no more, she said you're like a disease without any cure

Depending on my levels of inebriation next Thursday, this may be my last blog post from Dublin :( It's 2:25am, and a taxi is coming in one hour and twenty minutes to take me to the airport, where I will fly to Amsterdam (ugh) and then direct to Cape Town on a 12-hour nonstop flight of misery. Luckily, the fact that I haven't slept tonight and have generally slept poorly for the last several weeks should ensure that I sleep through most of the plane ride. I was in the office until midnight tonight, which was a fitting end to my worklife here; I had to finish up all of my peer reviews before going on vacation. Luckily, I got through absolutely everything on my to-do list, which means that I can start afresh when I get back from vacation. That will be a lovely feeling, at least until I start wading through the hundreds of emails that will greet me upon my return.

My team here is great, and I'm sad to leave them. I had 6-7 hours of meetings calendared over the course of the day, and so when I was in one of them, they decorated my desk with balloons and left a card and present on my keyboard. The present was a gorgeous silver pendant with a vaguely Celtic design, which is perfect because I'd been considering getting one and hadn't gotten around to it. Also, Darragh got me a couple of books; one is 'The Rules of Management', and the other is '101 Things To Do Before You Die'. It's clear from this combination that my dictatorial tendencies have come to the fore here, and also that it's clear to everyone that I desperately need to get out of the office more often. 'The Rules of Management' does look interesting, though...and the list of things to do before I die is probably a good thing, because I only do stuff when I can cross it off of a list.

I can't believe that I'll be on a plane in a little over three hours; it still seems absolutely impossible that I could be leaving here. Oh, well. It's funny--I'm sad to say goodbye to what is essentially a summer-camp experience, only to go on vacation with my summer-camp friends from India. But, the summer-friends from India turned into genuine friends, and it's too bad that I'm not here long enough to effect the same transformation with my summer-friends here.

So anyway, I've loved being in Ireland, and I'm looking forward to coming back this fall. I've had some rough times (immigration issues, too much work, not enough sara time), but I've also had some truly lovely days and met some v. entertaining people. Now, though, I'm too tired to write anything either profound or amusing. Also, I think I really need sleep, since I just started to itch my eyelid and instead poked myself rather hard in the eyeball, and now my eye really hurts. I'm so stupid. So, I'm going to sign off, see if there's anything else in my room that I can pack up so that I won't have to deal with it when I get back from South Africa, and then hopefully stay awake long enough to stumble out to the taxi and get to the airport. Have a great week, everyone!