Day 41

I saw something yesterday and I feel compelled to write about it.

It was something many people would have disregarded, but being the over-analytical and baby-crazed person that I am, it hit me. Literally. The kid wacked me with her 3 foot French baguette as she ran to catch up with her Pa. I’ll explain.

When you have an hourly countdown going on in your head for when you will be able to enjoy something next, life becomes a reflective and provocative thing. In my head. I’m thinking all day long about bread. It’s all encompassing. Did you know that if you search “Bread” on thesaurus.com, the first definition for it is “daily food”? Ironic.

But back to the grocery store and the mean little kid. I was shopping for dinner. It was decided we would make chicken, again.

And I don’t know how this happened, but I was once an American girl who hated beer, refused meat, and overdosed on bread daily. I have become an Irish squatter who grills her own chicken fillets, and has replaced her nightly dinner roll with a Guinness nightcap.

But again, back to the grocery store. I was wandering around with chicken in one hand, stack of oaties in the other, and I see this cute little girl standing in the middle of the aisle with her back to me. Sporting ringlets and big rubber boots, she was uncoordinatedly following behind her (assumed to be) dad. I went about my shopping (definitely not oodling over the cutest little Irish offspring I’d ever seen), when she turned around abruptly and I saw that she had a baguette the size of a Subway sub clenched in her dinky little hands. Man, she was a sight. Slobber rolling down the torn-open packaging that I could only hope she wasn’t swallowing in her fervor. She looked at me, ripped off another bite of her tightly held prize, then spun and ran away.

Did she know? Did she do that on purpose because she knew I couldn’t be doing that? Even if this whole lent thing was over? Let’s be real. Me slobbering on a stick of bread in the frozen foods aisle wouldn’t emit the same reaction from passerby’s as the toddler in polka dots.

I tried to put it out of my mind.

As I neared the queue to pay, I saw her again in front of me. She had probably devoured at least a third of it by then. Her father, after paying for actual baby mush and suitable forms of food for teething infants, took the bread from her so the the unlucky cashier could scan it. And in that instant, that girl must have had all the sadness in the world come out of her eyes. Tears ensued. Quickly realizing the mistake he had made, Dad gave the bread back to the girl, who snatched it and started off without him.

And I stood there, and thought to myself. This girl and I are not that far off each other. Sure, we are citizens of different countries, and I have about 4 feet in height on her, but on the inside, we’re exactly the same. That would be me, without cognitive awareness or acceptable social behavior skills. That girl is going to grow up, and maybe she will become the next Irish Taoiseach. Or maybe she’ll be a street performer on Grafton St. Either way, she’s going to do great things, I can tell. With a passion like that, why not?

A few days ago, a Dubliner told me that “Aran” is Irish for “bread”. It’s a dreadful language, Gaelic. Independent/dependent forms of verbs, some short vowels are lengthened while others are diphthongized… terrible.

I love it.

Day 37

Yeah. It’s been a while.

I gaze at my keyboard as I do of the baguettes in the store fronts, with apprehension, and wonder to myself why it is we tear apart the very fibers that tend to hold ourselves together.

Somber thought for a Friday morning in Trinity library. 32 breadless days in the last 37. 32 mornings of waking up to yet again, porridge. 32 evenings of make-shift tortilla shell pizzas. And you know what? After over a month of the nonsense, I’d like to believe that I’ve learned something important. Bread isn’t my fibers.

Well. Actually, it is to a certain extent…

What I mean to say is that bread isn’t what holds me together; it’s the comfort that is served alongside it. It’s the familiarness that is sprinkled on top. It’s the god damn flakes on the side of the croissant that my tongue melts on impact, I’m that hott.

Eating bread has lead to thinking about bread. Which has lead to writing about bread. Which has lead to psychoanalyzing my undivided and consistent emotional attachment to an inanimate object that lingers a moment on the lips and forever on the hips. This sequence is not favorable. And I blame this terrible progression solely on Trinity.

Yes, you Trinity College, you overzealous and pretentious school.

I have a paper on Insight and Creative Thinking due next week. That’s why I came to the library this morning. To work on my paper. But all I can think about is how much happier, more productive, charismatic, and good looking I would be if I could have just had toast for breakfast.

And this is where it hits me. Bread will do none of the afore mentioned things. It may in fact do the polar opposite. I know this. I am a nutrition student, and though I near-to fail out of every chemistry class, I know what massive amounts of carbohydrates do to the serotonin and insulin in a body. So why do I want it?

About a week ago, I cheated.

In Howth. It was dusk. Wind was calm and the sea was spraying drops of salt water along the pier, and the ambiance was just stellar, it shouldn’t have happened… but it did….

All over a hamburger. A hamburger wrapped in a decadent sesame seed bun. I bit into it like I hadn’t had beef for years (which I haven’t) with the appetite of a practiced carnivore (which I’m not).

My life is a walking contradiction.

So now that I am over the bread cravings and on to the beef, chicken, and fish cravings, I’ve completed my attempt at total and complete irony, thru and thru.

Maybe it’s time to start that Insight paper.

Day 21

Hey, look over here at the roof. Let’s climb up it.
Not my smartest moment, but potentially my most brilliant.

My lasses and our new English boy-toys followed me over the hand rail as we crept to the peak of the Oasis Hostel roof. Not only because we weren’t tired, but also because one of them was dreadfully cute, and we just couldn’t decide if he was into girls or not.

Saturday night was long behind us and by the time I realized it was Sunday, I was perched like a pigeon, file-line along the shingled rooftop, legs dangling and gleaming out towards Granada, or rather, the space in Granada between the rooftops and Heaven. It’s a shame we don’t see more cities in this way.

But in any case, by the time I realized it was Sunday (!!!) I was very much stuck in one place, with the whole slew of us trying to remain covered by the lone blanket that belonged to the brit on my left. We clumped together (like pigeons) and talked in obnoxious Irish/English/American accents about our past adventures and our future destinations and how America totally owned England in the American Revolution, and how Ireland totally did too. And how Britain has little-man-syndrome. And bread.

Bread. Random, right? Not so much. It was officially Sunday, remember. And the moment I realized I could run down the (roof shingles) stairs and scrounge around the hostel for bread, I was tangled in a mess of wool blanket and human legs. Thus, I weighed my options and the expected outcomes if I were to

A. Leap up and make a bolt for the door to the roof, satisfy my intense craving, consequently sending my new friends down the roof and to their “When In Rome…” death, or
B. Wait it out till morning, or at least when we all ventured back down together.

After much debating I resigned with choice B.

But my girls knew what was up. And as a result, the story of the Bread Blog surfaced. I explained my little idea of self-sacrifice and atonement, and how much bread has been a part of my life. One of the gents challenged it:

Him (I don’t recall his name, but I’ll always remember him): Bread doesn’t seem to be hard to live without.
Me: For me it is, I really love it a lot.
Him: Why give something up if you really love it so?
Me: I guess just to see if I could do it at all.
Him: You make no sense you crazy American. But it’s kind of like that movie, Forest Gump?
Me: I do not follow. Please explain.
Him: Well, he has a whole “life crisis” and so he goes, “well, I wanted to run, so I just ran”, and all of them goes, “Run Forest, Run!”
Me: Am I Forest Gump in this analogy?
Him: Ahem, yes. Yes you are. Eat bread Liz, eat bread!

*All pigeons stooped on the perch join in.

I am not kidding. This conversation did happen. Give or take a few words, by this point it was 5am and no one was speaking coherently.
We contemplated staying awake till the sun rose, but after I established the Christmas Theory (the sooner you fall asleep, the sooner Santa comes), I decided I wanted to pass out PRONTO, so that bread would come sooner. At this point we all turned to the east, and imagined the most beautiful sunrise, went “Awhhh….” And then leaned backwards and shimmied on down.

The next morning, breakfast was complementary, and I ate 4 pieces of toast with Spanish knock-off Nutella.

**I know this post did not contain a lot of DIRECT bread material, however, I’m realizing more and more, the anticipation is sometimes more pleasing than the climax. Interpret as you will.

Day 15

It’s been difficult to sit in one place today. Wandering legs led to a wandering mind, and sometimes I find that I am not in Dublin, but rather a whimsy old town in the middle of a glen. Or in the middle of my mind. And everyone there is quite bizarre and inspired and gifted at the art of baking bread. A wandering mind manifested into wandering eyes. Curious eyes that scrounged the corners and dark windows of the shops this morning that were out of power. Eyes that darted to the passerby’s own darting eyes then back to the cobblestone wobbles. My fingers drumming my hip as I turn off Grafton onto Wicklow and follow the indent in the sidewalk to stand before the small teal door of my prized French café. I won’t be eating bread today. It’s not like I’ve forgotten this inopportune detail.

I can’t remember why it is I’ve wandered this far.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be an addict.

I start breathing heavier, because the sweet woman behind the counter recognizes me and assumes my normal behavior to ensue, and for her to get her fix of crazy American banter this morning, but I think in a way she knows it’s not happening. She can see my eyes. “Ahs yeah, she’s a goner,” she’s thinking. I nod my steam-filled head on my way past the window, “It’s still early in the game.”

I think it’s fair to say that a thing can be observed clearer when it’s not in front of your face. You don’t know a good thing till it’s gone. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. Love is a battlefield. You get it. As my weeks go by with only one out of seven days being bread-furnished, I start to see where my multi-daily regimen would have fallen into position, almost unconsciously. Filling up idle hands, silences, mumbled words, and most importantly, bellies.

There are times of day, places in the city, and conversations with people, which have become a sort of Pavlov conditioned response trigger that sends off a vibe that says, nay, screams bread. But alas, I am above a trained animal, and shall continue my attempt to prove so.

I met a lovely Dublin man who works for Trinity today, and his wife is taking bread baking lessons in town. He explained to me how she goes every Thursday, unaware of what the lesson will be on for that week; pizza? Focaccia bread? Bauernbrot? Either way, she takes home to him at least 5 or 6 baked attempts. They have so much by the weekend, he said he might need a bit of help putting it to use. He thinks I’m a crazy and a little eccentric (and who’s to really argue with that), but he might bundle some up and bring it to campus for me some Sunday. What a guy.

I tell him, I’m doing this to prove a point.
What point is that?
That even though it’s splendid to surprise all the skeptics, the sliest one to shock is yourself. That’s a lot of ‘s’s.

I’ll be in Granada this Sunday. And I do believe I’ll be in a skirt, wandering the coast with a trusted baguette.