Every day is a lovely day for a Guinness

I hate when Paddy's Day is on a Friday or Saturday, because you get more amateur drunks than you would normally and the pubs are packed to the point where you can't breathe and people taller than you are spilling beer on your head. There are too few Irish pubs in the DC area, and most of the ones that do exist aren't very good, with bartenders who pour a full pint of Guinness in one pour and leave the kegs on tap until they are empty, even if it takes a month to empty them and everything that resembled freshness has long since departed.

I am thinking back to the time when I spent my first Paddy's Day in Dublin. I was studying in Luxembourg at the time, and since it was on a Tuesday, I received special permission to miss class, as I could justify needing to go to Dublin for a project I was working on for my core class. The way the program in Lux is set up is that all students take one core class worth six hours total, and two of those hours are for one major research project, which is why I "had to go" to Dublin.

The class was an educational psychology class I took because the intelligent but socially retarded professor they had hired for the political theory course had the power to make boredom excruciating to even the dullest dork. I had taken his political philosophy course in the first semester, where we had to take a week long trip through Flanders and Holland to study, well, I couldn't even tell you, because it was all so disorganized and disconnected that none of us knew what the hell was going on. The classic line was, "Who is Christophe Plantin?" spoken at the end of the trip after we had apparently been studying the impact of this famous printer all week. This professor was so bad, he had to cart in beer and wine on the last day of class when we were filling out evaluations, but I don't think it helped. He was not invited back the next year.

Anyway, the professor of the ed-psych class was brilliant and everyone raved about her during the first semester, so I chose to ignore my major for the second semester and take her class. She ended up being one of my top three favorite professors, if not the favorite, and had a profound effect on my life that I have never quite understood, but I have to say it was the best class I ever took. It was an odd combination of literature, history, and psychology, where we studied the psychological effects on adolescents in various social situations, including war. For our week long trip, we went to Terezin, the "model" concentration camp where the Nazis took all of the Red Cross workers to prove that the prisoners were being treated well, and no one had to ask who Christophe Plantin was. The museum at the camp had some disturbing children's art work from the time of incarceration, and to this day I wonder if any of those kids became serial killers on account of the psychological damage they incurred in those camps.

Now, for my research project, I chose to write a short story rather than a research paper. This, of course, had to be approved by her, but she welcomed the idea since I was studying for a year and had already done a research project in the previous semester. I figured that since we were reading stories about troubled adolescents (like one of my personal favorites Catcher in the Rye,) I could write my own story based on research into adolescent psychology. I chose Ireland as the setting for a number of reasons, the first being that I had fallen in love with Dublin and wanted every excuse to go back numerous times. The story was about an American girl whose family moves to Ireland and how she deals with the different culture and her preconceived stereotypes of the Irish.

So I found myself going up to Dublin on the Friday before Paddy's Day, celebrating the pre-Paddy festivities and doing very little work on the project. This was in '98, the prime of the Celtic Tiger, so huge, over-marketed Paddy's day celebrations were still relatively new to the city. They tried to dye the Liffey green but the muck was too thick and it didn't take. Back then, you couldn't even get t-shirts that said "St. Patrick's Day, Dublin 1998" but I am sure the tourist shops are filled with them these days. I've seen them over here on the backs of college kids on occassion.

My point in writing all of this is that these things are as vivid to my mind as they were back then, which makes it incredible that nearly a decade has passed since they happened. Time is something we can never get back, you know? No amount of human progress will ever triumph in our battle against time. We incarcerate ourselves in offices while the sun rages on through the window, if we are lucky enough to have a window, never able to get back the hours we spend in our confinement. We should be out celebrating each breath we take, but some floozy had to go and eat an apple and condemn us to a life of labor. (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course.)

To me, Paddy's Day is an excuse to celebrate life, friends, good times and passions and joy. You don't have to be Irish to partake in the festivities. I am an Irish-German-American (with an unfortunate bit of English) who grew up with certain Paddy's Day traditions, but it's a great time of year to celebrate regardless of your ethnic heritage - the end of winter, the solstice, Lent, Purim, March Madness, Spring Training - use whatever excuse you can come up with, but just take a second, draw in a deep breath, and appreciate the fact that you've been given the chance to do so.

If you read all of this, you deserve a medal. By the way, I earned an A for the story.