Hanging Out with the Irish Club

 

Last night the Bucks lost the playoff game against the Bulls, which isn't that big a deal since they won the first one and it's a seven-game series, but one of their best players did get an ankle injury and may be out for the rest of the series, so that is worse news. Anyway, Travalon thought it would be funny to take his little Bango the stuffed deer and make him look sad and then post it on social media, but when I saw the photo, I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.

It is a wildly appropriate photo, in that yesterday was 4/20 and Bango looks stoned, but "sad" isn't the first word that comes to mind when I see this photo. Would you Fear the Deer? No, because his eyes are going in two (at least!) different directions, so he couldn't get a bead on me to attack me. Maybe this is what it would look like if Picasso had been into making stuffed animals instead of painting.

Today was another meeting fail for me because I swear I checked my calendar first thing this morning and didn't see any, but I got back a little late from lunch and had a reminder that my meeting had started a few minutes earlier. Then Boethius was taking forever to open Zoom, and then I should have turned off my camera because I didn't prepare with a better outfit or seating area, so everyone could see me in my hoodie, sitting in my easy chair. So professional. I have had it with meetings this week. Luckily tomorrow I'm taking a vacation day, so meetings shouldn't be an issue.

Then this evening Travalon and I met up with the local Irish Club. They had asked us some months earlier to provide our Irish bona fides, so imagine my surprise when we met up with them in person and I was about the Irishest person there. A couple of women told me they were part Scottish, which is not exactly the same thing, but like genetically it is. Also, I appeared to be the only one torturing myself by trying to learn the language; nobody else seemed to have any interest in that. That is a very Irish thing to do, I guess, since actual people from Ireland tell me they were tortured in school by having to learn the language. Kind of like how people used to be tortured by having to learn Latin. (The "How many Romans?" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian will never not be funny to anyone who studied Latin.) I wrote my Irish teacher an email in Irish today, and she seemed to understand what I was trying to say because her response made sense. Bless her, she didn't correct me. I do have a terrible habit of not using the accent marks, and yes I know they are important, or how else would you know if I meant "man" or "grass"? I remember when Irish seemed like a cool, mysterious thing, and now it's just that thing I have to do on DuoLingo every day. But someone posted a TV show (?) of Buntus Cainte, which I thought were just these crazy books full of cartoons, and I could understand a lot of the story about a rabbit, so I have learned something, in case I ever need to discuss rabbits with someone who only speaks Irish. As random as my life is, it could happen.

Famous Hat