The dream is this: to achieve happiness when we reach our goals. To go to college, study law, go to either King’s Inns or the Law Society of Ireland, become a solicitor or barrister, find that person to spend your life with, and everything will just fall into place. Basically, we want to send our lives off to the dry cleaners, and collect it when we’re in our mid twenties all shiny and perfect and just how we wanted it to be. If that’s the dream, I would really like to wake up. I mean, I spend all my time off in a daydream. Dreaming of how I will be a halfway decent lawyer some day, that the person I’m looking for really is out there and will just float into my life. Then I have to realise that the dream is a complete impossibility.
At some point, we have to accept that the dream has become a nightmare. We tell ourselves that reality is better. We convince ourselves that it is better never to dream, as it will only lead to disappointment. But the strongest of us, the most determined of us, hold on to the dream. I am, I fear, one of these people. I’m always chasing the dream, and if I didn’t have the career dream to chase, I don’t think I would have anything. Sometimes I wonder if I would just be a million times happier if I had wanted to be a waiter or a bartender. I mean, you just serve your customer, and away they go, completely happy. None of this deposition crap, and the threat of professional negligence. Of course, I think that if a person settles into believing that their life will turn out fine, they will never be truly happy. Content, maybe, but the goal is happiness, isn’t it? I guess the trick lies in being able to be stand up and chase your dreams, as opposed to just waiting for everything to just fall into your lap. And if the dream is accomplished, we have to be able to know that we will instantly move on to a new, bigger, better dream. We don’t want to believe that if we win a trophy, that we should place it on the mantelpiece, because then we hold ourselves up to it and define ourselves by it. We have to be able to say that this is something that I did, and did successfully, but it not exclusively who I am. And if we’re lucky, we realise…In the face of everything, in the face of life…The true dream…Is being able to dream at all.

As lawyers, we are supposed to be experts on the truth. Probably because it is our job to make sure that a client’s lies and secrets are all aired out in the open in order to ensure that they stay on the right side of the law. Generally, we are against secrets. Secrets, like some many other things, complicate even the simplest of trials. I have found, that it is human nature for us to keep secrets. We want to hold onto some level of mystery; the idea that not everyone we know is exciting. Trust is such a privileged thing: we are dealing with someone’s life being examined in a public forum. We must gain the trust of the client before we can argue on their behalf. Secrets, it seems, never stay secret forever, and whatever about the feelings we think we might experience when those secrets are exposed, in my experience it is never anywhere close to how it is when it actually happens. I guess that there’s a reason that the cliché is: “The Truth shall set you free”. Secrets hide behind facades and constructs, and they like company-usually with secrets comes misery and self-doubt. With the unleashing of secrets comes freedom and a new outlook on the world. However you have to deal with the fallout of a secret, once it’s out there in the universe you can move forward. It’s just a shame I probably won’t be getting an clients like this in the future. Either that, or I’ll get landed with complete blabbermouths who tell you everything, and it’s up to me to sort through it all for relevance. Oh well, to moving forward, to new outlooks, and to actually having some big secret to reveal!

Aislinn and I were talking the other day, as we are one to do, and she was shocked to discover that among the plethora of things she doesn’t know about me, one of them is that I’m a romantic. She couldn’t comprehend that someone like me, what my “black hole where a heart should be” could ever be a person who would fall head over heels in love. The whole ‘first time you see them the Romeo and Juliet theme plays, the lights all focus on the person, they smile, you smile, and the rest is history’ thing. To be honest, as I was with her, I don’t really believe that’s real, but I think that has to be something more to ‘love’ than sex and joint checking accounts. What makes two people come together and stay together? Is love a fleeting thing that eventually fades or grows with age, or is there really one person out there in the world that can give you something that nobody else can give you?
Aislinn thinks that most of the people you meet have the potential to be your ’soulmate’, but then it is up to you both to work on the relationship. For example, she thought that she was in love with Andrew, but only realised afterward that it was more fleeting. I think that is a very good of way of looking at it, without being too cynical. As lawyers in training, cynicism sustains us, but we have to know when to draw the line and really be prepared to fall flat on your face in love-if that is what happens. My faith in soulmates hasn’t really existed in years-ever since my English teacher told the class one day that statistically most people marry a person who lives with ten kilometres of where they themselves live. What does that say about the idea of soulmates being all over the world? And if, as they say there really are more fish in the sea (about 6 billion on last count), then why doesn’t everyone find that person who is all things?
Of course, society today has a lot to do with it. The idea of finding the person that you are supposed to stay with forever is supposed to happen sometime in your twenties; after that there just isn’t a point. Of course, the double standard effects women much more than men. Elligable bachelor; old maid. Why, if we all really do want love to come along, do we attach all these rules as to how and when we want it to come along? Case in point, “22″ by Lily Allen; a song I love.
Of course, I never have actually fallen properly in love. Not for real, anyway, just the usual puppy love when you’re sixteen. Being a dreamer, I’m hopeless when it comes to love. It probably doesn’t help that my favourite film is ‘Amelie’, where the two lonely dreamers end up together in the end after the usual cat and mouse chase through Paris:

How can you not believe that love exists after seeing that film?

Do you ever have one of those weeks where everything has you in a bad mood? Like everything within your world is making you sad, and because you can’t lift the mood, nor find a reason for it, you are angry. Most people in Maynooth seem to think that since I started back in college, angry and icy are my default expressions. Aislinn thinks I’m finally cracking up, (and she might be right), Cathal noted that I’m extremely demanding and sensitive lately, Alan joked as to whether I was having my man-period, Liam is throwing constant verbal digs at me, and everyone else is running scared. And that’s what happens when I’m there; I can only imagine how I’m discussed when I’m not. I can probably guess: Aislinn’s telling everyone than I have become the male Anna Wintour. I don’t really want to be like that, but everything just seems to be bugging me lately. Whether it’s the constant work, the early mornings, the migraines, or a combination of it all, college this year is just getting to me. Some days I just want to stay in bed and just have my imaginary animals for company, but of course I’m old enough to know that I have to get up and go to college every day and learn to be a lawyer. I’m determined to be optimistic, however. I’m going to get up every day and read whatever they throw at me, study all I can. If only to prove to myself that I can do it. Plus, I want to show everyone else, especially Ciaran and Cathal, who both seem to think I’m a complete moron just because I live in a child-like fantasy world. In my opinion, they’re both not lucky enough what a special gift an imagination is. I’ll show them. Even if I do have to take a leaf out of Anna’s book.

Competition; it means different things to different people. To law students, it’s a way of life. Most of us enter legal training because we have high flying dreams of success and wealth. To be that successful, we have to be better than everyone else. Of course, the challenge is that we know absolutely nothing going in, and we are entirely dependent on what we are told to study and research. So naturally, the competition arises on how well we retain what we know and well we do in the essays and exams. I don’t particularly like competition; it seems largely irrelevant to me how well any other person does in an exam we took. To be honest, people who base their entire self-worth on other people’s opinion of them not only irritate me, they get pity from me. Of course, like everything I believe in, there are exceptions. For instance, I don’t really care what anyone else in law (apart from my friends) think of me, but I still study quite a bit, just so I can feel great and sing to myself: ‘Ha! I bet I did better than….’ Law really does steal your soul. According to Aislinn, you hand in your soul at registration. I think, the entire course is one long competition, and if you lose, you get to keep your soul, but you’re completely poor and unemployable. Then again, what career and walk of life actually allows you to keep your soul? Trying to be an adult is bleak.

I was talking to Taragh yesterday, and it was the first time we had spoken for a while since we came back to college. We were both trading stories about how dissatisfied we are with second year. We were both agreed that second year is just not as good as last year. In her case, it’s because she is alone most of the time; being an arts student, her subject choices are unique to only her. As well as that, she is basically living out a “Days of Our Lives” episode in living with Ciara, who decided that being a scary sociopath was much more fun than being a sweet and pleasant housemate. Sorely burned, Anita and Taragh went and got even. Stylishly. I’m not going to detail what they did, but rest assured, it was just and very entertaining to hear about. I love listening to Taragh’s stories. Another little anecdote was her false pregnancy. Last year, Cara called her, offering to come over for a visit. Shudders. So, out of desperation, Taragh and Anita told her not to come over, citing the notion of a suspected pregnancy. That kept Cara at bay for a while, at least. When the girls heard that she wouldn’t be coming back to Maynooth this year, they were delighted that the charade wouldn’t have to continue. Except that they got a call last week from Cara herself. She would be hopping on her broomstick and coming to visit her friends from college (of which my name was totally absent!), and she wanted to see how far along Taragh was. Cue panic signals. Thinking quickly, and also not thinking at all, the girls grabbed a pillow and a scarf, stuffed it under Taragh’s jumper, and referred to it as ‘Baby Elly’. You couldn’t make this stuff up! Fortunately, I think it worked, which says more about Cara than it does about the girls. As Taragh says, it just all part of growing up, and growing up sucks. In the case of my growing up, well, let’s see. I’m trying to juggle four different law modules and three English modules simultaneously, I’m not part really part of any world, and I don’t like the person that I have become. As a result, I’m hallucinating more than ever. Lately it’s animals. Including a whale in my EU law lecture on Friday morning, and a monkey when I was with Seamus in the Roost yesterday. I can’t help wondering when I’m going to grow up, and whether I’ll like the person that I grow up into?

I’ve been wondering this past week about clichés. I see a lot of them around college all the time. For example, most of the people we see in the computer labs fit that classic template of ‘nerd’. You know, read manga and superhero comics, listen to scary death metal, have either long unkempt hair or a beard, or both, and never seem to leave. Dave has summarised it very well, here.
Then there are the arts students, most of whom look like they belong in an episode of ‘Gossip Girl’. It’s always assumed that because people are beautiful that they must be stupid. I, as an individual, absolutely hate labels. I hate the stigma that goes with your label; that you are summed up and identified by that one trait.
For example, when we were in the Elite the other day, (as is traditional), and the story of Alan once blowing Aislinn off because he was having a fight with his hairdresser came up, Byrne immediately asked of he was gay. Why is that the first thing people assume? Then yesterday when I was sitting with Aislinn, Seamus, and Alan. When Cheryl came along and was talking to us. She had never met Alan, and she was surprised by his height. She said that: “I assumed that you’d be, you know, another version of Dave.”
I can’t help wondering how people would summarise me with one word, and what I would think of my label? (Comments are open for this, by the way!) As someone who can never really decide whether or not that love really can exist, I think that the idea of labels and stereotypes seriously limit the idea of soulmates. I mean, if the whole fairytale ‘love at first sight’ thing is real, then we fall for the package, right? Well, if people truly act the clichés that they are, and more often than not they do, does that make love one huge illusion? That’s a reality that I’m not willing to face just yet. I’d rather live in my dream world and keep believing in idea that love can exist. If people decide to label me as a hopeless dreamer, at least I can take solace in the fact that I hope that love really is something more than good sex, joint checking accounts, and liking the same movies. If that means I never find love, well, then at least I won’t be labeled.

There are many things I do not understand. One of these many things is the attraction that people have to one another. Being a romantic who is completely out of touch with reality, I often have the opportunity to observe others and the dynamics that they have together. For instance, I have very little in common with Aaron, Rob, Ciaran, and Dave, but still we get on very well. It was very difficult for me to understand the attraction that Aislinn had for Andrew, until I saw them together and it just fit. Then, as soon as I met Seamus, it just fit, even better than the first time. Like Andrew and Aislinn were a jigsaw that has been around for so long that it’s frayed and you kind of have to pound the last middle piece in to place, but it still looks good. Seamus and Aislinn just seem to need no pounding. Opposites, it seems, really do attract. For instance, take Alan and Aislinn. Six feet four, and five foot one respectively. Yet everything is all broken in and familiar. My friends in law, everything just seemed to click the moment we met. The same holds true with Cathal. Now, I did meet Cathal before I started college, but I didn’t really know him until I sat beside him in an English lecture one day last October. A year later, we’re sitting side by side on his bed watching television. He is sick and needed cheering up, so I rushed out of English as soon as it was over, got a bagel, and then walked to his house. While on the way, I found a two cent piece in my pocket and planned to toss it at the window, like you see in the movies. Even though I didn’t just in case I got the wrong house or I broke the window, when I went upstairs to explain, he said he was actually expecting me to toss a pebble at the window, though I hadn’t told him before then. Now that’s friendship. Having similar thoughts.

Yes, I know that the picture is *gag yuck*, but it is also really sweet!

Chemistry. We can’t define it, we can’t bottle it. But when we experience it, we know exactly what it is and the effect it has on us. The world is full of unlikely partnerships, but the more people embrace the differences, the more the similarities float to the surface, magnified somehow but also mattering much less. People come together for many different reasons, and the reason some of these stick and blossom into friendships and relationships is beyond me. I guess chemistry, like so much else is the whole wide world, is something we will never understand. But, like everything we can’t understand and sometimes take for granted, it is something that we only miss we it’s gone.

As lawyers, we generally like to think that we want a challenge. A hurdle to overcome, a hill to run up. Then we get to the hill. We see that you can’t lift your neck high enough to see the top. Whereas beforehand you felt completely in control and optimistic, the feeling of being ten feet tall and bulletproof just falls to crap. Pretty much like the feeling of being a week into second year. Whereas last year law was divided into two modules, constitutional and contract, this year we have four modules which run concurrently, and each are extremely detailed and run into each other thematically. The fact that they are spread out completely evenly throughout the week also doesn’t help. Just when you seem to have your head wrapped around some very difficult aspect of tort law, you then have to go and learn some EU law, or Criminal law, or evidence. Yes, they are all very interesting, but I seem to be experiencing the sensation lately that everything and everyone around me is moving much faster than I am. It’s amazing how different I have become in the last two years. Two years ago, if someone asked me what I wanted to be, I would have answered: “A lawyer, but I want to English as a subject as well.” Then I get to college, where I do exactly the combination of subjects I want, and I’m completely unable to keep up with the coursework. In terms of hours, I am recommended to do about two hours preparation for every lecture, and with fourteen hours a week, I actually don’t think that I’m awake for that many hours! And that’s before tutorials have begun! However, I am completely determined to succeed, and am not giving up until I get the grades I want. Two firsts in July could be pushing it a little, though.

I was in a terrible mood today, and everyone was able to tell, given that I was a little bit scary. I don’t know why I was in such a mood; I wasn’t really tired, I had actually very interesting law and english lectures, but still I was just horrible to everyone I met today. Aislinn was worried because I was being very distant and cold all day, but I couldn’t help it. I guess what triggered it was the annoyingly cute couple on the bus this morning. They were being all cuddly and cute and I just got to thinking that in every group I seem to find myself in, I am the perpetual third wheel. Normally it doesn’t bother me in the slightest; I’m very happy to be single and live in my little fantasy world and dance with my tigers, but every now and then it just hits me and I really don’t feel like pretending to be happy when I’m the furthest thing from it. That’s what happened today. When you think about, it is completely true. Aislinn has Seamus, Fitzy has Ailbhe, Alan has someone (I think his name is Tom), Dave has Cheryl; the list goes on. But, while I did get bothered by it earlier, I feel fine about now. I am completely happy being exactly who I am, as wonderfully inappropriate as that is. I like that I live in my own little universe which doesn’t disappoint. I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about checking in with someone else constantly. But no matter how many times I tell myself these things, I can’t really get rid of the fact that I’m kind of lonely. At least, that’s what I think is wrong with me. I know I’m about seven years shy of my clinical psychology degree, but the recurring hallucination that I had today (Robert Palmer singing “Addicted To Love” in the middle of the street) seems to be hinting at that. Or maybe I really am just finally cracking up.

The song, by The Cardigans, really struck a nerve with me today. Well, that and Alan put it into my head.