1:00 pm saturday afternoon, and the week long bender of entertaining grace and rachel in ireland is drawing to a close. these last ten days have been a blur, a long run on sentence of pint after pint and empty bottles of wine, of puke and rally and punches thrown, of broken glass and purple bruises, of sloppy drunken crying and fights over avocado, of strange boys from cork and the meat market of the lodge (some guy on the dance floor decided it would be way sexy to chomp on my dreads. i had to rip them out of his mouth and hit him in the stomach multiple times and still he didn't get the hint). there were long black outs and things i'm sure we wish no one remembers. and to top it all off, ben and i still had to trudge begrudgingly to class each day to take notes and nurse hangovers while grace and rachel slept in. oh, the inhumanity of it all...

while i am glad the girls came, while it was great to see them and was a more than effective cure for my homesickness, while i am touched that they traveled all the way across the atlantic to visit me and ben, i have to admit i am not heartbroken to see them go. i don't know how much more i could have taken. i'm craving time alone, meals for one, quiet nights, sober moments. my liver is screaming for me to take pity on her, my room is crying to be cleaned, and like old mother hubbard, my cupboard is bare. i'm going to need another ten days just to recover.