Xan's Interesting Insights

I know this post is after the deadline for this assignment, but I guess I just wanted to post a goodbye.

I finished all my assignments with time to spare, and to be honest, I’m really proud of my English assignment. I think all of it is really good – bar the conclusion, but I just ran out of steam and submitted it. I really put a lot of effort into it, and I just hope that’s reflected in it. I think it was the first time I actually enjoyed writing an essay and enjoyed finding sources for it. I found an article by Cristina Alfar, “Blood Will Have Blood: Power, Performance, and Lady Macbeth’s Gender Trouble,” and it was so beautifully written, that it inspired me to start reading for pleasure again.

So, mildly influenced by my boyfriends obsession with Lord of the Rings, I started reading the trilogy, and am now also close to obsessed with it. I had read the first one and half of the second one years ago but never finished them, so I started from the beginning and am, once again, halfway through the second one (but I won’t give up this time.)

I also took advantage of the free counselling service provided by UL, and although I only got 4 or 5 sessions, I found it really helpful. I always had this weird fear that I didn’t actually have anxiety, and that it was all in my head, so it was oddly validating when my therapist conformed that I do indeed have anxiety, so… hooray? I’ve also been rewatching BoJack Horseman for the umpteenth time, and it’s really interesting to see the characters display symptoms of mental illness, and see how they deal with it. While it does get extremely dark after season 3, I would highly recommend watching it if you haven’t. As I said, it deals with mental illness, but also addiction, loss, grieving, acceptance, and growth.

It’s sad that my first year of college ended with us all being in our respective homes so we couldn’t go and celebrate together, but I guess that just means we’ll all have to go out and celebrate when we’re back next semester! I’ve been getting my workplace ready for the past few days (cleaning, stocking shelves, etc) and it’s been really nice to talk to people other than my family. I’ll be getting my rota tonight, and I’m interested to see how the gradual lifting of restrictions will affect the number of COVID-19 cases. As you know, I’ve been keeping up with the pandemic religiously, and we now have a daily death rate of ~16, and between 100-200 cases a day. There’s obviously gonna be a rise in cases as restrictions lift, but it seems as though we have a hold on it? At least I hope we do, because I’m honestly dying to go to Charlie Byrnes in Galway and Chapters in Dublin to stock up on books.

Well, that’s all from me, I think. Whoever is reading this, I hope you and your family are keeping well.

Good luck and god bless lads.

As part of my Tech Writing module, we had to create a website. This website could be about a real/fictional company, school, etc, a hobby, an interest, etc. So I decided to base mine around a rather important hobby of mine; houseplants!

I used WordPress to create this website (mygreenfingersonline.wordpress.com), and had it essentially finished, and then (because I’m essentially illiterate when it comes to technology), I completely messed up the layout and everything was just… wrong, so I had to start again!

I made my own logo for the website (which is now findmygreenfingers.wordpress.com), and thankfully, I still had all the information from the failed site that I was able to copy and paste over to the ‘correct’ one. It was relatively easy to pick themes and colours for my website, as browns and greens are associated with plants. My website has information about how to provide basic care for houseplants, a basic identification guide, and problems people may encounter while caring for their plants.

I chose to base my website around houseplants because, as I’ve mentioned briefly in my website, they hold a weirdly special place in my life. When I was 15/16, I was extremely depressed, and it was when my granny first became ill. I bought my first cacti (which I still have), and caring for it gave me something that I could focus on. It also, as sad as it sounds, gave me a reason to keep going. If I died, who’d care for it? I realize how sad and depressing that sounds, but that’s just how I thought at that time.

Since then, I now have around 40 cacti and succulents. About half of these are ones I have grown from existing plants that I had, and it’s oddly fulfilling to see them all grow and reproduce. So, yeah, that’s why I picked them to base my website on.

Here are some of my plants (they’re looking a bit worse for wear at the moment as I haven’t had much time to focus on them.) Do you have any plants?

I haven’t wrote too much about the current pandemic, but I’ve been following the updates religiously (here’s where we see my inner journalist come out). Ireland, as a country (well duh, what else), has actually been doing pretty well.

As you can see on the graph, we seem to be on course for a relatively linear path. So, I think, this means we’ll be seeing near enough the same amount of cases every day for the next while until it (hopefully) starts lowering. So, basically, the pandemic may last longer for us, but we won’t have as many daily cases and deaths in comparison to other countries, which would be ideal seeing as we have damn all beds in ICUs.

As for student doing their Leaving and Junior certs, there’s been no official announcement on what the situation for exams will be, but there’s an update due to be announced any day now. From what I’ve seen, there’s two viable options for the exams: have them done as normal, but with tables spaced out more and less students in each room, or just postpone them til August and have the college semester delayed til October.

To be honest, there’s nothing new to say about college works and the likes. There are talks about a field hospital opening in UL but there’s still students living in on-campus accommodation, so I reckon that’ll be delayed until the official end of the semester to avoid giving refunds (yup, still haven’t gotten them yet). I do acknowledge that these are stressful and unprecedented times, and I can appreciate that nobody really knows what to do, but UL should’ve closed their accommodation relatively soon after the schools and universities were forced to shut. I think once Ireland officially went on shut down, the reality that we wouldn’t physically be on campus for the rest of the semester quickly became a reality, and the accommodation should’ve closed and issued refunds to those of us who were living there. But sure look, hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Bhuel, sin é mo chairde, feicfidh mé tú arís an seachtain seo chugainn

Well, I won’t lie lads, this learning from home malarkey is not working for me at all. I know I probably sound like a broken record at this stage, but I just genuinely can’t do any of my work recently. As we’re all at home now, it almost feels as though doing assignments and catching up on lectures is… optional? Which it obviously isn’t, but I can’t get myself into the headspace to actually dedicate the time and effort into doing my assignments, which are all due relatively soon, which sucks.

I’ve got plans done out for my English and sociology essays, but besides that, I haven’t done a tap. I’m planning on starting (and hopefully finishing) my website assignment over the Easter, but as always, I haven’t a clue on what to do. But hey, that’s a problem for future me!

As for the actual ‘college’ aspect of, well, college, I am ridiculously homesick for Limerick. Those of us who had on-campus accommodation haven’t, and probably won’t to be honest, been issued refunds. We’re paying for accommodation that we can’t use, and there’s loads of petitions online for this to be changed. I’m just glad I already have my accommodation for next year sorted, as UL have said nothing to those who’ve applied for on-campus besides announce that the offers are postponed. As a journalist-in-training, I do genuinely think that the state of the accommodation service is atrocious, and I’m shocked I haven’t seen more articles wrote about it.

What I will say though, is that all my lecturers are still amazingly supportive and accommodating of everything due to the circumstances. It’s genuinely really nice to see that they care about their students wellbeing. And, as usual, my course group have all been supporting each other. I like that I have a small course group, I think it lets us be closer to one another, and we all help where we can. I can’t imagine a course with +50 people in it could get as close to each other as smaller courses can.

With my usual ranting done, I bid you all a good day/night, and please wash your hands and maintain social distancing ❤

Well. Things in Ireland have changed. We’re now in lockdown until at least April 19^th, so this week I made the decision to move out of my accommodation and move back home. It was tough, and I already feel homesick for Limerick. On top of this, my workplace has shut down indefinitely due to the virus, so I’m out of work for the first time in 2 years, which is not helping things, but sure look, be grand.

I have one of my interviews for my radio module edited, and I have one left to edit before I put it all together. I submitted my paper one for my sociology module, which isn’t being graded. We were supposed to receive peer feedback, but due to us… y’know, not being in college, that isn’t likely to happen. The paper two, which is being graded and is worth 100% of our grade, is causing me immeasurable stress, so I emailed my lecturer and attached my paper one essay in the hopes he can guide me on what to do for paper two. My sub-editing and design module is essentially finished, we just have a grammar assessment in week 11, and (although you probably couldn’t tell) grammar has always came relatively naturally to me, so I’m not too worried. My English lecturer hasn’t graded our essays yet, but I feel as though I at least passed? For that module, we had two essays, each worth 45%. I’m planning on getting the second one at least halfway finished this coming week. Besides that, I only really have my website to do for my technical writing module, and I’m hoping that won’t be too difficult, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.

During this pandemic, I’ve been brushing up on my art and trying to be more active. I’ve been doing a mixture of jogging and brisk walking for a mile every day and doing yoga or Zumba for 10 minutes afterwards as a cool down. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, right? I’ve also stopped smoking and switched to vaping, so that’s saving me a lot of money, which is helpful seeing as I’m, y’know, unemployed. I have to say though, I find that I’m talking to my course mates more and we’re coming together to help each other with… everything. It has to be said, Sean has been an absolute angel and doing his best to help us all, I would be genuinely lost without him the past few weeks.

I’ll end with the ‘’’’art’’’’ I’ve been doing, and hopefully I don’t get corona so I can update ye next week. Stay safe, wash your hands, and for the love of all things good and holy, stay inside.

I can officially say, learning from home is not for me. It’s really difficult for me to actually do college work at home as it’s a completely different environment to what I’m used to working in.  I definitely find that I’m just… not checking the lectures that my lecturers are genuinely working so hard on, and it’s making me feel awful, I’m just not feeling like it’s ‘mandatory,’ y’know? It feels as though we’re done this semester in a sense, which is most definitely not true. The pressure that you’d normally have to actually attend college is no longer there for me and I’m slipping. I know in my heart and soul I’m going to end up doing all my assignments until the last minute, and that just isn’t an option.

I already miss the independence that I had in college. If I needed a break, I could stroll around the college or text my friends to meet up for a while. As I live in the middle of nowhere in Mayo, neither of those are really options anymore, which sucks. The fact that people aren’t taking isolation seriously isn’t helping this pandemic either. If we all just stayed inside for the 2 weeks, I’m sure we’d get over it faster, however I know that won’t happen.

I hope everyone is doing well in these odd times, talk soon!

Well, the past week has been… something. It started off normal enough, with talks of the college closing due to the coronavirus pandemic, but I genuinely wasn’t expecting Varadkar to announce the closure of schools and universities on Thursday. To be honest, it sucks. A lot of my coursework is reliant on the MacBook’s provided to the people in my course, as it has the relatively expensive software that we need to use, such as Adobe InDesign and Adobe Audition. It also means that we can’t edit the audio that we have for our radio pitches, so it feels as though everything is on hold.

So, the story so far is that colleges will be closed until March 29^th, but I’ve heard talks that they might just close for the rest of the semester, which I guess is fair enough, right? But I already miss all my friends and the UL campus itself, I really don’t know how I’ll cope in Mayo if I’m stuck here until the end of August. I’m also worried about the online lectures and tutorials as I learn more when someone is actually explaining things to me in person and I can see them work as opposed to just watching a screen, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Anyways, I’ll leave ye with some hand-washing advice from my English lecturer, and I hope none of us get corona in the meantime, stay safe lads!

I’ve missed a LOT of lectures this week because I’ve been sick and just generally mentally run-down. A lot of deadlines are closer than I thought, so I have to get on top of them.  The thing I’m most worried about is my sociology paper.

It’s due in week 8, but I have no idea on how to write a 1,500 word essay essentially based solely on tweets from my peers. I’m hoping it’ll be easy once I get into the flow of it, but for now, I feel drastically unprepared. My sociology tutor, Stephen Byrne, has definitely helped put me at ease.  He says everything in a straight-forward way and genuinely helps give us an idea of what we’re actually supposed to do in the essay.

Another thing that has been stressing me out this week has been UL’s solution to the influx of students looking for accommodation – doubling up the rooms. As someone who REALLY needs their own personal space, finding a room off-campus was a priority. After messaging 10 people on Facebook who had posted ads about rooms going, I finally got one, and have to pay the deposit on Friday. It’s been an incredibly stressful week trying to find accommodation, I really think UL should start taking in less people and make more on-campus accommodation rather than doubling up rooms that were designed to be single rooms.  

My aim for next week is to have audio to edit for my radio module. I got feedback for my pitch that I had to present last week and I did a LOT better than I thought, which is definitely reassuring! I hope my actual radio package turns put okay because I’m genuinely enjoying this module a lot more than I thought.

Here’s a link to the video we watched in sociology that we had to base our tweets off of, let me know what you think!

This week has been an interesting one. On Tuesday, we watched a short movie in sociology as part of our assessment. We all had to live-tweet our reactions to the movie, and we then need to write an essay based of these tweets, which is worth 100% of our grade. To be honest, I would rather have the essay be worth 50% and then have an exam at the end of the semester to make up the other 50%. I know I’m going to find it hard to write an essay good enough to get a substantial grade, but I’ll try my best. How hard can it be?

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a presentation to do in class as part of my radio module. It went much better than expected, thank god! I also had all my interviewees get back to me, so hopefully I can start interviewing them next week. I’m really looking forward to learning how to edit audio, as I think it’ll come in handy with my future career in journalism. I think audio editing, along with the indesign and photoshop we’ve been doing, should be taught at some stage in secondary schools as I think the skills you learn with these softwares are really useful to have, do you agree?

All in all, it’s been an interesting week, I can’t believe I’m a third of the way through the semester already! Bring on the summer!

Well, it’s the end of week 3, and I think I’m settling in quite well to the new semester. There’s no shortage of work to be done, and no time like the present to start it, wouldn’t you agree?

As a journalism student, I have a module that covers radio journalism. As part of this module, we need to pitch and record a radio package. I find this a little intimidating as I’m not the best at public speaking, but hopefully after this assignment, I’ll gain more confidence. My plan for my pitch is to discuss the new LGBTQ+ drop-in centre in my hometown. I’m planning on interviewing someone from the group who organised the centre, OutWest, and a member of the LGBTQ+ community from the area. I would also love to talk to the counsellor from my secondary school to discuss her opinion on it, and whether or not she thinks it’ll help the LGBTQ+ youth.

A tough decision I have to make this semester is choosing between my electives, sociology and English. I love sociology, and as an aspiring journalist, it’s important to get an understanding of society as a whole because in the end, they’re the ones I will need to appeal to. However, I am a complete English nerd and think this module will help me more as I’d love to do book reviews, or something of that nature.

Most of my days this semester start at 9am, and at first it appalled me, because who in their right mind wants to be up that early every day? But the silver lining is that I have the rest of the day to focus on my assignments and meet up with my friends, so it’s not that bad. Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic that this semester will keep on going up!