Geek in the Low Lands

I'm an immigrant. I moved from the United States at the age of 19 to the Netherlands. I'm a Dutch citizen now, I've given up my US citizenship. I'm in university. I'm white. For many, they forget that I'm an immigrant. After all, aren't immigrants those people from poor countries? Aren't they people of color? Aren't they all people who simply leech off the government, never wanting to get jobs? It bothers me every time a conversation about immigration comes up. I hate that first, people will say horrible things about immigrants - no qualifiers, just immigrants - and then they get all flustered when I remind them, hey,  I'm  an immigrant. "Oh, well, I didn't mean you, of course!" No, they meant anyone who doesn't look like them. It doesn't matter where you go, the US or the Netherlands, people of color have it hard. There are many people about my age who are actually Dutch. They were born here, raised here, speak bett...

No one here reading this would know that when I was younger, I wanted to write. I wrote a lot, almost everything that came in to my mind. I was alone a lot as a child, and writing was my way of dealing with all that was going on in my life. I wrote fiction, grand adventures involving fantastical creatures and horror stories filled with revenge, and non-fiction about how I saw what was going on. I wrote poetry and even attempted a song lyric or two. Now? Now I have trouble writing comments. I stumble over expressing myself, filled with fear and self-doubt. Somewhere along the way, my dream of being a writer, of sharing what I was feeling so eloquently that others felt it too, it was crushed. My confidence in so many things was shattered. I can hear the voices in my head, telling me how no one will read it, or it has been done by other people who are a thousand times more eloquent than I am. My opinions on controversial things also get swallowed. I want to discuss current events, pol...

I find the ever-changing relationship people have with food to be fascinating. Never mind the clear shifts in tastes within various cultures. Only too true! I'm currently watching through the BBC program 'Turn Back Time: the High Street'. Having just watched the first episode, I was surprised when the baker and the grocer both thought of the 'purity' of Victorian food. Perhaps it is my own bias as a history buff coming through, but I thought everyone knew that the Victorians were notorious for adding any number of (really awful) ingredients to stretch their food. Lead, chalk, sulfuric acid, mercury were common additives. This is what crosses my mind whenever people express nostalgia for the 'Good Old Days'. Well, that and these people are suffering from some delusion, as the good old days never existed! It is the sort of propaganda that gets pushed around a lot, in my opinion. A mixture, of course, of nostalgia, a touch sometimes of the ' Noble S...

For those among us inclined to Medieval things (such as myself) here is the British Library's Calendar page . Otherwise, what movie have I finally watched this last weekend? I finally saw Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance . Now, I am a great fan of horrible movies. I love movies that are so bad that they become good again. I had heard that GR:SoV was horrible, and I had high hopes that it was one of those movies that can be wonderfully horrible. I was mistaken. It was not a good movie. The animated sequences were pretty well done, and the effects weren't terrible, but the plot, and the acting. Let's just say, usually I love watching Nicolas Cage in all his craziness on screen, but this was a movie full of moments where all I could do was wince. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, there's a road! Really, when a movie starts off with this descriptor of where things are happening. Yeah, Eastern Europe, because everyone knows that is just one big homogeneous area, cult...

Introduction In Irish literature, there are many aspects of the supernatural. Indeed, there are entire genres based on specifi c supernatural occurrences, such as supernatural lovers in tochmarca . However, what is possibly the most known and enjoyed genre within traditional Irish literature is that of echtra . All genres have their own tropes, and those of echtra are many. You could probably spend several books discussing each one individually; the history of it, it's use within various stories; exceptions that prove the rule. In this post, we will only handle the story of Echtra Chonnlai and the traditional themes of the Otherworld therein. This story can be found in many manuscripts; including Lebor na hUidre, The Yellow Book of Lecan, Rawlinson B 512, Egerton 1782, Egerton 88, R.I.A. 23 N 10, Harley 5280, TCD H. 1. 13.2 I will be using a translation that seems to be based off of Lebor na hUidre, edited by Tom P. Cross and Clark Harris Slover, as is it  includes ...

So, there is an amazing musician , Marian Call, who is trying to make it to my side of the pond. As I really want to see her, I'm already shamelessly promoting her Kickstarter . Please, if you can, support her!

Introduction In the tradition of Irish literature, there are many genres. One example is the genre of dindshenchas , the stories of why places are given certain names, and there is also the genre of tochmarc . A tochmarc is a story of the wooing of a woman. While each story has it's own unique details, there are many shared themes and tropes within the genre of tochmarc . Finding these common threads can give us some ideas of their idealised romance. For this, three stories will be used: Tochmarc Étaínne , from the Tales of the Tuatha De Danann, Tochmarc Emer , from the Ulster Cycle, and Tochmarc Becfola , from the Tales of the Traditional Kings. In the first section they will be briefly summarized while in the second section we will tie them together and briefly discuss the themes of tochmarc and the common elements within these stories. The Stories Tochmarc Étaínne The story of Tochmarc Étaínne 1 has been divided down into three subsections by the editors of Ber...

To celebrate my new blog I will be posting more entries like the one today. I don't think all my entries will be so thorough (these are older essays that took some more time than I'm regularly willing to spend on a blog post) but I hope people enjoy them. I also hope to do some translation posts, but I'm not yet sure how I want to format them. I'll probably try a few ways out and see what works best. I'll also be writing about other topics, but I want to ease in to blogging before I go diving in to things like current events. That is, unless someone asks for something. As I said in my introduction , I fully welcome that! (So long as it is not something like asking for porn...)

Introduction From 43 AD to about 410 - 425 AD 1 the Romans occupied Britain. However Rome's influence lingered even after the occupation ended. The appearance of Latin loanwords in British Celtic is strong evidence of this influence. In Britain, the Roman language left a lasting mark on British Celtic that we can still find in Welsh today. The question is what is the history of Latin and British Celtic. What did the people of Britain speak between the fi rst and seventh centuries AD, and how did this eff ect British Celtic? This is what will be briefly covered in this blogpost. Latin and British Celtic After the Romans invaded in 43 AD, we fi rst see Latin loan words used in conjunction with terms concerning the upper class. This only seems logical,as some of the things of the new ruling class were unique to Roman civilization and had not yet made an appearance in the Celtic world. We also see that some Latin load words are taken, even though there existed a Celtic word a...

Who is this person? Welcome to my rambling blog, you can call me Tric. I'm 26 years old (soon to be 27) and I have a difficult time trying to summarize who I am. I was born in a tiny town in New York, USA, where I lived until I was 19. At the age of 19 I moved across the Atlantic ocean to the Netherlands to live with my boyfriend and continue my education. I have been continuing my education for awhile now and I'm hoping to try to get a little bit more than just school in my life. What has been my education 1 ? I did a year of Independent Studies in the US at SUNY Ulster, focusing mainly on history, music, and art. I did one year of history at University of Utrecht (Universiteit Utrecht) and am now finishing up my 5th 2 year studying Celtic languages and culture, also at Utrecht. Besides that, I'm a feminist, an atheist, a skeptic, and a fan of music, movies, history, languages, and whatever catches my fancy on a given day. I also am a musician, singing currently with...

So, I posted one blog, and then proceeded to vanish from my own blog! You'd think I could keep this up, but I have serious issues with writing things. (Loads of issues, enough to fill libraries..) I used to write fiction when I was a teenager, but for whatever reason I stopped. Most of my writing these last few years has been non-fiction, in the way of essays for various classes. So, I'm going to leave the previous post up (because the Unsinkable Molly Brown is interesting), and try again. It's summer now, so at the very least I shouldn't be as buried under all of my activities. Probably no one reads this anyway, so I'll post up a new post with an introduction to me, a little bit of my background/interests and what not, and we'll see if I can't post a bit more often. I'll try for every weekday, and I'll see if I can't come up with a series, which should be easier than just trying to pull new, unrelated topics every day.