I'll be funny again tomorrow, promise.

"Don't you think it's so funny how you're life is turning out?"

No. No I do not. And as she sat there at my kitchen table, grinning and laughing about "how my life has turned out", I felt like throwing up. I don't accuse her of maliciousness, as I think she was genuinely amused for me and not at me. But I am not amused. Not at all.

I don't remember when I decided to get a PhD, or how long it's been since I've seen myself as a professor. Seems like that's always been the plan, though I know it hasn't (didn't I once harbor faint ambition to be a singer? for like....a week in high school maybe?). And then there was this fantastic grad program that fit my interests and credentials like a glove. And I applied and got some great feedback from them and some unofficial "we want you, are you still interested?" emails.

But I also had some friends and coworkers who had run that grad-school gamut already, who told me it was a blast...and they didn't quite but almost sort of regretted it because it didn't end up landing them a job, like, at all. And some of them are not giving up just yet. And others have taken that PhD and accepted jobs not at all in their field of study. And none of them said not to go for it, but you know, it's not a fairytale here. Really.

And that PhD program? It's not around these parts. Which would be great since "these parts" have some of the highest costs of living in the country. Except, I don't harbor any ambition to move to a dying old city in the middle of nowhere and, as much as DC summer kicks my butt, I'm even worse at long, ugly winters (I think). And the closer we came to leaving this city, the more I realized how much I love it here. And then the cherry blossoms came out again.

I started to think about my own sense of entitlement, too. Quite deeply. For me to go on and get that degree in religious studies, someone else (likely various someone elses) would have to fork over the cash so I could become an expert in goddess worship. I see no reason why I should not be an expert in the worship of female deities, only that I'm not sure why it would be worthwhile to anyone else. That is to say, I think learning and knowledge are vital to the continuation and improvement of the human race and condition, but I was never really sure that my own contribution would be all that helpful. And then it seemed that the world is flooded with people who study what they want to study, but do all of them really pay back to the academic community what their education cost them? I don't mean financially, but intellectually and philosophically? Can I ask someone else to pay for me to study and write about this? Do I honestly believe it will be worthwhile to them? I don't know. (Please don't get me wrong. I think foodstamps are great. This is about my own sense of entitlement and not some overarching political statement. I'm not interested in judging others here, merely myself.)

All of things things, and a few others besides, contributed to the fact that I'm not going to graduate school. And it breaks my heart right in two. It is not a joke for me. It is not some funny giggly, who'd-a-thunk moment in my life. It's terribly sad. It will affect everything I do from now on. I now doubt I'll be able to be a mother, because I'm afraid I'll either push my kids to follow the road I didn't take so I can live vicariously through them, or base my entire self worth on my children until they fall apart under the pressure. And when I meet someone new, I don't like to talk about what I am doing with my life anymore, in casual get-to-know-you style. I've started to hate having people ask me "So, what's going on in your life?" and I've kind of stopped answering with anything of substance. Ask me that, and I'm more likely to talk about the weather than anything else. But it comes down to this: I have decided to give up on graduate school, and as a result, I don't really know who I am anymore.

I've been offered a couple of new positions at my current company. Technically I work for two companies right now, one owned by the other. They each asked me to come over full-time to their side and were both super flattering about it. Eventually I chose one and will be transitioning over to a new set of responsibilities and opportunities. I've also stared taking some graphic design courses at a local arts college. I'll be enrolling this fall in a certificate program, so that in a year I'll have not only the credentials but the real life experience of a graphic designer, since my new position is basically full-time graphic design. I harbor no illusions that this will make me an actual graphic designer, but it will be fun and marketable. Something I can do full time, or part-time, or even from home if I get over my fear of being destructo-mom and decide to start gestating. More than anything, it's a chance to try something very challenging for me, and hopefully something very rewarding. It's an outlet for some creativity, but it will also require me to be relentlessly creative, which is daunting and new. I don't pretend to be a creative genius, or even anything out of the ordinary. But I want to try, because there is something I need to find out about myself: Am I more than a mocking-bird?

I've always excelled in academia, and underneath it all I've wondered if it's because I am nothing more than a good student--capable of giving a professor exactly what they want, but nothing further. Is my strength limited to the assignments I am given? I can rock a standardized test like you would not believe, but am I capable of making something of my own? My mother would assure me (and you) that I am very capable of it. I hope she's right. I'm about to find out.

But honestly, truthfully, I don't want to talk to you about it. To you, or anyone else. Giving up grad-school has torn a little hole in my soul, and I can't drag that out and let you poke at it in casual conversation. As much as you might want to. As curious as you might be. As funny as you may find it.

This was my final project from a photoshop class I took a couple of weeks ago. We were supposed to choose a quote and make a poster illustrating it. Everyone else chose inspirational quotes from famous people. Mine is a line from the weather forecast.

Tombs

(I wrote this months ago, but never posted it. I wanted to include lots of pictures etc, but editing the 900+ photos we took seemed overwhelming so I kept putting it off.)

Back from Scotland once again, and oh my loverlies. This one was nothing like the first trip, actually. It had a whole new feel to it. Last time we were swimming through life in a haze of honeymoon bliss. There were castles and kilts and lochs and churches. It was romantic and kitschy and absolutely perfect. This was....better.

This time there were tombs. Ancient, cold, moss covered cairns which we climbed into and around and through. Hauling our stretching forms up the windblown hills through the sheep and mud and heather to the old un-hills that once housed rituals and bones, we pulled back the solid trapdoors and descended down rickety ladders into sacred darkness. Here the decaying walls and half formed domes spoke not of yesterdays gone by but of the very beginning of time. We stood next to stones three times the height of modern giants and raised our arms to a sky as unforgivingly gray as it was when our ancestors raised the stones in circles and left behind a secret we are only beginning to unravel. We handled tools made by a race who perished among the winds and cliffs of this land long before any nation claimed it, who lay buried here with eagle talons and the skulls of dogs. These first islanders who were not English or Scottish or Viking or Celt or Pict but something older even than the legends of fairies and elves.

We passed through doors weighing ten tonnes but swinging on hinges so perfectly made they can still be opened by a ten year old girl five thousand years later, down tunnels positioned to catch the rays of a solstice sun and spray them over a clay covered chamber of bones. We stood outside the foundations of homes where children fought and spouses embraced some seven thousand years before we took our first breaths, where bowls still stood on stone shelves and cold hearths. We crouched down and pulled ourselves through passageways leading to spaces from before the world was born where mothers wore necklaces of bones and shells and rocked their children to the sound of waves and gulls.

As you can tell, it kind of got to me.

More pictures here

The Hunger Games: A post about random food (wherein no children are killed)

Wheat Thins are my new favorite cookies. Salty, crunchy cookies that sit under my desk humming a soothing lullaby while I reformat that GPA spreadsheet again. Generally I like to suck on them one by one to get at that salt first and saving the mildly graham-cracker-esque crunchiness for last. Sometimes, when work is being particularly persnickety I eat two at once in angry defiance of the world and it's horrible denizens of annoyance and that-is-not-how-it-works-and-you-know-it-so-stop-pretending-you-were-ever-even-close-to-correct-ness. I also enjoy hyphens.

Do you remember those animal crackers with the frosting? Of course you do, because your parents love you. So you are aware that those things are amazing, in a slightly waxy way. A couple of weeks ago I found a bag of them in the CVS when I was looking for snacks to smuggle into the movie theater that night (not that I am the kind of person who smuggles stuff, of course. That would be wrong). And then I munched little sprinkle covered pink and white elephants and sheep all through The Hunger Games. It was bliss (What? Maybe Mr. Awesome smuggled them. You weren't there. You don't know!). Then, for Easter, I figured we'd fill in for the nasty-hollow-chocolate-bunny with some of those dream filled animal cookies. Except, they appear to have disappeared entirely (which is a lovely turn of phrase, is it not? Appear to have disappeared! I'm now going to use that all the time, particularly when it is totally out of context and unnecessary. It will be my new "literally"). I've checked Giant, Safeway, CVS, and RiteAid now. None of those fine establishments even has an empty shelf where the cookies ought to be. It is as though they have vanished into the mist of childhood nostalgia. It makes me sad. It makes me want to appear to disappear.

Lately I've been eating salad in a jar for lunch, and that has been quite refreshing actually. Packing a lunch to work is such a great idea, but if you cannot handle a sandwich for lunch everyday (Rotating cold-cut meats and pbj gets old after a while...and by a while, I mean two days.) it can be almost as difficult as appearing to disappear. Thank the gods of creativity and plagiarism for that bounteous harvest called Pinterest. (Oh do not even pretend you don't spend hours there planning dinner parties you will likely never throw or redecorating the den you do not even have. You know of what I speak.) Except, you know, where does one find a these mason jars everyone is using nowadays? They appear to be quite the hot new thang, but Harris Teeter most certainly does not stock them.

As I was going through the pantry, rotating the food storage (read: two bags of ramen and a can of beans which we will never eat) I came upon an unopened jar of cherry butter. If you do not realize that saying that is akin to saying "I randomly found a masseuses in my sock drawer, waiting to give me a free massage this evening" then you need to investigate the purchase of some cherry butter, stat. And re-evaluate your life, probably. Anyway, so I found this hitherto unseen bottle of instant euphoria and realized that I could therefore eat the last portion of the stuff I've had lingering in my fridge since last fall without freaking out about "I cannot go without cherry butter for five whole months until Cox farms starts selling it again! I cannot do it!" So I ate it. Alone. Standing in the kitchen with the light off. And then, as I was holding the empty jar in my hand contemplating the need to rinse it before adding it to the recycling pile, behold the heavens did open and mine eyes did see. I stood there in the kitchen reverently staring at the glass container in my hand and sighed "Oh, a mason jar!" with the wonder and awe you would imagine in that scenario. And then I appeared to disappear.

Anyway, thanks to that empty bottle of cherry butter, the salad-in-a-jar pin has come to vibrant life in my workweek. Yesterday I packed fresh Italian greens with sliced strawberries, poppy seed dressing, and pine nuts. Today I have only just finished the quinoa, fresh pineapple, poppy seed dressing, and baby spinach that I packed into that magical jar this morning. Am I detailing my salads so you will think I am possibly less of a junkfood eating gross person and more of a healthy produce-conscious winner? Dudes, the first two paragraphs are about sucking the salt off of crackers and binging on waxy animal cookies and the forth hinges on my late-night consumption of jam straight out of the jar. What do you think?

Cherry Blossominationatorium

There are times when I think about leaving DC. Cherry Blossom season is never one of them.

This is NOT a crafty mommy blog

However, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary to document the strange ways in which a newly married couple chooses to observe certain holidays, these things happen:

This year's flavors of Valentine's Day Truffles (Mr. Awesome prefers that his holiday traditions be food related. In fact, he prefers that most things be food related. Honestly? So do I.) From left to right: Milk Chocolate, Spicy Dark Chocolate, Lavendar Chocolate, White Chocolate Saffron, and Lime Sugar Chocolate.

Valentine's food revisited: We made mini-alfajores to take to his family get-together. Four of us have served in the same Argentine mission, so these sort of matched the empanadas and castellano theme of the day.

Also some of them are heart shaped, but that's mostly because I really wanted to use those cookie cutters.

Our take on "Easter Egg Baskets" this year. Do you get it, do you see what we did there?

Mr. Awesome has declared this "the coolest project we've done together yet". I'm dubious about that, but I'm glad he likes the result.

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's Day to you! We had friends over for games and various green dips (Green Goddess Dip, Pesto, Bacon-Guacamole, and Key-Like Curd, oh my!). This was my last minute concession to Mr. Awesome's panic that "We haven't even decorated for St. Patrick's Day!" The fact that I just happened to have seven glass bottles lying around, though, is not something I can easily explain.

 And that, dear ones, is that.

Nothing tasts as good as...

It's a common enough sound in my office, that frustration filled sigh of longing and rage when one of my coworkers notices the box of cookies/candy/doughnuts/cake/sweet potato pie sitting in the kitchen. I've been hearing it once or twice a week since I started working here. The sweets come more often around the holidays, but they never really let up entirely. And no matter how firmly my coworkers avow they are "NOT eating ANY more SWEETS!" the goodies keep mysteriously appearing and disappearing in that kitchen day by day. Perhaps most confusing of all is that most often, the person who objects most vehemently to one tray of sugar and fat will be the person who brings in the next unhealthy but oh-so-alluring offering to the gods of growing waistlines. It is a conspiracy against the hard-working office chairs which must sustain our growing bulk, and we are all complicit in it.

Mmmm, stale fritters...

Meanwhile, on Pinterest:

"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."

I'mma tell you straight up, the woman who posted that has never had a fresh Lemonberry Cupcake from Georgetown, my sister's hot breakfast casserole, or those cookies I ate in Glasgow. In fact, there are a great many things in life that woman cannot yet have tasted. Her life makes me sad. Her life makes me want to buy a dozen G-town cupcakes and then eat them in front of her.

Meanwhile, at home:

Me: "Hey Mr. Awesome, I'll make you a deal."

Him: "Okay."

Me: "Everyday after work I'll come home and tell you whether or not I ate any of the treats in the office. And if I didn't, you give me a back-rub and/or face massage. This is really a deal to benefit me, you don't actually get anything out of it."

Him: "Okay." (See that girls? Absolute agreement. And all it cost me was a remote control helicopter for Valentine's Day. Take notes!)

Meanwhile, back at the office:

I have yet to eat a single treat in the office since making that deal with Mr. Awesome about two weeks ago. Proving once and for all that the old saying holds true:

"Nothing your coworkers leave in the company kitchen because they don't want it at their house tastes as good as a nightly back rub."

You are so very welcome, my dears.

Blogging means never having to say you're sorry

Oh my loverlies, why do I even have a blog? It's been over a month since my last post, I'm woefully behind in the Istanbul recap-saga, and to top it all off I've been cheating on you all. My blogging sins are legion, my darlings. I'm not even going to insult you with an apology.

What to write, what to write... I think I've decided not to post that long blog I half-wrote about this years V-day truffle experience (also, V-day? Really? I'm using that now? Even though every time I see it I thing Venerial Disease Day? Yes, apparently so.) I'm doing my darndest not to talk about a certain conservative talk radio host who recently said some very stupid things that got him enough publicity to show up on my Google News feed, proving once again that he hates women and could probably make a second living as a stunt double for Jabba the Hut. (Woops, looks like I just blogged about him anyway). And I really don't think any of you would be all that interested in my latest craft project which involves egg-shells and hot air balloons (What's that? You are interested? Well suck it, monkeys, this ain't no crafty mommy blog... and I'm not posting about until I have pictures to show you).

So, I guess that leaves Istanbul. Here we go...

Just kidding. I have access to neither the photos not the motivation required to travel blog right now.

I suppose that leaves nothing more than to promise you I'll blog more often. Granted, I have no intention of holding myself to that promise. It's a silly promise anyway. Like promising your husband you'll stop blaming him for everything any conservative pundit says. You both know how that will turn out.