I’m holed up in our guest room writing a paper and I asked Longball to fetch me some water and chapstick. He came back quickly with both and I was surprised. Usually he can’t find anything in my purse.
“Hey you can now locate my chapstick!”
He nodded and waited until I took a drink of my water to say:
“Yeah I just turned it over and shook everything out!”
And ran away as I choked.
While I sit here at my dining room table, anxiously writing a paper on brain surgery where people had their corpus callosum’s severed (the fiber “bridge” if you will that connects the two hemispheres) while fending off two felines trying to eat my leftovers (cats love polenta, apparently) and just generally stressing out.
I still find myself happy.
School is fun. No matter how difficult the paper or the exam, it’s always infinitely better than the last two jobs that I had.
It’s great knowing you are in the right place.
Christmas 2009 was the first Christmas that I spent away from my family. Knowing that it was going to be hard (my family is close and we like spending time together), Longball made us a mixed CD of songs to get us through the tough times. Those being a holiday away from my family, throwing a disastrous Christmas dinner (two meats, two kitchens, one meat thermometer) and knitting a baby sweater that I was certain was going to be too small when the intended opened it.
One of the songs was “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros which we played over and over again and sang aloud as we drove back and forth and back and forth between Longball’s dad’s house and ours (the site of the second meat and the working meat thermometer).
My brother-in-law Tim every December invites his friends to record cover songs of tunes that came out the preceding year. You may remember I did “Bridge Over Troubled Water” for their wedding.
Well this time I got Longball in on the action and with the help of our friend Josh (who was also the wedding photographer for Alison’s wedding), we recorded our version.
It’s sentimental but true. Home for me is wherever Longball is. Hopefully in the future, home also has a working meat thermometer.
How was your holiday?
Usually I try to have my posts be more than a complaint. Usually.
Is anyone else out there getting totally taken by the post office? Now that I don’t live close to my family I mail my presents (probably like many people). Yesterday I got suckered into the “if it fits, it ships” only to have the droopy guy working the counter say “you would have saved money if you had bought your own box and sent it priority mail.” He mentioned that as he was taking my money and wrapping my package with tape like a mummy.
Today I thought I had their number so I purchased my own boxes and pranced up there to pay for shipping only to have the little chipmunk say I would have been better off putting my packages in one of those prepaid shipper dealies.
Anyone else feeling smothered by the Holiday Spirit?
“Why do you keep banging your head against the wall?”
“Because it feels so good when I stop.”
I finished all my finals and research and can now relax and live like a normal person.
Except, it’s the week of Christmas and I decided to clean my office. I’m seemingly one of those people who loves to pile on more activities and to-lists. I call those kind of people “Border Collies.” You know the type, the ones who have to be constantly busy otherwise they will chew their own feet out of boredom.
My dad is a Border Collie. Recently he picked Longball and I up at the ferry dock on Whidbey Island and we asked him what he had done that day. He said, “nothing.” After a few more beats he said, “and it was really hard for me.”
Last week I worked a few eight hour shifts in a row like a normal person and I had a moment of panic. I was panicking because I couldn’t imagine working just mere eight hour shifts at some job-job for the rest of my life. Then I was relieved when I reminded myself that next semester I’m working, taking two classes and working in two research labs. No normalcy there.
You’ll find my dad and I out herding sheep.
After freezing last weekend, I found the ideal head wear situation for this week’s game. Double coverage.
Anyone who has been to a November football game knows the value of covering one’s own nose and mouth. All of my exhalations serve to get recirculated back into my own face.
Much of the year the weather around here is harsh and depressing. Like NOVEMBER.
But June and July are downright pleasant. When I’m in the midst of crappy weather I look forward to early summer when the wheat is green.
Spectacular! Fail!
Well I failed on my quest to post every day in November. The demise of my plan started out as a simple mistake and spiraled down from there. Here’s what happened, in a nutshell - to give you an idea of the crazy in my life.
Friday (day one of fail):
My Friday will give you an idea of my average day. Work from 8:00am to 10:30am. Run for the bus (about a five minute walk) and catch the bus to my 11:10 class. After class, I eat my sack lunch and then head to a lab meeting at 1:30. Often when the lab meeting is over at 3:00, I return BACK to work and work from 3:30-5:30 or 6:30. This particular Friday I gave myself a break and instead we went to eat dinner at a friend’s house, because I am trying to avoid getting the flu be more social.
It snowed that evening so it took us a little while longer to get home from our dinner engagement and by the time I got home it was past midnight. I gasped as I remembered while brushing my teeth, but it was too late.
So Saturday I was set to resume in the spirit of posting every day. We got up early to head through the snow to a bar on campus to eat and spend time with Longball’s father. We attended the game shellacking and I officially froze my ass off. Like I said, it had snowed the night before and there was still snow on the ground. At some point in the third quarter, I had a laceration on my nose from wiping it with the back of my sleeve and I begged that we leave. Longball and his father though wanted to stick it out until the bitter end. We then trudged for 15 minutes on the ice back to our car when I developed hypothermia. We dashed off to “Taste of India” on the University of Idaho campus and stuffed ourselves with warm, spicy Indian food. I came home and collapsed on the bed in my wool cap and parka and fell asleep. At 9:00pm.
Sunday I was ready to resume my schedule but Gladys had a, ahem, health issue. She would like me to be delicate so I will just say that it involved some bloody loose stool situations. She has been sick lately so Sunday was shot while I worried and wrung my hands.
And then Dan ate some unleavened yeast dough which sounds really funny. Except when Longball looked it up and turns out the dough can expand in a cats tummy and burst the stomach. Oh and as the yeast does it’s magic it creates alcohol which can cause alcohol poisoning. Oh and if neither of those two things happen the dough can create a bowel obstruction if it does not pass.
And now I’m home sick. And on double poop watch for both cats.
So. Fail!
Second Annual
As much as it seems like this new life is perfect and I’m loving it, it’s not true. I don’t always skip around singing out my love to Pullman and WSU. Just most days.
On those rare other days when I don’t love it, I dislike it immensely. Like this morning when I woke up and had had it. With everything. And then I remembered that it was November.
Last November, I snapped. The summer was fun, and the Autumn semester started out fun. But as the weeks wore on into November, I began to get tired. Sure I was hitting the semester wall and was tired of the crazy schedule and tired of never having a free moment when I didn’t feel like I should be studying. Tired of studying.
The weather also got crappy in November and it turned from a beautiful crisp autumn into a dreary, mushy leaf mess.
I had also kind of “had it” with the love of Pullman, surprisingly. Most of Longball’s friends and family view Pullman as Mecca. They all have (or at least talk about) only good memories. They approach every conversation with me with some variation of “how much do you love it!” Not really even a question, just a statement. And yes, I love it but sometimes I want the freedom to talk about how much I don’t love it here sometimes.
Longball is the prodigal son and it seemed like every interaction was spent reminiscing about the good old days. When we go places we were “The Prodigal Son and his girlfriend.” I had a hard time finding my own identity. I was either Longball’s girlfriend, or just another nameless undergraduate, but I didn’t know where Amie was.
Even my own old Alma mater UW was dissed at every turn. The school rivalry jokes don’t stop just at football, but people’s comments attack the integrity of the school and my education. Sure, I am more than where I went to college but it seemed like everything about the old me was either forgotten or actively made fun of.
It all culminated in my football team losing in a heartbreaking fashion, and then Longball’s brother made me watch it a second time on the replay over dinner.
I came home and cried. Cried over the football game, cried over not having any friends on my side, cried that there wasn’t any Amieness anywhere. I just wanted everyone to SHUT UP about the Cougars.
So we made a decision that I would try harder to make connections and friends.
So I thought that last November’s burnout was a one time deal. I have fixed the problems from last year; I have three really good girlfriends that I can gossip with, people who never knew Longball from before and take me on as a friend based on my own merits.
Still the November burnout is back. It does seem that part of it is seasonal. It’s freezing mushy leaf time and the semester is so freaking long and the notes and tests are endless. But it’s more than that. Those yearly events push me into a month-long questioning of “why am I here?”
It seems that November has now transformed into my identity and role-questioning month. I feel constantly in between everything. It’s obvious that we are not undergraduates anymore. Longball works with undergrads and I go to school with them every day and yes, they are often as vile as you remember. It’s sometimes hard to spend all your time with people who have their whole lives ahead of them manage it so poorly. They have all the years left on their biological clock, they have no credit card debt yet, they have no wrinkles. I don’t necessarily want to be them, but I feel envious that I don’t fit in.
We are also not quite living the lives of adults. I go to school every day and can’t take days off. I study nights. Longball works nights and many weekend so people very understandably plan adult lives and invite us to do adult things and we can’t. We miss family events and weeknight dinner parties because people forget that we have crazy schedules. Everyone is having babies, getting raises and buying houses. I don’t necessarily want to be them, but I feel sad and envious that I don’t fit in.
We don’t even fit in to the graduate student circle either. I don’t have a mentor, funding or any department that organizes parties or events for us to attend. I do want to be them and I’m just not there yet.
So I guess November is my month to deal with issues of self, and remember that who I am doesn’t need to nicely fit into any category. Which I think I’m okay with. I like it that I don’t just glibly go along without questioning where I am going, so then bring it on, November. November sucked last year, but then it got better.
Plus this November, I hope I’m winning the football game.
Longball has a friend who owns 30ish acres in the North Idaho woods where her and her husband are building a house. Last Christmas she said we could go out there and cut down some trees for our Christmas tree.
She doesn’t own a tree farm, we just got to go to the woods. And cut down a tree.
Being in the woods in the snow was breathtakingly beautiful. Longball’s father came with us and the three of us walked around admiring the trees, sometimes in silence and sometimes loud and giddy from the crisp air and sunlight.
Living in an urban area my whole life, I never got a chance to wander around without trails and fellow hikers.
At one point we lost LB’s father. So we tracked him.
We found him.
Finally get found our little fir, Longball’s father found one and we dragged them through the snow, across the draw and back to our truck.
I get to be much closer to nature here and participate in days I never could dream of.
Fun and odd outdoor day trips: I will always remember that day. Someday I may have to get my tree from a lame tree stand and I will remember how much more meaningful it is to see a tree in the woods. Maybe someday I might live somewhere where there is no snow and I will definitely miss the snow. I will not take winters or the outdoors here for granted.