The Joy of Growing Things

There's a lot about me that screams farm girl (like, for instance, the fact that I grew up on a farm); however, I'm not one. I've never particularly liked the outdoors. I took horsebackriding lessongs only because my friends and family did and gave it up during my teen years for theater, field hockey, and bussing tables at a local restaurant. I've weeded intensely huge vegetable gardens, mucked out stalls, collected fresh chicken eggs, thrown hay bales...with the same disinterest any other child feel at making the bed or washing the dishes.

Now that my property has gone from being measured in acres to feet, my attitude towards outside work has changed. There are no longer chickens or horses, nothing so glorious, but the small plots of land I have to cultivate are loved and tended. I spend hours slaving over 2 x 12 feet of dirt, urging the soil to bring forth beans, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and beauitful blooms. I check their progress every day, watching vacant spots produce tiny green shoots that seem to grow every time I turn my back. I keep a nervous eye on the areas that remain empty-- are they failures or late bloomers? Only time will tell.

So why the change of heart? It could be stubborness. After all, no one (besides myself) is making me weed and dig and mulch my weekends away. Now that it's not an assigned chore, it's more attractive. It could be the ownership. This is my land, growing my crops. I'm practically a pioneer out here in suburbia, dealing with the harsh conditions of shade and the occasional rabbit. Or it could just be that now, in my early adulthood, I can better appreciate delayed gratification: how the hours I put in now will, quite literally, bear fruit in the future.

Whatever the reason, I can't wait until June-- perhaps July-- to see it all happen.

Now in "oh-so-grown-up"

So, this Saturday, I attended my undergrad alma mater's Homecoming for the first time since 2005. So, three years ago. I was 23, I mooched off of my parents' tailgate, attended a party at the theater, got drunk, and slept on campus.

This year, I had a group of out-of-town friends come to my house on Friday night. We got up at 7AM to drive to the college, planned and executed a fabulous tailgate, and went back to my place fairly early and fairly sober. We proceeded to sit around in my living room, discussing life plans, memories and politics, and generally cracking each other up.

I suppose what I'm saying is: I am no longer in it for the drinking, the craziness, the lack of remembering. I am in it for the people and the memories. I have a fantastic group of friends. Their only bad quality? Some of them live too ding-dang-god far away.

In other life news, I'm busy as anything. I'm lost but not too lost. I'm open to possibilities. I'm generating creative output (yay, NaNoWriMo). I'm reconnecting. I'm planning. I'm decorating. I'm dreaming. I'm marvelling at all the things that change and those, of course, that stay exactly the same.

Note

In less than three hours, I will sit down to sign the papers that officially make me a homeowner. I think it's safe to say my life will never be the same again.

First Day of School...Again...

Today I started teaching at the community college. The topic listed on our syllabus was "Course Introduction," so I suppose, officially, I haven't actually started teaching yet. Still, it was fun and different. I think this entire experience is going to be challenging in the best possible way (and everyone can remind me of this cockeyed optimism later in the semester, when I'm bemoaning the state of America's youth, etc., etc.).

My students, thus far, seem fairly well-behaved and willing to at least be coaxed into participating. The problem? They all look the same to me. Exactly the same. They just look young and sloppily put together. The girls' hair all shines with the same sheen. The boys wear the same t-shirts. I pass a student in the hall and I'm not sure if he or she was sitting in front of me five minutes ago. They're identical. I don't know how I'll ever learn a single name.

I did get almost every one of them to smile at me when they turned in their first writing assignment at the end of class today. Not too shabby.

In other news, I continue to walk the fine tightrope line between ADULT and HOPELESSLY IMMATURE POST-ADOLESCENT (okay, I'm working on the title for the latter). This weekend was pretty much a blur of careless hedonism. There was far too much wine, a couple great parties, some questionable choices and me insisting to friends, in a slightly slurred voice, that I had no ambitions and really didn't want to do anything in particular with my life. And then Tuesday I signed the papers for my house.


This is my kitchen. I love the kitchen. I picked this house almost purely based on the stirrings of lust and desire for ownership that this kitchen inspires.

Tomorrow I have my home inspection, and I'll be signing the big old scary mortgage papers. Settlement is October 17th. Very soon. I feel this move is both terribly adult and wonderfully reckless at the same time. Wonderfully adult and terribly reckless? Not sure.

A Problem with Monogamy

So, I have a third date scheduled for today at 12:30. And another third at 1:00 and a second around 1:30. If you think 12:30 on a Monday is an odd time, try 1:50 on a Sunday or 11:00 on a Thursday. And, of course, I have anywhere from four to eight dates scheduled in a two to three hour period.

I’m not talking about men, of course, but real estate.

Either way, a third date implies something serious. At this point, it’s really time for me to either make a commitment or cut these poor properties loose. But here’s the thing: they’re all keepers. All three of them. I can see myself building a long happy relationship with each one. So how does a girl with very little experience making important decisions make this one?

The Job I'm Leaving on the Dressing Room Floor...

There are some people who would say I have very little to complain about.

They are absolutely, one hundred percent correct.

And I am, all in all, an almost ridiculously happy person. Or am I a ridiculously content person? I've never been sure. Either way, I like my life. A lot.

But I don't really know how to get by without complaining.

Right now, it's mostly student loans. Which are scary. And sharing a bedroom with my younger sister, which is both uncomfortable for an almost 26 year old woman and embarrassing. And then there's my utter lack of focus or direction, which I don't know...is this my fault? Was I just born like this? Is my mother to blame? My mother still isn't sure what she wants to do with her life. Maybe I inherited this feeling from her, a long with all her physical characteristics.

And today, it's this job interview I had.

Today I interviewed for a job as a Box Office Assistant at a regional theater in the area. This is a job for which I am overqualified, but that doesn't bother me; I'm overqualified for lots of jobs I end up doing. It offers benefits and it would work around my teaching schedule. Plus, I would be working in a theater-- glorious, glorious theater, which I sometimes miss so much it just aches inside.

Problem? It doesn't pay enough.

Going for this job interview-- which I almost didn't do-- was like trying on an expensive dress. Not a one thousand dollar dress, not one that is decimal places out of your budget, but one that is maybe one hundred dollars over, when you're at that place balancing your budget where one hundred dollars almost might as well be one thousand. And you think, "I'll try on this dress just for fun. I would never actually buy it."

So you step into the dressing room with it draped over your arm and already, even before it's on, it just feels better than the dresses you can afford. And when you're standing in the dress, looking in the mirror, you fall a little bit in love: not just with the dress but with the person you are in the dress and the person you could be. It's just lovely. And suddenly, you think maybe that extra money that you swore you wouldn't spend, that you can't spend, that is perhaps all that is keeping you in your apartment or eating or some such trifle, is not only worth it but entirely necessary for your future happiness.

That is what going on this job interview was like.

But you can't buy the dress. And you...or, I suppose we can switch to 'I' now...can't have the job. Because you, I, we are getting beyond that point where we get to buy frivolous dresses and have fun, low-paying jobs. We're adults now and we have to save those extra bucks and shoulder a bit of responsibility.

Sigh.

Everything Else in the World

Too young to take pleasure
from those privilged glimpses
we're sometimes given after failure,
or to see the hideen opportunity
in not getting what we want,
each day I subwayed into Manhattan

in my new, blue serge suit,
looking for work. College, I thought,
had whitened my collar, set me up,
but I'd majored in history.
What did I know about the world?

At interviews, if asked about the world,
I might have responded-- citing Carlyle--
Great men make it go, I want to be one of those.
But they wanted someone entry-level,
pleased for a while to be small.

Others got the jobs;
no doubt, later in the day, the girls.
At Horn & Hardarts, for solace
at lunchtime, I'd make a sandwich emerge
from its cell of pristine glass.
It took just a nickel and a dime.

Nickels and dimes could make
a middleman disappear, easy as that,
no big deal, a life or two
destroyed, others improved.
But I wasn't afraid of capitalism.
All I wanted was a job like a book
so good I'd be finishing it
for the rest of my life.

Had my education failed me?
I felt a hankering for the sublime,
its dangerous subversions
of the daily grind.
Oh I took a dull, well-paying job.
History major? the interviewer said, I think
you might be good at designing brochures.

I was. Which filled me with desire
for almost everything else in the world.

~ Stephen Dunn, "Everything Else in the World"

What do I want to BE when I grow up?

Yet again, I am faced with the near-existential crisis that accompanies graduation. Or being in your mid-twenties. Or simply being alive.

I strongly feel the question should be "WHO do I want to be?" but it isn't. I have to pick a job, because that's what people do. And I am supposed to pick a job that can turn into a career- that can go somewhere, direct my life, give me purpose for the next forty years or so.

Is it okay if I don't want to?

I don't like to work.

There, I've said it.

More specifically, I don't like having a job. It's not that I'm lazy, per se (I am lazy, just no more lazy than plenty of people who have jobs, careers, etc.), it's just that I don't want that life. Get up, go to work, come home exhausted, go to sleep so you can get up and go to work again. I understand that plenty of people who lead that life don't particularly want it. It's just what you do to be an American adult. But I don't want to do it. So, do I have to?

It's looking like the teaching thing might not happen, at least not this year. For about two weeks, this really freaked me out. I wanted a path, a goal, certain steps that would lead to certain other steps that would lead me down the road to respectability and old age. Then I stepped back and realized that I don't really care that much if I'm not teaching. I mean, I want to teach: if I have to have a career, I want one that I feel is contributing to the world and one that focuses on things I love (reading...books...talking about reading and books). But as I don't actually want a career, the not teaching thing isn't such a great loss.

A friend and I recently discussed my plans and put the "things I want to do with my life" in this order:

- Writer
- Own/Run my own bookstore/cafe
- Teach

And what I want most by far is to be a writer...so doesn't it seem silly to pursue another career in the meantime? Yes, I need to make enough money to live and make my student loan payments...but that's it. I don't need a job to become the center of my life when I would rather center it on friends, family, and writing.

So here's my justification for a possible future of bummin' around: all typed-out and easy to access.


In other news, no Madam President for us in the US. She's been losing for so long that it's not a shock at all, but it's still disappointing. Time to learn how to be an Obama supporter, I suppose.

Winning at Losing...

Work, work, work.

These days it seems that everyone is the most tired, the most busy, the most stressed, the most overworked. It's a contest I never meant to be in the running for. When I was young and lazy (-ER, as I'm still young and lazy), my Dad would yell at me: "Someday, you're going to have to work hard all day, every day, like I do." I said: "Not if I can help it."

I still mean that. Not to be trite, but there's more to life.

Anyway, I suppose my weekend was 'the more', but I refuse to live just for weekend respites. It was a birthday weekend. Friday was my college roommate's birthday, so we went to the O's game (my first baseball game in years...they suck) and dinner and drinking. There was no dancing, but there was Naked Woman Memory. And how can that not be a good time?

Saturday was mostly reliving my college days- sitting around with two of my best friends doing absolutely nothing. Then getting up and ordering take out food, so we could continue to do absolutely nothing. Doing nothing with your friends is so much better than doing nothing all by yourself. The sad part (one of them) about growing up and leaving college is that you have to get up and go somewhere to effectively do nothing. Or have people come to you. Either way, it involves a lot more effort than it used to.