something apropos, i don’t know

It’s a new year and I couldn’t be happier about that. With my wedding as the one notable exception, 2007 was a rough year. No disasters or life-threatening crises, just day after day of getting kicked in the shins. 2008 has to be better.

I really miss blogging. I’d think about posting but then the time would get away from me and the longer I went without writing the more I felt like I’d never be able to catch up on everything that had been going on and so on. But it’s a new year and the important thing is for me to write. Often. Even if some of it is crap, I just need to get it out there. Going without writing takes its toll on me and I’ve been inspired by the joyful, heartfelt writing of others and how much it can move and comfort me.

Having said that, I’m actively looking for a new space to call my own. It’s taken me too long to accept that I’ve been languishing in this spot. Many reasons for that but one example is that when I checked my site meter for the first time in months, I saw that even during weeks of no new posts, the same old unwelcome visitor still comes by. Every single day. I find it incredibly odd that they still care enough to check up on me. Blogstalker much? And I’m tired of the small stupid voice in my head that thinks “I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing when I had a bad day.” So onward ho.

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In the meantime, even as I look for new digs, I’m still here, easing back into writing for the sake of writing. Writing about finding joy in limbo, how my theme song went from "Dancing in the Dark" to "Mushaboom", how big shot MDs are a bit like my former students, and more.

you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both

It’s a rainy Saturday morning, a rare occurrence here. It’s the kind of day where we have no choice but to go to an Indian buffet for lunch and then go museum hopping. We have a movie gift card from the Husband’s parents (We have yet to pay for a movie here, which is good, because it’s a ridiculous $8-10 for tix) but there is not a single thing out we want to see.

The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster. We hit a pretty bad low two Mondays ago. Our beloved little kitten got suddenly very sick and short of spending hundreds of dollars on invasive tests that would more likely than not reveal he had something untreatable, we had no choice but to put him to sleep. That was incredibly heartbreaking. He was so sweet and loving and adorable and pretty much perfect and it made me so happy to finally have a two cat household. Losing him after only one short month of happiness felt incredibly cruel. It’s still hard to talk about.

The pain of losing him, on top of our frustration and anxiety about our lack of jobs, seemed to be the last straw. What the hell were we doing here? I decided to give notice at my crappy temp job and that’s when things got better. Last Friday was my last day and yesterday I started at a new job. How awesome is that? I had a phone interview Wednesday, a face to face interview Thursday, and then Friday was my first day. Just like that.

Fed up with my job, at the end of September I had sent out my resume to a few places, finally overcoming my irrational aversion to sending out resumes in the absence of advertised openings. Last Thursday I got an email asking if I was interested in a position that they were just now advertising and we set up a phone interview. It is pretty damn lucky that I sent them my resume because had I seen the job ad, I would never have applied since it asked for 4 years of previous experience.

And even better, not five minutes after I got done with the phone interview, the Husband’s phone rang and now he has an interview for Monday. I love serendipity.

As if finding out on Thursday that I got the job (they even asked me if I wanted to start as soon as the interview was over!) wasn’t good enough, I then finally went out and bought myself a guitar. It was a very good day.

we pause for station identification

I continue to be not dead, just with scarce time and inclination to write. Weekdays are pretty much entirely sucked up by work, approximately 10 hours a day down the drain. Soon after I’ve eaten dinner on a work day, I’m half asleep.

I hate the job and the commute and the ceaseless sameness of every day, I’m job hunting with renewed vigor and also considering the possibility that SD may not work out for us and we may have to pick up and go somewhere else. Not a fun thought for lots of reasons but we knew that was a risk before we moved out here.

Considering taking a blog hiatus, since I post so infrequently and unsatisfactorily as it is. I’ve been dissatisfied with the output here for quite a while and though I know one of the big reasons for it (it could be a whole post in and of itself), time is also an issue. My next big project is starting a psychology blog and looking for other outlets for my psych writing so I can start building a portfolio. Doing the research for my writing and getting such a blog up and running is going to take up a lot of time and between that and work and church activities and going to the gym and our weekend outings and daytrips and the guitar lessons I hope to take in the very near future, something’s gotta give. I’ll update here with whatever I decide to do with the blog (resume here or have a personal blog attached to the psych blog or something else) and when/if I come back, so that ya’ll (all five or so of ya’ll!) will know what’s going on. If you’re interested in whatever new blogs I start up or what’s going on with me, feel free to email me . Gmail knows me as awatersign.

I can’t see myself quitting personal blogging cold turkey but a break might be good for me and my writing. And who knows, maybe in a nice bit of reverse psychology, by announcing that I’m not going to write for a while, I might be inspired to write more often.

i need a job and i wanna be a paperback writer

Not dead. Have been alternately bored, blocked, or busy. Unemployment sucked, but working a mindlessly boring job is no great shakes either. I found a spot as a data entry monkey and started today. Slowest day ever. Tomorrow I go back dressed for comfort and with a fully loaded iPod (I'm light-years behind on the whole podcast thing but I'm trying to fix that, so if you have any faves, let me know. Right now I mostly have tons of NPR.) and things should be better. My professional life is obligated to get better, right? Because it can’t get much worse.

Good things have included going to the beach on an absolutely perfect evening , having a picnic and watching the sun set. Reminds me why I’m here. Went to a hip little tapas place Friday night. Sittingon a sunny patio and sipping Bellinis and eating duck confit and poached oysters with truffle butter is something a girl could get used to. Followed by a glass of sangria on the quiet bamboo decorated patio of a tucked away little bar and then on to the best chocolate cake in the history of chocolate cakes at Extraordinary Desserts. Orgasmically good.

We’ve joined a Unitarian church, which is interesting, due to the whole lack of creed thing and a mix of people that includes Christians, pagans (cue Dar Williams song here), and atheists. After service on Sundays we go to the farmer’s market in Hillcrest (a lot of my favorite activities tend to take me to Hillcrest) and snatch up fresh veggies and fruit for the following week’s meals and then enjoy a really tasty lunch, like a feta, corn, and jalapeno tamale, a squash blossom quesadilla, and a pineapple agua fresco. Yum! And laying out on a blanket in Balboa Park reading, listening to Andrew Bird, and eating plums is a perfect way to while away an afternoon.

So a crappy job seems like a small trade-off for all the fun I am and will be having off the clock, but I’m not going to be fully happy until I find something I can do uniquely well and feel fulfilled by. And I refuse to believe that that’s asking too much.

pilots call me starbuck, you may refer to me as god

The newest addition to our family. He doesn't have a name set yet (but Starbuck's a contender) so for now he's the Nugget.

lonely, baby i'm not, i've got my imaginary friends

Being unemployed means I have lots of time to spend uploading old pix to Flickr (which in turn makes me miss our friends something fierce) and doing silly things on Facebook. I joined Facebook only recently and was never on it until we moved and now I needle people into joining so we can chat and stay in touch. I don’t really know why but My Space skeeves me out and Facebook doesn’t. Maybe because it started out as only being available to the academic community and because I’ve seen so many silly pages on My Space (grown women with pictures of sparkly pink ponies and shit). Not that there aren’t skeevy groups on Facebook (apparently enough guys agree that handjobs suck to form a group).

And I’ve joined San Diego groups and even started a group for other newbies but so far I’ve only met 18 and 20-year-old girls. I’m too old to make friends with 18-year-olds, dude. I can’t even comprehend their language. One girl wrote “I’m the real FFG” in her description and I have no idea what that means. Even Google couldn’t enlighten me. Another girl wrote for her favorite music – “nething I can move too”. Ug. And when I look at the pages of random people in San Diego, I always find something that makes go “Next!” I tell myself I’m not being a snob, just realistic. If someone’s politically very conservative, is into Nascar, and loves country, we’re probably not going to click.

(I am a snob about spelling mistakes though. And I don’t mean typos, I make typos all the time. But if someone talks about something that “peeks” their interest, I roll my eyes and move on. Today I found a food blog where someone talked about their “pallet”. For the love of God, if you’re going to write about food, use the correct word!)

Nor do I have any illusions about how quickly someone could rule me out based on my info. If I was a 20-year-old girl who liked to party and listen to Incubus, why in God’s name would I want to make friends with someone who’s almost 30, watches sci-fi, and when it comes to music is clearly an indie tool? As if!

It’s not very rational for me to be so pessimistic about making friends online, considering, you know, how I met the Husband. But I still think of that as one of those amazing, odds defying lucky things. And if I saw someone online who was in my age range and loved Alton Brown and John Cusack movies and geeky shows and could quote the Big Lebowski, well then let’s talk.

But when I think about all the qualities I value in the friends I left behind, their humor, their warmth, their quirkiness and massive brains and the rare and perfect combination of someone who’s a good companion and fun to pal around with but also a good person who’s true of heart and would do anything for you, it gets hard to imagine finding all that on a computer screen (Again, not very rational. If I can meet the love of my life online, why not just a friend?). But I hope someone proves me wrong.

sail away with me

We’ve been married two months today. I realized I never got around to writing about our blissful honeymoon, which I should do soon.

One of the highlights was the Baths on Virgin Gorda. Among these amazing boulder formations scattered around, there’s this very cool trail that you can take that the signs warn you is “challenging”, which made me nervous. I felt vulnerable climbing rocks in a bikini and flip flops and I’m just naturally a wuss about a lot of things.

But I let the Husband lead the way and put my hand in his. And climb we did, in between, over and under the boulders, up wooden ladders and scaling walls with some old rope to guide us. We saw the loveliest little pools and grottoes and at the very end of the trail was our prize – Devil’s Bay Beach. A less fitting name I cannot think of. The water was so calm and clear it was unreal. It was heavenly.

Although my feminist streak occasionally makes a showing, in some things I am all too willing to let the Husband take the lead. When I think of our trek through the rocks, it is impossible for me not to feel the symbolism of following my husband up and over obstacles, through the dark, and up into the light. I gave him my hand and my complete trust and just having him to guide me helped me be brave.

I can only imagine that difficulties we’ll encounter in the future will be a lot more challenging than a little beachside obstacle course but knowing that I have the Husband as my partner and my guide in both the rocky parts and the blissful parts means that I have no fear.