lazy Saturday

Leaving Café Lemont

It's snowing something fierce outside, and I'm sitting at Café Lemont in State College, just letting the cafe noise wash over me and enjoying the hum of warmth and activity.  All of the mugs here are handmade by a lady who sells them in house, and mine has a thick, bulbous ceramic base that you can cup in your hands, and it's full of warm, frothy latte.  My friend and neighbor E and her boyfriend are at a table a few feet away, and she's explaining to him what garden path sentences are, and the couple behind me are code switching between Arabic and English.  I love this café.  It's furnished with what seems to be antique/thift store furniture, and there are these beautiful dreamy paintings on the walls painted by a local artist.  They're the types of art I'd like to have in my house someday, maybe in some far off future when I'm making a professor's salary instead of a postdoc one, and I can do things like buy art from local artists that I like.

Inside Café Lemont

I've been feeling down this week.  Very intermittently, though; it comes and goes, and thankfully it mostly goes.  That is to say, most days I'm really happy and there are so many good things in my life right now.  I love my job and my work, and I'm making some really great friends here.  I've made it a point to exercise every day since I got back from break, and that's been really nice.  It is so cold here right now.  Too cold for running some days, really, and I am not exactly a wimp when it comes to running in the cold.  15 degrees is about my limit, though, because below that and it just hurts your skin and lungs.  So I go running as long as it's not too windy and biting, but that's usually only once a week right now.  The other days, I've been doing strength training-type stuff at home, and I'm getting noticeably stronger, which I really like.  I haven't had much upper body strength since I was playing volleyball and lifting weights regularly in high school, and I'd like to get back to the point where I'm actually strong-strong.  Winter in central PA is a pretty good time to work on that, it turns out.

Last night I had two bad dreams (two!) and I don't know what to make of that; I can't tell if I'm in a weird-sad mood today because of the dreams, or if already being in a slightly weird-sad mood is what brought the dreams on in the first place.  I think it's a little bit of both, unfortunately.  But I woke up in the middle of the night and was just so, so sad and couldn't get back to sleep for a little bit.  Thankfully I did get back to sleep after not too long, but then I had a second bad dream, and then it was morning, so I stayed awake after that.  But it was just not a restful night's sleep, and it's definitely affected my day today.  Bad dreams are funny when you're an adult, too.  Not funny-ha-ha, obviously, but funny-isn't-that-weird.  You'd think they'd go away when you grow up, but really all that changes is the things that feel out of your control enough to make you feel scared.  I don't mean this to be as cryptic and worrying as it sounds.  I'm just musing on the fact that at nearly 30 years old, it's still possible to wake up feeling freaked out from a bad dream!

Well, one of my postdoc friends is here now, so maybe that will help get me out of my funk.  I decided to dress up a little bit today, and it's almost silly how much that perked me up.  I decided to wear a dress and put on some mascara and even a tiny little spritz of perfume, and it's kind of fun to feel the tiniest bit fancier than normal.

* * * * * * *

We just had an awesome conversation about science and programming and spectra, and now I'm feeling much better.  I have these three friends I met through the Penn State Postdoc Society, and they are some of the most interesting, fun, smart women I've ever known.  The one who's here now is an astrophysicist, the one I went out to dinner with last night is a biological anthropologist, and the one who might be joining us later today is a cancer researcher.  So basically we sit around and have hugely nerdy conversations and it is so so so much fun.

So... things are good, in the scheme of things.  But I miss my boyfriend very much, and that sucks, and I still don't know how long I'm going to be here or where I'm going next or for how long, and that kind of sucks too.  (The other side of the coin is that it's fun and exciting by turns, but I definitely vacillate between those feelings with some regularity.)

On a related note, it's looking pretty strongly like I'll be staying here for at least one more year, maybe two, and conceivably even three.  I have a near-guarantee of funding for next year, and I also have two grants that are going to be reviewed very soon, and if one of those comes through (fingers and toes crossed!), then I would have 2-3 years of my very own funding.  So within two months, I will know for sure just how long I'll be staying here, and I think that will help a little bit with my mild feelings of drifting-related anxiety.

Hmph.  I think I'll try to go back to reading Game of Thrones now.

I still love you, blog.

Ohhh blog.  My poor, poor blog.  Here it sits, all on its lonesome, with no one to love it, and no one to write in it, and therefore probably no one to read it.  Poor, sad, un-updated blog.

I will fix you, blog.  I will write in you right now while my apples bake in the oven and make my house smell like yummy cinnamon dessert.

Where to start?  It's been nearly two months!  (For shame.)  Well...

I spent two weeks in Berkeley at the end of November/beginning of December.  It was so nice to see everyone.  I mean, that's an understatement, really.  The nice thing about only having been gone for three months is that it was so normal to be back in Berkeley!  Everything was just as I left it, really.  The only weird part was that I didn't have an apartment anymore.  I kept thinking, "Okay, well, time to go home now..." except that someone else lives in my "home" now.  That was small potatoes, though.  I was surprised at just how normal everything felt, and it was very comforting, but slightly unsettling at the same time.  I keep bumping up against this feeling that I have multiple homes, and multiple places where I sort of belong.  In some ways, it's a nice feeling, obviously, because there are lots of places I can go where I mostly feel at home.  But the flip side, of course, is that there's literally nowhere in my life where I feel completely at home, and it's enough to start me down the path into Existential Crisis Land, if I'm in the wrong mood.

Anyway, we did Thanksgiving, and it was really wonderful.  I went to a conference, and I got to hang out with lots of people I had missed very much.  I sort of wasted a day driving down to Stanford to give a talk... "wasted" only because it wasn't particularly well attended, and I would have been better served by going to the last day of the conference I was ostensibly in town to attend... but it was okay.  I also submitted another research grant that probably won't get funded, but you never know!  And I had a great meeting with one of my advisors, where we set down The Grand Plan for how I'm going to get my dissertation stuff published.  That plan involved me submitting at least one (preferably two) papers by the end of January, so... ahem....  (There's still time, there's still time, I tell myself.)

Then I came back to State College for a few weeks, where I must have done something, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

And then I drove to Illinois for Christmas, which is a freaking long drive, in case you were wondering.  It was a nice drive - at least until you get past Columbus, Ohio, at which point it turns into cornfields-cornfields-cornfields-flat-flat-flat.  Christmas was also nice, but I found myself missing J a lot and really looking forward to heading back to Berkeley.

So, then I headed back to California and spent two more weeks in Berkeley.  Well, sort of; we actually drove down to Santa Barbara right away and spent a few days hanging out in the glorious sunshine, running on the beach, and doing the sorts of things that feel like you're rubbing it in people's faces if you tell them about it.  Suffice it to say that I adore Santa Barbara, and we had a wonderful time down there.

We drove back up to Berkeley after a few days, and I started to get myself back into work mode a little bit.  I was having a very nice time, in fact: walking to a nice cafe in the morning, working for a few hours before meeting up with a friend or two for lunch, then maybe going out for dinner or just hanging out in the evenings.  Then - BLAMMO - food poisoning.  Nooooo fuuuuuuun.  I think it must have been leftover Thai food, because a few hours after I finished it off, I suddenly started getting really nauseous and uncomfortable, and then I was up all night violently ridding my body of all its contents.  Thankfully I had someone who apparently loves me very much who was willing to go out and buy me popsicles and Gatorade, but that was the only remotely good part about it, and my gastrointestinal tract was noticeably messed up for close to a week.

And here I am back in State College!  It's been nice to be back, and it's nice to start getting back into the swing of things.  I've been trying really hard to finish up one paper and get to work on a different paper, and have been making decent progress on both, so that's pretty good.  I've also been enjoying being back in my own kitchen so I can cook to my heart's delight; I baked some really nice bread yesterday, and I've been roasting lots of veggies to eat over baked potatoes, and baking lots of apples to eat over cold, tangy yogurt.  Maybe it's the aftermath of the food poisoning and feeling so out of whack for a week, but I've mostly been craving healthy stuff, so I'm just rolling with it.

Oh!  Speaking of nutritional anomalies, here is a doozy: I think I have a sensitivity to eggs!  Isn't that the lamest thing ever?!  I love eggs!  I eat so many eggs!!  Maybe that's the problem, or something; I've been trying to reduce the amount of empty carbohydrates in my life and have been largely replacing them with eggs for a while now.  Scrambled eggs and veggies instead of oatmeal for breakfast, lentils and eggs instead of beans and rice for dinner, that sort of thing.  But, when I was in Illinois for Christmas I realized my skin totally and completely cleared up, and it hadn't been that clear for a while.  So I realized that two major things had been removed from my diet as a result of not being at home: eggs and dairy.  I decided to experiment when I got back, and went back to eating my normal amount of dairy but still not eating any eggs, and my skin has stayed clear.  I guess the thing to do now would be to have scrambled eggs for breakfast and see what happens, but I'm worried that if I do that, I'll have incontrovertible evidence that I have a dietary sensitivity to eggs, and I kind of just don't want to know, so I haven't eaten any eggs for like a month now.  It is bumming me out a little bit.

The other thing that's been a little weird lately (going back to what I was saying before) is that I keep forgetting where I am, which is a very strange feeling.  Not like, "wait, am I in the kitchen or in the living room?", more like, "wait, am I on the East Coast or the West Coast?"  I never in a million years thought that would be an issue in my life, but here we are in 2014 and I'm one of those annoying jet setters who commutes across a continent and can't keep her time zones straight.

Anyway.  In conclusion, I guess: life is weird, and it only gets weirder.  But that's not a complaint: life is very, very nice, too.  It's just really not what I thought it would be, and right now I feel like I'm very much along for the ride.  So I'll keep baking apples and trying to write papers and living half on one coast and half on the other for the foreseeable future.  Quelle vie bizarre et inattendue que je mène!