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.