SAIL (plans for the future, which don't really involve sailing but if the opportunity presents itself, hey, I'm game)

Kitty Corliss-- Grinding the Crack (AWOL Nation) 

A contender if not the hands down best 36 seconds on the internet. You're welcome.

So it's post-midnight... Blog time! Here are all the nouns rattling (shuffling? bouncing? flickering? verbs, man, verbs) around in my consciousness. Not in order of importance. In the order they surface for discussion.

     1. Baby

 A message to my ovaries.

Good Jesus, girls, CHILL OUT. We will get around to having a baby. To get pregnant now you'd have to put off travel, and school, and without school you can't get the dynamite library job you're hoping for. Calm the fuck down. Babies are adorable, husband is extra adorable, forthcoming child or children will undoubtedly be the adorablest, smartest, charmingest, least obnoxious baby in the world and never make you miss an hour of sleep or want to scream obscenities in public, but now is not the time for this wonder kid. You'll get there, and it will be great when you do. You and husband's manvaries (you don't have to be ready to have the sex talk to be ready for a kid, right?) are going to be in a better geospatial, socioeconomic place to have children than many other people around the world. And there are things I want to do before having a baby. So you, lefty, and you, righty, and the rest of me are going to get up to some adventures and then when we are classy as fuck from world travel and having a graduate degree and a house and maybe, hell, maybe a DOG or some crazy shit like that, THEN THEN THEN we will jump the husband's bones with wild abandon and get to serious babymaking.

In the meantime, we can jump the husband's bones whenever we are not too tired from school and work. Word.

Love,
She In Whose Body You Reside

     2. House

Is it even possible to find a place that has enough of what we want to make what we can afford possible? How do we know what will happen to a neighborhood over the years? We're both from a pretty rough part of Orlando and don't really want to buy a home in a place like it. If we don't live in Madison, it will be harder to get chickens. Almost no homes have the big tub I'm looking for. Beloved husband can't give me a very specific answer on where he is interested in looking. I don't know where we start and J is not very forthcoming with what he learned at a seminar our credit union offered for first time homebuyers. We don't know which realtor we should consult with. I don't know how long the process will take. WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING AND ONLY ONE OF US CARES AAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.

     3. Travel

Another before-baby thing. We didn't take a honeymoon and weren't planning on it until after I graduate; we'll probably roll graduation/honeymoon/J's sabbatical trip into one. Which means we'll have a few weeks, which is great... where to go? He offered Europe and I thought I was so down with that, but as soon as he said it I thought "Isn't that what everyone would do?" What the fuck does it matter what everyone else does? I just want us to get away and have an enriching experience and hopefully come home with some cool things. International travel is something I want very, very badly but the logistics of it seem overwhelming. If this is our one big trip, where do we go? Maybe it would be helpful to make a list of places I want to go and then prioritize them...
 
     4. School
I want to be a librarian but why did I ever think this was a good idea?

I don't mean that. I love some of my classes. I'm anxious because one this semester makes me feel like I've gotten next to none of my money's worth, and I know the student loans are going to take forever to pay back, and goddammit all the second years are so worried about getting jobs and most of them are looking everywhere; it is making me terrified that, anchored here, I will find nothing that will allow me to pay off my loans in a timely manner and nothing that will put me in a place to make enough money to save for maternity leave, including paying for student loans during.

I feel like there is so much I am NOT learning, and maybe it's just that I haven't taken specific classes yet. But I feel like the year longer I'll be in the program is not going to be enough to learn what I need to. On the upside, great continuing education through the school for local graduates, which I'll be.

     5. Jobs
There's a 20 hours/week position at a public library less than 30 minutes from home. I'm going to go tomorrow morning and pick up an application. It wouldn't be doable to do my practicum, the public library job I already have, the academic library job I already have, AND this job over the summer, so something would have to give. The academic job pays a little more than the public library job and can offer me more hours a week (15 academic, 7-10 public), which in most other situations would make it a no brainer... But I like the public library job many, many times more. It could be worth it to keep sloughing away and learning at the academic job (they're also very flexible with hours and have treated me very well and taught me quite a bit about the scope of the tasks I'm working on there). I want to get a grown-up job in a public library, not an academic one. But given the pay and treatment and flexibility, the academic job has a lot of merit.

     6. Grown Up Job


AAAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHHHHH what am I gonna dooooooooooooo?! My advisor says because of my course load I should start looking for jobs in the fall. I'll graduate next May, so... coupled with the "I do not know nearly all the things I should know" feeling is making me panic a little bit.


Can you tell?


I'm just a terrible bundle of nerves about the future. I'm telling myself to breathe, chill out, be thankful for comfort and security of my home and the opportunities I've been presented with, but my mind is constantly flitting against thoughts of the future and then shying away, some degree of terrified and horribly sad I can't have everything right this minute, perfect. Like good skin. 

Wait, you found me how, exactly?

One of the best search keywords that has ever shown up on my statistics page is there now. "pronetovomit boat".

I'm pretty sure I get what this person was going for, but I'm not at all sure how that search got them to this blog. Also it's fun to think that pronetovomit is the name of the ship, or that it is the boat that does the vomiting in this scenario. Or that someone got REALLY weird and was looking for puke porn featuring some one named Eto. Lots of interpretation possibilities, I'm saying.

Now that I know that someone is looking for this stuff, I feel compelled to address the information need. If you are prone to vomiting on boats:

• On a smaller boat, sit near the back/stern. Less choppy back there, generally. I love being as far in the front as I can, but one day I got pretty green around the gills sitting on the bow and my uncle, a captain, told me to sit at the back for a few minutes. Nothing changed about our speed or the water conditions, but I felt better almost right away.
• Ginger up. Ginger candy, ginger snaps, ginger ale, hug a ginger... Whatever you can get to.
• Don't be proud when it comes to Dramamine/dimenhydrinate. That stuff is around to be mocked because it WORKS.

Happy and cookie-tossless times on a boat to you and yours!

YOLO

Well, it's 1:30 and I'm still awake. Blog post time!

The "YOLO!" phrase has pissed me off for a while now, as there are lots of examples where people say it after doing something like an asshole, not a risk taker. Sadly, I am seeing more and more of people being assholes and completely charmed with themselves for it, so I don't think this is going away anytime soon. But the guys of The Lonely Island were kind enough to write a YOLO song, which I've been listening to for the last ten minutes. Two words about furniture: KILLING MACHINES. It is helping me remember to relax and let people be ridiculous because if no one is ridiculous, who the hell am I going to judge and then what, what I ask you, would I have to open blog entries with?

Hmm, what's going on aside from jerks and music? Question for the ages.

It feels like school is slowly killing me. The semester is nearly over and that is probably why, but there's just so much going on, work is busy... It's good to be busy, but I feel overwhelmed and that means all I want to do is hide in bed or on the couch, read something, anything that isn't a scholarly article or textbook, watch HGTV, and daydream. None of the pressure makes me feel like the tasks left in this term are insurmountable obstacles, but I'm having trouble keeping myself on the obstacle course at all.

This semester's challenge has mostly been that two of my three classes are on Tuesday and Thursday nights. It sucks the big one. Hubs has Pathfinder Wednesday night and game night Friday, so Monday is our one night together and I work until 5:15 that day and usually have homework. Which I usually ignore, which usually makes me tense in some way. Augh. No more night classes if I can avoid them! None in the summer and none in the fall, thankfully. I'm trying to set up my practicum for the summer at a public library I focused on for a paper last year. I like the library and especially its director a lot; it'd be a dream to get to work there and the experience they make available to students is ideal. There are some gaps in my Alex Has Done This And She Is A Pro At It list, so filling in those blanks would be really satisfactory.

Work continues. I've started training with a young woman who really knows her stuff in the academic library job, and that's making things there much less headachey. I'm learning a lot. I respect this woman and she's very kind, doesn't seem to mind questions about the why of what we're doing. The cataloging is much less confusing since I got ushered under her wing. I am very happy to be there! Have been doing a few new things at the public library, too: shelving magazines and YA materials (it doesn't require special training or anything but it seems like there are always two carts of children's materials to be organized and shelved, so I give those priority), processing holds (cool) and returns (a mule could do it). Tonight Josh and I watched the mid 2000s Casshern movie. It wasn't what I was expecting based on the cover, but I'm glad we watched it because now I feel like a cool kid with a "foreign film watched recently" badge to display. 

I miss having garden plans this year. My fingers and toes are getting itchy to plant, so I may bite the bullet and get a big planter for our porch, but it would have to be carefully selected; we don't get much sun. It would be better to save the money towards house downpayment but just typing that I'm wrinkling my nose so you, dear reader, and I know exactly what's going to happen here. 

Speaking of foregone conclusions, I got a super serious craving for a doughnut or six Friday night. Dunkin' Donuts didn't disappoint. What I wanted was a chocolate frosted doughnut and not only did they have those, they had brownie batter doughnuts.

WELL, OKAY.

It was some kinda special. There was actually too much filling (I love yummy middle-of-doughnut surprises that are supposed to be there, but I had to move my neck pretty quick to not spill brownie batter [?!] on myself), but it was good. As Josh and I are MyFitnessPal-ing it around, I entered the doughnuts like a good little guilty-over-food-er.

WELL, NOT OKAY.

Jeeeeeeeeeeesus, doughnuts are terrible for you! Who knew?! Why did you ever let nutritionists know?! Why are there Big Oil, Big Used Car, and Big No Abortions but no Big Doughnut to look out for my interests?! You'd think if there was going to be a doughnut lobby, it would be here in the US but no. No. This is why other countries don't respect us, I am quite certain. But since they don't have doughnut lobbies either (?), whatevs. Deuces, other countries. You Only Live Once.