Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

First Comes Love

May 12th, 10 / 19 Comments

For many people life is a list of milestones that one is meant to check off in successive order. After The Man imposed hierarchy of grade-school-middle-school-high-school many move on to college, graduate school, love, marriage, baby carriage, retirement, blah blah blah. A punch list. A neatly numbered “To Do” entry in life’s log.

 

This weekend I attended a baby shower (twin girls! nom nom nom!) and it was full of pink and swirls and cupcakes and happiness. And while it was oh-so happy and lovely I found this little part of my brain thinking “Yeah this cupcake is gonna be reaaaal helpful at that 3 am feeding in a few months….enjoy it now… while another part of my brain was thinking “Babies! Nom Nom NOM! Must have one or ten of MY VERY OWN!”

 

 (You can see how I spend good parts of my days in conflict, no?)

 

Recently I’ve noticed a few bloggers (about my age or somewhat in the vicinity) who have written about their decision to not have children. I can honestly say that I 100% support their decision. Kids are not….a requirement. They are an obligation, that many people take on happily (others perhaps not so much, but uh, I don’t have all day here) but I’m finding more and more people that I know who are choosing other things. Travel, cars, charity work, animals, friends, family. They are simply choosing to devote their time and money to other endeavors they find fulfilling.

 

When B & I went through our pre-marital counseling, our pastor (who is married, happily with five kids) said something that stuck with me: “Don’t wait to have children. By far the hardest guidance I have to provide isn’t to couples who have gone through death in the family or are considering divorce, but married couples who struggle with infertility, especially when age is a factor. The guilt is enormous.” It seemed..sincere. Realistic. Thought-provoking.

 

I’ve known, without a doubt, for my entire life that I wanted children. A gaggle of them. Games of tag, hand drawn birthday cards, farewell parties when the oldest goes to college, giant celebrations when the youngest graduates. I want a nest filled with chickadees who turn into wonderful people with lives and interests, who perhaps have my curls or huge teeth but hopefully not my musical talent (read: NONE). Maybe I’ll have a little girl who tries to-out princess my younger days (read: IMPOSSIBLE) or a boy who idolizes astronauts.

 

B grew up an only child and I think I can simply say he has no wish for a gaggle. Sure, he’s happy with the idea of a kid or maybe even two (but as someone who enjoyed being an only child, the idea of Just One is ok with him too) but he feels no need to help set up the neighborhood soccer team. Besides, he reminds me, have you noticed how expensive kids are? Car seats and high chairs and sailing lessons and field trip fees and private school (we live in the city…) tuition and college, which incidentally, my goodness! Why so pricey Mr. Higher Education?

Right now I have a husband, a life, a fledgling career. I have student loans that can only be described as “An Assload of Debt” and a car that we’d like to replace sooner rather than later. We have an itinerary in Europe this fall, and are trying to find a few days to sneak back to Napa Valley for more wine and breathtaking views. We have date nights that require no babysitter payment and our dog, while awfully whiny at times, has yet to announce “I HATE YOU” and stomp off to his room to listen to something angsty at a volume that bothers the neighbors. I worry about my grocery list but not if I signed a field-trip permission slip & when something bad happens in the world I have no little ears to explain it to.

I suppose what I’m saying is, for a girl who had a Plan and Timeline for everything in life, this one seems bigger than just me and B. It changes everything, it re-centers our world, tilting our axis to a degree we didn’t know existed. Some days I think I just can’t wait another moment for a little Baby B and then in in an instant, or on long days, I find myself sighing in relief that we have a little more time to plan something else, even if it is just the great bottle of wine that will pair nicely with our homemade pasta on a Friday night.

 

(Discussion welcome, all thoughts allowed.)

Career Advice, Education, Family, Married Life, Travel, Wedding

Coeds

May 5th, 10 / 6 Comments

After my last post I’m feeling very compelled to clear the air. To clarify that the “mansion” I lived in college was truly a former-mansion. It was….run down. Dilapidated. Crumbling a bit. There are many, many reasons that five sorority girls shouldn’t be shown a house with 14 foot ceilings and decently low rent with five bedrooms and two bathrooms in the Garden District of New Orleans, but I’ll start the list for you:

  • The “house” will have been lived in by brothers of the same fraternity for 15 plus years, each class just handing the keys over to the class before it. (A fraternity that for better or for worse made national headlines a few years ago for their hazing of pledges, which was previously done IN SAID MANSION’S HALL CLOSET.)

 

  • The 5 sorority girls will not pull the shower curtain back in the bath-tub of the 2nd bathroom. This will lead to a startling discovery upon move-in that said bathtub’s bottom is completely rusted out & it doesn’t drain. FTW!

 

  • The girls will not notice the copious buckets places strategically under leaks in the roof.

 

  • The girls will not realize the CEO of a large Southern bank lives next door and detests said house, in all of its former glory, and will make life a living hell for the next two years, including a dispute over a security light for said girl’s safety, that tragically also shone in the CEO’s precious snowflake daughter’s bedroom. (Said girls will catch said snowflake smoking illicit substances in the back yard when said CEO is out of town, magically fixing many of the neighborhood relations. There might have been threats of tattling involved UNLESS YOU MAKE YOUR MOTHER LEAVE US ALONE.)

 

  • The girls will not have magical powers alerting them to the fact that in the future the downstairs neighbors will plant pumpkin seeds as a joke in the front yard, and the yard will never be mowed, and it might lead to a neighborhood relations problem when pumpkins start sprouting among the two foot tall grass. (Property value? What?)

 

  • The crumbling kitchen floor will be seen as “quaint” not “oh my goodness this is unsanitary and also: biohazard.”

 

  • The pigeon-poop colored walls will be seen as a blank canvas for aspiring painters. This will not end well.

 

  • Also, the house…the house look like this:

Webster

(Please. Power lines? The kegs add character! And remind the girls of the Halloween party they attended here their freshman year of college!)

 

So anyway. The jig is up and you know how it ends: we rented the house! With its charm! And…character! And the frat guys just took their clothes with them and left everything else behind. We changed the locks and hauled 8 truck loads of junk away (and sold quite a few sets of golf clubs, natch) and cried before emptying the dishwasher of their dishes & throwing out all the food they left behind, and then we scrubbed and scrubbed and hired cleaning services and scrubbed some more and threatened our landlord until he finally replaced the rusted out bathtub & had a plumber fix the drain issue and then….we painted. I picked a cheery pale lemon for my room:

Webster 1

My Mother referred to the color as “toxic macaroni & cheese gone bad”. We didn’t know what would happen when we painted our plaster walls but lets just say it went poorly. The cheery lemon turned flourescent and the light, pale peach we selected for the living turned…Pepto pink. We referred to our living room as the “uterus” after that. Our mint green kitchen was more avocado and my roommate’s lilac room was…..well that was our fault. We probably shouldn’t have opened the bottle of wine while painted in there. Whoops. We also had a small menagerie:

Webster 2

(Not pictured: our dauschund puppy, the elderly lhapso apso & the snake and its feeder mice that uh, lets just say: not all the roommates agreed to that one, but with Fido’s Palace & all, there wasn’t a lot of room for negotiation.)

 

I will say this: all we saw were the 14 foot ceilings and huge windows and light that filtered in. We loved the oak & magnolia trees and our huge bedrooms that provided us lots of personal space, as opposed to the shotguns our friends all lived in with closets for bedrooms. Our closets were cedar lined & our hall closet was so big it had two doors at opposite ends of the hallway, with room for a fifth cedar-y bedroom inside. There were two sunrooms that we had patio furniture on, and a back porch and the all important air conditioning. The fridge was decently new & it had a dishwasher and street parking and we could see the trolley cars rumbling down St. Charles Avenue. It was, at the time, perfect. Even if it was filled to the brim with women and dogs and flat irons & pumps strewn about willy nilly among take-out menus & mis-matched silverware (that we got for FREE courtesty of said frat boys!). It was, for better or worse, some of the best years of my life. My Webster Street girls will always hold a special place in my heart, even if it is becuause I’m laughing at our complex milk buying system that ended in tears because I don’t drink skim milk! I’m not buying your skim milk! Buy your own bluish water!

Education, New Orleans

Liar Liar, Pants on Fire

May 3rd, 10 / 10 Comments

I’m a boring creature of habit. If I find something I like on the menu somewhere, I will always order it. Always. Even if said restaurant has a “special” that is my most favorite thing in the entire world, I will most likely flip and flop back and forth before finally ordering what I always order. What can I say, I like what I like. (FYI- at most restaurants the thing I always order is a cheeseburger. I LOVE THEM. I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR IT.)

 

In college, once I lived in a house rather than a dorm, I ate a tuna sandwich for lunch every single day. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I made a tuna sandwich for me and my roommate, and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I made one just for me. I also ate tuna and shrimp sushi for dinner about 3 nights a week – a spicy tuna roll & a “Sara” roll, which was made with shrimp and tuna and lots and lots of spicy sauce. Yum-o, to the max. (What? I can say yum-o. I’m adult like that.)

 

Anyway. My point is that later on, after many many months of the tuna diet I got really, really sick I was in the hospital for a week and wretchedly ill and no one could figure out why. In the midst of my many follow-up appointments, during which many possibilities for my bizarre illness were discussed and tested for, my Mom decided I was suffering an acute case of mercury poisoning. I had kept a food journal (attempting to locate the problem) and both my parents and doctors were horrified at how much tuna fish I was eating. They asked me why and I shrugged my shoulders – I mean, I don’t know. I just like tuna, ok? OK? Sheesh. I immediately had a ridiculous amount of blood drawn for the test and was sent on my way with yet another useless prescription.

 

Two days later Hurricane Ivan began barreling towards the Gulf Coast, and like every other Tulane student I began using my parent’s credit card on hotel rooms I began packing and taping windows and frantically making phone calls while eying the sky as if the storm was going to barrel down upon us like a tornado. (Hint: hurricanes do not in fact barrel down on unsuspecting coeds like a tornado.) My roommates and I lived in an old Garden District mansion that really had fallen into disrepair (“But it is so charming!” we’d tell our horrified parents when they came to visit us, pointing out the built in hutch and the crown molding and dormer windows, they too busy looking at the pepto bismal pink paint we’d accidentally used to patch up the living room walls to notice……) and we had holes in our roof (only a problem when it rained, which was every day, so we invested in a darling set of cute buckets from Target that were strategically placed to catch the drips) and we were realizing that having the coolest house out of everyone we knew, complete with two sun rooms and a back porch to die for was not perhaps, the right gamble to take to New Orleans. But, uh, there we were. So as we packed and threw things into the cars and plotted our path out of the city (damn fishbowl) to Dallas where my parents had a condo, my cell phone started ringing with a strange number. I finally answered, probably something like “Hi this is Evacuating-From-A-Hurricane-Daisy, hurry it up Joe-Blow” only to discover it was the lab with my blood samples. You see, apparently there are only two labs in the world with the equipment to test for mercury poisoning (Hey Jeremy Piven, we have so much in common, lets do lunch. Sushi?) and this lab managed to drop my vials on the floor, creating a messy heavy metal bio hazard, and also, I really needed to come get my blood drawn again RIGHT THIS SECOND so the second sample could get overnighted to the lab before the storm hit. So could I drive across town for a blood draw right now? This very second? OR ELSE? Sigh.

 

So I drove, like a maniac across town, and raced in and had another 19,769 vials of blood drawn and then raced back to my house to finish packing (Side story: when we arrived in Dallas we realized I’d only packed jeans, underwear and my purses. My Mother was not amused.) and then we climbed into our cars and began the caravan to Dallas which took, no exaggeration here, 17 hours. SEVENTEEN HOURS. (It normally takes 8) And if there is anything you shouldn’t do before leading a pack of 3 dogs and 8 college students to a town where you are the only contact and person who knows how to get there, it is get half of your blood sucked out of your body. At about hour three of just plain sitting on River Road as we made our way towards Baton Rouge (typically a 55 minute drive) I began to feel woozy, and while I blamed it on my over-heating car (95 freaking degrees outside) my roommates instead had to force me to drink 4 Coke’s in a row. That caused another problem that wasn’t easily fixable when sitting on a slab of steaming asphalt  with 100,000 other evacuees and I’m just going to end this story now with a brief wrap up:

 

- Hurricane Ivan missed New Orleans but we all know what happened the next hurricane season, so really, that isn’t a happy ending.

- We spent the entire time in Dallas studying for midterms because after the double whammy hurricane season from two years prior (Isidore & Lili for those wondering) all of our classes had a hurricane policy which read: you will still have midterms the day you return so study up, suckers.

- I did not have mercury poisoining. Not even close. But the test cost 5 bazillion dollars and my Mom made me stop eating a tuna sandwich for lunch every day anyway. And we never did find out what was wrong with my stomach. My new lunch of choice for the rest of college: a can of tomato soup. Ahhhhh. Heavy metals, I heart thee.

 

And in conclusion, it is my scientific opinion that hurricanes suck and Jeremy Piven is a big fat liar.

Education, Family, New Orleans, Travel