like being 14 all over again

Back in Austin and readjusting to non-vacation life. As well as my own "cooking." Which is in parenthesis quotations because these days it's actually what passes for cooking, but usually involves something frozen coming out the microwave hot. Also adjusting to the fact that my parents are getting along and by all appearances communicating after a year long separation and God only knows how much of my adolescence. Call me a cynic, but this dramatic of a change in my dad all of a sudden makes me wary.

But on a more shameful, frightening note, I went through my old closet while back home. Came across my tape collection from middle school. In addition to a wide range songs ripped off the radio were two Carman tapes and a Newsboys tape. Mortifying.

one week in

Only in a state job is possible to take three days off work and get an eleven day holiday out of the deal. Much less be able to do it after your first week. Upon leaving on Friday I still didn't have access to my computer or the permission to do anything independently. I did spend at least four hours doing online training courses on the lab computer, which kept crashing on me. Somehow I think this a fairly good indication of what having a government job is going to be like...

Tomorrow I'm off for the east for Christmas. Big plans to do some serious sleeping in and eating my mom's cooking. Though I doubt I'll get my most sincere Christmas wish for snow.

one door away from heaven

Plenty of hubub in the house this year and yet I still can't seem to drown out the worries of Austin, which have followed me to east coast. I love my family, but yet I'm seriously irritated half the time. Grouchy in my old age or some such.

It's bitter cold here. Last night I donned a coat and sat basking in the moonlight and the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks, looking for a moment of internal peace long after the house had gone quiet. It's all energy somehow, light, motion, sound, five year old boy... The two year old carries around his blanket like Linus, occasionally moving too quickly and tripping over it. There is love here, in this house that is finally feeling broken in after fifteen years, that's starting to smell the way I remember the cottage smelling, of old wood and dust and salt air settled into the cracks. There are answers somewhere in this, just at the edge of my peripheral vision, just beyond graspable.

contrast

There are so many things in my life right now that make me exceptionally happy I am alive. Today while at the grocery store I ran into a couple, one a post-doc, the other a lab tech, I know from my graduate school career, which threw just how much better my life is now into sharp relief. I walked away from our brief conversation about PI's and other academic people with the strong reaffirmation that, for me at least, all the misery is just not worth it. Terrors for PIs, failed experiments, long hours, lack of job satisfaction, never seeing any good come out of excruciating painstaking work...not worth it. I'll take high quality of life over a few more letters after my name any day.

It's been about a year since I bottomed out. Three since I moved to Texas. Grad school got me to Austin, and thus is the reason for so many of the wonderful things I appreciate so much. I wonder though if I shouldn't have realized earlier just how miserable I truly was. Then again, hindsight is always clearer.

inclusion

Home from back home... For the first time in a long time I was not seriously considering how to get out of coming back to Austin. Presumably because now I only have good things to come back to. The week was a bit crazy, but I love my mother's family. It becomes more apparent each time I'm around them where certain previously unexplained parts of my personality stem from.

As much as I love and appreciate them, however, it becomes overwhelming after a while. At one point during Saturday's party I took refuge in the for-the-moment uncrowded house where my mom's brother, Steve, and his wife, Debra, were also hiding out. This elicted a "You're anti-social, too?" from Debra. Upon responding that it sometimes is just too much Steve piped in with a cheery "Don't worry, you've got plenty of time to get worse." It's nice to be included in the club.