Wannabe Soup Addict

I love autumn.  I love the leaves, and the blue sky, and sweaters, and boots.  But do you know what I love most of all?  I love that it's chili/stew/soup season.  There is absolutely nothing like making a nice, bubbling stew or soup, warming up some crusty bread, and having a hot apple cider to round out the meal.  I loved last fall in Seattle, when Zan and I would sit on our balcony in the cool night air as the smell of the stew would waft out to us.  Ahhhhhhh.......

So this fall, I'm determined to make even more soups/stews/chilis.  The other day I made chili for the first time ever, using my mom's recipe.  It turned out pretty well, so I'm going to attempt it again tonight for my dad.  I have pinned several likely looking recipes on Pinterest, and I have bought some chicken broth in anticipation of the season.  Plus, my dad has some beef broth on hand that needs using up by mid-October, so obviously, soup.  I'm so excited to try my hand at all of these soups and stews!  I just hope that I have the patience to actually make these recipes, and that I don't let homework and rehearsal become excuses to run down to one of the nearby restaurants to grab a quick bite.  Eating out certainly has its place (and I do love to try new restaurants), but taking the time to make a real, hearty, home-cooked meal often has many more intangible rewards (and leftovers!).

Here's to an autumn of soups! 

... and maybe baked goods, but that's another post for another time.

If I Start Writing Now...

I end up getting nothing done when I have a paper due.  I stress and I stress about having to write it.  Especially little papers.  I have a little paper due.  Little papers are much worse than big papers, because they need to pack a whole lot of quality into a very small word count.  So, I make tea and I look at Pinterest, and I consider starting, and then I stress some more.

I meant to get a draft done yesterday, but that didn't happen.  I picked out the author I want to write on, and I think I found the exact sentence that I want to write on, but I didn't get a draft done.  I'm too intimidated to write a draft.  I'm still figuring it all out in my head.  I'm still wrapping my mind around what I actually need to accomplish with this paper.  So no draft. I ate Indian food, and I took a shower, and I checked e-mails.  I read for another class for a bit.  I looked at shoes online.  But I didn't write the draft.  It's a new way of reading, so alien to my background in history-- we read and write so differently.  How can I learn this new way of reading?  How can I understand the mechanisms that made this writing effective, instead of reading it for how it responds to its time, how it fits into the larger context of its period, what it illumines about its society and its author?  Such a useful skill to have; such a useful skill to add to my toolbox.  Knowing this, with what I know, will make me such a keen reader.  I want to learn.  So, it's still morning, there's still plenty of time today before my Apprenticeship Teacher workshop and my Cabaret rehearsal...

Maybe I'll make a cup of tea.

Charlie Brown Awareness

Did you all know that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month?  My friend Megan knows, and has written an excellent post about how childhood cancer affects lives, although most people seem to want to ignore the issue because it's pretty depressing.

The thing is, childhood cancer is real, and until we start becoming aware of this and start doing something about it (like, researching ways to stop it), it will continue unabated.  As Megan points out in her post:  Childhood cancer patients and caregivers have no other support when we are quiet or we look away. They get almost no funding from drug companies. They get less than 4% of cancer funding from the government. They get less than 1% from general cancer charities like the American Cancer Society/ Relay for Life.

Perhaps part of the problem is that most of us (if we're lucky) have no concept of how this disease affects families and friends.  Fortunately for us, Charles M. Schulz, creator of the Peanuts Gang, made a Peanuts Special on this topic to educate us.  Please watch "Why, Charlie Brown, Why?" and then begin to agitate and advocate on behalf of Childhood Cancer Awareness!






(I do not own the copyright to "Why, Charlie Brown, Why?", and I am not trying to infringe on copyright law. 
If you own it and want me to take it down, please feel free to contact me and I will do so.
I make no money from this blog.  I just want to spread awareness!)

A Busy Day, A Busy Week

Days and weeks seem to fly by here at Georgetown.  I only have class two days a week, and Tuesday night as I cross the bridge back home I always feel so relieved, as if I have so much time to complete all of my work before Monday.  But my, how the time goes, and before I know it the week is nearly over and I still have so much to do before another Monday arrives.

Yesterday took the cake for busy.  I woke early, got to campus early, then went to my first workshop for the Apprenticeship Teacher program.  I think I'm really going to enjoy this program.  The workshop yesterday was especially fun since so many of my friends have decided to take part in the program, and they gave us free Panera bagels.  As a graduate student, I appreciate free food.

Immediately following my workshop, I headed to the English building for the first meeting of The Modernities Working Group.  The topic this year is archives, which-- with my history background-- is a very dear topic to me.  One of our readings even obliquely referenced Montaillou, and before I knew it I had written, "Hello Montaillou, my dear friend," in the margin.  Ah, I love French Annales.  The other readings were more abstract, and gave me something to really wrap my brain around.  The working group itself was comprised primarily of professors and librarians, and the discussion was very heady.  I think I'm going to like this group.

After the workshop, I read some Thomas Paine outside in the perfect, perfect weather, then visited two professors' office hours to become better acquainted with the department.  I think both meetings went well, though I was a bit nervous to just drop by uninvited (though, obviously, that's the point of office hours).  I finally arrived home after dark, but only just long enough to change shoes and grab a light coat, before I was off again for dinner with Zan and two old friends, one of whom is now in my M.A. program!  Zan gave me bad directions, but that got sorted, and on the way there someone threw a Jolly Rancher at me and that was weird, but otherwise the evening went very well!  We had a great pizza dinner in Chinatown, complete with a lovely pineapple rum/ginger drink to round out the evening.

My friend Rick has a thing he says: "Go to bed tired."  And I did.

Autumn Begins

A rainstorm blew through the other night and took with it the last of summer.  Muggy, sticky evenings appear to have left for the year, and cool autumn nights are rolling in.  The past two days the sky was bright, deep, blue-- the blue of fall, not the faded blue of a summer sky.

For most people, I suppose, autumn signals the beginning of the end: trees begin to lose their leaves, cold air wipes out flowers, harvest is ended.  But to me autumn signals a strange rebirth: the world wakes up from the lazy, over-hot days of summer.  We shake off a kind of daze and begin to feel and to taste more richly and deeply.  Autumn means long walks in crisp air, a bounty of spiced, flavorful food, and bursts of intense color as the year enjoys its final hurrah.  

Whirlwind

There's so much to do and to tell, and for once I don't mean reading and schoolwork!  Well, okay, I don't mean entirely reading and schoolwork.  There's still a lot of reading and schoolwork.   

But!  Now there's a play!  A musical, in fact!  I'm so excited to be a part of the ensemble for the Georgetown Law Center's Gilbert & Sullivan Society production of Cabaret!!!  Plus, my friend Mike J. will be in it!  We haven't been involved with a play together since, I think, Romeo and Juliet in 2006, and that's far, far, too long.  And while I've done tech work on a few plays in the past couple of years, I haven't actually been in a play since 2008!   I'm so excited to be in a production again.  I have a very, very bit role (which I'm going to chalk up to my horrible dancing-- seriously, they asked me to walk across the stage in time to the music, how do you imagine that went?), but it's a role and I think it's going to be an excellent production!  So glad to be involved!

But there's more!  I have an amazingly wonderful cohort.  I really, really love them.  Last night we had "Girl's Night Out" in Georgetown.  We went to a Mexican Restaurant for margaritas and gossip (about boys, obviously), and we discussed classes just a little bit, too.  It's a little intimidating how much socialization I'm doing.  I love it, don't get me wrong, but I'm used to holing up with my reading materials and never seeing the light of day.  Or the dark of night?  So this is new.  In a good way.  Plus, beforehand, I had happy hour drinks with Cara and Amanda-- it's complicated how we all know each other, but suffice it to say, we have lots of mutual friends, but I just met them.

And today, my friend Alicia is meeting me for lunch, I have a make-up class for British 1790s (which is why I spent all yesterday reading, and will spend the rest of this morning reading), a guy in my cohort invited everyone over for homemade pizza (seriously, when I said my cohort was wonderful, I meant it wholeheartedly), and my friend Pete is having a horror movie night at his place to celebrate Friday 13th.  Plus, I think I'm getting dinner with one of my best friends from undergrad tomorrow night.

Look at this happy whirlwind.  

Shorter

Apologies in advance for the slightly blurry selfies below, but I got a haircut!  My first haircut in over two years!  I cut off more than eleven inches to donate to Locks of Love.  My friend Shea did the cut and styling-- she has cut my hair several times since we were roomies in Bath and I always like how she makes my hair look.  I also like that she lets me drink a glass of sangria during/afterwards/as needed (cutting hair is a big deal).  We went with a slightly slanted bob this time, a la Posh Spice.

If you have long hair you should definitely considering donating to Locks of Love.  It's super easy to donate, and besides just loving my new length, I feel really great knowing that I'm helping someone out.  Thanks, Shea!

Certainty and Anxiety

School has started and brought with it those mixed emotions of excitement and anxiety.  I really love my courses so far; I can't explain it, really, but I think they will alter the way I perceive the world.  They are showing me new sides to things I thought I knew something about, fundamental things.  One of them, surprisingly, is more of a poetry class than anything, and as I haven't taken a course that focuses on any type of poetry since junior year of undergrad, I'm pretty excited.  The professors seem really wonderful, too, in that way that gets you pumped up about learning after just the first day.

But of course, being me, I manage to get overly anxious and to set myself impossible tasks before I've even started.  I have butterflies in my stomach and my breathe comes too fast.  I had forgotten what this kind of panic feels like.  It's been so long since I've woken up gasping for air, certain I've forgotten to do something or certain that I won't be able to finish everything I need to accomplish.  I will be able to accomplish it, of course I will, but the anxiety creeps in all the same.

I'm holding on to a feeling I had last week.  The day after orientation the second year students organized a scavenger hunt for the first year students.  We looked for things across campus, down M Street and in Dupont Circle, and took pictures of them.  We had to find things like the chapel on campus, someone in a Georgetown shirt or hoodie, at the canal, at the place that sells Chicken Madness.  We had to take a picture of us using public transportation, eating a cupcake, in Kramerbooks, and one of all of us jumping once we'd completed the scavenger hunt.  It was a really wonderful day.  It might have earned the distinction of my best day in D.C.  I walked across Key Bridge back into Virginia as the sun was setting.  The sky filled with pink and blue and yellow, and in the river below people kayaked and paddle-surfed, and the breeze blew cool across the bridge.  I had this feeling that everything was as it should be.  I experienced a kind of certainty about where I am and what I'm doing, and this overwhelming joy that I'm here.  And it's the certainty and joy that make it all-- even the anxiety-- worthwhile.

 (English grad student scavenger hunt!)

Images from a Wedding Weekend

Cramped fingers from tying together tiny booklets of poetry by Rumi.  The smell of lavender on my hands, permeating my clothing, the whole house.  Bits of blue ribbon on the tabletop and on the floor.  A homecooked meal out on the back porch.  The smell of citronella candles.  Glasses of wine, cups of coffee, tennis on the television, a house filling with people and love and laughter.  Voices in the kitchen, in the hall, steps on the stairs.  Hugs and handshakes.  Tent deliveries, hauling boxes of wine bottles and champagne out to the new tents in the pasture.  Purchasing a croquet set.

A birthday!  For Zan!  Donuts and a surprise breakfast party in the dining room, decorated with streamers and twenty-seven pictures of his face.  Then the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner.  The bride and groom both directors, and their parents, too, and their officiant.  Standing in the discovery space at the Blackfriars to page the curtain for the flower girls, then the bride.  The things kids say.  "I could use a little help out here, Iris" in a six-year-old's voice.  The beautiful, calming sound of a hammer dulcimer.  A drive up a steep hill to a lovely mock-Tudor with tables set up outside and twinkle lights.  More music, and singing, and dancing, and the bride and groom waltzing, and they look so happy, though she says her feet hurt from her spiky heels.

The wedding.  Entering the theater early, somehow I have much more to do than I thought I would.  An escape for my favorite chai vanilla latte, so smooth and sweet.  Helping locate pieces of video equipment, or at least the videographers.  Told to go down to the bride's dressing room, back up to the theater, where's the groom? There he is.  Is it time?  Is it time?  The house is filling and I watch through the little window in the side doors and Sarah says, "It's exciting to watch everyone coming in, this must be how the actors feel."  The flower girls located, the groom in place, he enters.  The groomsmen and bridesmaids process to the stage.  Then the bride appears, resplendent.  A vision in white and sparkles and feathers, and it's the perfect dress and she looks perfect.

"Absolutely."  "I do."

A dance party on stage.  Then to the tents for more dancing.  A game of croquet and a moon bounce.  Toasts, amazing toasts!  A roaring T-Rex toy that encapsulates the bride's goodness.  The groom speaks again, and his words are true and lovely, and as a lump forms in my throat he says, "So, my vows, this wedding-- today was just a rehearsal..." and the five-year-old ring-bearer shouts, "I thought yesterday was the rehearsal!" and everyone laughs.  Then food that brings tears of joy to my eyes, and catching up with old friends and new friends.  Blowing bubbles and learning to contra dance.

The defining image: a rainbow.  A promise.

(Zach and Lys with a Rainbow.  Photo by Krystal, a bridesmaid)