let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

It's been a long time since I gave LJ a general rundown of how my life is going, hasn't it?

I don't think I ever updated here about the UChicago thing. I let them fly me out and woo me, and the program seemed really excellent; I would definitely have done it if they'd given me full tuition and stipend, like the program I actually applied to would have. I'm not going to go into further debt, though, and it would have been expensive. But I did have a spectacularly productive conversation with the director of the program! This program shoos a whole lot of students off to Ph.D. programs, and so they see a whole lot of acceptances and rejections, which gives them data about things like GRE score cutoffs. This guy went through my application and told me what exactly I need to improve on and how. He also told me what the admissions committee liked, and which parts of the application they don't actually care about. It was immensely helpful. If I'd had all this information in senior year of college, I might have my doctorate by now.

So I'm retaking the GRE this fall, and adjusting a few other things on the application. I'm also pulling together a journal article on which I will be first author, which I'm hoping we can get submitted in time to put on my applications. I've been doing some soul-searching about what exactly I want to accomplish in my life and whether grad school is something I need for that, and I've concluded that I could potentially live a happy and fulfilling life without a doctorate but would really rather have one.

In less pleasant news, Pi and I broke up. Not because it wasn't working out--god, we worked so well together--but our long-term situations weren't ever going to align, and she needed to be able to start setting up the life she eventually wants. It's the first time I've ever broken up with someone when everything still felt right, when I still really desperately wanted to be in the relationship, and that was hard. It was really hard for a while. She came to my birthday party and picked up the variety cryptic Mike made me and quietly got the hang of it right off the bat while helping me color in posterboard for the giant Set deck, because understated brilliance in the midst of efficiency is just her, and my heart hurt a whole damn lot. But I'm okay now, mostly. It had to happen, and I guess I'm glad it happened now, because I was only ever going to get more attached to that girl the longer I was with her.

Mike and I are at six years now and still doing great. We took a road trip to California last month to see my grandpa, who's not doing so well. It was really good to see him; I got to know him pretty well the year I lived there as a teenager, and I miss his subtle humor and habitual kindness. He's hard-of-hearing, so it can be difficult to talk on the phone. We visited a few other people in the Bay Area I hadn't seen in forever, too, and that was awesome. I've always thought I wanted to end up living there if I could, and I do think I'd be very happy there, but... we came back after a week and Seattle felt like home. I have never loved a city like I love this city. Dr. K's been pestering me to apply to UW again, and even though they've rejected me twice, I'm considering it.

I've been skating two or three times a week since April, and can't see myself getting sick of it. Actually, I think I'm addicted--if I go more than three or four days without making it to the rink, I start feeling antsy and crappy. I'm looking into hockey gear, and I have two road trips to Vancouver planned for NHL games this upcoming season, assuming I can get tickets: one to see the Coyotes by myself in November, and one to see the Penguins with friends in February. Hockey will be the death of my bank account.

Besides the hockey, though, I've been doing okay at money management. The last few months I'm averaging over 40% of my income put toward savings and paying off my student loans, and I'm almost ready to start a personal investment account. The kind of fascination I have for finance right now is the same kind I usually experience with fandoms. It's interesting to examine because that kind of fixation almost always comes with a dollop of guilt for not doing more productive things instead, whereas stuff like obsessively calculating a plan for paying off different student loans on different schedules that overlap based on a combination of balance and interest rates is just about the most adult, responsible use of my time possible. So I'll get lost in this for an hour and resurface automatically going "oh man, what time is it, I should be..." and then realize that no, there's nothing I should be doing instead. It sort of makes me question the guilt I feel about watching movies or reading webcomics or whatever, because... you know, it's okay to do things that make me happy. And yet somehow that's instinctively difficult to accept.

I'm still watching kids for a living. It's not my ideal career, but it's still going fine. There's actually a lot of opportunity for applying psychological concepts and thinking about preference and decision-making in the process of wrangling little kids. They're both great kids, and the two-and-a-half-year-old has been turning into a super awesome little person lately--she has shitpiles of grit and she's getting pretty good at things like negotiating for things she wants and chasing down follow-through on promises.

Other things... I've gone to a couple Mariners games, and started learning and appreciating baseball, which has been fun. I've taken a couple of really cool geology field trip courses, and learned a lot about Washington's geological history. I recently finished a "Welcome to Night Vale"-related audio project I'm very pleased with, and am impatient to release. I've been vidding a bit; the one I'm most proud of is the Nathan Fillion one (NSFW). I'm working on some non-fandom writing projects, slowly but surely. I'm working PAX again in a couple weeks, at a booth I think will be a lot of fun. I made a local fannish mailing list and started hosting fannish dinner parties a little over a year ago--haven't had time to do one in a few months, but I love doing them and I've met a bunch of amazing people through that group.

Overall, life is going really well, and I'm grateful for that.

I thought I'd lost these because I didn't run Time Machine between dumping them from my camera and my computer deciding the other day that it would rather host a rave in various shades of blue than boot up, but the nice dude at the Apple store performed some kind of magic OS reinstall that kept all my data. So: Pride! It was pretty great. Here are a whole lotta pictures of it, mostly from my camera but a few from my phone because the camera battery ran out.

( here there be rainbows, nudity, rollerblades, motorcycles, a zombie, a drag queen dressed as the Space Needle, butt plugs with attached tails, a person dressed as a giant vulva, a massive Flying Spaghetti Monster, and a pretty epic sunburn )

Woman on packed bus, loudly into phone: "Yeah, so thanks for listening. I just needed to confide in someone."

Child: "It's the magic guy, Mommy! Hi! Hi, magic guy! Will you do magic?"
Off-duty street magician: *attempts to ignore the child for a while, then exasperatedly performs a coin-disappearing trick*

Child: "La la la laaaaa..."
Parent (much more loudly than the child): "DANTE! Use your INDOOR VOICE! That is an OUTDOOR VOICE! We can turn around right here, you know, we don't have to go to Wal-Mart!"

I was talking to my boss yesterday about how my friends tend to be older than me. I've always known this was a trend, but I didn't really realize until I was explaining it to her how particularly true it is right now. I still have a few friends my own age who live elsewhere, but not here. I have two Seattle-area friends who are 26 and two who are 29, and all the rest I can think of are in their 30s or older.

I made a graph a few years ago of the ages of my LJ friendslist and hypothesized that the age I would get along with best was around 30, but that social circumstances had led to my befriending the upper end of my own cohort and the lower end of my mom's. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but current evidence certainly supports the part about me liking people in their 30s. I think that's how old most of my puzzle, yuppie-nerd, and poly-kink friends are, which is most of my friends. This might be why I didn't make many close friends in college--I had a lot of acquaintances, but the only person from Clark I connected with and felt comfortable around (and the only person I've really stayed in touch with since graduation) is Gerry, who's in his 40s. People my age tend to bewilder me. They're always texting right there in front of me while we're hanging out, and they never say what they mean, and there's so much drama. I realize that's a generalization--as I said, I do have friends my age elsewhere--but that was pretty much what college felt like for me socially.

There's also this distressing pattern wherein I have a friend who I believe to be close to me, and who behaves like we're close, and then out of the blue completely cuts me off and refuses to respond to my attempts to contact them. This has happened four times now with people who were important to me. I realize that the common denominator there is me, and believe me when I say I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I did and how to prevent it happening again, or at least predict when it's going to happen (and if you have any theories, by all means lay them on me). But they've also all been around college age. Four is not a sufficient sample size to draw conclusions, but it's enough to make me pretty much okay with not seeking out younger friends right now.

Even if my older friends do always tease me for being a baby. It's a cross I must bear.

It's the end of PAX, and we're pretty much out of swag except for a couple of things we're holding back. A dude walks up to the booth with a kid who looks about eight.

Dude: Would you happen to have any more of those nifty water pouches?
Gaby: Sorry, we're all out.
Dude: *incredibly crestfallen look*
Me: ...okay, convince me I should give you one.
Dude: I will use it to save a puppy from a burning building!
Me: I see no puppy. Are you going to trap a puppy in a fire just to save it? Come on, give me a better reason.
Kid: (quietly) I'll use it to save the environment by refilling it more than once.
Me: *tosses the kid a water pouch*

OH at the Harry and the Potters show: "Oh, Harry Potter the book series! That's why it's in a library!" >.<

OH at the Harry and the Potters show: "This is the closest to the stage I've ever gotten at a concert!" -50ish guy

OH at the Harry and the Potters show: "I tried to start a game of Quidditch, but that didn't turn out so well." -8-yr-old kid w/ broomstick

They're piping in Mrs. Robinson to a room of ten-year-olds XD

These guys are still fucking awful. I still fucking love them.

They keep addressing us as "SEATTLE" like they're a real rock band. It's adorable.

There's a solemn-faced guy in a leather jacket standing motionless in the middle of the crowd, surrounded by bouncing kids.

How DOES Ollivander stay in business?

hahahahahaha they are actually waaaay better as a screamo band

Think I'd get kicked out if I started a mosh pit?

lol "our biography" lol

They just rhymed "process" with "nauseous"

One of them is playing a bright red saxophone. Badly. It's AWESOME.

"When the reviews come in let it be noted that Harry and the Potters play real music. With emotion. MY WIZARD SCAAAR STILL BURNS FOR YOU!"

Oh my god it's a Smells Like Teen Spirit parody

There's an eleven-year-old crowdsurfing

VOLDEMORT CAN'T STOP! THE ROCK!

Waiting to say hi to the Harrys. There's a guy wearing Ron's pink lacy robes. <3

There's a gang of bored-looking hipsters I'm pretty sure are here ironically.

OH: "Best concert EVER!" -a 5-yr-old

Halfway through the show, they referenced the "enchanted ceiling," which is funny if you know about the downtown library's architecture.

Told the younger Harry I'd seen his name on his mailbox when I worked in the mailroom at Clark.

Was going for school-spirit-based rapport. Pretty sure it just came off as creepy.

The contractor just flailed around under my sink for ten minutes before hollering triumphantly, "OH! I see the problem! It's broken!"

*sigh*

Today I went to VegFest, an annual event that basically consists of hundreds of different vegetarian food samples. There were speakers and cooking demonstrations and book sales and other stuff too, but the samples are the main draw of the festival. I volunteered to help out for a few hours and therefore got in free, but then they talked me into signing up for a Vegetarians of Washington membership for $22. The membership got me so much awesome crap, though! Here's a list of stuff they gave me:

-A half-gallon of So Nice organic soymilk
-A loaf of Hemptation sprouted whole-grain bread
-A loaf of Dave's Killer Bread
-Two packages of Mori-Nu silken tofu
-Two cups of Amande almond yogurt (blueberry and strawberry flavors)
-Two cups of WholeSoy soy yogurt (peach and apricot mango flavors)
-A bottle of Sambazon acai juice
-A bottle of Good Belly Splash juice (blueberry acai flavor) --ETA: blech.
-A bottle of Taste Nirvana coconut water
-A bottle of Odwalla Superfood juice
-An Odwalla berry energy bar
-A sample size Lara energy bar (chocolate chip brownie flavor)
-A Cascadian Farm granola bar (Harvest Spice flavor)
-A sample box of Cascadian Farm organic dark chocolate almond cereal
-A sample packet (two pancakes' worth) of Prana vegan pancake mix
-A three-ounce bag of Bob's Red Mill steel-cut oats
-A bag of Boulder Canyon salt & vinegar potato chips, which are basically the best goddamn potato chips in the universe
-A bag of Somersaults cocoa nuggets
-Two packets of Dilmah tea (English Afternoon and Moroccan Mint flavors)
-Four packets of Numi tea (two Earl Grey, two mint)
-A packet of Bigelow green tea with pomegranate
-Two packets of Sunbutter sunflower seed spread
-A 15-gram bag of shelled hemp seeds
-A packet of organic sugar
-A Natracare feminine hygiene sample packet
-A birthday card (??)
-A year's subscription to the Vegetarian Times
-About 20 coupons, including one for a free half-gallon of Silk and several for free meals at Seattle-area restaurants
-A VegFest T-shirt

So yeah, I'm betting the value of all that is more than $22. And it's a good cause to support, too.

I spent some time there hanging out with Mark, who now holds the endurance record for obliviousness about my academic situation. He's known me for over eight years, and only today fit together the information "Julia is 20 years old" with the information "Julia is a college graduate" in his head. (He was perfectly aware of both of these facts, just never connected them.) It was a pretty hilarious conversation.

I had a really great time at the festival, and definitely plan to go again next year if I'm still in the area. Lots of awesome food, lots of friendly people, lots of fun.

I'm pretty happy right now. Today was a good day. I didn't actually do any writing, but I did a lot of pre-writing thinking, and that always makes me feel like I've accomplished something. I like accomplishing things in my own head. It's like when I used to cozy up with a friend for a sleepover and share secrets late at night, except without the complications of social interaction.

I talked to Gerry on the phone for a while. Life has been hurling giant balls of manure at his head, as usual--seriously, the guy has just about the worst luck of anyone I've ever known--but he was just as cheerful and wisecracking as always. I don't tend to spend much time missing people because my friends are so widespread that it would result in a lot of misery if I did, but I actually miss the hell out of Gerry, so it was great to connect with him.

I got stopped by two different groups of religious folks on the way to the grocery store, which was weird since I've only ever seen that happen downtown since I moved here. The first group was the standard "hey, how you doing, ever heard of Jesus?" type, but the other guys were awesome. They weren't spreading the word, they were accosting people on the street for a trivia quiz about Aurora Avenue, which they asked permission to film and put on their website as part of an effort to clean up the neighborhood. I only missed one question (I guessed that "aurora" meant "light," not "dawn") and won four dollars and fifty cents in quarters. Yay, bus money.

I spent the afternoon curled up under a blanket making icons, which I haven't spent much time doing lately. Seashore is not as awesome as Photoshop (sadly, Dr. K resisted my attempts to persuade her to put the copy she bought for the lab on my laptop instead of her desktop) but it's good enough for most of the basics. lisaecksteincom linked to this three-part series on characterization, and that led to more pre-writing thoughts. I have this crazy notion in my head to write a screenplay for a musical based on Jonathan Coulton songs. It's been a while since any original characters have grabbed my attention like this. I'm not at all sure it will go anywhere, not least because I have zero experience with playwriting, but I'm having fun with it.

I've been working on making my sleep schedule more sane, and I have commitments outside the house every day this week. I think both of those things are contributing to my good mood. I always forget how much of a difference the sun makes, even though I hate it while I'm out in it.

I just got kept at work two hours late, then slipped and faceplanted getting on the bus, and the driver said, "You okay back there?" over the intercom and every single person on the accordion-jointed double bus turned to look at me. And my Ann went back to Missouri this morning.

:(

But Chinzi's coming over and staying the night, and we're gonna sleep in and then make brunch, and my favorite co-worker (the one who quoted Weird Al over the walkie system the other day) invited me to Christmas dinner at his place. So life is gonna be awesome as soon as I get over the bruising to my knees and dignity.