Home

Being home is nothing more than a tease. It's certainly an exaggeration to say that I dread going back to Boulder...but I'm certainly not relishing the thought. My first day back there's a Steelers and Pens game, both win, it snows, I get to drive into the city through the Fort Pitt tunnels (the only city with an entrance, baby!), and go to Mad Mex with Julz...c'mon now. How could I want to leave all this?!

A pretty uneventful time home. I do realize, however, how excited yet anxious I am to finish school in May and begin the job search. That's just, quite literally, a position I had never seen myself in. I mean, the intention was to go through the PhD and get an academic job...no Monster.com in that equation. Now, I am almost a little fearful of the job market and all that jazz, especially seeing the situation my mom is in and listening to my dad talk about retirement, 401ks, and how much he'll "need to live on." But there is undeniably a lot of excitement coupled with the anxiety. I can't wait to be free to embark on some new journey--whatever it may be. I want to provide for myself, have an apartment that I can actually settle into (and not have to tell myself, oh, well, you're leaving here in x number of months anyway. Don't get too comfortable.), and start a "lifestyle" (I hate that word, but it's meaning really fits here) that I decide for myself and can sustain for longer than the length of a semester.

I have other worries on my mind--both important, warranted ones and silly, selfish, irrelevant ones. Of course the latter are the one occupying my mind most of the time and are taking away from comfortable slumber. Alas, living and learning is one of the greatest highs and most despicable endeavors one could ever think to deal with.