It is early in the morning and I am sitting outside on my back patio before the heat lumbers in and forces me to find a new place to sit. Lenin, my grown-up puppy, is playing tag with...himself. I am watering the grass.  Every half minute or so my bright yellow sprinkler bows low before me, then leaves to pay homage to the fence. A green camping chair serves as throne for this domestic Venus.

But enough bizarre paganism. This weekend we are celebrating Pentecost. The church is sure to be full of those who only come on holidays. Tonight we prepare with the Great Vespers of Pentecost. I have never celebrated Pentecost before and Husband may not even know what it is, so this weekend should be educational as well as spiritual.

I have started a new job...programming. No, I am not a programmer. Surprisingly, my philosophy education has prepared me more for this job than any other training I have received. Perhaps this means I can begin a reconciliation process with Philosophy, or, in the very least, we can once again be on speaking terms. The company I work for produces surveys for other market research companies. My boss seems to take marketing very seriously and doesn't seem to feel, as I do, that marketing is a social wrong imposed upon us by the tyrannic capitalist system in which we live. She seems to find it a veritable playground, and producing software is the equivalent of her favorite swing. I prefer to sit at my desk and imagine pirate stories rather than read marketing magazines, but that is why I am the employee and she the president of her own company. Yesterday she sat us all down and presented a powerpoint about the financial info and future plans of the company. It is debt free and she has no desire to accept money from investors, because "they tend to want you to work 12 to 15 hour days, and I feel that would cut into my yoga time." I almost fell out of my chair in admiration and applauded. A business woman who actually WANTS to balance real life and work! Despite her odd interests, I'm starting to have a great deal of respect for this woman.

And that is Life. I honestly don't think that at this point it could get any better. My Husband is happy and healthy, my puppies are happy and healthy, and I am happy and healthy [as long as my allergy medication is at hand].

1. I have become a grad school drop out. And I'm proud of it. Only, I haven't informed the department yet. I'll do that sometime soon. I have quit for many many reasons. This is the first major thing in my life that I have started and not finished. It took me months to come to this decision, but I think it's for the best. I can do what I feel needs to be done, I can spend more time with my fantastic Husband, and school can no longer interfere with my education. I even bought myself an "I'm a Quitter!" t-shirt to celebrate. However, it, much like myself, has decided to begin it's journey to Texas but not complete it. Very fitting. I wish it well wherever it has chosen to stay.

2. Yesterday I went to Wal-Mart and bought an axe (I prefer ax with an "e"...very Anne of Green Gables of me, I know). So, what do people say when a 115 lb pound woman is waltzing around Wal-Mart with an axe? Surprisingly, they all say the same thing: "Wow, that's an axe. What are you planning to do with it?" To my knowledge, axes only serve one purpose and can be used by both genders of all sizes. In any event, I took it home to Husband who used it [shockingly] to chop things, namely unwanted trees in our back yard. My childhood memories of Fern Gully came back to me, and now I feel like I have corpses strewn about my lawn. I also have more sunlight, which means more vegetables...

3. I have a job interview sometime this week. For a real job, but not a teaching job. The hiring needs were filled before I had my interview. Schade. But there are other ways into that field. This real job is in a field I am not interested in, but I am told that I am allowed to hang posters on the wall. If hired, I will hang this one.

4. I have a new puppy. Her name is Maggie. She spends all her time looking sweet and innocent, until my other puppy, Lenin, tries to bond with her. She loves to lick.

5. I produced my very first bottle of orange oil. Using that and grits, and I am warring against the ants in my yard. I am not alone. I have an ally. I was searching the web for organic ant killer when he crawled down one of my trees, ran over to my vegetable garden, and starting licking up the ants. Thank you Lord for quickly answering my prayers.

6. To all those not opposed to alcohol, go buy a bottle of vinho verde wine. It's summer.

I am restless, useless, and unsure of the future. I am supposed to be pouring all efforts into my training to enter a dying profession (excuse me, a changing field). Recent articles on the imminent doom looming over me and my fellow colleagues make me even more restless. If I am not being productive, I feel guilty. If I am being productive, I feel that I'm only doing it for my own good, which causes me to feel guilty. I want to take care of my house, home, and husband, but there is little time for that. I need more time to devote for church, but the earth manages it's rotation in a fleeting 24 hours.



My new neighbor is extremely lonely and preoccupied with her own thoughts. For financial reasons, she has had to leave her family and is now in a new house all alone while a stranger takes care of her child. She goes to work at 6 am and tries to work as long as possible to avoid coming home. Once she comes home, she pelts Husband and I with questions that she could answer herself if she really wanted to. Last nigh I invited her in for a cup of tea that she did not want in order to provide her with the company that she obviously wanted. Her story seems very similar to most people's nowadays. She is very educated, had a very good job, helped her relatives financially, survived several rounds of layoffs before being forced to leave her job. For 6 years she worked every single weekend. Six years. Colleagues with PhDs who were published and well-known in the field were being laid off with no job prospects. And now she is alone, only seeing her family when she drives home on weekends.



So. Plenty of people work their lives away. It is their choice and they seem to enjoy it. But it seems to me that at some point they realize they have other priorities. I have other priorities. Two, to be exact. The first is my family, the second is making some sort of contribution to society. I am in the process of apply for jobs that I think are Good and Useful.



That's not to say that I think liberal arts academia is useless. Liberal arts keeps people human, among other things. But...it seems to suck in people's brains. They are consumed by their own research and must spend their time defending their points of view...that is, their opinions, their own interpretations of their research

Husband and I have managed to buy a house. We are in shock and are not entirely sure how this came about, but we are very excited. I fantasize about which room I'm going to paint green and have decided to have a deep brown/rusty orange/light blue office. Most exciting, though, is the massive amount of counter space. Now when I tell Husband to go chop up something, hopefully he won't try to do it in the exact same spot that I'm in, although I suspect I'll still have to tell him to go chop it elsewhere.

Puppy will have a yard. He can run about and dig holes and kill small animals in it. Well, I won't let him kill small animals, and Husband will most likely not let him dig the animals up, but he can daydream about it. We have a group of trees in our backyard. I am told they are elms by our realtor who was very excited that the builer left any trees at all. Husband doesn't like the trees, though. He says "they're dead." But they're not. They just aren't oaks (which also look "dead" right now). Our elms look like very very very tall sticks poking up out of the ground, and they creak a lot when the wind blows. I don't know if this is normal behaviour for an elm, but this is what we have. I have been trying to imagine a good place for an herb garden, and I've also been thinking about planting vegetables in the front yard. My reason: I don't do anything with my hands unless I can eat it when I'm done, and everyone loves a landscaped yard (especially in Suburbia). Why not combine the two?

I am a little bit afraid of having Lawn Nazis for neighbors, but Husband and I have both agreed that should this happen, we will put plastic pink flamingos in our front yard and explain that we are from Florida. Some people will hang up their national flag when living in exile, but we put up tacky lawn ornaments. This, of course, just makes us secretly wish that we will have Lawn Nazis living next door.

Most exciting, though, is that some friends may live with us for a bit if all works out. I've missed them and haven't seen them in a year now, so this should give us lots and lots of time to catch up.

Husband and I both decided that Kendo was straining our brains too much and quit going to class. All the Zen-mind-discipline-shouting was too much for us, so instead we sit at home Thursday nights and watch Lost.

This past week I had a couple of prospective graduate students stay with me. I would drop them off at the department, the department would spend the day pumping food into them, and then I'd take them home at night and tell them that it was ok to sleep. All this made me think again about academia and its absurdities. The university is not a real place, I think. It's full of strange and wonderful things. Sometimes I think to myself "Gee, what a wonderful universe I'm in," and other times, "Gee, what a wonderful universe I'm trapped in." I supposed the latest blow was when we met with some of our professors over some problems, one of which is the lack of a graduate-level intro. course to linguistics. Apparently only a couple of professors and all of the students think we need one, but not anyone who has the power to arrange such a class (one explanation was "It wasn't a problem for me."). I personally do not understand why the basics are covered in our literature classes but not in our linguistic classes, even though we are to be competent in both areas. My second problem with academia is that it seems to be totally removed from the rest of the universe AND it's very, very, very competitive. I do not mind being competitive for something that I think will make a difference for a great many people in the world, but why must I be stressed out over something that, so far, seems to be solely for my pleasure and to make my department eventually look good in the eyes of the rest of academia? Sometimes I tell myself to go push paper for a while and see how I like that, but my 2nd year in graduate school will involve teaching. After seeing professors who are not interested in teaching the basics, I'm starting to become much more interested in pedagogy.

Of course, all this removal from the world makes me less and less interested in literature studies and I've completely lost all interest in cultural studies (my respect is waning too). Cultural theories are even more bizarre than philosophy...with some exceptions. The most terrifying part of all this is that I'm beginning to be interested in economics. I find myself very very excited about the international cattle trade of the early modern period (probably because I find the present-day meat trade baffling and scary). Who knows what monstrous things this could lead to...like finance.

But now it is spring break! One week without seeing anyone in the department, neither the Sane nor the Others. This will give me time to...study. And learn the Arabic alphabet, and figure out wtf those three h's are (my teacher has a little bit of a hard time understanding why we can't hear the differences...sometimes she giggles, and so do we). And work on my Romanian (because I think it's time for me to learn a Romance language). I can also take time-out for all those internet procrastination activities, like blogs.

Also, there is a ridiculous daytime show that comes on TV that makes me giggle. It's about people who have haunted houses and what not. It's very exciting, and not at all educational. There is usually someone who has just fulfilled a life dream of buying a house or supporting themselves in some way. They move in. The walls are usually painted a dark color and the lighting is always dim. Also, they all seem to have a fireplace with a mirror over it. Strange things occur. Then the neighbor tells them that the previous owners have opened up a portal to hell inside their fireplace, or some other inconvenient place. They try to sell the house, but houses complete with portals to hell don't fetch very good prices. Oftentimes they call in some expert who walks through the house burning sage leaves and chanting, which doesn't work. I want to see someone who has a house haunted by the ghosts of Pythagoreans so that the "expert" can walk through the house scattering beans everywhere (the difference being that it would actually work). The last episode I saw was about a woman who got a new male roommate who then struck up a friendship with a demonic force that would throw plates at her. I will never again complain about roommates being messy, or smelly, or idiotic, or asking me for beer money because daddy hasn't deposited any money in their account recently.

So yes, that is my life up to-date. We move this weekend. Yay. Introvert cheer!

Scotties are natural "diggers," like other terriers, whose name derives from the same root as "terre," French for "earth."^[5] They were bred with strong tails so that their owners could pull them out of holes when they would dig after vermin and voles. [from wikipedia]

Yes, my dog comes with a built-in handle.