My Summer Jam

Everybody needs or at least likes a summer jam, right? I used to like some of the pop offerings, like Wale's "Chillin" featuring Lady Gaga back in 2009. But nowadays, for whatever reason, unless I am in full-on dance mode, I can't handle nearly as much pop music as I used to. Maybe it's a sign of being in my 30's? Or maybe new pop music just isn't as good as it used to be?

Anyway, my summer jam is turning out to be an oldie, but a goody: MGMT's Electric Feel. I can't get this song out of my head, and I can't help but want to start a dance party in the car or wherever I am when I put it on. It is groovy and mellow yet upbeat. Perfect for summer.

AND as a tribute to a friend (and regular blog reader), I found this video featuring the Rock-afire explosion performing this song. This one is for you, MS!

Work-Life Balance

This is something I am extremely familiar with. No, I am not a Rhodes Scholar, nor am I anything close to being part of the Washington elite of high powered women. But I find myself extremely wrapped up in this conversation sparked by Ann-Marie Slaughter's article because of the excessive time management and whatnot I have been through in the last year as I try to support myself and be responsible about loans while making my dream of a PhD a reality. Getting a graduate education has just become even harder as graduate students are no longer eligible for subsidized Stafford loans, which researchers cited in this article claim will ultimately "have the greatest effect on the debt levels of women and of students from under-represented minority groups."

What to me is at issue here is something far greater than just the choices women have to make about motherhood versus careers, as many commentators have already noted. It is about class, and it is indeed a feminist issue, but in my opinion, it is a feminist issue because women continue to be treated like second class citizens, not because women have a maternal instinct and feel more driven to care for their children than their male counterparts. I identified with Slaughter's struggles with the workplace's inflexibility and archaic restrictions that were not relevant to my job, which can be done remotely 90% of the time. I wanted to pursue a life outside of work -- a full life, not a part-time life outside of work -- and by and large, the typical American workplace (i.e. NOT the progressive American workplace), does not allow for that.

As an aside, I think that part of the reason I watch Mad Men -- even though it is more a show that I love to hate than a show I love -- is because it portrays one very unique and yet very typical workplace in which the boundaries between life and work are blurred, and when a life fully outside of work develops, it is a problem. I digress....

I think a more interesting article  would have been "Why White Men Can Have It All and No One Else Can." That is the real story in my opinion. Women AND minorities are paid less than white men, to name one issue included in this debate. I'm surprised that in these discussions I have not yet heard anyone mention the book Nickle and Dimed. Barbara Ehrenreich basically shouts Slaughter's woes of inflexibility, inability to get ahead, and managing time from a lower-class perspective of people trying to come from much further down the ranks and having to deal with mass transportation and other poorly developed American infrastructures that present barriers to rising up the ranks.

Sure, the workplace needs to change....and how likely is that since the Paycheck Fairness Act was just rejected (with five Republican female senators voting against it) and studies still showing that minorities AND women make far less than men?

Convincing People

...that I am awesome.  It's a tougher job than I thought it was.

My project for the week is to secure housing for "the sun of my life" and me in Santa Cruz.  I went through this whole thing where I was over-eager and looking too early back in April/May...and then, I went through this extremely uncharacteristic moment of feeling like we would just find housing once we got out there in August.  Now the time is ripe to find a place and find it soon so that we don't end up screwed with places that are too expensive and have an undesirable commute.  

Finding housing is difficult, especially when you are not in the same area or in the same time zone for that matter.  It's just not going to happen for me to visit and look at places before we move out.  Too expensive and too time consuming.  So, lucky for me, I make a living off of letting people know they can trust me and confide in me and want to spend time with me -- all via telephone.  I'm really turning on the charm for these Santa Cruz landlords and trying to convince them that they should rent the place to me AND save it until August rather than rent it in July....  It's hard work.  

Lucky for me, credit reports are required for Santa Cruz rental applications (um, yes, this is insane and I have NEVER heard of this before, and I think it is wrong, so by "lucky" I mean that I am exercising my privilege) because mine is excellent.  Otherwise, things are not so lucky.  People I speak with are just SURE that I have a friend, relative, SOMEONE who can view the apartment for me and represent me...and no, that is just false, I do not.  I resorted to sending my professional bio on AU's website to someone today to convince her that I have a trustworthy look and a strong employment (ie. rent paying) potential.  This is really not how equal opportunity is done, AND it is difficult and really silly.

Shouldn't I be able to apply online and stuff like that?  The only places that do that are the undesirable places as far as I can tell.  Although, I did spend 20 minutes on the phone with Roger today who manages a property in the Seabright neighborhood where I would like to live and explained that waiting a month to rent a one bedroom to me would be an investment on his part because I am going to be there working on this degree for at least four years.  He seemed to take my point, but he didn't concede the point.  He is after all a manager and not an owner.  His consolation to me was telling me to send a check in the mail to "reserve" a spot that might or might not be available and might or might not actually be held for me even though I sent $700.  That was the end of our conversation.  

The good news is that this is the kind of stress I can handle.  It's a much better and much more motivating stress than the issues I've had to deal with for the past three months: ridiculous IRS audit that tried to take away my education tax credit and tell me I'm not a student (how do you argue with totally false information and logic?!), a storage container that was run into a TREE not 2 blocks from my house (seriously?!), etc.  That's the kind of stuff that will send me into crazy town. This persuasive business is just regular 9-5 work for me.

And Neal Brennan, gets how ridiculous this dynamic is:

Animal Dreams

I had this crazy dream last night in which my significant other/partner (who has asked to heretofore be referred to as "sun of my life") and I went to visit a friend of mine.  In the process of the visit, said friend took us to this forested park that was not a reserve, but was some kind of weird experimental natural habitat.  It gets weird.  Really weird.

The friend was telling us about how there were these enormous over-sized wild animals, like Godzilla-sized gorillas and gigantic bears.  The only evidence I saw of one was a bear that had been trapped in a huge cage that looked more like a ginormous teddy bear carton (you know, the cardboard boxes that bears come in).  Then, he showed us these really advanced apartment buildings that were totally cylindrical.  They were brick and glass and none of the doors opened by the pull/push method, they all had to slide to open since animals can push, but they can't slide (um, this is the rule in my dream, I have no idea if this is true or not).  I was scared because I had no idea why people would want to live here in these super nice apartments in the middle of this supremely scary environment of experimental animals-gone-mad. And then, my friend told me it was because these investors were sure that they would make bank on these apartments in the future...?

I was scared, and I asked if we could get some ice cream.  I remember eating some really delicious almond ice cream in the dream...although it kept melting too fast, so I was drinking it more than eating it, but I really feel like I could taste it in the dream.  The ice cream and bears together seem to pose a problem for dream interpreters...and by dream interpreters, I mean me.

I have NO friggin idea what this dream was all about.  It was disturbing.  I do think and dream in metaphors, so I assume there is some parable that my mind has made up in some way.  But I'm also kinda wondering about why so many animals have been in my dreams lately.  I don't typically dream about animals at all.  I don't own pets.  I don't desire to own pets.  And I don't really interact with pets that aren't my own (as those of you with pets know quite well).  But in my dreams, animals aren't pets, they are rulers.  In this dream they are uncontrollable freak menaces.  In previous dreams about a friend's cats, the cats were running the neighborhood while they were out of town.  What does all of this mean pre tell?!

Typically my anxiety dreams are normal: walking around in public naked or semi-naked OR my teeth are falling out of my mouth.  That's your typical stresser.  But what is this about animals and why are they so extreme?  It seems to speak to some form of fear, which I totally get.  I have some big changes coming in the near future. But why animals?  And why do they exercise so much power?  I know it isn't going to answer my questions, but I do now have a strong urge to read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams.  

According to this article in the Huffington Post, bears in dreams are uncommon and represent human behaviors.  Dr. Condron tells me I need to listen to the message of the dream...but what if what I hear is too confusing????  Any dream interpreters out there?  I'm lamenting the shortsighted decision to pack my dreamcatcher away into storage.

L'Optimisme

My favorite reading tends toward dystopian novels and dark fictional stories like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Never Let Me Go,The Poisonwood Bible, and Song of Solomon. Yet, I'm by no means put down by these types of stories. Theoretically speaking, I could go on and on after reading a book entitled Empathy and the Novel about all of the reasons that what we read has nearly zero impact on how we think or behave, it merely has the potential to enrich our perspective. But that's not the path I'm going down today.

Today, I'm interested in the synchronicity that I am experiencing with the word optimism lately, which has piqued my interest even more because I completed the official Myers Briggs Type Indicator and found out that my personality type is ENFP, which is called the most optimistic personality and is characterized by "giving life an extra squeeze." My first thought was actually, "oh shit, Candide warned me against this."

So, now that I've been mulling over this characterization, I've been seeing the promising aspects of optimism rather than seeing my life go down a long series of unfortunate events in which I respond "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." And admittedly, most of these opinions are coming my way through the New York Times or the New Yorker...so, something tells me that perhaps NYC is in search of the ENFP.

One of these was a recent article entitled "Really? Optimism Reduces the Risk of Heart Disease," which shows some correlation between optimism and physical health. Another one a month later, "A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full," talks about the benefits of optimism and definitely sounded familiar to the way that I think and approach situations. Anyway, this is all good news for me, especially since I had no idea that I was an optimist before the Myers Briggs thing. I definitely thought that I had a positive perspective, but I didn't realize that in the scheme of their 16 personality groupings, mine is the most optimistic.

Of course, this has made me slightly obsessive about where my friends rank on this scale. I think I have a lot of other ENFP's in my life...and a lot of ESTJ's and ISFP's.... I'm not sure how helpful the Myers Briggs test has been for me in general, but I will say that in the workplace it has been super duper helpful. My employee feels she knows me better and "gets" me better as does my supervisor. So, I'd say it has been really helpful in that specific situation, but I would hate to be labelled like this in general...because after all, the ENFP type hates labels!

I just took this test online to see if it would give me the same answer as the official test, and it did, so take the quiz here if you are interested in finding out your type: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

In conclusion, I feel the need at this moment to point out at that my partner has the following poster on a wall in the apartment that we share, and we make an excellent pair:

Boot Camp - Part Deux

I've been trying to figure out the best deal and the best program to keep me motivated for exercising and getting in shape this summer.  I just finished 30 days of boot camp with "The Sarge," which I really liked because it was challenging, no frills, kept a good pace, and because the sarge made it really difficult to be a slacker.  Unfortunately, my $30/30 days Living Social offer ended last week, and when I went to sign up for another 2 months, I realized that the minimum you can do is 3 months, AND it is $199/month.  No way no how could I make that work.

Soooo, I started researching temporary gym memberships and even thought about how I could visit 30 gyms in 30 days on free one day passes.  Yeah, that was a little insane.  Lucky for me, a Groupon for eight weeks of boot camp came out last week, and I bought it.  This time it is through SalFit, and I went to my first session today.  One plus side is that The Sarge's program started at 5:50 a.m., which meant I had to get up at 5 a.m. to get to AU in time, but this one starts at 6:30 a.m., which gives me a glorious 40 minutes of extra sleep!  

SalFit boot camp takes place at Meridian Hill park and presented the first occasion for me to visit that park so early in the morning.  Who knew that this place would be BUSTLING?!  I mean, I almost thought it was Sunday afternoon drum circle it was so packed.  There was at least one other boot camp taking place, people doing yoga, others walking dogs, and at least one personal training session taking place.  The mood alone helped me to feel more awake.

My first impression of this camp is that it isn't as intense as The Sarge's program.  There were 50 people instead of 15 and the instructor yells at you, but because there are so many people, it is easy to slack off in the shadow of other people and not get noticed...which I'm slightly ashamed to admit I did today.  But hey, I figured today was more or less my observation day.  I'll give it more on Thursday.

I will say that after doing this for a few weeks, it seems like boot camp in general has at least two favorite moves that they like to do in sets of 20:

1) Burpees -- seriously, even after doing Jillian Michaels videos for YEARS, I've never done so many burpees as I've done in the past 5 weeks

2) Up and down plank

It's not just that these are frequently used, the instructors seem to like to force you into muscle failure...okay, not seem to, SalFit actually has a megaphone and yells "I want to see you get to muscle failure."  Unless I made that up.  I don't think I did, though.  

Boot camp has been the perfect segue out of the master's program since I felt like I was in my own sort of intensive training as I prepared to show I had the chops for a PhD program.  I don't know if I will continue to do it in California (in fact, that is seriously doubtful since there is a group of grad students that hike once a week and do yoga once a week, and I might prefer a more chill workout once I'm out there), but this has been a good activity for me in the interim.   

My First Catholic Wedding

I've just returned from nearly a week down home in Louisiana. I spent much of that time in Thibodaux preparing for my friend's wedding, which was pretty fun all in all. As I've written before, going home is always an adventure in some way. Something always seems to happen that catches me by surprise or offends me deeply even though people don't seem to have ill intentions. It's a really weird feeling to have been born and raised in a specific place and then, as an adult to feel like there is no "home" to go back to. After I moved and then, my parents moved, it's like the distance between my childhood and my current life are totally disconnected.

Anyway...this visit was less about having one specific moment of shock than a longer visit that made me see how different I am in almost every respect from the people I grew up around. And yet, my friend and I have always been different and are still the same close friends we have always been. That is what keeps me heading down there.

For the record, here are a few of the memories from the week:

1) Being the maid of honor in a small town wedding ostensibly means that you are supposed to be the wedding planner, photography director, errand runner, and all around chilled out presence. People may have been joking, but it was far more aggravating than it was funny as the other bridesmaids kept finding faults with me like how could I forget to put together some tacky fake bouquet for the dress rehearsal? I'm like...um, I didn't forget, I simply have never heard of this. I've done a few dress rehearsals and never heard of having some fake bouquet for the bride to use down the aisle. Then, everyone in the group starts talking about her wedding and how she definitely had one at her dress rehearsal. The bride couldn't care less, so why is this a topic of conversation? Then, when I didn't exactly seem super chilled out because the other bridesmaids had been ragging on me for three days straight, they also comment on me being stressed. Um, yes! I am stressed since I've just found out that I'm supposed to be coordinating photography, handling all of the bride's needs, AND generally answering questions that I have no idea how to answer. I'm always astounded at how mean southern women, in particular, can be towards each other. Thank you patriarchy for succeeding very well down there.

2) I was reminded that by the age of 31 it is extremely rare to find people in my hometown who can talk about anything other than their children or their frustrated love lives. In fact, as I tried to get to know some of the bridesmaids, I simply learned more than I ever wanted to know about their kids' baseball schedules. My best friend from home and I have a unique friendship in that we stayed up until 2:30 a.m. every night talking intimately and seriously about Bobby Jindal's education policy (she is a teacher), abortion (we are on total opposite sides of this argument), and other social issues. My friend has a hard time finding anyone else to talk with about these things, and our time talking gave me a huge sense of gratitude for my friendships, which always have space for such discussion, and especially for our special friendship.

3) On a happier note, I did love getting in my fill of line dancing. I LOVE me some line dancing. I did not realize that people not only line dance to the Cupid Shuffle and the Electric Slide, but also to hip hop favorites.... I can't remember the exact song right now, but I jumped in to the dance floor at the reception prepared to shake my booty and instead found myself getting in line. I'm not going to lie, I pretty much loved that....

All in all, I definitely do not feel like I was on vacation, which is something I lament about going home because it never does feel all that relaxing. BUT I am glad that I was there for my friend and was the maid of honor she wanted...and I'm glad I won't have to do it for anyone else down there.

I Heart Pittsburgh!

I've been in DC for 8 years -- close to a decade -- and I know that part of my ability to stay here so long is because of the access it gives me to getting out of town on a fairly regular basis for domestic or international travel.  Sometimes I don't get out of town enough, and then, I get edgy.  After nearly a month of not going out of town or really getting out of the city at all, I finally went to Pittsburgh this weekend, and it was GREAT!

I do think that part of my love for Pittsburgh is the fact that I went there for the first time last year in the middle of an intense semester and so it was a much needed break.  Not to mention the fact that a wonderful friend lives there and time together is always fun.  But the city also compels me for other reasons.  

Like, for one, it is a city on the water, which I love.  Growing up on the bayou means that I thrive around water, and I'm sorry but the Potomac is better than nothing, but it really isn't enough for me.  Pittsburgh has 446 bridges!!!!

The city of bridges is really laid back and feels like it isn't as slow as Louisiana, but isn't in a rush either.  I got back on the bike for the first time in 7 months and did a 10 mile ride through the city and was only honked at ONCE.  Seriously, one honk.  All day.  It was amazing.  

Did I mention that Boyz II Men played after the baseball game?!  I mean, Big & Rich played after the Nationals game last weekend...there is really no comparison of how much more awesome Boyz II Men is by comparison.  It was a great weekend away, and I think I will be back there despite moving super far away.

I remember a whole lot of dancing with my hands on the shoulders of my date to this song, and I felt really proud of knowing all of the lyrics when they asked the crowd to sing along on Saturday:

Transit of Venus

I am super excited to see the Transit of Venus tomorrow night! I really enjoy observing the sky no matter how pedestrian the activity. Cloud watching and star gazing are two of my favorites, which probably stems from my childhood when my mom and I used to drive the convertible out into the swamps and watch meteor showers together. The habit of watching the night sky, in particular, led me to realize that I was seeing the Northern Lights in Wisconsin one summer back in my college days. I stayed out until about 3 a.m. watching blues, greens, and faint shades of yellow move all around the sky. I was pretty bummed when I was NOT able to see the shuttle being moved to the National Air & Space Museum back in April because I was on a train to Philadelphia when it happened.

So, the Transit of Venus is my opportunity to see something rare and interesting up in the sky this year! I have an eclipse viewer, but I also recently learned that because Venus is so small it is best to watch it with a special telescope that guards against the bright sun and allows you to see Venus more clearly than just a dot over the sun. The National Air and Space Museum is hosting a public viewing with telescopes on the mall, so I'm thinking that I will visit and try to see it through a telescope and perhaps bring a picnic along. On one of my visits home to Louisiana years ago, my friend and I went to the observatory in Baton Rouge together to look at Saturn, and it was pretty amazing to see through the telescope. You could count the rings and it was a crisp, clear view into outer space that I don't often have the opportunity to enjoy. This makes me think that watching the transit with a little telescopic support is a good idea.

And for those of you who are interested in the other universes out there...the Ultra Deep Field Skywalker, which is part of the Hubble Telescope, has amazing clear images of the spiral and elliptical galaxies way out in the farthest reaches known to us in outer space: http://www.aip.de/groups/galaxies/sw/udf/index.php

A New Quadrant

Today marks the end of the first full week of my new residence off of H Street NE.  I've lived in NW since I moved to DC in 2004, except for a three month stint in Anacostia.  So far so good.  

One of the most difficult things about moving into a new area is figuring out how to get places in a timely manner.  From Mt Pleasant, I know how to get pretty much everywhere.  From H Street, well, I've made a lot of bad decisions in the last week that got me caught in Columbus Circle or Florida Ave for lengthy periods of time.  Today my task is getting from here to Southwest Waterfront.  WMATA tells me that I should take the bus to Anacostia station and then the metro.  Um, I don't think so.  I think I'll just walk to Union Station and take metro.  

On the more exciting side of living in a new place, I get to explore new interesting walks and restaurants...and even random stores.  There is a thrift store along H Street that I had never noticed before.  Doesn't look like I will find any vintage gems in there, but you never know what kind of quirky purse or top you might find in the most random places.  I had brunch at Granville Moore's today and had a delicious egg sandwich with avocado, bacon and chipotle mayo.  It was my first time not eating mussels there. 

All in all it's been a great transition.  I'm excited about the summer adventure here!