A Hood, Panic, and Various Sundries

I think that they should really sell grad students on the part where when you graduate, you get a totally sweet hood to wear with your ridiculous graduation ensemble. I mean, I know that pretty much the only thing I will enjoy about that ceremony when I make it there is that I'll be rocking a hood like some kind of cultist.

Like many rituals that used to have greater meaning and which we now do mostly by rote, I don't really understand it. I guess we make graduates wear silly garments in order to distinguish them from the adoring hordes or something, or at least that's why we still do it. Hoods and other regalia are beyond me, though. We don't dress up for any other part of school, but at graduation it becomes expected. Either way, I'm digging the concept of the hood, because then I can play like I'm a super hero.

Graduate Girl will totally correct your grammar!

...Maybe these are the reasons the second-year students thought I was an uncommitted spaz. Hey, at least I know how to have fun.

Sometimes, anyway.

Which brings me to the next part of things. I have never, ever, lived truly alone. I have always at least been in a building full of people. And living alone for the first time, homesick and without a local network of friends... that is Hard.

I will try and keep the pity parties here fairly brief and painless for readers, but it's true that I've spent a lot of the last week or so kind of panicking about being on my own. I lost a beaded hair accessory Mom brought me back from Alaska sometime in the move, and the discovery that it doesn't seem to be anywhere in either house had me in sort of a tailspin of frustration and homesick and panic. It became like a Great Holy Quest for a while, where I thought that if I could just find it, everything else would feel better, like a giant psychological bandaid.

And then I looked at the quilted wall hanging that Mom spent hours making for me, and the needlepoint bookmark she handmade this summer, and I realized that I have the most important things, and that my angst is not going to be suddenly fixed with a trinket. And all mush aside, I really should be doing something better with my life at those points, like unpacking, or repainting my great Grandpa's fence.

And so here I am, trying to figure out how I will be feeding myself on a budget that consists of kind donations from family and my own savings. My assistantship doesn't pay me until the very end of September, and so I will need to be creative. What bugs me most is the way that eating as a single person poses challenges that I don't know how to overcome, like how the heck to eat a loaf of bread before it goes bad when I don't want a sandwich every day.

My last piece of news probably should have been my first, but that's just not how my mind works, guys. I'm totally in classes and teaching now. Holy crap, I'm a teacher of freshmen. I'm adapting lesson plans and talking about rhetorical theory like I know something about it. And that's cool, and scary, and I have no idea if I'm doing it right. Luckily, I have a mentor.

Okay, all the Graduate Assistants have mentors, but I lucked out and got the cool one, the one who said funny snarky things all through our training and who swears and who wants to hold our mentorship meetings in the bar in the student union.

Oh yeah, the student union has a bar. You go, Cowpokes.

In Which There is Mycological Adventure, Flooding, and Retreat

"How odd," I thought, clearly at my best on a day during which I did not once put on proper pants, "Some sort of piece of nerf wedged in my lawn. And what is that on top?" So I pick it up, and pull it out of its... bizarre underground sheath, revealing spongy and definitely not-nerf matter. It's a mushroom. A mushroom that dries to the cheerful reddish color and consistency of some kinds of nerf. And I touched it. Eww.

After washing my hands, I did a bit of research. The horrible things are Elegant Stinkhorns, and they are harmless, just unpleasant in just about every other way. That, children, is why we don't touch nature, even when it's pretending to be nerf material.

Add that to yesterday's dead-squirrel-palooza(don't ask), seeing a fox in the middle of town, and the knowledge that earwigs like to infiltrate the basement, and I kind of feel like I may have to defend myself against Nature since there's so much of it here.

But I also have duties, because part of living here means that I must water and mow. "Okay," I say, "Let's start off easy. Watering is easy. I water in Albuquerque all the time."

But watering is not easy. It is a lie.

First, there is the matter of the shutoff. This is an old house, and the uncle who owns it, bless him, has a lot to take care of. One of those things is how the water outside in the back does not turn off properly and so must be shut off each time with the valve in the creepy concrete root cellar in the basement. To turn it on and off, one must either be quite tall or standing on a chair, which is an adventure of its own.

Then there is the matter of not being familiar with the sprinklers, which means that in trying to place them well, I end up drenched. But I was watering the front and feeling pretty proud of myself.

Of course, shortly after, one of the two cats I brought to keep me company starts acting as if something is very distressing. The noise of the water, I figure. Whatever. Cats are weird. After he tried to trip me down the stairs three times, I realize that the kitchen door out to the front is open and that means that the uber-soaking sprinkler I turned on is dumping water in through the screen door.

So I am retreating into the house. Mowing the lawn will have to be another battle, because I concede this skirmish. I am lucky to have had many people here over the last few days while I move in who bought me food and used tools, but clearly, I need to put on my war face now that I'm alone.

And I haven't even started the school thing.

This is a test post to see if I can do mobile blogging. I figure that this way, I can be spontaneous or something.

On Leaving the Not-So-Big City

Anyone reading this probably already knows: I'm about to leave my desert home in Albuquerque and go to grad school in Laramie, Wyoming. Population of Burque: 521,999. Population of Laramie: 27,204. Oh, my.

Now, I'm not a native city dweller. I am in fact, a Laramie native, raised there from age 1 through the third grade. When I wasn't living in Laramie, I was living in Los Alamos, tiny town of physicists, and in rural Minnesota (seriously, our road wasn't even paved). Albuquerque is, in fact the only city I have lived in. I spent an entire summer in a town that was three miles across in either direction. In Utah. Moving back to the prairie should not be a stretch.

But I guess I thought that once I fell in love with city life, I was kind of, you know, done with the rest of it.

Clearly not.

"Two and a half hours to Denver," I keep telling myself. I can go there for urban therapy. Denver is a proper metropolis. They have a light rail system. That's like a real place.

And Laramie will be full of school. And other good things. I'm sure of that. But it's an abrupt about-face in terms of what I'm used to. So... a formal and fond farewell to Albuquerque and the desert southwest. I'm off to new cowboy country, a land where men are men and sheep are... sometimes pretty comforting companions. Sorry, sorry. Not sheep, other cowboys. Sorry! I know there's more to cowboys than sheep jokes and Annie Proulx, seriously I do.

So here starts the big adventure of education, prairie life, and wondrous strange snow.