Home again

I arrived back home again yesterday; my trip back east seemed terribly short.  Stacey’s wedding was lovely; the ceremony was held in a music hall that has an enormous pipe organ the size of the whole front wall of the building.

The pipe organ; it was very impressive, covered with ornate wood carvings.

It was all quite impressive.  The reception was great too; I got to see a lot of old friends and danced the night away.

Mom and Dad on the dance floor. Don't they look snazzy?

Now, home again, I have a lot of work to do.  I applied to 18 schools, so now I have 18 secondary applications to complete.  However, my common application was accepted, processed, and verified, so that means I did it right and it wasn’t rejected.  I was worried about that, because if they didn’t take it I’d have missed a lot of deadlines, seeing as how I sent it in at the last minute.

Last night Brian and I went out to eat at the Outback (thanks Carolyn and Dale!) to celebrate having finished the first step of this application process.  It’s always a treat to have someone else cook for me, as it happens so rarely.

Today I will start with the Harvard application, as it’s due first.  Onwards!

Scaredy cat

Today I am driving myself to Portland; tomorrow morning I get on a plane back to Massachusetts, again.  This time my trip is short, less than a week.

When I was gone for almost a month last time, some good came out of it here at home, in that Brian and Chester finally became friends.  It took me months to befriend Chester while he was still living out in the backyard, and though Brian fed him occasionally, Chester really wanted nothing to do with the big loud scary man.  When we brought Chester inside we immediately appointed Brian the title of “breakfast man,” hoping that Chester’s opinion of him would improve when he noticed that big and scary though he is, he is also the keeper of the wet food.  It was a good idea, but it worked only so well–he’d rub agains Brian’s legs while he was dishing out the food, but the minute Chester had finished wolfing down his breakfast he reverted to scaredy cat.  When I was away, though, Chester had to make a decision.  You see, he actually really does like people, and is a sucker for pets–so when I wasn’t around, he had to either get pets from the scary man or else go without for a month.  Fortunately, he decided Brian isn’t so scary after all…

Dress up

I think it more tasteful to refrain from posting the "before" picture...

Well, Stacey’s wedding is coming up, it’s this Saturday in fact, and I’m flying back east (yet again!) on Thursday.  So, today, in the interest of being able to wear an actual dress for the event, and for the first time in many years, I waxed my legs.  Stac, don’t ever say I never did anything for you!  (Though really, I don’t find it painful–more like annoying, and messy.  If you’ve never experienced it, leg wax is approximately the consistency of pine tree sap, and it has a similar ability to stick itself it any number of unexpected and remote surfaces.  I had to scrub down half the bathroom with “Goo Off” when I was done.)  Interestingly enough, now that my legs are more “girly” in a sense, they look more muscular than they did before…

I haven’t worn a fancy dress for about ten years, so I think it’ll be kind of fun to dress up.  I have also been attempting to apply eye makeup–again, I haven’t tried to do this since I was about ten years old–so that I’ll have some hope of being able to make myself look presentable this weekend.  There is a whole genre of videos on YouTube in which young ladies demonstrate how to apply eye makeup to achieve certain effects. This is very helpful, if, like me, one has a limited understanding of such things.  I watched a tutorial last night on how to create a purple “smokey eye” look, a process that involves about twenty steps, half of which require black eyeliner.

In thinking about it, when I was younger I rejected a number of the trappings of what I saw as “socially acceptable” femininity–makeup, girly shoes, “doing” my hair, and whatnot–many the things girls generally have to do to be seen as attractive in a mainstream way.  I feel like as I get older I care less about how people read my appearance.  Maybe because of that, many of the things I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing/wearing seem more and more like they could be a fun option.  I started wearing nail polish just last year for the first time in maybe a decade, and it occurred to me that I like painting my nails.  (Preferably with a safe and relatively green brand of polish, insofar as those things go…)  For a long time though I didn’t do it because I didn’t want others to read my nails as a sign that I was someone who believed that women have to paint their nails, or wear makeup in general, in order to look good.  It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m figuring out that keeping a couple of pairs of heels in the closet, as an option, doesn’t necessarily make me less of a feminist…

Floof

Floof is fascinated by shadows...

I think I post more photos of Floof here then either of the other cats; Brian and I definitely both take more pictures of her in general.  She’s very photogenic, and particularly silly, so it’s easy to catch her doing strange and adorable things.  Chester doesn’t really like the camera itself, annoying flashy thing that it is, and Sumi is just hard to see in photos because of her dark coat.

Isn’t she cute?

Basket o'Floof

Smart cat.

Lazy

My, haven’t I been lazy about my blog lately?  Well, my essay is just undergoing the finishing touches, my Mom likes it, and Brian thinks it’s decent, so it’s going out within a couple of days.  Me, I’m about to hit the gym here.  For old time’s sake, here are some videos of me at last spring’s Tactical Strength Challenge.  I had just hurt my shoulder and didn’t do so great, especially with the pullups.  It’s nice to look at things like this, it reminds me of how much progress I’ve made, bum shoulder or no.  It reminds me that lifting 200 lbs. was a big deal at one point.

Deadlift #1, 200 lbs.

Deadlift #2, 215 lbs.  I dropped the third one, lost my grip.

8 bodyweight pullups

Mmmm

Chicken cacciatore, with some extra veggies…this was good.  We may be poor, but we do eat well around here.

Hi Stac!

Then...

This is me and Stacey, my best friend since we were three.  In this photo we’re about twelve, I think, and on a Girl Scout trip to Alaska.  Can you even imagine how many damn cookies we had to sell?  I tell you, it was a lot of cookies.  I remember my parents’ whole basement being full of cases and cases of cookies.

And then below, that’s us, just maybe a month ago, at my mom’s 60th birthday party in Tyngsboro.  Amazing that we grew up to be decent looking people, no?

...and now.

It’s raining

I'm probably fifteen, sixteen here. That's OJ, he was a Maine Coon, and a huge cat.

Well, it’s finally happening, I am in the thick of the application(s).  (I add the (s) because it doesn’t stop with AMCAS; once I finish this I have a bazillion secondary applications to do.)  For each “work/experience” entry you get 1325 characters–that’s about 200 words–and spaces count as a character too–to describe and elaborate.  That’s not much room when you’re talking about, say, five job titles in five years at OPB.  However, the people who will read it have to read an awful lot of them, so I imagine brevity is exactly what they want. I intend to use seven of the fifteen spaces.  I mean, who really has done fifteen important things in their lives, anyway?

Today I got my first letter of recommendation!  That’s exciting.  From Max Apple, my writing teacher at Rice.  They’re all confidential, these letters people write about you, so I just hope the folks I ask say nice things about me.  I mean, that’s the plan, anyway.  Max was my teacher a long time ago, but the idea was that since my degrees are actually and still in English and Art, I should have at least one recommendation that represents that.

On another note, I saw someone this past weekend who I haven’t seen in, what, thirteen years?  And who, if you’d asked me, I would have said I never expected to see again in my life.  This guy here, sitting at my kitchen table, is Brian Deshler, one of my first boyfriends ever.  We were fifteen, I believe.  He found me on Facebook, and was in the area for a conference.  It’s funny, seeing people from high school–it doesn’t happen to me much, as I’ve been out west since college–but when I do see anyone, it always amazes me how little people change.

Fall

Sumikins in the warm tent. Don't ever stick your hand in there, cute as she may be, or you're bound to end up bleeding in short order.

Last night the temperature outside dropped to 37 degrees; there’s no denying it’s fall.  It’s 60 in the house right now, in the early afternoon.  I had to set up the little electric blanket for Sumi, tent-style; she’ll pretty much live in there until next summer rolls around.

Today I am working on finishing my AMCAS application.  (That’s the common app.)  This is something I should have been doing for a long time now, but I got stuck.  I got to a section where they give you 15 spaces to describe activities, awards, jobs, and other relevant experiences–things you want med schools to know you’ve done, and that you think make you a more competitive and interesting candidate, basically.  Me, I read it as, what are the fifteen most important things you’ve done in your life?  I pretty much froze, and it’s taken me a while to get back to it.  On some level I feel like I haven’t done enough, I don’t have enough important stuff to put in those blanks.  A crisis of self-doubt, you know.  Happens every now and then.  And once again, I just need to get on with it.

I went to Massachusetts with such good intentions, about getting work done and whatnot, and in the end I just had a complete time warp, and then coming back and getting knocked down by that cold…I kind of lost all momentum.  However, today I am sucking it up and getting on with things.

Yesterday I went to the gym for the first time since I got back, and they’ve moved all the equipment around and put in new floors.  I don’t see that it’s a better arrangement of space, but I imagine they might have done it because the morons dropping the barbells on the Olympic platform were damaging the building, or so they said.  What I see as the most significant problem in that gym–the distinct demarcation and separation of a “women’s area” near the entrance, where the 2-12 lb. free weights are kept, and a “men’s area” at the back of the gym, with 10 and up lb. free weights, still exists.  Not only does this strange arrangement reinforce the idea that it’s appropriate for women to have only a limited and cursory interest in weightlifting (ie, they should stay near the door–and most do), but it’s also pretty inconvenient for us smaller lifters who need to use weights from both areas.

Scores

All that time here...

Well, my score is in.  It’s allright.  Not what I was hoping for, but allright.  I feel disappointed.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s competitive.  In percentiles, it’s “98.4 – 99.0″, they say.  But it’s at the low end of the range I thought I was in.  I had wanted to do better.