reminder from the universe to breathe

I decided to change my tack and bring myself to work for once.

When I got in yesterday, Sheena told me her goal for the day was to sell 5 Southwest burgers and asked me what my goal was.  I told her I needed some time to think about it, because I'd never thought about setting a daily goal for myself at work.  I never declared my goal to her, but it was: have a conversation, no matter how short or insignificant, with every table I serve today.

My last table of the day was a one-top, a guy about my age, maybe a little older, with long eyelashes and eyes the color of maple syrup.  He sat down at the first table, in no hurry whatsoever, with a composition notebook and a few stapled sheets of typed paragraphs.  He ordered a beer.

I asked him what he was working on and it turns out he was writing a speech about living in the present, with slight detours into Buddhism, enlightenment, Cartesian dualism, references to psychology and philosophy and theology...  I read it over, asked some questions and gave him a few suggestions, and then he asked, "Are you busy later?"

After I got off work we walked around downtown for awhile.  He's from Chicago and he couldn't get enough of the small-town factor.  I have to admit I worked it a little, exchanging words with everyone I knew or had met at some point in the past three weeks...  Having lived in a small town for a good chunk of my life, I have what I think is a healthy skepticism for small towns and their politics, but I see where he's coming from.  I love all the same things about this place.

All that existential talk on such a warm day exhausted me -- I'm out of habit.  But he came to me with a reminder that the past and the future don't really exist right now, and left me with a reminder to breathe.  "Not just through your mouth," he said to me on the shaded stones under the Overlook, "but through your nose, so your brain gets the oxygen."

After all these years, you'd think I could remember on my own.

situational own

Every day I bike up the hill, which takes 5 minutes longer than biking down.  Every day I sweat less, every day my thighs burn less.  Every day I (with Ann's help, most days) cook something delicious for dinner.  Usually it is also (relatively) cheap and healthy, and it's not ever heavy.

These are small things, at first glance, survival things, mundane "everyday" things.  But they mean that I am capable and that I have at least made the first cut in the contest to survive.  I am, if not the fittest, then I am among the fitter.

I'm making progress in big ways, too.  Those of you who know me well know I hardly make it through one single day without working through something.  (As Ann and I are starting to realize, this can sometimes be a tripwire, like when we don't know how to be at peace since we're both so comfortable working through things.)  But we're staging rituals to burn hurtful parts of our past, we're budgeting, we're learning different ways to cook meat.  We break a lot of glass items, but that happens, right?  And at least I'm not doing that at work...  (Knock on wood!)

It took me at least 2 1/2 years to own at St. Olaf, to feel on top of that world.  But it truly was that world I had mastered.  And mastery, even there, didn't mean I wasn't still tripping and stumbling left and right.

This has been happening every 3-5 years for quite some time now: we spend a few years as underlings, gradually making our way to the select elite for a year -- only to be plunged into a bigger pool where we constitute, once again, the bottom of the food chain.  Such are the joys of the American educational system.

Right now, I am a fish of undetermined size in a pool of undetermined size.  I feel fairly strongly, now that I'm thinking about it, that I am not the algae on the sides of said pool; but by no means am I familiar with the terrain enough to avoid colliding with a pirate shipwreck or being chomped by barracuda.  I have 3 months -- two, now -- to get acquainted with this seafloor, and I want nothing more than to do so.  And then the task will fall upon me to figure out how this particular seafloor fits into the bottom of the global ocean.

To a fearless explorer, this task presents merely an exciting challenge.  But when I'm not entirely sure who I am and what skills I have that are relevant outside of the Situational Own (St. Olaf), it's a bit daunting.  I hardly know where to start.

So far, the answer has been "somewhere," and that's worked just fine so far.  But I'm starting to realize that I need a heading if I hope to ever capitalize that S: Somewhere, here I come.

small-town twang

I've noticed myself picking up a twang from waitressing: Can I start y'all off with anythang to drink today?  It's not quite as pronounced as Ann's Wisconsin accent, but she rolls her eyes at it anyway.  It's slower than St. Olaf intellectual banter, and slower than self-reflective chit-chat.  I think it sounds American, grass-fed, born-and-raised Smalltown U.S.A.

I spent the opening shift on Friday talking music and artistry with Eric, one of the cooks.  Eric plays drum set and trumpet, organizes shows and events and carves pseudo-totem poles in his garage.  His art is what he lives for, though he says he might have liked to go to college, and until his daughter Ella was born he spent all his time with the band trading hometown shows with groups all across the country!  He told me that Dessa's guitarist, and a couple of other back-up artists in the Twin Cities hip-hop scene, originally come from this part of Wisconsin.

Last summer open mic nights and Saturday night local music at the Beanery kept me sane and social -- but when I asked Ann about open mics in St. Croix Falls she laughed, "You're in the wrong place for spoken word."  When I mentioned this to Eric he scoffed and pointed up the street.  "You know the Red Bird Music Store?"  From that small shop Eric and his friend put together shows and events showcasing all kinds of local artistry, from wood carving to spoken word to a wide variety of music.  "Every town's got its artist scene," he said.

Now this twang, I understand.

That same day Ann and I met up at Music on the Overlook (MOTO) after we both got off work.  The kid-friendly jokes and magic tricks got old pretty quick, but we watched as long as our cheese curds and ice cream lasted, exchanging words with a few people we knew.  My financial adviser passed us on Main Street in a car full of kids, with a red balloon bobbling wildly out of her sunroof.

After the MOTO crowd's bedtime we ran into a bunch of my coworkers at the St. Croix Tavern, where Eric was playing with a band.  I started chatting with Alicia, who almost declared a sociology major until at the last minute she discovered a family-focused branch of social study at her university, which is more geared toward what she wants to do later on in life.  (Close enough to count among the ranks of 5 Little __, WWRFD, and CAKE!)

"So is this what goes on around here on the weekends?" I asked, not wanting to miss out on any of the action.

"Yeah," she said almost apologetically, rolling her eyes.  "Shitty small town."

"I'm into it," I smiled, because I am.

"You're from New York?" she asked then.  "Is that like city, or upstate...?"

"Shitty small town," I grinned.  "So this is kinda familiar.  I love it though."

I wonder what it would be like for Alicia or some other 21-year-old to move to Amsterdam out of the blue, with a friend and a bike, a college degree and a restaurant job (probably at Crystal Bar, or maybe Raindancer).

I wonder if high school boys would put a Snickers bar on her bike seat when she locked it up outside the library while she checked her email and updated her blog.  If the Easy I.T. Guy would recognize her after she rode up and down Main Street on her bike day after day.  If the meat guy at the Farmer's Market would suggest easy ways to cook a 10-oz. sirloin steak and say, "Enjoy, see you next week!"  If the cooks would ask if she was 16 and the guy selling old library books for 50 cents each would ask if she had nieces and nephews to buy 25-cent picture books for.  If, after a month of living in her own place, she discovered a full trash can and would have to figure out some way to get rid of it for free.  If she would go for an hour-long bike ride through local farmland, get chased by an unrestrained brown dog and find the mythical recycling center on an alternative route home.  If a local boy would holler, "Nice catch!" when she fumbled the disc she was throwing with her friend on the track, or maybe at the Four Diamonds.

I wonder if she would end up at Dave Swart's Dave Matthews cover shows at the Beanery on a Saturday night, and if her small-town twang would pick up nasal New York a's and silent r's to replace the Midwestern flat o's and rounded r's of St. Croix Falls.

personal finance for idiots

The thing at the winery is for everyone to claim idiocy.  Someone is a self-proclaimed idiot every day and it's great.  I usually am one about once a day but it's all good.  It seems like my learning curve is finally starting to level out.

A lot of my fellow servers are young moms.  Yesterday Erin showed up cheering that she'd figured out daycare for her 3-month-old for the next year.  She said most daycare providers charge for every day of the year even if Erin doesn't leave her son there, which doesn't make sense for Erin since she's a teacher and she won't need childcare over the summer or during any school vacations.  She needs a per-hour set-up.  So she found a woman with school-aged children who will watch her son and another boy about the same age, and will charge only while she's got her eye on him.

Erin teaches math in an alternative program targeted mostly toward at-risk youth.  In an unpleasant job market, she has relative job security with a school district 5 minutes from her house.  She told me about a few other jobs she applied for but didn't get, which would have been full-time -- but it's a mixed bag.  A full-time job 45 minutes away might get her health insurance, but adding in the extra gas she would use and the extra time she'd have to pay for daycare, she might still be saving money.  Not to mention an hour and a half of extra driving every day, as long as traffic isn't slow and the weather is good.

Speaking of health insurance, I found out the other day that I have it, finally, which was a very nice surprise.  Thank you, health initiative!  Because my current job doesn't exactly have a benefits package.

Back to P.Fin for Idiots.

Sheena just celebrated her "babydaddy's" first father's day.  (I was pumped when she referred to him that way, but I didn't feel like I could ask more personal questions about him yet.  On another occasion she pointed him out to me: "That's my love."  Mostly she just calls him Sam.)  Her son is 9 months old and she loves showing all the girls at work photos of him doing cute things.  She's working on her master's, and Sam is a middle school teacher.  When she showed us a photo of their family at the Twins' game this weekend, one of the other girls asked her if she and her babydaddy are married; she said no.  I asked if they're planning on it, or if it's not really a priority.  She didn't seem put off, but she shrugged and said simply, "Weddings are expensive."

The expenses I have to cover are relatively little.  My health insurance comes from my dad's job and I'm not paying a whole lot of living expenses this summer.  My cell phone still comes on a family plan.  Ann and I eat simply and cheaply, we try to ride our bikes to work, and neither of us has any kids to care for.  But I'll have to think about these things before too long, when it's harder to bike to work, when I have to think about renting an apartment possibly in a city where I don't know anyone to share rent with, when I have a job and a husband/boyfriend/babydaddy and kids.  Things get more complicated.  I can use all the help I can get.

being lilly

On Saturday Ann and I drove down to the Cities in the pouring rain to see Timmy dance in a performance at the RedEye Theater.  He's the completion of our trio and we've been missing him.

Something changed in the past year.  I stopped visiting the art galleries during my free afternoons.  I stopped going to every dance performance and theater production that was free with a St. Olaf ID.  I hardly even stopped in for any open mic nights.  This is the second time I've seen Timmy dance since I tied him at limbo on Halloween weekend at the 24-hour danceathon, but it's not the second time he's danced since then.

So it was a big deal for me to make it down to this (especially when I could have stayed and worked all night at the winery) and even more significant that I found myself laughing hysterically or having visceral reactions to the dance.  Most significant, a phrase popped into my head that I haven't thought of in maybe over a year: I'm Lilly! I am the Queen! I like EVERYTHING!

It's from a book called Chester's Way by Kevin Henkes, one of my mom's and my favorites.  If you've known me for any extended period of time in college, I've probably read it to you.

Anyway, I used to identify with Lilly like CRAZY.  She never leaves the house without one of her nifty disguises, she carries a squirt gun for emergencies, she waves at cars and tries everything once and basically is always just making some sort of a ruckus.  At some point I got scared, shy, self-conscious, and I lost touch with the root of Lilly's wildness: a taste for life at its richest.

So this weekend I hit up the Osceola Braves game on Friday night, with $2 brats and $2.50 beers.  (It reminded me of the Amsterdam Mohawks games in the summer, and going there to see everyone I graduated with that I wouldn't see otherwise.)  I spent Saturday night in Minneapolis with my trio, ate delicious thick spiced pancakes at 3am.  On Sunday I swam in the St. Croix River for the first time -- it takes some getting used to again, liking everything.  Especially ticks, which are out in full force again.  We had five between the two of us last night alone.  But already I have taught myself not to scream and flail when I feel one crawling.

This is a cool time to be single, so we can try a bunch of different things and decide for ourselves if we like them or not.  We can try different jobs, different foods, different types of music and different fun activities.  We can like everything if we want to.  And suddenly I am excited again about this possibility.  I can recalibrate myself.  I can break old habits and do everything new.  Sweet.

eyes on the prize

On Thursday I made it all the way up the hill without walking my bike for the first time!  I wanted to mention this unbelievable progress on Friday but I spent too much time trying to find out the exact elevation change (a la "our house is 1000 feet straight above the high school [at Woodstock]!" -- it sounds way more impressive.

On Friday I opened at the winery and it was busy.  I took a lot of tables and started talking to people, which I've realized I love doing.  Too bad it takes me so long to transition into "social" mode from my self-sufficient mornings at home, so I can hold a conversation and actually be able to register and respond when someone ribs me or asks me a question...  What a strange thing to suddenly realize about myself.

Among the items stuffed in our P.O. box at the end of that day I found a fat envelope from my Grampi, which included a letter beautifully penned on a sheet of blank computer paper (the improvised margins and densely stacked script reminded me of my old obsession with handwriting analysis) and one of those stapled, pocket-sized devotional books often found stacked in church entryways.  Honestly my first impulse was to roll my eyes, but I am aware of how lucky I am to get a handwritten letter from him so I set it aside to look at later.

He wrote about how much he loved visiting my school and attending my graduation -- he's been present for a good percentage of his grandchildren's graduations from high school, college, even fifth grade, eighth grade, or kindergarten.  He reminded me how lucky I am to have spent the last four years at a Good Christian School, which is something a lot of my family members appreciate considerably more than I do.  And I read, in his own hand: "Thanks for your comment about anthropology.  It's an area of study I love."  At which point I almost laughed.  How far we have come!

So on Saturday morning I opened the little book to June 18, 2011, and read the reflection aloud to Ann.  We giggled a little bit through it, that somehow the two of us are eating Saturday brunch together and reading Bible verses and devotionals.  "This is bad," she laughed, "but can I translate the basic thesis to eyes on the prize?"  As it turns out, the translation of the verse they included said something like "keep your eye on the prize of Christ" -- not exactly, but close enough to be hilarious.

I'm treating this lightly here, but the truth is I've been feeling over the past semester --I'll call them text messages from God, just a little vibration in my pocket that gives forth a message like, "Sup, girl?"  Like, a few months ago on a Wednesday morning, I was sitting across from Mary in the caf crying about how I probably would never find anyone who wanted to take on my emotional baggage, no one who could help me carry it.  She clamped her lips together, but not before she had blurted out, "Jesus!"  I laughed, spraying tears all over our french toast.  "I'm sorry," she said, grinning sheepishly, "but I couldn't help it."

And what are the chances that I would start doing devos on a day whose message is "stay focused on Christ"?  I don't believe it's coincidence.  When it comes down to it, I rarely do.

But I'm also not ready to settle into a church, not ready to dedicate my life's work to the Christian God.  Right now I am uncharacteristically receptive to invitations to faith.  I'm inclined to think that someone's got an eye out for me, that I matter intrinsically as a part of a Creation which begs my care and in which I play a crucial role -- but not that my steps are plotted out for me or that my ultimate purpose is already recorded by a pencil without an eraser.  Maybe.  I'm not going to touch that one right now.  I'm not ready to say that the Christian God is the One and the Only (Alpha and Omega!).  I doubt if I will ever be ready to pledge my life to mission work (which in my family seems almost as radical as joining a vegan nudist colony would be for most of my peers).

All I'm saying is, I'm feeling open-minded.  Open-hearted maybe.  It's time for another Reformation, a Great Awakening, a religious revival.  Right now, I could get gung-ho about jumping on that worship-band-wagon...

happy dads' day

This Father's Day, I am appreciating my dad's incomparable ability to let me go.  You might never have thought about how hard this must be, but as recent college graduates my friends and I are (sometimes painfully) aware of how hard it must be for dads (and moms) to let their kids grow up and maybe even move really far away.  Maybe it's just that my dad has had awhile to work on it, seeing as I left home for the first time when I was 15 and since then I've basically considered myself the dictator of my own life (which is significant since I know of so few female dictators throughout history).

It must be hard to give birth to a baby (I was their first); to feed it, clothe it and house it for an indeterminable number of years; to teach it to drive and cook and make it get a job; and then at some point watch it run off with maybe a backwards glance, if you're lucky.  I've heard some babies even tell their moms and dads they hate them.  I don't remember ever going that far, and if I did say it out loud I didn't mean it, Mutti and Papa, but I guess some do.

Anyway, this is my backwards glance.  I love you guys and appreciate you so much, the things you have shared with me, the values you have instilled in me, and the seemingly inexhaustible love and support you have given me.

50 delicious ways to eat canned tuna*

1. tuna straight from the can, with a fork (Ann's favorite pre-summer 2011)
2. tuna white sauce on rice
3. tuna-green bean casserole
4. tuna melt, closed- or open-face, with cheese and tomato
5. tuna salad sandwiches (add grapes and throw it on a wrap to switch it up)

*List still in progress.  This is turning out more like an "ode to tuna" than a list of recipes, which wouldn't really be that far from the truth...  Ann and I have taken it upon ourselves to figure out as many different ways as possible to eat canned tuna, and are loving it.  I know, it sounds gross, but wait 'til you figure out how many cans of tuna you can get for $5... and how many days it takes you to finish that stash!

honey

I'm on the schedule at work today until 6, but Linda let me go twenty minutes ago even though I desperately wanted to take the table of two guys on a business meeting, one of whom looked like a European biking-backpacker and the other of whom looked like a rugged Australian outback guide.  Desperately.

I finished reading The Help, which galvanized me to write.  That's how I know it's a good book, or a good poem, if it makes me want to do it too.  It doesn't happen very often anymore.

In fact, I've realized over the past two days that I've been avoiding writing for a few months now, even this whole year.  Academic papers are easy to write, and I even enjoy writing them; but there's less of me in them and therein lies the appeal.  Like Eminem said, way back when: I got some skeletons in my closet and I don't know if no one knows it, so before they throw me inside my coffin and close it I'm gon expose it.  Not that my skeletons are particularly grimy but there are definitely some bones in that closet I've been meaning to clear out for awhile now, I just haven't been ready to grab them and pull them out quite yet.  Maybe I'll even bleach them and string them onto a really pretty necklace.

Too far?  What I'm getting at is: emotional baggage.  So many of us are still carrying around what feels like literal tons of pain and I've been saying for awhile now that I'm worried no one will want to share mine with me.  What I'm realizing now is, I just feel guilty sharing it.  And I know a bunch more people who do.  As Liz said last night, "I think we're all kind of starting to realize the gravity of love and heartbreak."  Beautifully put, and painfully true.

I'm a little bitter, sorry to say.  And I want to sweeten up so I can get on with my life and carry honey with me instead of oil.  This is important because it comes up every time I speak to anyone, especially someone I've never spoken to before.

But I've still got some, even if I try to stretch every bottle to ridiculous extents.  Honey is one of the hottest items in our pantry.  This morning I had it on toast and in both tea and yogurt (yes, separately).  Unfortunately it's very expensive, especially the pure local kind which, I've heard, assuages allergies to local irritants (and anything that eases allergies sans side effects is starting to look REALLY attractive right about now).  Maybe, if I wasn't plagued by apiphobia, and if I had more time, I could get my own hive and harvest my own honey and eat as much of it as I possibly could.

...Or maybe I should just skip the middlemen and become the queen bee myself.

productivity

Ann and I don't miss our internet at home; in fact, we love not ever turning on our computers.  The desktop computers at the library serve us just fine, and for the most part put a 1-hour limit on our web-surfing.  Today I've had my session extended because I haven't checked my email or Facebook all weekend -- once, sophomore year, I missed a job interview because I didn't check my email from Thursday to Monday.  This weekend, I didn't miss much of anything pressing.  Life is slowing down a bit.

On Friday I had trial shifts at both of the jobs I interviewed for.  I had decided not to work at the Indian restaurant after the lunch hours because I wouldn't make enough working the shifts I would get.  It's unfortunate, because I am particularly well-suited to serving Indian food in small-town Wisconsin, and I like the family feel of the kitchen.  So I was feeling bad about the way it turned out, but my boss said, "You're not working for me, you're working for yourself."

The afternoon at the Winery stretched into an evening and then into the night.  The sun doesn't go down until at least 9:15 in these parts, but it was dark by the time I got out.  I'd been washing glasses behind the bar for hours, watching all the servers rushing around with their heads spinning, watching how things went down.  A highlight of my shift was chatting with a research psychologist from Lafayette, NY -- an Upstater like me.  He was downtown to see Zed Leppelin, Led Zeppelin cover band, on the Overlook, and promised to let us know how it compared to the real deal when he saw Led Zeppelin live in 1969.  "My girlfriend and I had to be helped to our seats," he said conspiratorially, "if that gives you any clue of what was going on."

I think I'm going to love this.

After work Ann met me downtown and we got 2 beers for $5 at the St. Croix Tavern, where one of the Winery cooks was playing drum set in a band.  She'd heard about the concert from a guy at a stuff sale behind the Red Bird Music Store, one of those back-alley record shops that has more going on than records.  We're not totally clear on exactly what else is going on there, but when I stopped by last week a guy with a fiddle and a guy with a guitar were jamming and talking about bands in the shadowy interior of the shop.

To make a long story short, we survived our first downtown-SCF bar experience.  The band was great, though for the life of me I can't remember what they were called.

Saturday was Ann's birthday, and her family came up to check out the scene and take us out to lunch.  We spent the evening garage saling and grocery shopping.  One of the main activities that happens in our library quarters is clothes-cutting.  This weekend several T-shirts, dresses, and sweatshirts underwent drastic makeovers on our hardwood floor.  For dinner: 5/$10 frozen pizza and cheap beer.  Post-college, baby.

On Sunday we slept late and ate French toast brunch on the back patio in the sun.  Ann mowed the gigantic lawn while I cleaned house a little, getting more moved in.  She parked the riding mower in the garage and we hiked into the jungly garden to harvest some rhubarb and asparagus.  We spent the afternoon baking rhubarb cake for our neighbors -- something people don't really do anymore.  After our social walk around the neighborhood we threw together a delectable tuna casserole with French-cut green beans and cooked the rest of the rhubarb into a sauce for cobbler.  So domestic.  So much fun!

The other day a fellow graduate expressed frustration that our "productive" afternoons these days are spent not writing papers or reading lots of dry intellectual books, but finishing a load or two of laundry, writing thank-you notes and cooking dinner.  That's some Cartesian dualism if I ever saw it, some residual Enlightenment guilt.  Ann and I spend our evenings reading (for fun!) and wondering aloud whether taking care of ourselves is going to get old after awhile.  I get such satisfaction out of balancing our meals and tackying another poster to the wall.  Such satisfaction from dropping off a plate of warm, fresh rhubarb cake at our neighbors' front doors.  Such satisfaction that I smell like Cajun penne and wine when I disarm the alarm at the end of a long shift.  Such satisfaction falling asleep over my pleasure reading, and dreaming about my future jobs and projects.  I feel so capable.  Not that I can do everything, but at least I can figure it out.

seeking drone for [insert meaningful position here]

A few days ago an old friend from my small group at confirmation camp (back in 7th grade!) texted me "what's up?"  I said I was looking for a job and, after two (relatively short) days of active searching I was feeling a bit hopeless about it.  Because suddenly it hit me that not only am I looking for some summer income, but I should probably start figuring out what's next, you know, what comes at the end of the summer.  I'd like to start on a trajectory, a "career path," as they say, but a job title and even a specific description of what I'd like to do evades me.

I said I wanted to work with kids, and he said he'd had a youth counselor when he was younger and he thought it had to be a really hard job.  I said I thought it sounded like an opportunity to form meaningful relationships.  "Well that depends on how you define 'meaningful,'" he said, and I almost laughed out loud.  "You're talking to an anthropology major," I replied.  "Of course it's vague, and open for interpretation."

It was a can of worms I maybe should have left alone, but it's a good and painfully relevant question.  Just today a classmate and good friend called me asking the same basic question: how can I do meaningful work?  Especially when I have to think about how I'm going to survive?!

On Wednesday morning I took a brief break from the Job Hunt to write thank-you notes, and around 10:30 in the morning I got a phone call asking if I could come in to a winery on main street for an interview that afternoon.  On my way to that interview, after posting my letters, I got a phone call from the Indian restaurant on main street asking if I could come in to chat that evening.  At 6 he said, "You're familiar with Indian food?  How about you come in tomorrow just before 11?"

So today was my first day of work.  I LOVED offering recommendations, filling water glasses, clearing plates, bantering with the kitchen staff...  It was a slow day, and the back of the shop was so from the kitchen, but one group of women asked at the end of their meal, "What was your name?  We plan to come back here and see you again."  I smiled, "Great, I look forward to it!"  And they said, "We look forward to it too!"

Meaningful work?  The way I see it now, meaningful is not an adjective but an adverb: I work meaningfully.  Like a good anthropology major, I know that meaningful is a state of mind more than a fixed factual description.  I know who I am and what I value, and that is something I carry with me into any interview, any job, any relationship, even any 2-minute conversation.

eating cheap #1: tuna sauce

Speaking of the social consciousness/frugality tightrope, here's our take on a classic recipe from my childhood.  Using local green onions from the Bike Farm (bought at the farmers' market on Saturday) and a can of tuna that cost 59 cents at Aldi, we cooked up a delicious, healthy dinner in less than 10 minutes -- and now you can too!

Saute some onions (your favorite color, chopped) over very low heat with a bit of butter.
Throw in a can of tuna (in water, not oil!) and some chopped celery tops; and keep frying a bit.
Add about 2 Tbsp. flour -- we eyeballed it, 'cause we're super into that.
SLOWLY add about a cup of milk -- don't let it scald or bubble, but with the flour it'll create a white sauce that will thicken nicely.
Add black pepper to be like us, or italian spice or your choice of savory seasonings to take it to the next level.

We ate our tuna sauce on white rice (always leftovers in the fridge) but we're planning on trying it again on pasta sometime in the future -- maybe a crispy-ish egg noodle-tuna casserole style dish in the oven.

*Courtesy of my mom for the basic recipe <3

will work for homeostasis

Monday.  Waking up feels like any other day of my life.

But it's not like any other day in my life.  It's not summer and it's not the school year.  It has never seemed more truly the first day of the rest of my life.  Today I have to be more self-efficacious than ever before in my life, and I feel strangely energized by the probably over-dramatized weight I'm putting on this particular Monday, June 6, 2011.

We've been hearing for years that nobody's getting hired these days, especially not right out of college.  I've been reading on Facebook and hearing through the grapevine about friends who can't find a job anywhere.  I was feeling lucky the other day at the number of "we're hiring" signs, and the overall bright responses I received to the question "Are you hiring, by any chance?"  But it's another story entirely to actually present myself for work, to fill out an application and turn it in.  It seems strange that practically shoving my (very valuable, if I do say so myself) time and energy at someone would feel so much like stepping on toes, but it does.  Maybe it's just my pride.

Which I am trying to squash, for a lot of different reasons.  It's a hard balance, to be proud enough not to stand for things that are hurtful to my self but not so proud that it's an obstacle to action.  Not easy to figure out and not easy to do.  Better just to plunge into it and work it out later -- at this point inertia is one of the most terrifying pathogens I think most of us can imagine.

Speaking of balance, living seems to be right now a series of pretty precarious balancing acts.  In the front of my mind right now there's the social consciousness-financial feasibility tightrope: do we buy organic foods from the co-op downtown or buy everything for a dollar at Aldi?  After four years at an institution like St. Olaf that puts so much emphasis on sustainability, living "green," avoiding products assembled by blind children in third-world countries or sprayed with deadly pesticides, it's been a bit of a struggle not to read the label on every product before we buy it.  The truth is, it's just not practical.  I want to care for the world I live in, but sometimes that means eating canned black beans grown and processed who knows where for 79 cents a can, just so I can get through the day.  And I'll try to turn off the lights when I'm not using them.  I really will do my best.

Another unexpected shock comes when we have been, so far, locked inside our house before nightfall every night we've stayed here, with the alarm system turned on.  My work availability is limited because I am not comfortable, as a young woman, riding my bike home alone from a late-night shift or hangout at a bar downtown.  I'm hardly even comfortable walking past uncovered windows after dark, not knowing what's out there.  Even though this seems like a fairly safe, small town, I perceive danger in my gender and my age, and the fact that after four years at St. Olaf my street smarts are baby-soft like my feet at the end of winter before I start running around barefoot on beds of hot rocks full of biting insects.  Or some variation of that feat.

In any case, it seems our party days are over.  And for Bizz-squared(TM), this could be a big adjustment.

I realized today that, when left to my own devices, I Get Things Done.  I tend to feel paralyzed when I know that my actions impact someone else, someone's schedule or living space or conception of the world.  This is a good thing to realize, so that I can start to sort out what is important for me to do for myself and how much I can feasibly take into consideration other people's toes, as it were.  Inertia.  Paralysis.  Terrifying.

So today, I turned in 3 job applications.  I put an important envelope in the mail and rented a P.O. box.  I visited the Chamber of Commerce for information about local businesses; the county information center for new resident resources; the Lucky Cup Coffeehouse for lunch; and the local Edward Jones branch office for a quick refresher course in personal finance.  I imported all my mail and contacts into gmail.  I checked out The Help from the library.  And I sweated through every item of clothing I put on this morning.

I think I can go home satisfied.

TICKing things off the list

100 Facebook notifications (mostly from my sister)

20 file folders

15 boxes (give or take) in the back of the truck

8-dollar swimsuit bottoms

5 wood ticks (and counting...)

4 years' worth of Asian beetle carcasses littering the floor of our summer home

3 job applications

2 (HUGE) scoops of ice cream

1 enormous farmhouse

I know I should be able to count by now (I remember when Steve from "Blues Clues" got replaced on the show so he could go to college and learn how to count to 50) but I'm going to use the excuse that in real life sometimes numbers in the countdown get skipped.  At least I can get from 5 to 1 backwards without too much of a hitch...

Ann and I have been moving for days, Monday and Tuesday spent moving our entire lives out of Northfield and, step by step, up to St. Croix Falls for the summer.  We're feeling pretty accomplished, since we already cleaned most of the space we're going to be using in the house and have moved the bulk of our items into the downstairs library, where it should stay cool enough to sleep comfortably at night.  We'll ride bikes to work (and to church, and to wherever we go for fun on Friday nights).  We plan to live simply, in two rooms of the huge farmhouse and mostly outdoors, without air conditioning.  We're still deciding if we will splurge on internet, and the Monthly Grocery Bill Bets are open.

On the plus side, we walked up and down Main Street this afternoon and a decent number of places are hiring!  I'm feeling a bit overqualified, but right now I'm mostly concerned with diving into the community so I just want to meet as many people as possible, and be friendly to everyone.  We've been waving at other drivers and so far everybody seems receptive.  We already got a warm welcome at the Lucky Cup (which has Wi-Fi!) and signed our brand-new St. Croix Falls Public Library cards!  We plan to hit up the Music on the Overlook on Friday evenings and the Farmers' Market on Saturday.  This weekend, there is a safari-themed petting zoo.  Our new friend Cole at the library enticed us into going by naming an animal we'd never heard of, and said we'd have to come back and pet it if we wanted to find out what it was.

The ticks will take some getting used to.  It's a bad year for ticks, i.e. they are EVERYWHERE, and while EmRo got the bulk of them last week today Ann and I squashed about 10 overall.  I'm working on the bug thing, sweeping up the Asian beetles and daddy long-legs without squirming too much, not screaming at bees or ticks, and basically just discovering how to be comfortable with the parts of nature that bite and sting.  This should prove a character-building summer for me.

I couldn't be more pumped.