Among the huge transitions involved in moving out of dorms and/or out of our parents' homes is buying food, and cooking it. I am just starting to get the hang of eating at 7:00 when I'm hungry instead of at 9:45 when the food I started cooking when I was hungry got ready. I still have not quite mastered Efficient Shopping for Singles -- I consistently buy too much food at a lower unit price, and then have to throw it away. And I always make either WAY too much or too little rice.
I've started eating lunch most days with bunch of girls at work. We all sit in the back room and compare notes on what we brought: leftover home-cooked food, leftover Domino's pizza, hummus and veggies, PB&J... We talk about a lot of things, actually: weight; our roommates/children/families; exercise and happy/healthy living; beers and bars; our social lives and dating lives or lack thereof; current events; what it's like being a working woman. You know the drill. Girl talk. I spent my final semester at St. Olaf independently studying it; and every other day I find myself wanting to add to the study or expand it or reiterate all the points I made in the first round.
Now that I'm out of college, I spend a lot less time talking about grand topics and a lot more time talking about basic survival: sleep, food, body pain, and work/life balance. This is what it's all about. No time for existential musing anymore. I don't mind it one bit! These are the things we spend most of our time doing, and so they are the things we spend most of our time talking about. And thus I continue my Life as a Series of Self-Improvement Projects.
Once, when I was complaining about running out of leftovers, Lori told me about a friend of hers who spends one whole day per month cooking. She makes a bunch of family-sized recipes, packs them up in serving-sized plastic containers, and freezes them. Lunch for a month! I know this genius as "The Queen of Single Girl Living."
I have been dying to emulate her for weeks or even months now, but given my whirlwind schedule I only got around to it this past weekend -- forgetting, of course, that I had a football-watching party to go to and sub sandwiches to make at church in the morning. And so I learned something very important: I need to set aside an entire day for this project. Nothing before it, nothing after.
I was shooting for 5 dishes, but I only squeezed out three. In round 1, only the lasagna turned out delicious. I ended up being 2 hours late to the Super Bowl party, and even that only after calling my mom in tears asking her how I could possibly fix the watery slow-cooked chili and the soupy jambalaya full of crunchy rice.
Which brings me to the second very important lesson I learned: I'm not really a "single" kind of girl.
Yes, I am fiercely independent, with a strong history of commitmentphobia. But I like company, and I need moral support. I have been blessed, pretty much since birth, with a family like football padding and first aid combined. I have sought out and been blessed with a series of good friends like crutches, wrist braces, and pacemakers.
I wrestled myself out of bed on Saturday morning to go to the First Saturday writers' breakfast at Panera. I almost didn't go because my mom wasn't going, but I'm so glad I did because I got to talk to a some great people. One of them mentioned her son, soon to be a college graduate, and how she feels she can hardly give him any advice because when she was in his position she was already with her husband.
My parents were the same way. It is strange being young and single and plotting out our lives as individuals instead of as a couple and a family, especially when our parents and grandparents often have very little context for our situation. So we craft these lifestyles centered around things we like and things we need to do to get by, and in many cases spend a good portion of our time trying to meet someone good enough to build our lives with. It can be a lonely road.
I force myself to get up and run every Wednesday morning, on the treadmill, with my earphones in; but every single week as I watch the miles tick up toward "3.0" the only thing I can think about is Anna pushing me to run another lap around the track, every Monday and Wednesday morning at 9:00. When I swim on Monday mornings I miss my lap counters for the 500 freestyle, and Kristi who always swam the butterfly races.
On Sunday, I was so late to church I missed nearly the entire first service. So I stayed for the second one, and walked into the sanctuary alone and sat down -- alone. And just as I did so, someone in the second row cleared her coat off the seat next to hers and beckoned me up to join her. It's a good thing she did, too, because when I started feeling dizzy in the middle of the service she mothered me nearly to death, and as hard as it was for me to admit there is nothing I wanted or needed more in that moment.
Wednesday night, as we have established, is date night, but here I am at the library by myself first, writing a blog post. This is my time. I have had to carve it out of a slew of other things I could do on Wednesday afternoons, and I need it. But what do I write about? And what do I write for? After my last post my dad recommended a few books to me. New Facebook friends liked and shared the post. And an old friend sent me an email saying she appreciates my constant focus on love.
Out of all the ways I describe my blog to people, somehow this has never made the list: a constant focus on love. I think of it as my log of adversity and (hopefully, eventually) overcoming it. It is about the struggles of young adulthood. It is about moving to a new place and meeting new people and rediscovering or evaluating the things that make my life meaningful. It is about depression and financial worries and the undeserved feeling of getting old. I write all of this in hopes of putting words to things other people feel but can't -- or would rather not -- express. Secrets rarely do anybody any good, so in an effort to conquer the struggles of being 20-something in the 21st century, I'm blowing that shit wiiiiide open. I'm crowdsourcing solutions to a world of problems, and at the very least asking questions that need to be asked.
And here I am, week after week, writing posts about love, of all things, and how I couldn't live without it.
I am going to try the cooking extravaganza again. Yes, I saved the jambalaya and the chili is on its way to goodhood, but I'm going to do a few things differently next time. The learning curve still hasn't leveled out, which continues to take me by surprise. I'll make different dishes, use my gut a little more, but most of all I'm going to love what I'm doing and I'm going to set aside the entire day for cooking and I'll probably bring a buddy (and maybe some wine) into the mix.
I'm going to be the Queen of Single Girl Living With Other People.
I've started eating lunch most days with bunch of girls at work. We all sit in the back room and compare notes on what we brought: leftover home-cooked food, leftover Domino's pizza, hummus and veggies, PB&J... We talk about a lot of things, actually: weight; our roommates/children/families; exercise and happy/healthy living; beers and bars; our social lives and dating lives or lack thereof; current events; what it's like being a working woman. You know the drill. Girl talk. I spent my final semester at St. Olaf independently studying it; and every other day I find myself wanting to add to the study or expand it or reiterate all the points I made in the first round.
Now that I'm out of college, I spend a lot less time talking about grand topics and a lot more time talking about basic survival: sleep, food, body pain, and work/life balance. This is what it's all about. No time for existential musing anymore. I don't mind it one bit! These are the things we spend most of our time doing, and so they are the things we spend most of our time talking about. And thus I continue my Life as a Series of Self-Improvement Projects.
Once, when I was complaining about running out of leftovers, Lori told me about a friend of hers who spends one whole day per month cooking. She makes a bunch of family-sized recipes, packs them up in serving-sized plastic containers, and freezes them. Lunch for a month! I know this genius as "The Queen of Single Girl Living."
I have been dying to emulate her for weeks or even months now, but given my whirlwind schedule I only got around to it this past weekend -- forgetting, of course, that I had a football-watching party to go to and sub sandwiches to make at church in the morning. And so I learned something very important: I need to set aside an entire day for this project. Nothing before it, nothing after.
I was shooting for 5 dishes, but I only squeezed out three. In round 1, only the lasagna turned out delicious. I ended up being 2 hours late to the Super Bowl party, and even that only after calling my mom in tears asking her how I could possibly fix the watery slow-cooked chili and the soupy jambalaya full of crunchy rice.
Which brings me to the second very important lesson I learned: I'm not really a "single" kind of girl.
Yes, I am fiercely independent, with a strong history of commitmentphobia. But I like company, and I need moral support. I have been blessed, pretty much since birth, with a family like football padding and first aid combined. I have sought out and been blessed with a series of good friends like crutches, wrist braces, and pacemakers.
I wrestled myself out of bed on Saturday morning to go to the First Saturday writers' breakfast at Panera. I almost didn't go because my mom wasn't going, but I'm so glad I did because I got to talk to a some great people. One of them mentioned her son, soon to be a college graduate, and how she feels she can hardly give him any advice because when she was in his position she was already with her husband.
My parents were the same way. It is strange being young and single and plotting out our lives as individuals instead of as a couple and a family, especially when our parents and grandparents often have very little context for our situation. So we craft these lifestyles centered around things we like and things we need to do to get by, and in many cases spend a good portion of our time trying to meet someone good enough to build our lives with. It can be a lonely road.
I force myself to get up and run every Wednesday morning, on the treadmill, with my earphones in; but every single week as I watch the miles tick up toward "3.0" the only thing I can think about is Anna pushing me to run another lap around the track, every Monday and Wednesday morning at 9:00. When I swim on Monday mornings I miss my lap counters for the 500 freestyle, and Kristi who always swam the butterfly races.
On Sunday, I was so late to church I missed nearly the entire first service. So I stayed for the second one, and walked into the sanctuary alone and sat down -- alone. And just as I did so, someone in the second row cleared her coat off the seat next to hers and beckoned me up to join her. It's a good thing she did, too, because when I started feeling dizzy in the middle of the service she mothered me nearly to death, and as hard as it was for me to admit there is nothing I wanted or needed more in that moment.
Wednesday night, as we have established, is date night, but here I am at the library by myself first, writing a blog post. This is my time. I have had to carve it out of a slew of other things I could do on Wednesday afternoons, and I need it. But what do I write about? And what do I write for? After my last post my dad recommended a few books to me. New Facebook friends liked and shared the post. And an old friend sent me an email saying she appreciates my constant focus on love.
Out of all the ways I describe my blog to people, somehow this has never made the list: a constant focus on love. I think of it as my log of adversity and (hopefully, eventually) overcoming it. It is about the struggles of young adulthood. It is about moving to a new place and meeting new people and rediscovering or evaluating the things that make my life meaningful. It is about depression and financial worries and the undeserved feeling of getting old. I write all of this in hopes of putting words to things other people feel but can't -- or would rather not -- express. Secrets rarely do anybody any good, so in an effort to conquer the struggles of being 20-something in the 21st century, I'm blowing that shit wiiiiide open. I'm crowdsourcing solutions to a world of problems, and at the very least asking questions that need to be asked.
And here I am, week after week, writing posts about love, of all things, and how I couldn't live without it.
I am going to try the cooking extravaganza again. Yes, I saved the jambalaya and the chili is on its way to goodhood, but I'm going to do a few things differently next time. The learning curve still hasn't leveled out, which continues to take me by surprise. I'll make different dishes, use my gut a little more, but most of all I'm going to love what I'm doing and I'm going to set aside the entire day for cooking and I'll probably bring a buddy (and maybe some wine) into the mix.
I'm going to be the Queen of Single Girl Living With Other People.
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