when life gets in the way

It's Wednesday, and I am just sitting down to post at the time I'm usually hitting "publish." As always, life is complicated, and it starts pouring when I am halfway home, and right when you are starting to get comfortable with the way things are something happens to shake it all up again and you have to start the "getting used to it" process all over again.

Date night is experiencing some turbulence lately. Not so much internally, and if it was I guess you wouldn't expect me to share it on the blog anyway, but thanks to factors outside of our control, J. and I are having to reevaluate.

The coffeeshop of lore, Bishop's, where we met, has been uprooted and is now a one-man baked goods supplier run out of a home kitchen. For awhile J. thought he was going to be without a job, but then the people who are taking over the space said they wanted to keep him on as part of the startup team for the new place. Which to me sounds like a great opportunity, but also comes with a heavy load in terms of time, energy, and expertise.

In my entrepreneurship classes in college, we always talked about what huge investment is involved in starting a new business. It's more than a full-time job, and obviously tends to require a lot of financial capital, and you also have to be extremely well-prepared with a business plan, some projection of how things are going to pan out (hopefully supported by at least a little market research), a certain degree of knowledge of the industry and good business practice in general.

But you don't really get it until you or your significant other is working 13- to 16-hour days, and when he's not actually at work he's tired and stressed out and distracted. You don't really get how much of a sacrifice it can be to follow your dreams (if opening a business is a dream for you, as it has been for me since I was 13 or 14) until you start to feel the repercussions on other areas of your life, outside of work.

And here's what really gets to me, as I'm recognizing this latest embodiment of the ripple effect.

I have a friend who recently got a 9-to-5 job just as her husband started working second shift. Exciting developments for both of them professionally, but rough because they are pretty recently married and now they rarely see each other. It turns into something similar to a long-distance relationship, where you only see each other on the weekends. And as many of us know, when you have so little time together it puts a heck of a lot of pressure on the time you do have to spend with each other.

I wonder how friends with new babies manage to maintain their jobs, their relationship, and make sure the baby gets fed, when, for example, they have to get a sitter to cover the undetermined amount of time between when mommy leaves for work and daddy gets home. When do they see each other?

And how did my parents, when I was three, four, five, six years old, take care of two to four children while my dad was in school and my mom worked second shift catering at Holiday Inn (which did not fulfill her), manage to feed themselves and their children, and still have time to even speak to each other, much less maintain an actual relationship and stay married for twenty-some years? I'm floored.

Because here I am, with no children, working 35 hours a week, falling out of touch with my boyfriend who I see every day, when he has an unusual work schedule for a finite (if undetermined) amount of time. We snap at each other. We talk past each other. We keep missing each other's meaning. Our communication -- the very foundation of our relationship -- is just generally suffering. I don't know how people do it when they have to go out of their way to see each other at all, when they have dependents, and when they are operating under these conditions for an indefinite amount of time.

When it comes down to it, J. and I are fine. Just today he had a couple of hours off from work, so when I got out we sat down for a pretty leisurely dinner at Hockessin's favorite little Mexican place, and got to actually look each other in the eye and talk about the things we haven't talked about.

So what I'm saying is, it's hard. It takes a daunting amount of energy and intention and commitment to even approach the topic of reconnecting, working out how to line everything back up, or find a new order that will work under different circumstances without burning everyone out. And every couple or family or friend group has their own version of this story: And Then Life Got In The Way.

Actually, I would bet that every couple, family, and friend group has a whole series of these stories. I'm sure I'll be writing and rewriting mine until the end of time.


* * * * * * * 
Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! Tune in on Sunday night for this week's All Good Things list, and next Wednesday for more reflections on being a "new adult."

all good things: brought to you by the letter B

All Good Things is a weekly feature on the blog. It started as a one-hour Sunday night radio show on KSTO St. Olaf radio, featuring feel-good music and 10 highlights from the past week. The show, and its current written form, is brought to you by Clara, Second Set of Baby Steps creator, and her radio co-host Cassie.

1. Song of the week: The Wire by HAIM.  Girl power band with some serious talent... Plus, the video is great. PLUS, men getting broken up with like women. I really do think we do it right.

2. Bonus song of the week: Red Hands by Walk off the Earth.  It's everywhere right now, and hasn't gotten old... At least not yet!

3. Cowboy Monkey Rodeo at the Wilmington Blue Rocks. We already all know how I love the Blue Rocks and minor league, hometown baseball in general... But this took my love to new heights. Hands down, the funniest thing I have seen in months. Legitimately: monkeys dressed in fringe jackets, riding on border collies and herding goats around the field. Priceless. I highly recommend you watch this: http://youtu.be/jGqfQuy14pA

Also, Wilmington was the City That Started It All! Now the Cowboy Monkey Rodeo does shows all over the country.

4. Birthday surprises. A bunch of us gathered at Grotto on Friday for a friend's birthday, and he didn't know we would be there. The look on his face was priceless.

5. Playing it by ear and rolling with the punches. On Friday night I was trying to split my time between two birthday parties, and coordinate with a bunch of different people about who would be where when... And of course nothing went according to plan! But I did get to see and spend time with a lot of different important people. So it all worked out in the end... More or less!

6. Babies! There were babies at the barbecue yesterday. One of them was a rambunctious two-year-old who had us all wrapped around his finger... And then of course there's Jason's niece, who I swear gets cuter every day.

7. Barbecue. We had burgers and dogs every day this weekend. Delicious, of course... But mostly great because it means we're with friends.

8. Beer. Had some homebrew that was good this weekend... Also, pumpkin beer and Oktoberfest season is already starting! Not quite ready for it yet... But I'm definitely getting used to the idea!

9. Caprese salad. The "B" here being fresh basil. I am OBSESSED with caprese salad right now, since Jason grabbed all those local plum tomatoes, and has been nursing his basil plant back to health in its new, much larger pot. It's so delicious, so simple, so light and fresh!

10. Random singing. This is actually a large part of my life in general, but this week it has come up a lot. I'll say this is a sign of good feeling all around, sharing music and laughter with different groups of people, lots of "motor mouth" belting out songs in the car, and "harmonizing" with the radio and with each other.

* * * * * * *
Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! Tune in next Sunday for more All Good Things, and come back Wednesday for my latest reflections on being a "new adult."

30 weird things we never would have thought to prepare for before "growing up"

This week's lunch break phone date covered a lot of really important topics, starting out about as sad-serious as you can get and ending on a much more lighthearted note. Still, though, the things we have to talk about are big. Important. Of consequence.

I want to take a moment (before I dive into topics I am actually equipped to tackle) to pay homage -- one of the sad starting topics for those Oles who read the blog. First, I must make tribute to Professor Jim Farrell, who I just learned passed away almost a month ago. This man made a huge impact on the St. Olaf community at large, and more specifically on my immediate circles, of which most members at least dabbled in environmental studies, campus ecology, the impact we make on our surroundings. To a man who knew the great extent of what that means: cheers.

You may also know that Pastor Jennifer Koenig has resigned since we left Olaf, due to illness. I must also pay tribute to her, the woman who taught so many of us how to communicate, how to smile, how to find peace. This week has brought some heartbreaking updates on her status, posted on CaringBridge. This is an uncomfortable thing to mourn at this stage, and yet we are in mourning. Please keep her and her family and the huge number of her supporters in your hearts in the coming weeks and months.

Now, I realize, this post can't be lighthearted in any universe. But I must take this, as I said, to a dimension where I can process it.

One of the amazing things about both of these people is how wide are the ripples of this news. Both of them taught my peers and me far more than could ever be encapsulated in a textbook or thesis paper. Or in two years of blogs. The things they have left us with clarified who we are and how we understand our lives, and continue to emerge to this day as we work through things like relationships and grief on the phone more than two years after our last class, our last coffee bought with FlexDollars in the Cage during senior week.

After Monday's phone conversation, which finished with a bittersweet acknowledgement of "the weird shit we have had to deal with since graduating," I read an article on BuzzFeed called "12 Things Our Parents Forgot To Teach Us."

(Since I am in the social media marketing field, I can't gloss over this prime example of native advertising: posts with some degree of actual substance, designed and paid for to promote a company or service. The topic of a future post, I'm sure... But back to the meat of the issue.)

My parents luckily at least mentioned once or twice that credit cards are not free money (number one), and that lending money to people must be done with extreme caution, if ever (number four), and they've definitely given me a crash course or 11 about how to read a paper map (number eight). But even if they did give me lessons in some of the others I still have stumbled over them once or twice. For example:

5. You never really stop feeling like a kid.
7. How to get along with your roommates.
9. How you feel after too much coffee.
10. How to deal with your first heartbreak.

And to be fair, a lot of this stuff would be pretty dang hard if not impossible to teach. I'm not sure whether the history of anthropological theory and the forced downtime and the infamous Project Without Parameters were intentional cover-ups for daily life lessons, but some of them sure served that purpose in the long run.

So, without further ado, a partial list of Weird Shit We Would Never Have Thought To Prepare For, But Kinda Wish We Would Have Known About In Advance. (Also known as, A Preview Of What Life Will Be Like From Here On Out.)

Disclaimer: Some of these are drawn from personal experience, and some of them are borrowed from undisclosed sources. You know who you are.

1. That we have food allergies, and spent all of college feeling really gross all the time and not knowing why.
2. Along similar lines, how to cook (and drink) gluten-/lactose-/meat-free...
3. Speaking of drinking, that we get more hungover, even if we drink less, higher-quality booze.
4. In other news, how to drink with bosses and coworkers without accidentally saying anything you shouldn't. Plus, what if everyone else is just hammered?
5. Also, how do you grocery shop in general?
6. What it's like really not having any money, but also not having a cafeteria that we, our parents, our grandparents, and/or our student loans already paid for.
7. How great it is to live somewhere that has laundry included.
8. How to meet our significant others' parents.
9. That we might want to move in with somebody before we marry them, and
10. How to talk to our parents about it, or
11. How to pretend like we are not living together so our parents or other important institutions don't find out about it.
12. How to work a job that didn't exist when we went to college, or even when we graduated college, or even when we got called in for the interview.
13. How to find something new to do if what we thought we wanted to do as a career turned out not to be the right thing.
14. How to leave a job properly. Is that a thing?
15. Deciding whether to sign our souls away to make monthly car payments on a new(er) car, or whether we would rather figure out how to get our old car into the shop every other month to get repairs done on it and parts replaced, and then how to get to work after that, and how to pay for it.
16. Or, whether it's worth it to live and work where you don't need a car. Really, there aren't that many options!
17. Facebook friends who get married and then change their names, and you have to look through half their pictures to figure out who they are and how you know them.
18. And then when your news feed is suddenly full of babies. Babies everywhere. Where did they all come from?! No, wait... I don't actually want to know.
19. Realizing that every conversation and relationship we have is a cross-cultural one and that you can never assume anybody is on the same page as you.
20. How to handle getting mugged, or robbed.
21. Is it ok to move away to get over somebody?
22. Or, if you move away for any reason, how do you meet new people you might like to spend time with? How do you meet anybody?
23. Also, how do you make friends in a new place if you know that you, or they, are going to be leaving after their gig is up?
24. How to get up and go to work when we really just don't feel like it.
25. How to grieve when life goes on and nobody around you knows about it.
26. How to wear black, brown, navy, taupe, or anything conservative without getting super bored.
27. That people make up responses and solutions to a lot of questions they don't know how to answer.
28. How to reconcile spiritual needs and personal faith, disillusionment with organized religion, and family expectations.
29. How to go on a cheap date without feeling cheap, or, if it is a first date, without making a big deal about it so the other person doesn't think you're high-strung.

And finally, number 30:
How to do all this stuff when your closest friends, the ones who know what you're dealing with and how you deal with things... When those people are who-knows-where, but they're definitely not up the hall, they may be in the same city if we're lucky but sometimes aren't even reachable by phone?

This is the really tough part. I have been fortunate to know that I am not alone in dealing with super weird stuff, and fortunate to be able to share it with people close to me and also with people who are really far away. (I must admit, I love Facebook and smartphones and text messaging for this reason...even though they are apparently causing the breakdown of our society.)

And I have been incredibly blessed to share it with all of you. Read on, dear friends. Live on!


* * * * * * *
Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! Tune in on Sunday night for this week's All Good Things list, and next Wednesday for more reflections on being a "new adult."

all good things: history and more heartwarming things

1. Song of the week: London Calling by The Clash. For some reason I've been hankering to listen to London Calling by The Clash this week. It's a completely random urge since I don't normally listen to The Clash.

2. Visiting friends! A friend from St. Olaf just moved to New York for grad school, and she came down to hang out for a weekend. It was really good to see her and get to talk about lots of interesting things. And an excuse to go to all the cool places there are to go to around here, and get people that I like together.

3. Old New Castle. I'm sure this one has made the list before, because I love Old New Castle. (It's also known as Historic New Castle, but I like the contradiction of "old new" right next to each other.) I also like the tours and the museums and just walking up and down the cobbled streets... I could take the old courthouse tour a hundred times (and I'm already well on my way). I like walking past this huge purple house that was up for sale a few months ago, and has since been taken off the market, but I still gaze at forlornly every time I walk past. And I always leave feeling more relaxed than I do at any other time.

4. Baking soda, tin foil, and hot water. We found a few pieces of really tarnished silverware, and discovered that if you line a pan with aluminum foil, set the silverware in there, sprinkle baking soda over it, cover it in warm water, and let it sit, the change is pretty impressive.

5. Puppies and babies. Separately, these things are both really cute. Together, they are unstoppably adorable. I'm not even a big dog person, but today at family dinner there was a new puppy who is SO CUTE and rambunctious... AND a baby that, as we have already determined, is endlessly charming, captivating, and the apple of everyone's eye. Is "too much cute to go around" even a thing? Because if it is, we achieved it today.

6. Someone bringing treats to work! I absolutely love walking into the break room at work and finding some type of treats in the break room. Last week there was a meeting in our building that had an entire tray of leftover desserts! It made my entire day. Nothing like an unexpected brownie, cookie, or bar to make your afternoon go by more quickly.

7. I've been working at my job for a little over a year now, and I got certificate from my boss the other day. It honors my "1 year of service changing lives and communities." Sometimes it can feel like no one notices or appreciates the things I do at work, so little things like a certificate really brighten my day!

8. Bunnies! My friend Kristy is moving out to Massachusetts which is really sad. But until her boyfriend, Mitch, gets back from moving her out there Luke and I get to watch her bunny, Noah! He's chocolate brown and super cute. We're learning his likes and dislikes. Likes: carrots, apples, head scratches, hiding under the coffee table. Dislikes: being picked up, loud apartment noises (slamming doors,etc), and going to bed at night. I want to keep him forever!

9. The National. Luke and I saw them in concert last week, and they were fantastic as always. They played at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium which has the worst acoustics in the world, but they still managed to be so great! At one point the lead singer hopped off the stage with his mic and sang a song while walking through the crowd. Such a lovely time!

10. Writing thank you's. I've been having some bridal showers lately, and my friends and family are so incredibly generous. Writing thank you's to them after the shower I get to really think about how grateful I am to each person and take a moment to explain why I feel so lucky to have that person in my life. When I first start writing thank you's I always feel like it's a chore, but by the end I'm feeling so overwhelmed and happy to have these people in my life!

* * * * * * *
Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! Tune in next Sunday for more All Good Things, and come back Wednesday for my latest reflections on being a "new adult."

consequences

Good Thing #4 on Sunday was J.K. Rowling's first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy. Since Sunday I have finished this book, and I have to update my recommendation.

 

I still say the book was excellent. J.K. Rowling has always had a sixth sense for details, which is largely what made the Harry Potter series so compelling, in characters, plot, and setting. In this latest book, the details did most to build characters and their relationships with each other.

She writes people so well. She writes teenagers to a T, which I think is hard to do without cheapening them as human beings and as characters, and she gets into the inner workings of adult minds and motivations as well. And, I think most brilliantly, she packages up so perfectly the complexity of everyone's emotions and motivations and the way they all tangle together to create situations, in all their awkward, dream-like glory.

All of this truth gets a little heavy and rough at times throughout the book, but right at the end, between page three-hundred-and-whatever and the end of the book, between now and Sunday, she just clobbers the readers with sad. I had heard when I first started reading that the book was depressing, and I didn't really believe it, and I still wouldn't personally call it depressing... But I must mention this disclaimer, that the book is really dramatically sad. And also that I loved it anyway. It made me think, but not too hard.

On Monday of this week I went out for dinner with my parents, and we talked about relationships. There has been a lot of relationship talk lately: how love distorts our decisions, and how our responses elicit certain responses from other people, and other things that would take days to relay to you. I will mention briefly that, on Monday night, the main agenda item was Jason moving in with me.

Now, despite the fact that I have always been fairly independent, and that I definitely am developing my own life now, and that I truly believe that my parents would accept me and love me no matter what... This is a scary conversation to have. It's also one I want to have with them, because they are pretty smart and have a lot of life experiences and, as much as I might not like to admit sometimes, they do know me extraordinarily well.

I won't go into a lot of detail, but the sum of the conversation was something along these lines: "Your actions have consequences, and you have to live with them one way or another, and we don't want anybody to get hurt."

Pretty amazing. Did I mention my parents are really smart and really cool?

Anyway, this isn't really anything new to me, since that has been, more or less, the gist of every "tough" conversation I've had with my parents ever (and a lot of the less tough ones too). Your actions have consequences. This is a fact I am all too familiar with.

Among the other things I've learned in my relatively few years: I can know things, and I can be 110% prepared, and I can have thought out the possible consequences of my every action hundreds of times (paying more attention to the details than J.K. Rowling herself)... And I can still be surprised, caught off guard, thrown for a loop, mentally and emotionally destroyed by an outcome to a situation. The degree of destruction caused by life's little curveballs has tended to decrease over time, because I learn from my mistakes and I learn how resilient I am and that I can recover from most everything that comes my way on a regular basis. (Knock on wood...)

All that being said, I can't go around letting the Fear of the Unknown keep me from doing things... So I go on. Sometimes recklessly, but mostly with a deeply-instilled awareness of what will happen if I...

A conversation with a friend after last week's post reminded me how big the decision-making topic actually is, and how relatively little of it I covered in the post. I think choosing and deciding is a particularly large and poignant topic for those of us who are just out of college, 1 year, 2 years out. And, I'm sure, it is monumental also for our parents, recent empty-nesters who are faced suddenly with a forced opportunity to rediscover themselves.

At this point our first jobs and appointments and living arrangements are running out or perhaps wearing thin, or we are suddenly presented with new jobs or positions or appointments. (Sidenote: look for a guest post soon about the year of service. The ultimate bookended post-grad arrangement.) We may be starting or finishing another round of school. Our relationships are changing. (How many of my friends are married or engaged or pregnant or now posting pictures of their babies all over the social networks -- I am too young for this, I insist!) Or we are moving in, or moving out (in with our significant others, out from our parents' houses).

And I will speak for myself and say that, to me, as I near the 2-year mark at my first "real" position, the possibilities loom with even more intimidating shadows labeled, "The Rest of Your Life." And all my decisions and their consequences bear labels and disclaimers warning me that this next thing, or, in some cases, this now thing, could be forever.

That's huge. It's like how we, as 17-year-olds, chose colleges that in many ways shaped our destinies and our identities. At 23, 24, we are trying to project who we are now onto who we want to be, and who it looks like we are turning out to be, and do they line up? Are we compatible with our dreams?

I do still believe in dreams, even though I see mine now as though through a fishtank, or in a funhouse mirror. I will answer my own question: I am 23. I have no idea. I don't know what I will be dealt in the next few months and years, and I have at best a rough sketch of the cards I will deal myself. I'm just trying to be straight-up with myself and the the people around me, and put out good into the world, and be smart without committing hubris, and believe that I will handle my choices and their consequences with grace and wisdom.

And if I mess up, I'll deal with that too.

* * * * * * *
Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! Tune in on Sunday night for this week's All Good Things list, and next Wednesday for more reflections on being a "new adult."

all good things: sun and sea and good food

All Good Things is a weekly feature on the blog. It started as a one-hour Sunday night radio show on KSTO St. Olaf radio, featuring feel-good music and 10 highlights from the past week. The show, and its current written form, is brought to you by Clara, Second Set of Baby Steps creator, and her radio co-host Cassie.

1. Song of the week: 2am by Slightly Stoopid. Not my favorite band name ever, but the song has been our Zumba cool down song for the past few weeks and it's got a good groove.

2. Patron XO. Jason's parents recently went to Mexico and brought back bottles of this delicious coffee tequila for their sons. Fortunately Jason has been generous enough to share it with me. My favorite way to imbibe it is over ice cream. Yummm!

3. Deep fried Oreos. The best Boardwalk dessert; the kind of thing you look forward to all day long. 

4. The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowlings' first adult novel. It's about a tiny town in England and all the political and social drama among its inhabitants. I've talked to a few people who started reading this and gave up when it became clear that there is no magic in it. But I stuck with it, charmed by the details (always a forte of hers in Harry Potter) and, now somewhere around page 300, I'm having a hard time putting it down.

5. Chicken madras. On Wednesday Jason and I ended up going to Maharaja for dinner. Last time we went there we got the entrees with hot spice and I couldn't even eat the food-- impressive, when most Indian restaurants stateside tone it down incredibly. Anyway, we learned our lesson and had recovered enough to go back. And we had mango lassi, garlic naan, aloo palak, and chicken madras, which wins dinner this week especially since I wasn't convinced at first that I even wanted it. Another lesson learned.

6. Wildwood. As I write this I am on my way back from the Jersey Shore with my "roommates." We just spent Saturday and Sunday on the beach, napping and swimming and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and trying not to let the seagulls at 'em. So relaxing, and good girl time. Also, the sand there is so much finer than the sand at the Delaware beaches... Which is good in some ways ( it doesn't get quite as churned up in the waves, for example) but that also means it clings to things and silts into cracks and crevices.

7. Zumba! Katy and I went to zumba twice this week with our favorite instructor. And on Thursday we found out that she will no longer be teaching at the Y! That part is not a good thing, but it does make me not take it for granted. It's just such a fun reason to be super sweaty!

8. Wawa. Stopping at Wawa for breakfast to kick off a road trip has become a bit of a tradition lately. The bagels are just so good! So are most things at Wawa, actually. Hoagiefest is something I am a huge fan of as well. 12-inch subs for $4.79? Yes please!

9. How I Met Your Mother (a.k.a. HIMYM). The modern version of Friends. So funny. So current and relatable. Jason and I are currently in the middle of rewatching the whole series while we wait for season 8 to come out on DVD/Netflix. I just bought season 3 (since we don't actually have internet at home).

10. Good conversations with interesting people. I went out for happy hour on Friday with Jason and a bunch of people he used to work with, all of whom I liked a lot. Good people, warm and welcoming. I also love how my horizons are expanded every time I meet someone new.

Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! And have a good week!

decisions, decisions

whole wheat pasta or veggie?

Do you ever suddenly feel completely overwhelmed and burdened, when somebody asks you to answer a fairly simple question? Or for your opinion on something that, in the long run, really doesn't matter all that much? Do you ever just feel tired at the prospect of choosing what to wear to work in the morning or what vegetable to cook with dinner or whether or not to go out on Friday night?

And then, you just know the asker of the question, or the person who invited you out, or the coworker hoping for some constructive suggestions, is just standing there looking at you and wondering why it's taking you so long to say "yes" or "no", "carrots" or "peas", "red shirt" or "the blue one"?

Lately I have been recognizing this feeling in myself more and more often. Starting first thing in the morning, when I have to decide whether to hit snooze or not, and regardless of the fact that I know it's almost always better not to hit snooze, in the long run... And then I go to work, and the day is one long series of decisions which feel increasingly like life-or-death decisions as the day goes on... And everybody is asking me whether they should send this email reminder, and who they should copy on it; what I think of the colors on this flier or cover photo; which word gets the point across better, or if I can suggest a totally new word that would do the trick; what time they should schedule a meeting with client X.

Don't get me wrong-- I do really like being in a position to answer questions and make decisions. I like that the people around me care what I think about anything. I like managing projects and people and being responsible for the outcomes of things. (And to the girls in my department who I know read the blog, by no means does this post mean you should stop asking for my opinion or anything. All I'm saying is, a girl gets tired.)

Plus, not that I need to pound this nail any deeper, but when I get home I have to decide whether to go to the gym or not (despite my set-in-stone gym routine, I still have this battle almost every day), and then when I inevitably decide to go, I have to decide what to wear to the gym. And then when I get back from there I have to come up with something to eat, and then decide what plate to eat it off of...

I know. I make things hard for myself. I like to keep things fresh and do things differently all the time. And there are about seven billion factors that influence every single one of these decisions, and I always try to take them fairly into account.

I heard this story on NPR awhile back, and it came up again at the writers' breakfast last month. It was an interview with a guy who shadowed President Obama for half a year and wrote a book about it. The bent of the article was on the decisions POTUS has to make throughout the course of a day.

What he said that struck me, the first time I heard it, was "about research that showed the mere act of making a decision, however trivial it was, degraded your ability to make a subsequent decision."

Fascinating. Apparently we each have an allotted amount of decision-making power per day, and if we use it up... that's it!

So Obama, as the President of the United States, has to make a lot of important decisions on a daily basis, I mean the kinds of decisions that impact an entire nation-- the entire world! And because every decision makes it harder for him to make another decision, he gets rid of as many extraneous decisions as possible. He cut out all choice from getting dressed; he now only has grey and blue suits, so he can literally just grab something and go. Somebody else schedules all his appointments and decides what he eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So all his mental capacity can go to running the nation.

This makes me feel a little better. I don't have a staff of people who can make all my minor decisions for me. Or even a board or a cabinet that can help me make the major ones. And when the major decisions have any infinite number of options and outcomes, and impact a good number of people, I think I have some license to waffle.

Just not too long, because then people will stop asking at all. As always, it is a delicate balance.

Seeing as it's Wednesday, the big choice I have to make now is what to do for date night, and exactly how to incorporate food into this plan. Better get on it.

* * * * *
Thanks for tuning in again, dear readers! Like second set of baby steps on Facebook to stay tuned, see new posts right away, read other posts from fellow post-grads, get teasers for future posts... And I'll see you on Sunday for All Good Things!

all good things: people and details

All Good Things is a weekly feature on the blog. It started as a one-hour Sunday night radio show on KSTO St. Olaf radio, featuring feel-good music and 10 highlights from the past week. The show, and its current written form, is brought to you by Clara, Second Set of Baby Steps creator, and her radio co-host Cassie.

1. Song of the Week: Listened to Faithfully by Journey today (an All Good Things classic!) It reminded me of our Journey paper in Senior Sem with Tom when he suggested we name our papers after Journey songs/lyrics. I named mine after the Faithfully lyric when Steve Perry sings "Ooo-whooaa-ooooooo-OOO" at the end. I thought it was the funniest thing ever :)

2. Visits from friends. One of my first friends from college, Lisa, came up from Baltimore this weekend and even just spending some really mundane time together recharged my heart and soul.

3. Sisters' night. On Friday night my two baby sisters (and by "baby" I mean they are not far from 20) spent the night. We ate Boston Market and watched Friends and then spent most of Saturday talking about important things and life. My family is really the coolest.

4. Perfect timing. On Wednesday night, after the great blogging fiasco of July 2013, Jason and I raced up to grab dinner before the 8:20 movie. We got to the restaurant at 7:50 and made it to the ticket booth at 8:30... And got decent seats in the theater halfway through the previews.

5. Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza. Delicious smoky-tasting pizza and savory, salty wings. Also beer, interesting decor, good background music, and pleasant, quick service.

6. Making new connections. Saturday night Jason and Lisa and I were talking about going out when I got a text message from a girl I met a few weeks ago at the Electric Run, asking if we wanted to get drinks in Trolley Square. So we went, and met up with her and her crew, and I remembered how much I love getting to talk to new people and expand my horizons. So worth it.

7. Orange is the New Black. (Netflix television show). Luke and I started watching it this weekend, and I really enjoy the show! It's completely different from a lot of the things on television nowadays. I really love how woman who are normally cast as aberrations (lesbians, convicts, ethnicities other than Caucasian) are main characters in this show. We're only 2 episodes in, and the show has been intense, but I like it!

8. Co-cleaning. Luke and I had guests over this weekend and didn't realize how gross our apartment was until like 30 minutes before they were due to arrive. Turns out, when Luke and I put our minds to it we can clean like the wind! It's actually fun to clean with another person, and I think we'll start doing that more often!

9. Napping outside! Spent a lovely afternoon at Lake Harriet Rose Garden on Saturday. I fell asleep on a blanket under a tree and had the most blissful nap ever. Gentle breezes, slow-moving puffy clouds, and fluffy dogs walking past me. It was seriously the perfect afternoon!

10. Baked peaches with brown sugar. In the summer I love cutting peaches (or nectarines or plums) in half, removing the pit, sprinkling brown sugar on them, and baking them. They make the perfect summer dessert with a little fresh whipped cream!

Enjoy the first full week of August, dear readers! See you next time.