Celebrate good times, come on!

Vintage Tiki Hula Girl Boob Mug from Harvey's

I've spent the morning researching PhD programs outside of California. Those non-resident fees are astronomical! Don't bother getting a PhD without getting a research or teaching assistant position, which will likely give you automatic resident status and give you a stipend or scholarship in return.

I don't want to be a "doctor" per se, but I continue to run into the reality that I think in a research/clinical way, and my work does not particularly allow me to pursue these things actively. I love to research and write. I don't necessarily want to do tests on people, or rats, or monkeys. I just want to write about the thoughts in my head. I think that's a reasonable goal for a doctoral program - Dear Dean of Admissions, I'm brilliant and I need to share it with the world. Please accept me. You won't regret it. You'll be happy you did.

I tried to do this as a seventeen-year-old applying to the honors program at my university. It didn't work out so well. It made sense to me, but I guess they diagnosed me with narcissism, and threw the essay away. I'm struggling a lot with self-doubt right now, and will be spending the next two weeks trying to work through that. I don't think I want to go back to school. I think I just want to go to Montana, and meet some lumberjack with a thick beard who will appreciate my intellect, and write poems about trees.

Actually, I'm less interested in men than I ever have been. It's pretty wonderful. I highly recommend it. I think I've dealt with some issues surrounding my feelings of inadequacy about being single. Or maybe I'm just pretending. Who knows?

Anyhoo, good to have you. Please come again :)

I guess I'll make do.

I've talked about finally selling the bike. Well, here she is, in all her glory :)

So being "thrifty" or "frugal" or, I dunno, drawn to simplicity, means that you'll probably come across things in your life that you want or need that you don't have access to. Or maybe you've lived in the West all your life, and this concept is foreign to you (you probably aren't reading my fascist commie blog then). But just as I am drawn to apocalyptic television (um, BBC's Surviviors? Fantastic), I am drawn to the idea of making more with less.

Well, sometimes this is not about making chocolate chip cookies with 100% whole wheat flour (which I've done - bleh), or riding your bike when you sold your car (thus the above bike being in my possession), but about relationships being imperfect and going without the things you want and need. I wish this weren't the case. I wish I weren't an idiot a lot of the time, and instead, said and did the right thing at the right time. I wish it weren't so difficult to repair the damage I've done with things I say. But instead, I have to make do with what I've done. I have to accept that life is imperfect, and I'm imperfect, and sometimes (most of the time), I use the wrong ingredient in the cookies, and I say "sure whatever" when I should be saying "I love you".

Making do with who you are, and what you're capable of at any given moment, is a painful thing, because it means not hating yourself, but at the same time being hopeful that things can and will be different someday, which is painfully challenging.

So, um, yeah...