Another postcard from chimpanzees...

There isn't anything going on with chimpanzees in my life. Or postcards. But maybe there WILL be postcards in about 6 weeks...?! At that point, I'll finally be able to have a little escape from my "normal" (abnormal?) life.

Some things really don't seem relevant. Some things really don't seem fair.

I slept through my alarm clock this morning. 2nd time in a week. I heard the 1st alarm (5am), but woke up 75 minutes after my 2nd alarm, having been enjoying the movies of my dream-time... wish it was more memorable. Actually, I wish my life were like a movie. I keep thinking about re-making my life - so that I feel like an actress all the time (in terms of my appearance - put together, confident, full of poise and vitality), so that I take time to breathe, ... but other things get in the way. Like waking up late - that kind of puts a damper on making sure I look great when I have 20 minutes to walk the dog and get to the bus. Bummer.

This is not very coherent. This is more for me than for the world to see anyway... so much I'm not ready to share fully, but I don't have time to write by hand. I DID make a promise to myself (yesterday) to take time every evening to reflect on what was good/life-giving about my day. Really need to start recognizing the blessings in my life - because I'm getting too far down again.

I have been feeling sorry for myself lately for a lot of reasons. When I hear about other people's circumstances, though, I try to remember what they are dealing with...

-significant others who live a 2-leg flight PLUS hour-long drive away (my husband will just be 45 minutes away)

-people who live in Abidjan (Cote d'Ivoire) who cannot even leave their home today because of violence... I am lucky enough to be able to walk outside alone pretty much at any time of day and feel reasonably safe.

My life isn't so bad. In fact, it's pretty good. I just have to embrace the challenges and focus on the positive.

Sights of the Neighborhood

Today I took a nice long walk after my (late) lunch, with Fante. It is a nice gray afternoon, pleasantly warm - a light jacket is required, but no sunglasses. I think I earned my Vitamin D today.

Fun things today:
1) I took time to veer from the sidewalk/path, to take Fante down to the lake. He was a little leery of the water as it lapped against the rocky/sandy "beach" (it was all of 10 feet long) but he was alert and attentive to the shifting mini-waves. And he was adventurous in climbing through bits of sand and over rocks!
2) A group of ~10 middle-school-aged boys passed us near the community center. One of the boys called out, "I like your dog!" Yeah. My dog rocks. He even wins over cute-loving middle-school boys. Not many dogs can do that.
3) Just after that, I saw two birds kind of fighting in mid-air. It looked like it belonged in Harry Potter or something. I've never seen that before!
4) Jon Stewart semi-impersonating Glen Beck (Thurs, April 7 episode) AND Jamie Oliver being interviewed in the same episode?!? HI. LAR. I. OUS. It was fantastic.
5) Amazon rocks too. Just by being a student (having a .edu email address), I get free shipping. I just bought an important SAS textbook - and "supplemented" the purchase with a Sword of Truth trilogy (to take the 1 I haven't read yet with me on vacation NEXT MONTH!!), and pre-ordered a new movie (click here. for information and to see the trailer!).
6) A good friend suggested that I use my imagination more in life. Sometimes, she puts on a cute apron, heels, and lipstick while cooking dinner and pretends she's in France. I think I'm going to have to devise new ways to imagine myself in a more exciting place in the coming months, with the dear husband preparing to live separately from me while I finish school (his new job is too far from home for him to commute from home, and too far from my school for me to commute. bummer.). I'm thinking of covering my windows with New Zealand landscapes... and that prompted me to change my time zone on this blog to Auckland. Baby steps...

Time to work...

A quote to ponder...

I saw this on the "Musical America Weekly Newsletter" (that I get at work) and it is a way that I hope is setting the tone for our new administration.

"A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.' "
--President Barack Obama

I'm officially applying for more school!

A couple of weeks ago, I turned in my application for yet another academic program. This time, I really believe that I've found my niche: the Interdeparmental Graduate Program in Nutritional Sciences (at UW-Madison, of course!). I've got to wait until March next year to know whether or not I'm in, but it's OK. I'll get to thoroughly enjoy the rest of my MM program, do a fantastic recital (March 7th!), gain a Masters' degree... and then I will be completely ready to enter back into the realm of the other world that I left 4 years ago when I dropped my molecular biology major.

I am really excited, and doing my best to convince myself that I still have the ability to be patient as I wait to (hopefully) get a call for an interview and learn whether or not they accept me into the program.

Cousin ~ Friends

The other evening, I was looking through my phone contact list, trying to figure out who was on the same phone network as I am (I went over our minutes last month, so I'm trying to be more careful...!) so that I could better enjoy my late-night bus ride home after teaching. I called one of my Bontrager-side cousins that I haven't seen for almost two years. She wasn't able to talk right then, but she called back later that night.

We did the usual catching-up conversations, and eventually eased into more "musings" about the relationships of cousins - our cousins in particular. Now that we're all officially adults (the youngest of the first cousins will be 19 on Sunday this week; and there are at least 8 kids in the next generation, ranging in age from about 2 months to... well, 22 years... that's what you get when you have a range of 12 years in our parents' generation!), the nature of our cousin-ly gatherings has changed quite a bit. When we were younger, we were thrilled to run around our grandparents' yard and our aunt and uncle who live next door (in the house where my dad was born!), climbing the pear tree (no longer there?), playing with the barn cats, jumping on the trampoline, playing baseball or woofleball (highly competitive when a certain uncle was around - he was very passionate about the game!), making up games, playing monopoly... Those days evolved into midnight pranks pulled while sleeping out in the tent (girls) or camper (boys), and then that evolved into late-night fiestas of dutch blitz or trivial pursuit and pizza (though some certain cousins had unfair Trivial Pursuit advantages, since they had the game around all the time and worked to memorize said trivia...), rambunctious story-telling and memory-reliving about our parents and grandparents (wouldn't YOU make good, clean fun of your grandma if you found out she'd stuck a rifle in the ground after the foxes, who WERE bothering the chickens, were gone after you'd loaded and readied it? or that she'd brought a "baby" alligator home from Florida and kept it in her room, till it froze to death thanks to the upstairs not being heated?)...

Now we're really adults. All of us have graduated from high school. Many of us have graduated from college or some other higher-education, most of us have steady jobs/occupations that we're generally content with, or at least a plan for getting where we'd like to be in the next 5 years or so. When we get together, the bond of being cousins - even though some of us we only get to have a handful of days together every one or two years - seems to pull us together with positive energy. We discuss our grandparents' health with great concern and our parents' current state of relationships with trepidation and care, knowing how much we love them all and wanting the best for everyone... but deeply glad that the problems they're having are not problems we have to enter into to make a difference. We hope that our parents don't do the same thing to us as Grandma and Grandpa have done to them (and to themselves). We discuss politics, theology and faith (following in the tradition of our parents, who debated tough issues with high energy and a wealth of Biblical ground-knowledge that inspires and energizes me every time I got to observe such a debate!), wrestle with issues of self and identity and responsibility to each other and to our world (the physical and the social world)...

Even though we don't see each other that often, it is so comforting to know that we have this depth of relationships that allows us to have such conversations in love and to listen to each other (at least most of us) when we come across areas where we differ. It is amazing that, despite our vast differences in life experiences, many of us share strikingly similar viewpoints and sensibilities. I feel so blessed to have such an amazing group of cousins (on both sides!) and to know that these people know me and accept me for who I am.

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I got this comic on a graduate school newsletter this week...


It's from "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com