Catching Up

So, I know I haven't posted in a long time. A really long time. And it hasn't been that I've been too busy but that despite going through a lot of transitions, things have felt pretty stable. Work has been good, not too crazy or stressful. The cats are good and healthy. I was running until my IT band decided to hate me; i'm now training for a half-ironman triathlon in May, by which time hopefully said IT band will have forgiven me the sin of trying to make the running shoe last through just one last race (FYI, I've started a triathlon blog at www.rutmaniatriblog.blogspot.com. Apparently there are a million triathlon blogs out there and you know how I'm a joiner). I'm making friends in the new city; it hasn't been easy but it has been happening. In the meantime I've been reading at a pace that matches my undergrad days.

I knew this would be a problem for me once I contemplated "settling down" -- I've lost all sense of an arc to my days and weeks and so it seems like one week could somehow stretch into 20 years and I might not really notice. I'm not specifically working toward any one goal anymore, like when I was in school, I'm just living. But while it was easy to know if I was doing all the right things when it came to getting into and finishing law school (as in, I knew that I should not watch two hours of Charmed reruns a night because I should be studying, even though I sometimes did) now I'm less sure.

And also I'm having an identity crisis. Nothing so extreme as a gender bender crisis, it's more subtle, but it's still there. One of the first things we learned to say in Romanian was "I'm a Peace Corps volunteer." I suppose they worried we might get into some sort of trouble where those words would be helpful (of course the translation was quite literal and unless the person was familiar with the Peace Corps we would just be saying we were a body of peace, which made us sound more like cult members than anything else.) But it was something I could be proud of saying; it made me sound interesting and adventurous. And now I tell people that I'm a lawyer, which does neither of those things. Not that I can't be an interesting, adventurous lawyer, just that it requires other people to want to get to know that part of me.

I just read a book called Choke -- which I loved but cannot actually recommend because it appeals to probably a very small audience -- but there's a character in it who starts collecting rocks, one rock for every day, because he wants something tangible he can say about what he accomplished that day and he wants a record of what his life has added up to, even if it adds up to a pile of rocks. I guess I'm looking for some way to spend my days so that I also have something to show for them (but rocks are heavy and my apartment is small, so I'm going to need metaphorical proof of my days).

That's it for now but I will seriously try and update this more often -- perhaps with something more mundane and less heavy, like how awesome the chili is that I'm making tomorrow (it calls for beer but I don't like beer so I never buy it just for the chili, but this time I bought it for someone else and it's still in my fridge --this excites me more than it should, but good chili really can make or break an entire day).