Thursday, June 10, 2010

Point of No Return

In a matter of days, I will begin graduate classes for physical therapy. I began preparing to apply to this program just over three years ago, and I will graduate in just under three years.

Three years ago I was a social worker, my mother was alive, my brother Job didn't have cancer, I was living with my brother Chevy, and my antidepressant was working beautifully. None of that is true now. I can't help but to worry about what is going to happen in the next three years. Will my 80-year-old father live to see me graduate? What will the stress of work+school do to my marriage? Will I still be agnostic, or will I be atheist? Or muster a belief in God? What will I weigh?

As tough as taking night classes and applying to grad school was, I'm nervous that was the easy part. If my classmates are unitards, I won't have the luxury of a whole different class next semester - I'm going to be with the same people for three years. What if I can't make friends and most of the classwork is group work and presentations? And if I do flunk out, I will have thousands of dollars of student loans, no degree, and no career. Awesome. I've had nothing but nightmares the last couple of weeks.

The time has come to put on my big girl pants and grab school by the throat.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

I Ate the Garden

MacGyver has been out of town for days, and if I don't have someone else to cook for, I tend to not cook at all. Last night I had precisely no food in my fridge, not nearly enough to fill my empty belly.



My first step to remedying the situation was to pick a big bowl o' snow peas. Our first planting is currently producing like sex-crazed rabbits, and the pods are weighing the plants down. It's so beautiful. Wasps kept flying out of the pea patch and toward my head, at one point I was dancing around yelling "LET'S BE ADULTS HERE!" and tried to reason with them to leave me the hell alone. Back in the kitchen I heated up olive oil with a heavy-handed dash of red pepper flakes and globs of minced garlic - the classy kind from the jar. After a quick stir-fry my snow peas were bright green and dotted with the flavorings. I ate the entire bowlful with my hands and felt sinful doing it.



I grabbed a knife and thinned the lettuce in the backyard. The greens are more mature than baby but far from full-grown. I washed them up and picked out the weeds and slug, then dried them (five paper towels later I remembered my salad spinner, d'oh!) and inspected them carefully for more slugs. I drizzled the lettuce with Caesar dressing and chewed thoughtfully - the leaves were crisp but not chilled, the texture was nearly buttery, and the babiest leaves were sweet.



Still hungry, I headed the the strawberry bed. I picked the overripe berries, the berries that were dark, dark red and had lost their luster. I selected a few of the younger, vibrant ones to eat right away, but the majority went into the mini-blender with some cheap vanilla ice cream and milk.

I didn't once regret not ordering pizza.