the time of our lives.

Growing up is funny, ain't it? Filled with lots of learning and growing and...learning and growing.

In high school I learned about poetry. The stage. Sharing and performance and reading. And poets. Oh, oh, the poets.

In college I learned about uhmm...cooking. And the importance of protected sex. 

And now. Graduate school. Graduate school is this amazing combination of paralyzing insecurity and exciting ideas and one minute you're flying and the next falling but the best part, the best part...the best part is the friends.

Between the falling and the flying there's someone that's right there next to you falling and flying with you. 

I passed my preliminary exam today, so I'm officially a PhD candidate. (oh that reminds me gotta go change my email signature...brb....ok back.) And the best part, the best part...well. 

Aspen sent me a pie, a pie! From Pie in the Sky! From WOODS HOLE. Aspen sent me a PIE. from PIE IN THE SKY. 

When I opened the air mail box from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, I immediately then ran back to lab to grab my phone to inform Aspen that she had in fact, sent me a PIE, and throughout the lab I sang/squealed, PIE. ASPEN SENT ME A PIE. 

And Firas. Firas got me DIPPIN DOTS, because you know they are the MICROFLUIDICS OF ICE CREAM. And samosas. Because 90% of the time I talk about indian food. 

Pie. From PIE IN THE SKY. Dippin Dots. And samosas. 

Oh yeah, and friends. Those too. 

i hope you remember this

In the hot tub, Mikey asks Lena, What do you think you will remember about this time in twenty years.

I hope it is this. The endless joke telling. The laughter. Late summer nights. The five people on a three-person couch and the singing and the dancing and Lena, this is what it is liked to be loved unconditionally. To be accepted unconditionally. Lena this is true friendship and I wonder if you will remember this.

And for me, on the way home, after Lena has fallen asleep and the windows are down and I slowly turn the music up, up, up and it's Kendrick Lamar singing I love myself and I hope that I remember this. This unconditional self love. This acceptance. And this is the way home. However hard it gets however angry or sad or frustrated or scared, this is the way home, and even though it's been a long time, even if I've been away for a while, I have never forgotten the way home.

i wouldn't want to do this without you

I have a friend that tells the most amazing stories. She's a little scatter-brained and kind of quirky about a few things, like she doesn't let her kids drink out of water fountains, and the weirdest things happen to her.

A few weeks ago she was working late at night and heard something in her fireplace, and it turns out there's a squirrel stuck in her fireplace. Instead of calling animal control, she decides to build an obstacle course/barricade a path to the door with couch cushions in order to shuttle the squirrel out. It worked, but her telling this story was so. amazing.

Today, it turns out her husband's grandfather is in the hospital because he was in a car accident. He's 95, and he really shouldn't be driving. She was telling me how her mother-in-law was telling her about the accident, (another car hit him) and that the other car was a big truck painted in camouflage. "So my mother-in-law thinks that he might not have seen the car, and I said, but it's not camouflaged to the ROAD, that's not how camouflage WORKS." She had me cracking up during gymnastics. I could not stop laughing, and I'm sure all the other parents thought I was insane.



I had a really demoralizing week. My project has hit a tough spot, I'm in a rut, a local minima. I talked with Aspen about it, and she said, "Think about something else to do, what else are you interested in?" and I, no lie, could not think of one thing. I've been so up this project's butt, that I could not think of one other thing that I was interested in, one other problem, one other question, the tiniest of experiments to do that could get me out of this rut. I went home early, and at 6:30, propped Lena up in bed with a movie and turned off the lights and just shut out the world.

I got a little bit out of my rut today---laughing about the "camo" truck helped. I also flipped through a textbook just to get some ideas, found a relevant paper to read. Then we got an offer for a play date and heels watching from some other friends.

Paul and Amy, have I talked about them here? They are going to get their own tag today because they are going to be a key part in this grad school thing. Paul and Amy both did grad school at UNC, Paul in my dad's lab. They left, did post docs, got TT faculty positions, and then came back here. Paul is now doing a project in my dad's lab. They're trying to clone in some mutation into yeast together and it's super cute.

So we go over to their house, and they ask how I am, because everyone always does, and I was just like, you know what? I'll be completely honest. I have no self-esteem right now, everyone else is smarter than me and I have forgotten how to have any sort of original thought.

And they walked me through it.

I told them an experiment I wanted to do, and they said, that's great, why haven't you done it? I said, because no one told me it was a good idea. Paul says, you can't need validation. Amy says, Paul needs so much validation. Paul says, that's true, but you still need to do the experiment.

It continues like this---I ask them a problem that Aspen has been thinking about, and Paul thinks it's doable. So I'm going to try it. Paul also expressed into words what my project needs: an assay. I don't have a good assay. He gave me a bunch of ideas about assays. I texted Aspen about her project idea and that I was going to try it tomorrow. She said, that's awesome.

This week I: cried, felt stupid, felt like I couldn't do this, went to bed at 6:30, wanted to give up.
Today I: came up with a new idea, got a couple ideas for assays, figured out what my next steps are going to be, started some cultures for a new experiment, got inspired, excited, ready to face the world again, also laughed hilariously at Belichick: "I handled the balls, we all handled the balls."

Gosh---------


How do we do this without friends? Luckily, thankfully, I will never have to find out.

"wish you would step back from that ledge my friend"

L had a new play date this weekend with a girl down the street from us. I would like to take a moment to give myself a pat on the back for overcoming my social anxiety and setting up this play date yes I did that all by myself thankyouverymuch we are very proud of how much we are growing up.

The mom is great, when we were making small talk at the bus stop I asked if she was from this area and she said, no, but she feels like it anyway since she's been here since she came for college in 1986.

*long pause*

Well I was born here and she's still been here longer than I have.

I did some "back of the envelope calculations" (the best phrase ever) and figured out that she had to be at least 18 years older than me. C'est la vie. (Pronounced "cess la vi".) At the park I find out we're twenty years apart, and we laugh at this, but we then find we have so many shared experiences. Wanting to force our kids into Sunday school, crying in the bathroom after we found out we were pregnant. Loving to share the most intimate details about our life. We're not so different.

We walked our kids to the park together, chatting the whole time, and after two hours outside L went over to their house to play for another two hours, while I made all the meals for this week (10 black bean and sweet potato burritos which after making them I never want to eat) and a lasagna. I walked over to their house to pick L up, and there is Christmas music playing. Fred (that's the mom, who is also Jewish) said, "I was trying to find some innocuous music. They didn't like Nat King Cole so we settled on this." She says to me then, when her daughter was a baby she listened to the Clash and the Kinks but now she's older so she worries more about the lyrics.

That's the only time I feel conscious about an age difference. L and I listen to a lot of Third Eye Blind and Rilo Kiley.

90s kid!

max

I’d forgotten how much I appreciate Max, until he walks (saunters? flounces? bounds? leaps?) back into my life. He talks about our kids’ summer camp as if it were a prison. 

“I keep telling David to look for Lena,” he says. “But I’m not sure if they’re let out into the yard at the same time.”

A new good friend is turning 40, and I’m going out with her to celebrate. Our kids are a month apart, and good friends. I am immeasurably lucky in that I love Jenny as a person. Despite over a decade in age difference, we are some of the same. Figuring out how to be parents, how to deal with daughters. We recommend each other books, meet at the pool.

But Max. Max flops down on my bed without asking. Opens drawers and cabinets and my fridge. Stops by my house with pie and comic books. Max calls, keeps calling, and forgives. Max is twenty-something. He doesn't know what he wants to do, really. He’s still a dreamer. He's lost, but he doesn't care. He's in limbo. He doesn't have a mortgage. He’s just Max. 

Max and I have never been in love with each other at the same time. Sometimes I wish this wasn't the case. But most of the time I don’t. I don’t want to have to give up another best friend. 

High school, when pops taught max and me to ride motorcycles.

the hill

L and I went to the mountains for memorial day weekend. We rented a house with friends, and on Saturday morning we (let's not even front here--I) packed up the car and we drove to Boone. We met at a park for lunch, then caravaned the rest of the way to our rental cabin. To get there, we drove up a big. ass. hill.

I love my car. It's amazing in the snow, it's been with me through everything. Longer than any boyfriend, longer than Lena. I love my car, I will defend my car to anyone. However, there are a few things that my car cannot do. It doesn't accelerate that great. It kind of shakes a little on the highway, if you go above 70. The stereo sucks. The air conditioning just stopped working. It..doesn't do hills that well.

The hill came up out of nowhere, and before I knew it, I was flooring the poor subaru, listening to the engine growl in protest, watching the speedometer slowly fall from 25 to 23 to 20...

L is in the back--happily pointing out trees and flowers-or asking me questions-or talking to herself, continuing our game of twenty questions started on the highway--I don't know, the only thing I could concentrate on was driving up this hill, wondering whether I was going to make it. My car is an automatic, but under the little notch of "D" for "Drive" are "3","2","1". Between wondering whether I was going to make it up this hill, the vague thought crossed my mind that maybe something about these numbers might be relevant, and that I should perhaps investigate what they do.

We finally make it up the hill, and for the rest of the weekend's activities, we pile into one car. I'm in the back sitting next to the 4 year old, and I never have to worry about driving up the hill again. Only one thing haunts me: driving down.




There's a really big change that happens when you become a parent. It hits a lot of people in different ways, it's probably contingent on where you are in life, how sensitive you are to the rotation of the earth, the changing of the winds. My change into parenthood was gradual, because I don't think I ever understood the weight, the gravity, of what it means to have a child. The best analogy that I've heard and that I love is that having a child is having a piece of your heart outside your body. As a twenty year old, I didn't know what my heart was. As a twenty-six year old, I know a little more of love and of loss, and my daughter, who is my heart, who walks on her own, thinks on her own. Lives and experiences things on her own.

So my change was this. I am fucking anxious now. It might be grad school stress induced, but driving on the highway stresses me out. Turbulence on planes freaks me out. Lena near roads, Lena on walls, Lena in trees, Lena careening down the hill on on her bike. Be careful with my heart! I want to shout. So selfish, I know. Forgive me. I'm only twenty-six.



I used to drive up to Asheville all the time. My best friend from high school  and a handful of other friends moved up there during my senior year, and I went up to visit them plenty of times throughout the year. Speeding on I-40 on a Friday after school let out. Driving from Hot Springs back to Asheville at 2 in the morning, singing Tracy Chapmen's Fast Car, into the yellow lights of a neighbor's party. Climbing up cliffs, looking for shortcuts, getting baked, setting up a tent on a hill in the dark, waking up a pile of tangled bodies at the bottom. One of those boys is dead now, the obligatory statistic of a high school class of 400. But nothing scared me then. Nothing at all.



(In retrospect, a little fear, one moment of not feeling invincible, would have served me well. But then I wouldn't have been young.)



After many hikes, meals, wonderful conversations, watching our children play, it's time to go home. Which means, time to drive down the big ass hill.

We drove up and down the hill plenty of times over the course of the weekend, so I had a plan. I was going to use these other gears that my car has. Because you're not supposed to ride your brakes, you're supposed to let the engine do the work. So at the right turn into the downhill, I shift down from drive into 3, then 2.

Then I rode my brakes the entire way down that hill.

When I made it to level ground I let out a whoop of joy, one of my arms going out the open window (because my air conditioning doesn't work, remember?) I did it. I conquered this hill. And after that, I had the most perverse thought of all: I wanted to go back up and do it all again. And do it all again, better. Because I did it. I made it up and down that hill.






For some reason I thought there was some great extended metaphor here, but I think I lost it somewhere. Anyway, I was really proud of myself for making it up and down this big ass hill. I felt really grown up and independent woman about it. The end.

rhetorical questions

is there anything more tiring than kids?
is there anything more exciting than outside?

is there anything greater than friends who have their shit together?
is there anything greater than friends?

is there anything more metaphorical than a mountain?


**

L and I had an amazing weekend in the mountains, with friends. Not new friends, but getting-to-know-better friends, and it was spectacular fun. This is going to be a fun summer.