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Go to hell carolina go to hell!
So today Enrique got a job, we got a house, and we might be adopting a friend for Nixie. A+, this day
if the sellers accept our adjusted offer now that Uncle Jim has talked to the inspector. i’m resigned to whatever happens — i’ll start getting excited about the house if we get it, but if they ask for more money, i’m not sure what we’ll do. Enrique is inclined to walk if that happens, and I don’t want to be unreasonable but there’s a good chance that that’s what we’ll do. The house *is* a little small, and while I like that it would let us live cheaply in a cute neighborhood, there needs to be enough incentive to justify having to remodel the kitchen and live with only one bathroom.
In other news, Enrique starts a new job in Raleigh on Monday. It’s a big improvement from his last job so we’re really happy about it :)
I haven’t been in this building in a very long time.
Although I work for the university, my office is downtown, way off campus. I have meetings on campus every other week now, which is new for me. Last time, I got lost. I’d been to my destination plenty of times — walked past it every day for years — and it hadn’t moved, but everything around it is different now. I stopped at the new library addition to ask about how to get there, and the girl didn’t know, even though we were only yards away. She pulled up the campus map that David and I wrote online. I know everything on that map, but it doesn’t help me because everything looks different now.
Today’s meeting is in the Allen Building, and I got here early after another meeting. I had plenty to do besides write melancholy blog posts, but I just looked up from my seat and started crying, so I felt like it was important to verbalize what just happened. In a building a hundred years old, few things are as they were even five years ago, but in front of where I happened to settle, there’s one thing that is.
Many years ago, I used to study Farsi in this building. It was the only class I didn’t bring my dad to when he visited me because there were only about six people in the class and I thought it would be awkward for him. Instead, I sent him off to hang out with Ben, the inspiration for my Farsi studies. About six years ago, I walked into this same room to find Ben and my dad sitting on a bench, the bench in front of me now, each with a copy of The Chronicle, each wearing khakis and a plain gray shirt, one leg crossed over the other. I had spent my whole class worrying that they’d find no common ground, and I laughed out loud to see them looking like two peas in a pod. I made them wait while I snatched a photo, because it was a moment I wanted to remember.
Fast-forward to 2010, and until this week, I couldn’t remember much Farsi at all. It was shocking, actually, how little I could remember. Once, I sat down in a library and tried to remember, willing myself to recall even the most basic things, with no luck. I rationalized why this might be with several theories, but none like the one I got from my naturopath.
One thing in Farsi I never forgot was a poem that I really love. When the naturopath would get into some of his more kooky exercises, I would calm myself and pass the time by reciting this poem in my head. After three appointments or so, the doctor apologized for the non sequitur but said that every time he saw me, he felt strangely compelled to talk about persian poetry. Neither of us is of persian descent and he knew nothing of that chapter of my life, so I found it really odd. But we stayed for a while after my appointment and talked about our favorite persian poets. This is corny, but I left that conversation feeling like I’d just found a lost lucky nickel.
Over the next week, something weird happened. Suddenly, without trying, Farsi words, phrases, jokes were popping into my head like crazy. I would think of the Farsi word before the Spanish word when talking to Enrique. By the end of the week, I must have recalled at least a year’s worth of study. I told the naturopath, who now knows the story of how I came to study Farsi, that I couldn’t believe how one conversation could seem to cause such an extreme cognitive shift. He said that that happens to people a lot — we prepare ourselves for what we think will be our future, and we block it out when we realize it won’t be. According to his theory, thinking of Farsi as associated with something other than a relationship that really devastated me with its failure allowed my brain to stop blocking it.
In that past few years, I feel so much tension between not knowing whether to fight to remember, or fight to forget. Lately I’ve been trying to remember and process everything that comes up as a result as I can. It’s really hard, but I think I’m going to be healthier for it.
And now I have to run off to my meeting. I guess that’s all I wanted to say anyhow.
one in four women can misread a traditional pregnancy test.
think about three women in your social circle…are you more intelligent than any of them? no, honey, that’s not self-deprecating. it’s just being realistic.
oh my god, wouldn’t it just be *so* humiliating if your smarter, more perceptive girlfriends asked you about your most recent pregnancy test, and you had to admit that you couldn’t figure out how to read it? we would seriously die if that happened to us. luckily, there’s a product out there that can save you from this exact scenario. buy clearblue!
Ask me how much i love frat boys, especially from Duke. I want to wash out my eyes and ears with this vodka. Or maybe theirs.
So the inspection went well (but Uncle Jim, i’m still calling you tonight!) — there are a few things we’re going to ask to get fixed but the inspector said that the only non-superficial issues with the house are not as serious or costly to repair as we worried they might be, so I think everything’s going to work out quite nicely.
also, two things my family will care about - we pulled up at the same time as the next-door neighbor, and he got off the phone with his mother to introduce himself and chat for a few minutes, which was really nice. the other thing is that while we were waiting, a bird flew into the tree we were talking about, and it was a chickadee.
i am excited about this chapter of my life.
so, we’re getting the house inspected tomorrow and in the meantime, i’m trying to collect whatever last-minute information i can about the house and surrounding areas before we go back to negotiations. today i have learned:
1. NC has a top-of-the-line sex offender registry (at least compared to Michigan)
2. Sex offenders tend to have really funny tattoos
Oh yes, from the dorky looking white guy with “THUG LIFE” tattooed on his back to the hard gangster looking folk with Tweety bird covering their arms, I feel a lot less paranoid about misplacing trust in some normal-looking but secretly creepy neighbor. My favorite of all the tattoos, though, was a one-two punch: a right arm tattoo saying TRUST COMES LOYALITY paired with a left arm tattoo saying LOYALITY COMES RESPECT.
i think that speaks for itself.
they accepted our offer! we’re going to sign the papers at lunch today. so much to think about, but not right now when other things are calling!
started at 6 with counter-counter-offering on the house. i’ve always prided myself on a gender-uncharacteristic ability to turn my emotions off and be logical about things (to an extent where I have learned to inject emotion into my decisions when rationalizing them to others, to mitigate the shock with which candid explanations are usually met), but I think I underestimated how draining it was going to be to get into these negotiations. Excitement about moving into the house would, I imagine, soften the process of contemplating a very big investment on a rational basis, but I’m not allowing myself that just yet. I have feel reasonably sure that I’ll be better off in 5 years for having made this decision, and I would rather lose the house than pay too much for it. We don’t have to buy a place, it just seems like a good idea given the circumstances.
Anyway, when I’m not following up on that, I’ll be launching a new application, preparing for and getting myself to a meeting on west campus without a parking pass, having taco night with david, and trying to finish a different side project because I have to demo it in a little over a week and have no idea when else i’ll work on it. There’s a lot more I would write about if it weren’t for all that, but I’m really pushing the number of things I can do in a day without being really unhappy about it, so I’m going to go try to be responsible.
Later I’ll tell you about how lately I feel like seeing that naturopath has given me a new lease on life. I’m feeling better every day.
