So tonight, we are young.

Ohh hey I've been back in the States for exactly 6 months. In 4 days, the alleged "golden year" is coming to a close and I can honestly say it has probably been the best so far. I spent 50% of it traveling the world to come back to a whirlwind of grad school acceptances, visiting friends, exploring America's national parks, and settling down for a new beginning in San Francisco.

On the plane flying back to the States, I made a list of the things I did while traveling. It is a ridiculous, hilarious list, more full of bucket to-do's and funny once-in-a-lifetime opportunities than concrete realizations of wisdom (that is what my Corbett writings were devoted to, burning the midnight oil with Tulsi and looking back on the first part of the experience.) It would be interesting to make a list of new events that entered my life over the past 6 months, then compare the two lists. Sometimes I feel like life has only been more ridiculous in San Francisco, when I came back to feeling "in my element" and embracing my role as the kind of person that stuff just HAPPENS to, you know?

And even though I have been back in the States just as long as I was abroad, I am STILL uncovering details of how the trip has changed me. All good, so far!

I feel so blessed to realize how precious, good, and important something is even while I am living it. Never again will life be so wide open and full of opportunities, waiting to be shaped and begging to be enjoyed like an endless waterfall on a scorching hot desert day.

On the radio, we heard November rain.

Ohh hey blog. There is something about throwing a full-time job in the mix that results in having zero time to write.

Not the most important thing that's happened is.. I am still realizing how profoundly changed I came back from my 6-month stint out of the country. I am observing character traits in myself that I have to work on toning down, while before I left, I lacked these character traits completely and wanted to work to develop them.

For example:
-Patience
-Being more open, fair to people, generous with my feelings
-Ability to be busy without being exhausted
-But at the same time.. doing something MEANINGFULLY useless with your free time.

I guess because I have significantly less free time (more or less working four jobs, thank goodness three of them don't add up to any significant hours), any me time I have is just so much more energizing because I have to draw the same benefits from it.

Like hanging out on the floor right now, listening to Mademoiselle Spektor on repeat, drinking a Thursday beer and not really thinking about packing for Tahoe. About getting into the parking lot at 11 PM and hiking in 2 miles to an appropriate campsite spot..
Yep, adventures only get better when you are busier.

So this is actually the first time I worked in an office full time. Before it was all lab or the silly pool. I kind of love it. For anyone who knows about my intense love affair with the great out of doors, this should be surprising. But it's so much more stable and safe than the POOL. And apparently, I am fine with barely moving before 2 PM. If you stay in your PJ's until 2, that is lazy. If you sit at your desk doing work, that is dedication. (Ohh hey study habit insight for grad school.)

But it's good to keep in mind that there is a huge, incredible, amazing world out there that is so much more REAL than your cubicle, people with more tangible problems, living more satisfying lives, and everything you do for most desk jobs is kind of.. not real. A made up virtual religion like math.

I guess that is motivation to do something that is "real" long term. No dropping things off clouds for me?

Lazy Friday Musings of a Fellow San Franciscan

Today is probably the most pathetic excuse for a summer day since I moved here. Yeah mid July. According to the weather prediction, it is 61 (even though the high is 57), and I think I have to subtract at least 4 degrees to account for the freezing wind that constantly blows down my street, assaulting my non-insulated apartment.  Either way, for a former New Englander it is pathetic that I wore my long spandex bottoms and a fleece (!) lined spandex top when I went for my run. I brought that top exclusively for snow camping trips, and it is the second time I wore it running. If this was New Hampshire and 20 degrees colder, I would be reveling in the fact that it is sub freezing and be sporting shorts and a T-shirt for my run.

Despite the fact that all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and cuddle with a nalgene of boiled water (I REFUSE to turn on the heat in the middle of the day on July 13! I will not be defeated!), I actually had such a wonderful run bobbing along to Russian pop that I ventured past the Presidio St. underpass bridge for the first time since I moved here. That is, excluding any drunk runs I went on, possibly in the dark, when I got hopelessly lost and did not know when I was, but I don't remember those/they don't count.

If you have ever driven with me, you know the motivating power of really good Russian pop (and "good" in this sentence can only mean "bad.")

Now I am sitting in the lovely Velo Rouge Cafe on the corner that serves delicious chai, but that has a hopelessly horrible vibe if you are trying to get any real work done. Seeing as how it's Friday and I have probably had the most pathetic workweek, I decided that I can dedicate the rest of my afternoon to blogging instead of pretending that I am going to solve this fluid mechanics problem before my hair turns gray.

It's a good thing I wake up early, because I did not do one productive thing after lunch all week.
Monday: drove an hour to meet with my advisor in the morning, so clearly it's OK to relax and shop in the afternoon.
Tuesday: did mind numbing research database compilation all morning (that could have probably been automated if I was slightly more creative) and accepted the fact that if I made no further progress between 12 and 2, I should just give up for the day. This was followed by a pang of guilt when I returned from the climbing gym in the evening, and I diligently worked until I got the required task done and sent off for review.
Wednesday: had a wonderfully productive morning where I caught up with 3 friends on Gchat, applied for about 5 jobs, and even did something research related. After lunch, decided I needed to dedicate my time to getting ready for meeting Brynne at 6 PM. Brynne is my friend, so it's important to be well prepared.
Thursday: sick day, obviously did not do any work.
Today: I woke up at a whopping 5 AM and jumped right into a programming tutorial in my online course catalog. This was followed by an entire morning of fluid mechanics, but as I already mentioned, it is Friday, so it is best to relax after lunch in preparation for the weekend.
Besides, I might start a temp job very soon, and then I will be very busy going to the office for 40 hours a week on top of research, fluid mechanics, and online software courses, so no reason to exert myself until it becomes necessary.

I hope that was Bridget Jones-esque for you.

Now, even though it is freezing, I would not technically label what I am wearing as "clothes." I don't mean to offend anyone, but any skin tight , black, stretchy bottoms garment that precisely shows off the shape of your ass is STILL not considered pants. Good thing they are underarmour brand and at least offer some compression, so it is an improved idealized version of my ass you are seeing. Since showering after my run was clearly out of the question, I figured that I should keep my running attire on as a visible excuse and apology for the sweaty, greasy-haired chic look I have going. Of course, since I changed into flip flops, I probably just look moderately ridiculous - but if everybody else in here trying to do work is really just people watching like I suspect they are, I know they all saw me zoom by at the end of my run ten minutes earlier.

Let's talk about you. How was your latest run? How is the weather wherever you are influencing what you are doing for the day? 

What do YOUR recent Google searches say about you?

Check it out. I am athletic, I use public transport, my friend broke his toe, I can't spell "wilderness" nor do I know the meaning of "concurrently," and I am hopeless when it comes to MATLAB.

But seriously, MATLAB. Handles? Children? It's bad enough when I'm driving on the highway and see those Cloud billboards on which I don't understand a single word, yet I know they have nothing to do with those white condensed fluffy things that engulf San Francisco. Now I also have to work with an array of words whose elementary-school dictionary meaning is suddenly devoid of any tangible, comfortable connection.

I wonder if using words that *very* vaguely relate to their original meaning is better than making up a whole new language. In the second case, it would appear to an outsider that you were speaking another language, and in the first case, it would appear that you were just loopy.

What do YOU think?!

Five Years Time

Recovering from a wonderful Tahoe weekend: sunburned, starving despite having eaten everything non-raw that I own(ed), semi-permanent tree sap tattoo on my leg, room is in shambles, I am good as out of hair conditioner, incredibly behind on my research, and oh so happy. Ah, to be young.

On Wisdom and Time

I feel that.. perhaps my travels have granted me the ability to step outside of myself ever so slightly to examine events present or past in my life. After having actually exited my American life and returning as a completely different person, I had the experience of attempting to reintegrate myself with this time-capsule preserved life as an outsider who was living and breathing my identity during and before my absence.

Now I find at times that I still take advantage of this outsider's perspective and get a clearheaded evaluation in situations when we are tempted to lie to ourselves. And I just feel that due to the common threads that link humanity, the world has so much more simplicity we are not always noticing during our day-to-day lives. Simplicity means lack of worry, simplicity means applying a mental equation system to see things as they are and not in a cloudy, wanna-be way.

But I find that with greater life experiences, simplicity also means a straighter-shot arrow weeding through the lots of ways that we imagine things could be and separating out the way that we have come to learn they really are.

Anyway, I wish time moved in a different way sometimes, maybe not so linearly, so I would have the chance to sort through all these thoughts and still in some parallel way get done what I should have gotten done while sorting through these thoughts.

i beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer...
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Let's take it one step further.. how can living this question make me a better person and inject meaning and love into everything else I do in my life?