As Suggested By

Staci just posted this meme/email forward on her blog, so I thought I would follow suit. :) Following are things you might not have known about me....

Four Jobs I have held:
1. Tagger at Polo/Ralph Lauren warehouse (I literally put price tags on clothes destined for Ralph Lauren outlets. I barely tolerated the job, but it came with a wicked good discount!)
2. Holiday HoneyBaked Ham counter salesperson (immediately pre-vegetarianism)
3. Dental Office runner (did office work as well as lab/equipment stuff)
4. Awesome, awesome babysitter (circa age 16)

Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Dead Poet's Society
2. Roman Holiday
3. Sleepless in Seattle
4. The West Wing (Not a movie, I know, but something I could watch for hours on end. The good seasons, at least.)

Four places I have lived:
1. Dallas, TX
2. Greensboro, NC
3. St. Petersburg, Russia (only for a summer)
4. Durham, NC

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Cheese
2. Homemade pasta. With Cheese.
3. Belgian chocolate
4. Asparagus

Four places I would rather be:
1. Emerald Isle, NC
2. Tallin, Estonia
3. St. Petersburg, Russia
4. Brugge, Belgium

Four friends I think will respond:
Hard to say. I'm not known for being good at responding to these things when my friends send them, so they might not be eager to respond either. By all means, though, go ahead and respond and/or pass it on! :)

My Secret Interests

I sounded really whiny in my previous post. Blah. In an effort to combat that, I've come up with an upbeat list. These are some of the things in which I'm secretly interested:

1) Studying piano again
2) Philosophy
3) Learning Martial Arts (in a practical sense, a la Sydney Bristow)
4) Becoming multilingual, and not just in a tourist way
(Addendum to #4: Linguistics)
5) Having a job that is completely different from everything I've done and studied all my life.
6) Learning how to chop evenly and quickly, like a professional chef
7) Taking voice lessons
8) Epidemiology

Same Ol' Stuff

It seems like every third post or so I am apologizing for not posting more. Or for not having anything interesting to say. I doubt anyone wants to read about my typical day which seems to go: Get up, Work, Come home, Work Some More, Sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. It seems like my entire life has been boiled down to one activity. Everything I do is now completely in support of The Thesis. And it's every bit as dull as it sounds.

I crawled out of the hole that is my office yesterday and saw some people for lunch yesterday that I had not seen in weeks/months. A professor that I might consider a friend (hard to say where that line is drawn between supervisor/colleague and friend sometimes) asked where I'd been. I looked at him dumbfounded when he gave me a hard time about spending too much time working. I mean, I get grief from all sides for still being in graduate school after 5 years, and he's asking me why I'm not getting out and having some fun?? It must be nice to be so smart that you actually can do it all. Do great work, have a fantastic family, take fun, exotic vacations.... I don't really wish for that much. If I could just get someone to come unpack my apartment and occasionally make me some dinner, that would be amazing. Let alone going "out" on the weekends or, heaven forbid, a date.

Speaking of the new apartment, I moved a few weeks ago! There are still boxes everywhere. I keep having to rip them open to look for something specific, but because this apartment is smaller than my old one, I don't have room to actually put everything somewhere. This new place is especially lacking in shelf space. So, a lot of stuff is going to have to just live in the boxes in my little storage room, I guess. I'll only be there for 6 months while I finish up school and then I'll leave for who knows where. Wherever I can find a job, I guess. But if I ever actually get unpacked and really moved in, perhaps I'll post some pictures of my newest abode. It will probably be sometime right before I have to pack up and move again. :)