Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Back in February, my mom wrote me the usual email asking what's new in the fabulous lives of me and my very handsome live-in boyfriend J. I replied, "Not too much here. We go to work, we come home, we eat salad, we watch Lost."

It's true. In anticipation of season 6's premier, we were plowing through seasons 1-5 with a focus and determination paralleled only, perhaps, by Joey Chestnut on 4 July. We stayed up late on school nights, we tried to make sense of time travel, and yeah, we ate a lot of salad. We still do!

J is not a scientist, but we both work long days, usually not getting home until 10 or 11. Monday through Friday, we are exhausted. Sometimes we muster the energy to grill up a few shrimp for our salad, but mostly not.

I remember re-reading that sentence that I typed to my mom and thinking Wow, we are like, objectively boring. I've decided, though, that I'm OK with that. For now, we are happy with our routine--at least we get to see each other for a couple of hours every day, existing in a state of objectively boring bliss.

The bliss may be ending soon, though, as it's now been made official that the grant I'm on runs out in just a few short months. I need to find somewhere to go, and I need to make the best decision I can for my career. Now, we knew this was going to be an issue when I was on the TT job market, but I think we were in major denial about it, and when nothing panned out in the TT search last year, it only served to reinforce our denial. Yay, no tough decisions!! Now, quite suddenly, it's a reality. There will be tough decisions. And our happy little work-salad-Lost (or Rome, our current series of choice) world may be turned upside down.