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November 29, 2006
i just want to love you madly
my dog. she is spoiled
my stats prof brought up a good point this morning.
being in grad school is costing me more then just the tuition i am not paying, but the earnings that i am not earning. i never thought about that, but it is true. it doesn't really matter as i am doing this for extra-rational reason (thirst for knowledge. interest in policy. desire to be hyper informed on every issue that interests me in the slight.). but it is an interesting point. i guess i could be out working, getting paid a whole heck of a lot of money, but beside buying my families all sorts of presents, and ben a plasma tv, i'm not sure how my life would be different if i was working. of course, i might not be singing this song if wasn't married to ben, but i think even if i was living on loans in my roger park apartment (which i loved) i would still not be living that differently then now. just in a crappier apartment.
i feel much better today. a good night's rest, a great workout on mr. elliptical, and rain makes life good. i'm enjoying the last day of warmth from inside the policy building. oh well, the last couple of days have been unexpected gifts. amazing. it might snow. a lot. on friday. not excited. most fridays it would be fine as i usually don't have to leave, but today starts finals boot camp (as i am calling it). I have a lot of review sessions. it is insane, but review sessions can be helpful, so i go. and there is one on friday. but not until 1. so hopefully no snow and if snow no snow by then.
Posted by christina at 2:20 PM | Comments (2)
November 28, 2006
you came in the name of love and / left a wake of happiness and tenderness
sweetness.
Well, the foot is not broken. or even stress fractured. not sure what the heck is wrong with it, but i am banned from running for a bit. I am allowed elliptical. I've taken the past couple of days off from both (instead doing pilates) and the foot has felt better. With finals coming up next week, i am about tempted to just stay off of it until after. I don't want to be off from school and not able to run. But considering how snack-a-licous i get when studying, i think it will be wise to do the elliptical. It just makes me feel better.
It is so warm in chicago. I've had the front balcony door open all day. Pepper is so confused by all the sounds. It is definitely keeping her up from her daytime nap.
i feel all off. I think it is because my body is just in shambles. It likes running and it does like weird swelling of the foot. I think i just hurt it (strain, whatever) and my body just interprets things weird, which makes the whole explain what hurts thing weird.
ugh. it is just going to be a brute force 8 days.
Posted by christina at 3:53 PM | Comments (0)
November 27, 2006
it is so warm here. i am so annoyed that my foot is not in a good way and hence i've been restricted inside. i have finally given up even on the elliptical as it my food is still swollen. I really want to be able to run while i am in arkansas for christmas.
today i get an actual doctor's opinion.
Posted by christina at 7:49 AM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2006
the only thing to do is jump over the moon
as i set here and eat leftover pie for lunch while reading "From substantive to procedural rationality" all i can think is, damn, i bake a mean pie.
Posted by christina at 1:25 PM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2006
i'm no superman
this article in the times interested me with its commentary on the lack of professional dress of medical residents. i find this to be true in both engineering and policy grad school. Yeah, we are graduate students, so i'm all for jeans, but I just don't understand clevage. at nu this was your job. and you interact with your boss. and do experiments in the lab. at uc you interact with professors. why show everyone the tops of your breasts?
Posted by christina at 7:42 AM | Comments (1)
November 20, 2006
one foot in / one foot out
let's see. a quick post. liz is visiting, so life is excellent. we had steve and jen over for dinner last night. steve got a post doc at argonne, which is awesome for him and also for us since they'll be sticking around for a couple of years. he so deserves it. he is awesome smart, modest, and a great worker. it was excellent to have them over.
it always amazes me how i get all wrapped up in stupid things, but when actual bad things happen i take them very well. i guess it is the fact that i know that i can't do anything about the real bad things, but i could have figured out the proper distribution on that problem.
last week the side of my foot swelled up. i thought it was strange, but it didn't hurt, so i didn't think much of it after the swelling went down. but this morning during my run, it started throbbing and hasn't stop since. it really hurts. after consulting with the sistas, including the physical therapist, i'm convinced that i have a stress fracture in my fifth metasomething. there isn't really anything they can do, so i'm going to wait until next week, which is the first time i can get in to see their sports med doc at the health center. rachel had a stress fracture last year. they just told her to stop running and be careful and about 3 wks later it was all better. of course, i'm so annoyed that i have to pause the running schedule, but the PT said i should be able to do the elliptical. so that is good since i thought i was just going to sit on my ass for 3 weeks (NOT good for the stress levels).
in addition to my throbbing foot, my car won't start this morning. i eventually got it started with some moral support from liz, and made it to school. it started right up after school, but i am not one to chance things, so we took it straight to the mechanic after school today. hopefully they will figure it out.
Posted by christina at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2006
imagine me and you / i do
today, in micro, the chick next to me was using one of those pens with the 4 colors - blue, black, green, red. it reminded me of my jr. high days when i used a pen with blue, black, purple, and pink. I would take classes notes in blue and write notes to my friends with the purple and pink. i can see that pen in my head. i wrote a lot of notes in class. this continued into college where my friend court and i would mail letters back and forth. we were old school like that.
there are some days when i have so much to read or i care (WAY TOO MUCH) about my grades, I wonder what i am thinking. why did i sign up for studying and tests and so much reading? Why did i take the hard stats when i could be breezing through the easy stats and my gpa would be better off. but my brain is better off. i am finally (thanks pepp ta) internalizing that grades should reflect what i should learn and not what i know. yeah, i made mistakes on my stats midterm (which, i have no idea as we haven't gotten them back), but i have learned what i did wrong and why it was wrong and how to improve for the next paper or the next exam and really for me in general.
i am here to learn a different language, which i what i am doing. i know where i want to end up many years from now. I have faith that i will end up there, the uncertainty of the path is bothering me. though, not really, it is a temporary bother that i know i just focus on as a distraction from my current work.
finals come soon in three weeks i'll be done with this quarter. i am not looking forward to finals, but i am looking forward to the break that follows. it is filling up with things like kitty surgery, a trip to arkansas, getting my plates changed, meeting with a very important person that i hope will be my path...
Posted by christina at 2:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2006
hush hush / keep it down now / voices carry
me, inside, today.
November's days are ticking away. fall quarter always goes so fast. This one faster the the rest. First there was the wedding. then midterms. now thanksgiving is next week. I really like thanksgiving. as i get older, i really like the holiday season. i am becoming one of those cilche of older people who like the holidays because one gets to see one's family. the strange thing (strange?, nah great thing) about this year is that i have an official other family. and it is a great other family. and it got me thinking about how when you date some one at first it is just about that person. but on the longer term it isn't just about that person. it ends up being the people behind the person - usually their family. and as much as people say it is my life and blah blah blah, if it is serious, in the end it is the whole package.
I was just reminded of this as one of my friends navigate the holiday season of her jewish in-laws and protestant parents.
Posted by christina at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2006
light as a feather
"It is the very complexity of reality which makes the analysis of an abstract interaction so helpful as an aid to understanding."
This is the pillar of a lot of my education.
About a year and a half ago, i got into bread making by hand (i.e. no bread maker). It was fun and easy. It just took patience, bread making requires a lot of waiting. Last winter was the last time I made bread. I was spurred into making it again by an article and recipe in the times about bread that rises for 18 hrs instead of kneading. Intrigued, i broke my no-white bread rule and tried it. It was so easy. And it came out amazingly. the crust was so crusty. One problem with homemade bread is that it is impossible to make a "crusty" bread like french bread at home. This is fine as I usually make cinnamon raisin and multigrain breads. Neither of these require a crusty crust. But on the occasion we have people over for italian, i like to have bread and oil. and one needs a crusty bread, so i always got it from the store. But now with this awesome recipe, I can make it.
Pete and J's album can now be ordered. Go here and click add to cart. There's steaming album is here. You should get it. It is good.
Posted by christina at 1:22 PM | Comments (0)
November 5, 2006
looking out for number one
leave the kitty alone.
this is how i spend a lot of my days - demarcating areas of the couch to the cat and to the dog. they don't fight, but the cat hisses a lot when the dog tries to play with her or to snuggle.
Last night, we went out with ben's parents to dinner with some of their friends from law school. it was fun. it is always fun to go to nice restaurants in very nice hotels and have good food and wine and conversation. i learned a lot about the minor league baseball system and the management of athletes. It really was interesting. i had no idea that services like these exist.
We also got a copy of pete and j's new cd which is quite excellent. i guess it hasn't been "released" yet, but when it is i'll post a link so you can all buy it. Their chicago "cd release party" is on Dec. 9 at uncommon grounds at 11. So if you are around, you should definitely go.
OH, we got some of that memory foam stuff (i found it online for 80% off) for our bed. The stuff is AWESOME. i've slept so well the past couple of nights, even the dog's whining doesn't really wake me up. (I think that i tell her to be quiet in my sleep, because i don't remember it doing it since we got the foam.)
off to right about collective action and national public radio.
chris and I, taken by ray.
Posted by christina at 7:54 AM | Comments (2)
November 2, 2006
everybody loves you, so don’t let them down
jenny, me, and liz. at some event. (thanks chris/ray)
i'm not really sure where my time goes. All i know is i have no time to return phone calls and e-mails, much less blog.
i'm a morning person and all, but i really wish the people in my 8:30 class would talk quietly. it is still too early for the yelling and talking about being hung over.
npr is having their pledge drive. they like to say where people are pledging are from. this morning when they mentioned some pledger was from chicago, i found myself realizing that i more identify with living on the near north side of chicago then in chicago. this is probably because i've spent so much time with peeps from evanston or, now, hyde park. as much as i make fun of the northside, especially wriggleyville, i like living there.
classes are busy busy. some of the people in my program drive me batty, as you might suspect from the previous comment. people everywhere drive me batty, so i why am i surprised? some of the people drive me batty in ways that i suspected before i came, but then there are the hung over people that i just didn't expect to encounter in this program.
i have found two awesome people - josh and emily. josh lives by me, is engaged, and is old like me. emily is even older then us and married. we all treat school as important, but not our lives and that is really nice. so really, i complain about people, but in the end all i really need is a couple of people. we work on stuff and chat about life. it is nice.
i do have to mention that it is strange going from a life where i really didn't talk to many people during the day (hello, why i graduated in 4 years) to chatting with either josh or emily or some one else most days. i like it, but maybe that is where all my time goes. ha ha, not really. all my time goes into stat problems that once the question is explained clearly i could have solved in 15 minutes. oh stats. you are so interesting, but all the people in my class are freaked out about the midterm next week. it is open book, so i'm not that freaked out. it is a hard class. i'm use to hard classes. i do better in classes that are hard because i understand concepts, but tend to make stupid mistakes on exams. this works out fine in hard classes, but in easy classes it can make a big difference. hence, why i'm a fan of hard classes. plus it is open book.
plus i've recently made a commitment (yesterday) to stop being so intense about school. i got behind (b/c of the wedding) and then got use to working every moment not spent walking or dealing with ms. pepper. and i got caught in my grades as i thought, hey, i should be doing spectacularly. i'm actually not sure how i am actually doing, but i perceived that i should be doing everything perfect b/c hey, i'm smart. Through all of my years in school i never really cared about my grades, which is actually evident in them. I studied and i tried, but i was never an overachiever. seems to have worked out. the ironic thing about my johnny come lately obsession with grades is that i know that grades don't matter. i know they REALLY don't matter in life, and they REALLY REALLY don't matter for me. so alas. my new commitment to not being so intense is working so far as i am posting to my blog instead of reading some of the many pages that i should be reading for my noon discussion section.
Posted by christina at 10:42 AM | Comments (2)