Hobbies. I need a better one.

Now that I’ve had a few months to settle in to my new job, my new house and my new life up here in Boston, I’ve started to notice my lack of hobbies. Starting a new hobby is certainly a tricky business. Your first hurdle: you’re going to be bad at it, at least for a while (believe me, this is a formidable hurdle given the type-A personality so kindly bestowed upon me by my undergraduate years). Your second hurdle: it costs money (given that my audience is primarily in student loan debt up to his/her eyeballs or is trying to live in a major metropolitan area on a non-profit fellow’s stipend, I’m sure you feel my pain). Your third hurdle: you actually have to figure out what it is that you enjoy doing (metacognition is not my forte—yes, NBS, it’s because I’m a girl).

That said, I think I’ve finally arrived at a solution. I’ve found a cheap, enjoyable hobby that only took me about 4 hours of patient practice at my desk to master.


Behold…I can now write both forwards and backwards with equal dexterity and speed! Then again, perhaps I'll keep thinking...

My Identity Crisis (aka: Welcome to my blog)

Last night while I was washing up the last dish from my rather uninspiring rabbit-fare dinner of vegetables and tofu, I was surprised to find myself in the throes of an identity crisis. "Aha," you may think to yourself, "she's going through one of those post-graduation, 'oh-crap-what-the
-fuck-do-I-do-with-my-life-now' episodes. And, come to think of it, you'd be right. But not completely right. You see, this particular identity crisis was sparked when my new female roommate stopped in the kitchen to say a friendly hello. “Hey Adriana,” I instinctively looked up to see who was addressing me, and found myself looking right over her head. Having spent the previous three months living with four guys (two of them several inches over 6 ft.) and two tall girls, I have revised my self-schema accordingly. I’m short. I will always have a good view of people’s nostrils. And that’s just the way it is. So why is it so difficult for me to accept that I’m suddenly the tallest of the female contingent in my house? Have I been literally, figuratively, metaphorically, allegorically and in all other senses replaced? Is the defining factor of my own existence really as simple as whether or not I have to crane my neck back to look someone in the eye? This is the point where I realize, soggy sponge in hand, that I’ve been attacking the same skillet for the past 15 minutes. Having reached my quota of philosophizing for the night, I put away my dish and trucked off to bed.
That night, my dreams were plagued with images of coming home to find a hoard of the curliest-haired girls this side of the Mississippi chattering in my living room.

Quote of the day: "If you put together your desire with my smell, you get a smore"