Life in St. Louis

The readership of my blog is an at all time high right now (meaning, 2 friends talked about it...) because of all of my banana bread recipe advertising, so I figured it might actually be a good time to start posting again. When I started this blog I promised myself that I'd never feel like I had to post with frequency or anything, because then it becomes a burden and not as fun.

So three weeks ago I moved to St. Louis and I live by myself. It's cool because I've made my apartment a shrine to the color blue, Wicked, and musical instruments.
My AV housemates might remember my reaction to the moment when I realized that I was living alone... serious panicking. It's pretty much a complete 180 from last year, and so I thought that since I was happy last year I'd be the opposite this year. For the first week, it was really tough. My gchat status one day was something about knowing why they call them the St. Louis Blues. Depressing! But I'm lucky to have awesome friends who were supportive from afar and- shout out to Whitney for being so amazingly kind and welcoming to me that first week and still now. But then, once life picked up a little bit, I've embraced this.

I actually like doing dishes now. They are my dishes, and they are going to sit in the sink until i do them. My mom and Ali Folker don't live here! So the 2 minutes it takes to put them in the dishwasher considerably improves the cleanliness of my apartment and I end up feeling really accomplished.

Other than my ability to be incessantly singing pretending-to-be-Elphaba and most recently Fantine without infringing on other people's rights, life is pretty much the same as before. Except there are a lot of thunderstorms which apparently I am scared of. One of my first nights I fell asleep on the couch and I woke up at 2:00AM to thunder and what sounded like a tornado siren but was actually wind whistling through the windows. Also, when I got home from work today my whole apartment smelled like gas, because I guess I never turned the stove all the way off... didn't exactly know what to do so I opened some windows and bolted. Definitely missed roommates in those moments.

What has been the biggest change since this move is the peace and quiet I can have at will. While it was great to hear Paul's stream of conscious in my family's little casita all summer, for years I have wanted to have some sort of place or way to start my day in prayer. Until now I had a hard time making that happen. Now, I've started to leave a little time in the morning to center myself before the day.

So I'm shaping up to really like life here. The people in my program are fantastic, and even though I feel like I'm in way over my head academically, they are all really supportive and don't ever make me feel bad that I have no idea what all the fancy words mean. I do 20 hours a week of graduate assistant work on a project I care a lot about, and I'm taking 3 classes. Other than class times, all my time is my own and I can choose when I work, which is a really good system for me. I wake up and I can't believe that I get to spend all day doing things I've been wanting to do for years. I wonder what I'll be saying during paper writing season.

Peace!