“Are you sure you don't want to go to grad school?”

From a recent More Intelligent Life column:

“Your mental focus narrows, and you discover that you have spent your 20s as an overgrown schoolboy, or girl, rather than establishing yourself in a career. . . . There are far better things to do with your 20s than acquiring yet more letters after your name.”

Yes.

After-dinner conversation.

“What do you want for dessert—ice cream or boba?”
“How about both?”
“We can’t have both.”
“Yes we can.”
“No we can’t.”
“Yes, we can.”
“Oh, wow—you’re right.”

Welcome to adulthood.

Mostly employed.

I was all geared up last week to write a post on rejection after I didn’t get a job I really wanted, but then I received a deluge of freelance work and didn’t have too much time to feel sorry for myself. The job I wanted was a salaried position copyediting a financial newspaper based in New York from home, and the job I have now is freelance curricula editing/thesis editing/ghostwriting. While I would prefer the steady income and résumé cachet of the former, there’s something to be said about the variety and flexibility of the latter. Today, for instance, I dropped Daniel off at school in the morning, headed over to the farmer’s market, came home and edited a unit from an intro to art course, touched up a project management lesson, revised the first portion of a course on paralegals and family law, and spent the afternoon researching neuroscientific approaches to investing. It works for now. I’ll keep looking for more gigs, but for the time being I’m happy to wake up in the morning and have a list of tasks waiting to be completed.

Daniel and I have been cooking a lot, and by a lot I mean every night, because we haven’t quite gotten the whole let’s-go-out-for-dinner thing down yet (even though we budgeted for it and told each other we were going to go out once a week...). The novelty of having my own little kitchen hasn’t worn off yet. Nor has the gratuitous feeling that no one is going to take my food or leave the dishes in the sink (dorm life is not for the uptight and persnickety). While I currently want, with every fiber of my being, to be one of those self-satisfied domestic bloggers who posts SLR shots of every meal she makes (you know what I mean), I don’t have an SLR (I told myself if I got that fancy job I would treat myself to a cute little Rebel, but alas, it was not to be. I have no other way of justifying half a month’s rent on an electronic toy...) and I don’t quite have the chutzpah to believe anyone actually wants to see boring pictures of my food (believing anyone wants to read my words, though? I’ve got buckets of chutzpah for that).

I will, however, give brief descriptions of some of our best meals so far, because I want to remember them and because I’m quite proud of what we’ve come up with (posting menus is nothing new for me; cf. The Dinner Club). Tonight, we paired the soba noodles we picked up at the Asian market yesterday with a spicy peanut sauce, and had these huge steamed green beans fresh from the farmer’s market on the side. For dessert, we had homemade cinnamon-apple boba tea. Talk about a pièce de résistance—boba is surprisingly easy to replicate at home. Other triumphs:

• Red bell peppers, roasted on the stove burners and filled with tuna 
• Butternut squash soup with garlic cheese bread
• Fried tofu with spicy peanut cabbage stir-fry
• Garlic edamame with tofu and rice
• Macaroni with homemade cheese sauce (roux ftw)
• Italian sausage on sourdough with cabbage salad

Et cetera. Thinking of dinner is a pain, but whipping it up and having everything I need at my fingertips is a serious joy. I can’t wait for fall foods. I just picked up a bag of Jonathan apples this morning. The fall weather, however? Not so much. I noticed this morning, looking out our window, that some of the leaves on the trees in the courtyard have started changing color. Um, it’s still technically summer. Go easy on us, Michigan.

Retroblog: What it took to get to Ann Arbor.

We left my sisters’ house in Carlsbad early on a Thursday morning and made it to a giant thermometer before lunchtime. Because we had loaded the car with every earthly possession we could (including hundreds of pounds of vacuum-packed clothing), we tried not to run the air conditioning too much. It was hot.

Soon the Nevada border arose out of the glimmering heat.

And then Las Vegas did, too.

Most of the drive was not very exciting, and Daniel hogged the first seven hours of driving, so I was left to entertain myself. Woooooo.

Arizona showed up unexpectedly, and we skirted the edge of the state.

We crossed through imposing canyons.

And all of a sudden, we were in Utah.

St. George, Utah: red hills, white temple. At this point, we had to stop, so we traipsed through the Target and giddily grabbed licorice, fruit leather, iced tea, and other strange things that sound appealing when you’ve been driving for longer than you normally sleep.

The only picture of me from the entire drive. It’s best that way.

In Utah, you can see really, really, really far into the distance.

As the sun set, we reached colorful Colorado. Tragic.

It got later and later, and we still weren’t at our destination (the home of Daniel’s gracious friends, the Blessings). At one point, we careened through the Rocky Mountains via this tunnel. At long last, we pulled into Denver at 12:30 am, 20 hours after we had left California, and four hours after we’d expected to be there.

We had a pleasant morning, and then shoved off. This is what Denver looked like.

This is what Nebraska looked like.

This is a Nebraskan sunrise. We stayed the night in Omaha and left early the next morning, now Saturday, and arrived in Michigan that evening.

This is how we sometimes stretched our legs. Daniel can totally drive with his left foot.

Right?

This is the Mississippi River.

It brought us into Illinois.

We got more and more excited as the radio station sources changed. Before we knew it, we were crossing into Michigan.

This was an exit we passed. Hah.

We got our key and parking pass, went to open up our apartment, couldn’t get the key to work, got a new key, and exhaustedly emptied the car. We built a blanket nest and huddled to sleep. This is our living room, with everything we fit into the car sprawled across it.

The next day, we walked through the U of M law quad and checked out Daniel’s new view. The town was shockingly beautiful (especially after hours of mid-American highways), and we were quite glad to be there.

Top five reasons why Ann Arbor is not in the middle of nowhere. (Alternate title: It’s not a cultural pit! They have Asian food!)

5. There are two Targets, a Walmart, a Trader Joe’s, a Whole Foods, and an Ikea within twenty minutes. Everything our pedestrian married selves could desire. Not to mention the way-too-cool-for-us Urban Outfitters, American Apparel, et cetera downtown A2 center.

4. Borders was founded here! Oh wait...well, I got a dayplanner for 75% off.

3. Detroit, while potentially as scary as everyone around here seems to think (I’ve yet to venture out there), is definitely a major metropolitan city, and only 35-40 minutes away.

2. It’s beautiful and woodsy, and the Huron River runs straight through town, but it still manages to be walkable and urban. The central campus, where the law school is located, is neo-Gothic wonderfulness with all the deciduous trees you know are going to be spectacular in the fall.

1. There is boba. Proof:

Yesterday we stumbled upon not one, but two bubble tea proprietors. I also timidly dashed into an Asian foods store the other day, haphazardly grabbing Want-Want and Bin-Bin crackers as I tried to track down some mochi. I’m never more aware of my whiteness than when I’m in an Asian market, but my deep and abiding love for certain products overrides my self-conscious sense of trespassing. Sorry for being clueless and white, cute Asian checkout guy!

Been there, read that.

Is it weird that right now I feel like I never want to read another book again? I mean, besides the book that Daniel gave me for Christmas that I’m still only halfway through, and the book a friend gave me for graduation that was a nice way to turn my brain off during wedding week, I haven’t read a single thing that wasn’t compulsory in more than a year. And I happen to be at a place in my life where I have a bit of free time, so I asked myself this morning, might I like to read a little? And I responded with a virulent “No!”

It’s funny, because I know a lot of people my age are marveling at the fact that, as newly minted grads, we’re not going back to school this week (cf. the plethora of Facebook “We’re not going back to school? Weirrrrrd” posts), for their primary identity has always been student. I’ve held my status as a student at a wary distance at times, but I have always been a reader. Always. Ask my mom what I was doing when I was three. She’ll be glad to tell you the story.

Not that I haven’t been reading, technically. I earn a living (can we live on it? Stay tuned) by reading, and redacting, and rereading. As a senior literature major, I read every word that was assigned to me (I’m almost embarrassed to admit I’m not lying about that). I read every newspaper article that ran in our paper (twice). I read my Facebook feed, and my RSS feed, and the latest Slate articles, and far too many Yahoo front page features. But sitting down, of my own volition, and just devouring a novel? I didn’t. I haven’t. And I still don’t want to.

I think I know what happened. Well, I have a few theories, anyway. I was (am) reading an awful lot, so why would I want to read more? It’s much more likely that in my free time I would want to stare at something further than twelve inches away from my face for a while. And a (tragically) large portion of the reading I did in the last year was conducted in light of a literature class (and of that reading, I had already read a large portion of it in high school. I thought reading as many of the classics as I could in high school would give me an edge, and it did, but it also set me up for some seriously tedious introductory lectures). And maybe that was it—maybe it was seeing the beautiful, the transcendent moments in the text overlooked, trampled, or garbled in the mouths of my classmates that turned my flame down lower and lower, until the pilot light just went out.

But that’s a terrible and pretentious thing to say, and it surely cannot be the whole truth. So I’ll hold forth with my final theory: that real life became much more interesting and exciting than anything I could find in a book, and that I wanted to try my own hand at the archetypal human experiences sans other narratives. Maybe I’m just Gwendolen in “The Importance of Being Earnest” carrying her diary around so that she always has “something sensational to read in the train” (I’m telling you, let those pesky narratives into your life and you’ll never escape them), but it’s a really good story. And I can’t put it down.