And the air is colder.
I meant to write an LJ post about school way back when it started in August, and here it's already October, which I know because my bloodstream is at least 35% honey crisp. Fall! So here are some updates:
[+] School: The hamster wheel spins on, but I'm so much happier this year: with my classes, with my friends. It’s so amazingly nice to walk on campus and feel happy and lucky instead of miserable and panicked. It's the first time I've gotten to choose all my own classes, instead of having to do required courses (mountains of econ problem sets!). Plus I can revel in the smug condescension of being a second year, chuckling at the first years freaking out about the same classes I freaked out about last year. (It's funny, at the time I complained bitterly about why we had to take the classes we did, but I run into situations all the time now where I know things I didn't know before, or think about things in a different way, all those frustrating discrete pieces suddenly clicking together to make me understand sections of the world differently. ..... so well-played, program, well-played.)
Anyway, my classes, in no particular order (ALL of which, I just realized, are taught by awesome ladies!):
[+] Work: I got a job! Well, I got an internship. But it pays! A tiny tiny bit. It’s with a tiny private sector development consulting firm which subcontracts on USAID programs - something I never thought I wanted to do, but I decided it would be good to get a taste of both consulting and the for-profit arena. Plus I’m learning all the USAID ecosystem lingo which is so useful to know in this field. It’s not thrilling and the time commitment - 20 hours a week! - is kind of killing me. I don’t have time to do my homework let alone network and set up informational interviews or go to events on campus. Also sitting in an office all day is a skill I seem to have lost, plus makes me stiffen up like anything. But I’m learning, and hope it’ll look good on my resume.
[+] Home: We moved! Upstairs in the same house. To an apartment that’s twice as big as our old one! Our old one was tiny and this feels PALATIAL: it has two floors! Natural light!! A dishwasher and a gas stove and a guest room and a built-in bookshelf for all my books, which have been living in boxes in the back of a closet for the past year, that’s how tiny our old apartment was. (I KNOW, TRAGEDY.) It’s so amazing it feels unreal. Our old apartment was cozy and sweet, but also kind of like living in a houseboat, without the potential for sailing adventures: everything must be stowed exactly in its place! Only one person can fit in the kitchen at a time! Commando crawl to the tiny fridge to see what’s inside! One foot of closet hanger space per person! Not enough chairs for dinner guests!
We’d ordinarily never be able to afford it, but we worked out a deal with the California-based landlady through which we’re getting a huge break on the rent in exchange for managing the property and helping her prep it to sell next year, including getting rid of lots and lots of old furniture and knickknacks from when she lived there. So that’s a project-and-a-half, but totally totally worth it. We just moved last weekend and were away this past one, so there’s still so much to do and I’m excited and antsy to nest like crazy.
[+] Honeymoon: We went to Thailand!! And, bookending that, Singapore and Jakarta. Singapore was an amazing mélange of food (Indian! Malaysian! Chinese!) and a surfeit of luxury stores. Jakarta and Bangkok were both fairly overwhelming and involved a lot of time sitting in traffic jams, but Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand was lovely: quaint and calm and touristy at exactly the right level, which I define as ‘still feels foreign, but you can get wifi and an iced coffee’. We took a sleeper train to get there, one of those always-wanted-to-do things. Visited a beautifully calm Buddhist monastery way up on a mountain. Did a three-course cooking class, which was excellent fun: they buy and prep all the ingredients and walk you through exactly how to cook them, and you get to be amazed by your stellar Thai cooking skills, haha.
We also went to Phuket, in the south, crowded with signs in Russian, Swedish and Hebrew, to cater to tourists. I was more seasick than I’ve ever been in my life on a boat trip to Ko Racha Yai, one of the outer islands, to go snorkeling, but the second I got in the water I felt fine, and it turned out to be one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. Neon blue water and fluorescent fish that swim casually an inch from your face and blue starfish and sinuous eels and crazy coral and huge, silent schools of yellow fish hanging unmoving in dark curtains in the shadow of the boat. Top life experience for sure. I could have stayed in that water forever.
I'm sure some other new things have happened but that's probably more than enough for now.
Fall always feels so sharply bittersweet. Like things ending and things beginning. The crispness in the air makes me feel connected to every other fall in my life - leafpiles in the backyard in New Hampshire when I was little and walking with coffee through Boston Common when I was 23 and now, riding my bike uphill to campus in DC 'til I'm radiating heat in the cool air, 30 and reinvented, lucky in so many ways and living this life I never quite imagined.
[+] School: The hamster wheel spins on, but I'm so much happier this year: with my classes, with my friends. It’s so amazingly nice to walk on campus and feel happy and lucky instead of miserable and panicked. It's the first time I've gotten to choose all my own classes, instead of having to do required courses (mountains of econ problem sets!). Plus I can revel in the smug condescension of being a second year, chuckling at the first years freaking out about the same classes I freaked out about last year. (It's funny, at the time I complained bitterly about why we had to take the classes we did, but I run into situations all the time now where I know things I didn't know before, or think about things in a different way, all those frustrating discrete pieces suddenly clicking together to make me understand sections of the world differently. ..... so well-played, program, well-played.)
Anyway, my classes, in no particular order (ALL of which, I just realized, are taught by awesome ladies!):
- Small and Medium Enterprise Development: Super-sexy things like mezzanine financing products and enabling regulatory environments! I jest, but do you know about this idea of the missing middle in developing economies? Poorer countries tend to have some very large corporations and microentrepreneurs, but very few small- and medium-sized companies: the very businesses that typically provide the most jobs. So there's a lot of focus now on why they're not there and how to fix that, aaaand that's what this course is. It is not, in fact, super-sexy, but I'm probably learning a lot? It seems useful?
- Demography and Development in Asia: I almost dropped this because it makes my schedule suck, but I'm so glad I stayed: the professor is GREAT, and it's really fascinating and I'm getting to remember and use my stats (regressionssss!) and it has the strongest gender component of any classes I've taken here so far. Plus she takes the broadest definition of Asia (Russia! China! Japan! Iran! Afghanistan! Etc.) which leads to a lot of interesting compare and contrast. And it plays really interestingly into my other classes.
- Business of Development: All second-year students are required to take a three-hour practical skillz workshop in their field, and this is my pick. The professor rocks and it's great in terms of hands-on stuff: budgeting! Proposal writing! The first big project was designing from scratch a youth employment project in the favelas of Rio in two weeks: HARD, but really interesting. (Unfortunately it turned into a group project situation from hellllllll. What is wrong with people??? But the less said about that the better.)
- Gender of Development: I'm taking this class at George Washington University because they didn't have one. It’s kind of hilariously fluffy compared to classes in my own program (such a light reading load! Such feelgood class discussions! Such disregard for econ!) but it’s interesting and an easy class is exactly what I need right now. Also it makes me much happier about my decision to turn them down in favor of G’town.
- French for Oral Proficiency: Again. Because il faut practiquer pour réussir l'examen d'aptitude avant d'être diplômé. Oy.
[+] Work: I got a job! Well, I got an internship. But it pays! A tiny tiny bit. It’s with a tiny private sector development consulting firm which subcontracts on USAID programs - something I never thought I wanted to do, but I decided it would be good to get a taste of both consulting and the for-profit arena. Plus I’m learning all the USAID ecosystem lingo which is so useful to know in this field. It’s not thrilling and the time commitment - 20 hours a week! - is kind of killing me. I don’t have time to do my homework let alone network and set up informational interviews or go to events on campus. Also sitting in an office all day is a skill I seem to have lost, plus makes me stiffen up like anything. But I’m learning, and hope it’ll look good on my resume.
[+] Home: We moved! Upstairs in the same house. To an apartment that’s twice as big as our old one! Our old one was tiny and this feels PALATIAL: it has two floors! Natural light!! A dishwasher and a gas stove and a guest room and a built-in bookshelf for all my books, which have been living in boxes in the back of a closet for the past year, that’s how tiny our old apartment was. (I KNOW, TRAGEDY.) It’s so amazing it feels unreal. Our old apartment was cozy and sweet, but also kind of like living in a houseboat, without the potential for sailing adventures: everything must be stowed exactly in its place! Only one person can fit in the kitchen at a time! Commando crawl to the tiny fridge to see what’s inside! One foot of closet hanger space per person! Not enough chairs for dinner guests!
We’d ordinarily never be able to afford it, but we worked out a deal with the California-based landlady through which we’re getting a huge break on the rent in exchange for managing the property and helping her prep it to sell next year, including getting rid of lots and lots of old furniture and knickknacks from when she lived there. So that’s a project-and-a-half, but totally totally worth it. We just moved last weekend and were away this past one, so there’s still so much to do and I’m excited and antsy to nest like crazy.
[+] Honeymoon: We went to Thailand!! And, bookending that, Singapore and Jakarta. Singapore was an amazing mélange of food (Indian! Malaysian! Chinese!) and a surfeit of luxury stores. Jakarta and Bangkok were both fairly overwhelming and involved a lot of time sitting in traffic jams, but Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand was lovely: quaint and calm and touristy at exactly the right level, which I define as ‘still feels foreign, but you can get wifi and an iced coffee’. We took a sleeper train to get there, one of those always-wanted-to-do things. Visited a beautifully calm Buddhist monastery way up on a mountain. Did a three-course cooking class, which was excellent fun: they buy and prep all the ingredients and walk you through exactly how to cook them, and you get to be amazed by your stellar Thai cooking skills, haha.
We also went to Phuket, in the south, crowded with signs in Russian, Swedish and Hebrew, to cater to tourists. I was more seasick than I’ve ever been in my life on a boat trip to Ko Racha Yai, one of the outer islands, to go snorkeling, but the second I got in the water I felt fine, and it turned out to be one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. Neon blue water and fluorescent fish that swim casually an inch from your face and blue starfish and sinuous eels and crazy coral and huge, silent schools of yellow fish hanging unmoving in dark curtains in the shadow of the boat. Top life experience for sure. I could have stayed in that water forever.
I'm sure some other new things have happened but that's probably more than enough for now.
Fall always feels so sharply bittersweet. Like things ending and things beginning. The crispness in the air makes me feel connected to every other fall in my life - leafpiles in the backyard in New Hampshire when I was little and walking with coffee through Boston Common when I was 23 and now, riding my bike uphill to campus in DC 'til I'm radiating heat in the cool air, 30 and reinvented, lucky in so many ways and living this life I never quite imagined.