Archive: May 2008

Sherry asked:

What made you decide to get married, as opposed to just living with JG? I guess my question stems from the fact that I am also a twenty-something married person, and I know why I did it. But I’m always interested to learn why other people take the plunge.

It’s interesting for me to consider this question because living together before getting married was never really up for discussion. In a lot of ways, I can see how it can make sense in that there are no legal ramifications in terms of property division in case the relationship turns sour, and I know that others might have a dim view of marriage as an unnecessary social construct. However, JG and I didn’t consider the option of cohabitation, and our religious beliefs were a big motivator behind that. Basically, we wanted to be married when we starting living together, so until our wedding, we just didn’t. JG spent the month between graduation and our wedding living out of suitcase at his parents’ house, and I held down the fort at the apartment I’d had for the previous six months.

I suspect that this explanation begs the question of why we got married right after graduation. My parents asked us to consider waiting for a year after college to get married, and then jobs and finances would be in place, and we might be in a better situation to start off. I already felt like being engaged for ten months was pushing my internal timeline, and JG and I had been together for two years when he proposed. To wait another year after that before getting married seemed like such a needless hurdle when we knew we wanted to be married, ultimately. It also didn’t seem prudent to pay for two different rent payments for a whole year when we could get married, live together, and save that money. Our apartment was on the cheap side of a low-cost town, but had we waited a year and JG got his own place, we would have wasted over $8,000, which would not have included the cost of driving to see each other. For JG and me, the numbers did not make sense to wait for a year, and besides that, we really wanted to be married. So we had our wedding a month after he graduated from college, bought a house two months later, and the rest is history.

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Laurel asked:

How did you choose your college? What did you like and dislike about the school you chose? (You may have already answered this, but I think it’s an interesting topic.)

During my senior year of school, I applied to seven colleges. Between the application fees, the essays, the visits, and my normal school life, I don’t know what I was thinking. I couldn’t apply early decision to any of them because they all had binding contracts, so I had to sweat it out until spring, when the results came in:

• Accepted: 4
• Wait-listed: 1
• Rejected: 2

Looking back, I realize that I had a rather unbalanced combination of reach, safety, and moderate-range schools, but it was fine with me to have half of the decision made for me. Of the schools that accepted me, I easily eliminated the University of Connecticut (more like University of My High School) and Virginia Tech (more financial aid, please), which left me with two remaining choices: the University of Rochester and the University of Delaware. They were my top two schools during the application process, so that was reassuring.

I had visited Rochester and Delaware during the summer before my senior year, and I thought that Rochester had a slight edge. It was more prestigious, I had an option of a 5-year master’s program in chemical engineering, and I liked the idea of being up north. Delaware was a more laid-back campus, but it had a history of undergraduate research and studying abroad, plus a good marching band. Unfortunately, I could only afford to go to Rochester by taking out massive student loans, including work-study, and Delaware would be no problem in that area. I went back to both schools during spring break of my senior year to make the final call.

During my second visit, Rochester seemed strangely cold and pretentious to me, which was partially due to the gray weather that is so common to the early spring. Maybe it was just my tour guide or the panel I attended, but there was an air that I should need to deserve to go there. If I decided to go elsewhere, Rochester would find another willing student who would. They didn’t want me, they just wanted a warm body. On the other hand, Delaware was lovely and bright. It was a beautiful day, and I soaked in the Jeffersonian architecture as I walked along the brick pathways. I talked with the honors chemistry adviser during lunch, and I was paired up with a chemistry major who was in the band. I felt like Delaware was pursuing me as a person, not just as another freshman to fill in the ranks. Granted, I think the honors program played a huge part in my recruitment by making sure that I was slotted into advantageous conversations, but it worked. I loved the campus, the professors I met, and my prospects for research and travel. Delaware was a good fit in terms of cost, and it was five hours from home. Perfect.

I had a great time in college. I switched up my major, made lots of friends, had excellent professors, and — oh, yes! — met my future husband. At times, I was frustrated with the idiotic antics that seem to come with college students, and I had one amazingly bad professor, but my experience was overwhelmingly positive. The university has wonderful memories for me, and it trips me up when I go back and things are not quite as I left them. I’m so glad that I went to Delaware and I love to go back to campus, whether it’s to catch football games in the fall, eat at our most-loved downtown restaurant, or seeing our favorite a capella group. Even though it took me a long college search to figure it out, I’ve been a Blue Hen all along.

#17, 18

Previously: Lent, hypothetical actions, superpower, television, favorites, hypothetical money

Over the lovely weekend:

• Caught up on about four hours of DVRed television.
• Tried out a Redbox rental kiosk for the first time.
• Saw Casino Royale. Liked it. Was totally worth the $1.06 rental fee.
• Realized that it was the first Bond flick I’d seen from beginning to end. Resolved to see Goldeneye at some point.
• Had delicious dinners of barbecue chicken with cornbread and broccoli mac and cheese gratin.
• Got a glimpse of why people enjoy watching hockey when high-definition television magically revealed the puck to me.
• Reorganized a closet to more efficiently store staples of paper products, candles, light bulbs, and other random household goods that are completely necessary in a moment of crisis.

This morning:

• Woke up at some ungodly hour of night with intense pain in my left eye, which was bloodshot and watering profusely. Staggered to the bathroom to get some eye drops.
• Woke up at the sound of my alarm with the same pain, plus a stuffy nose.
• Asked JG why he was walking so funny. Was concerned to hear that he had mysterious, intense pain in his hips and could barely walk, but he had to go into school today to give tests.
• Tried eye drops again, but the eye was terribly sensitive to light. Instant headache. Pushed glasses onto my face to walk Ted.
• Stepped out in the pouring rain and driving wind, which was only mitigated by the knowledge that I did not have to drive to work today.
• Passed my carpool partner’s car and saw that he had a flat tire. Left JG a voicemail to please not take my car because I would probably need to drive.
• Briefly considered throwing in the towel on being put-together today, but instead made a small effort in the hopes that it would make me feel better. It did, just slightly.
• Got a call from my carpool partner, Joe, about the flat tire. Cheerfully agreed to drive, gritting my teeth all the while.
• Took some allergy medicine and ibuprofen to stave off the attractive bloodshot eye and ensuing headache.
• Gritted my teeth again when Joe asked if we could stop for coffee, since he didn’t have time to make some at home, and even though I wouldn’t buy anything. Felt like a chauffeur while waiting in the parking lot of the coffee place.

I am now freezing in my office. My left eyelid is drooping, hag-like, and I must have taken the two dud pills from the ibuprofen bottle. Any eye make-up I applied is destined to run off into tissues from dabbing at my eye or smudge into my face. Five o’clock seems like a long time from now.

Monday, I want a do-over.

… the fire chief lives on the corner of our street. He cooks on a charcoal grill at least two days a week, regardless of the season. He used to have a big squad car with “CHIEF” painted on the side, but he has traded it in for a manly SUV. When the volunteer fire siren goes off, it’s just a matter of moments before that SUV rolls quickly past with him in the driver’s seat, wearing his fluorescent green sweatshirt. He and his wife had a baby girl last year, and Ted is inexplicably afraid of her stroller.

… there are flags of all sorts flying from people’s houses. Collectively, we support the Flyers, the Seminoles, America, spring, and a duck in galoshes.

… there is a telephone pole that was completely taken over by morning glories. When I walked in the morning, before we got Ted, I always loved to see how its flowers faced the rising sun just over the hill toward the high school. This year, I realized sadly that someone had “cleaned” the pole, so there are no more morning glories.

… a publication called The Bulletin is tossed into people’s driveways. No one seems to want it, judging from how long the copies lie languishing on the sidewalk, but how to stop the distribution appears to be a mystery.

… the air smells like spaghetti sauce, chimney smoke, freshly-cut grass, or hamburgers, depending on the time of year.

… there is a preponderance of lawn ornaments in the shape of deer or sheep with holes cut into their backs to hold potted plants. I don’t understand those creepy things at all.

… the school buses tend to honk their horns if the kids aren’t at the end of their driveways. If I’m close enough and unaware, it makes me yelp and jump out of my skin.

… the ice cream truck began its rounds in the last weekend of March. It plays a mangled version of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and it comes to our street at 6:30 on the dot every night. I’ve never bought anything from an ice cream truck before, so I am always tempted to raid the coin jar and flag down the driver, but I’m not sure how that would look. Even then, if I couldn’t get a strawberry Good Humor bar, I would be really disappointed.

… there is a car with a bumper sticker that is so faded that it reads only, “God Save.” I always wonder what it originally read. God Save America? God Save the Philadelphia Eagles? God Save Me Money?

… a group of high school girls walks to school with one of their moms, who walks a yellow Lab named Friday. The girls always squeal at Ted when they see him coming, and he starts wagging his tail even before I can see them coming.

For about a year and a half now, JG and I have set aside Wednesday as a no-television night. Sometimes, we ease up and turn on the TV after a climbing session, but I don’t feel so bad about that because we haven’t spent the entire evening zoning out. Recently, we added internet browsing and playing video games into the Wednesday ban, so last night’s entertainment consisted of hardcore games of Boggle and Scrabble. Woo! Party animals!

JG beat me to a pulp in Boggle, and I am determined to get better. I have trouble when the letters are not aligned so I can read them easily, and I did not have the advantage of playing hours of Text Twist in college, so there’s that. As for the Scrabble, well, I did not have the best game of my life. Apparently, I was not in the good graces of the tile gods, because I had to trade in my tiles twice, which is absurd for me. I successfully challenged JG’s non-word off of the table, shortly before he bingoed with CREATURE and hit two double word scores with it. Agh! A quadruple word score plus the fifty point bingo bonus! I was sure that the game was over, but I plugged along. As is my habit, I got distracted by playing a beautiful, low-scoring word, but I managed to chip away at JG’s lead until there were just a couple of turns to go. Then I pulled the last two tiles in the bag: the Q and the K. Awesome. I managed to dump both of them (QI and KEGS), but JG used all of his tiles first, so he ended up winning by about twenty points. Still, I consider this game a moral victory because I didn’t get blown out of the water. I will say it again: quadruple word score on a bingo. Bah.

While JG and I were locking horns in nerd warfare, Ted was wandering around on his indoor leash. Boggle was very exciting for him because of the rattling dice, but Scrabble was more of a snooze. Every so often, he snuffled up to the coffee table to see what the fuss was about, and he sat on my lap for a while to help me make sense of my awful tiles. I’m sure that Ted will be able to qualify for a novice tournament in a year or two, that is, if he doesn’t eat the tiles first.

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