Updates

It’s been a whirlwind week!

Stomp

At my recommendation (I’d seen it before), I took C to see Stomp. If you haven’t seen this show, which includes a variety of dancing, percussion, and comedy (despite no dialogue) I highly recommend it. The show was sold-out and a great experience.

Anniversary

May 12 was our three-year anniversary - woohoo! I always get a kick out of remembering our first date, especially because I was supposed to be C’s practice date. See, I was his first official date after breaking up with the girl he’d been dating for over three years, and he also knew that he was going to be moving over 100 miles away less than a week after our meeting.

He thought to himself, what are the odds that I’ll even have a good time on the date? It’ll be good practice for after I move back to Phoenix and really start dating. So he figured that he’d use me as his confidence builder and never see me again - no harm, no foul. Problem was, halfway through our date we were clicking so well he knew that he wanted to see me again. We managed to squeeze in three dates and the “exclusivity” talk in the 5 days before he moved. Wowza!

Anyway, for our anniversary this year we ate at House of Tricks. We shared a cheese and fruit plate (somehow I never realized how well blue cheese goes with strawberries before!) and then I had homemade gazpacho with creme fresh and a green apple, candied pecan, and blue cheese salad while C had “everything spiced ahi tuna.” Check out the menu here - delish! Considering this place is less than a 10-minute walk from where I work, I think I will be treating myself, with or without him, a lot more often. We had beer but they have a phenomenal wine list and it’s probably only a $5 cab ride home in the inevitable case of overindulgence.

Obama

Well, as you may have heard, Obama was ASU’s commencement speaker. I got a ticket but decided not to go because a) there are going to be over 70,000 people there and it’s going to be a general nightmare, b) you have to get there five hours before it starts and sit in a concrete bleacher in the sun next to those 70,000 people and you can’t bring in water or an umbrella, and c) at the last minute we got word that the university was closing at 2 p.m. and so I could go home.

Woot! I’ll watch it in the air conditioning of my own home for that price. I kept my ticket, though, for my scrapbook!

Vacation

Plus we are leaving for Vegas next Thursday and will come back either Sunday night or Monday, depending on whether we decide to change our flight or our hotel reservation. I am super stoked because this is the first time I am bringing more than $100 in gambling money and I want to try some of the games that I have been afraid to play because you need a bit of a bankroll to do them right. Very exciting! Also our first trip with my best friend and her husband - if this goes well then we will probably try a Europe trip eventually.

The History of C and G

Since it is our three-year anniversary next week, it is worth (re)telling the story of how we met. It's pretty awesome. Way back in 2006, I was still living in Tucson. I had been dating since moving to Tucson (I was coming to the end of my 3rd year living there) but nothing serious. I dated one fellow for six months or so and that was the longest thing. I'd actually reached the point where I decided not to date anymore because I was just going to go "on the market" (i.e. start looking for a tenure-track job) in 2 years and it didn't seem like there would be enough time to build a relationship with anyone and have them be willing to move with/for me by the time I anticipated being done with my PhD.

Then one night near the end of the semester I was procrastinating grading papers or some such thing and found myself browsing MySpace for single fellows. I sent clever, one-line e-mails to two of them. The next day, I found myself with an e-mail back from the first guy (not C). To my surprise, he'd sent me a long pornographic story that he'd cut-and-pasted from an erotic website.

Um.

Okay, so not only is there the somewhat obvious fact that no girl likes to get unsolicited porn, but also, you're e-mailing a PhD student in English, for goodness' sake. Does it have to be plagiarized on top of everything else? Enter C: his first e-mail basically said, "I read your profile, and we have the same favorite book!"

Ding ding ding! We have a winner:-)

We exchanged a couple of e-mails and then he tried to add me as a friend, but I had my MySpace set up so that you either had to know my last name or my e-mail address to send me a friend request, and he had neither. He e-mailed me and said, "do you want to be my friend?" I essentially said that depended, because I went out for beer with my friends. Lo and behold! A first date.

We met at Gentle Ben's (walking distance from my house) and everything went great. I actually called Dalyn halfway through the date when he was buying me another drink and said, "I think this one's a keeper!" After a couple of hours talking he brought me to an end-of-semester party his friends were having. Two days later we went out again, and he revealed that he was moving to Phoenix for a summer job (about 120 miles away). We decided our chemistry was too great to have things end there, and managed to squeeze in one more date before he moved. We decided to be exclusive before he even left, and visited back and forth all summer until he moved back to Tucson.

We dated like normal people for a year while he finished law school, and then he got a job in Phoenix and I still had a year left of my PhD. So he moved and I arranged my schedule (since he was working full time like a regular person) so that I could spend four days a week in Phoenix with him and three days a week in Tucson. I put almost 10,000 miles on my car driving back and forth on a weekly basis for 8 months. During this time I did do a national job search for faculty positions, but didn't come up with anything that would enable C to make a lateral move and retain his current salary.

So after I defended my dissertation (April 9, 2008!) I put in notice at my Tucson apartment and moved to Phoenix - sans job, sans friends, sans everything (or so Jaques says in Shakespeare's As You Like It). I applied to job after job and was finally offered a position at the only place that called me back - the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. I coordinate the grduate programs and make a decent salary, fantastic insurance, retirement plan, vacation days...I have it all!

So here we are in Phoenix until the wind blows us somewhere else (hopefully within 2-3 years). Happy, both working to pay off our consumer debt and, one of these days, save for a wedding.

And all because some other guy made him look good by sending me porn.

My New Blog

Okay, so I was an avid blogger over on MySpace forever, but now I hardly use it for two reasons: (1) everyone and their mother migrated over to Facebook, so after a two-year tantrum where I wept at the visual cacophany of their platform and signed out immediately after signing in, I gave it a real go and (big shocker here) got as addicted as anyone. (2) I own my own business blogging under a pseudonym (if you're interested in the less politically correct details of my life, then facebook me and if I decide you are awesome enough, I'll shoot you the URL).

So now that I'm on Facebook I find myself wanting to do a family- and friends-friendly blog again, and since Facebook doesn't have its own blog feature (probably because it caters to the ADD among us and doesn't anticipate anyone typing more than 100 words at a time) I was told this is the platform to use. BONUS: My dad and sister (and other family members who are interested) can read it even if they don't have Facebook accounts.

So what's going on in my life lately? Life is good. My sweetie C and I are going to celebrate our three-year anniversary next week. We just moved to Tempe so my commute went from an hour to about 15 minutes. We have two cats (our sweet, sweet Hailey passed away in February after her four-year battle with diabetes) and a dog. We are trying to resist the urge to accumulate more pets because we are hoping to move out of AZ in the next 2-3 years. I graduate with my PhD (after 6 years!) next week as well. C and I both have good jobs - awesome in this economy. I have tickets to see Obama speak at ASU's commencement.

For those of you who knew me when I was younger (or don't know me very well at all) here are some salient - and potentially controversial - facts about C and I that you should know before getting too deep into the blog:

1. We are atheists.
2. We are vegetarians.
3. We do not want children.
4. We are crazy liberals.
5. We own thousands of books. Literally. Thousands.

So that's us! And while I totally get that there are people out there who don't feel the way I do (for example, my entire family), I am not interested in debating these issues or converting anyone. Statistically speaking, we are lucky to have found each other since such a small segment of the population agrees with us on even one of these issues, let alone all 5, that all I want is to be grateful that I have found him and celebrate our life here.

I can't wait to post more!