four years!

I doubt anyone reads this blog anymore, for the few who ever did! Even I couldn't find it without Googling the title... my name didn't bring it up. If I can barely find my own blog, I don't expect many others to come across it.

But that's all okay because most of these posts, especially in later years, were more to catalogue thoughts than to communicate anything to The World, and that's still true. I'll keep posting, maybe not more than every four years but who's it hurting? It's nice to write thoughts down when you have a chance to actually hear them. That proves to be less and less frequent in adulthood.

That's right: I am an adult. I'm not sure when it happened; it sure wasn't during those early years of grad school where all I apparently did was bitch about Florida. But - and I suspect this could be true for most people - I mostly just kept pretending to be one until somewhere along the line I started fooling even myself, and here we are.

Having a real job where you're responsible for other people helps toward that whole adulthood thing. For example, the other day I was asked to decide whether a man's catatonia was psychiatric, when it was in fact non-convulsive status epilepticus - so my insistence it was not psychiatric may literally have saved his life. It's those "oh, that thing I did mattered!" moments that really drive home that whole sense of being a Grown-Up. Like, who green-lighted me being in charge of that? They're just lucky that one turned out okay.

Being married is pretty grown-up too, and somehow I pulled that off. I married Blake last year, and he's hands-down my best friend. We're a lot alike, but one thing I've noticed about marriage is that you tend to take for granted all the things you share in common, and the differences can easily take center stage. He's perennially the reasoned, put-together one to my loose cannon, the Jerry Seinfeld to my Kramer, but if we look past that, beneath it we see eye to eye on nearly everything. That makes being partners in life pretty easy, most of the time.

Skills I've mastered in my one little year of marriage so far: Don't be a jerk. Think you know better than he does? Proud of that supremely clever jab you thought of? Keep it to yourself. When your focus in a marriage is on being the winner, that's the one way to guarantee you're not gonna win. Winning's about you both coming out on top, together, as a team, so forget about being right or smart (even when you are, you're so right and smart). Be ready to hear it when you're wrong, and be open to the possibility you might really be wrong. Maybe you'll even learn something from it. Be ready, without hesitating, to say you're sorry. Especially when you were a jerk.

Owning a house is also grown-up. Somehow, I have found myself on a farm in Indiana. This is one of those things that goes back to winning in a marriage being a team thing. Husband really wanted to live in the country. And you know what? Not me really, but there's an adventure I hadn't tried yet. Gainesville ended up being a wonderful place to live - I obviously survived the cultural vortex I thought it'd be when I left Chicago, and got things out of living there I wouldn't have known. So why not learn to live in the country? I've started a little vegetable garden, learned to run our John Deere mower without chopping my limbs off, and next try my hand at beekeeping... once this full body reaction to poison ivy clears up.

I don't know how I got here to this adulthood thing, but it actually isn't that hard. As long as you don't think about it too much. Thankfully you can't - there isn't usually the time to spend navel-gazing like I could when I was writing these earlier blog posts. There's a partner to hang out with, dogs to feed, a lawn to mow, laundry to do. But with this little update completed, I do still intend to drop in with some thoughts now and then, or at least a poem or piece of writing that needs saving. Till then...