Magically Delicious

Yep, that pretty much sums up my life this week thanks to my recent employ at a gourmet, hand-crafted chocolate retail shop and its accompanying cafe. I am learning the art of living on coffee and chocolates, styling my hair to fit beneath a "bistro hat," and muscling my clammy hands into plastic gloves.

Our little shop is a dreamy sort of venue, located on Main Street in a charming New England downtown. From our vantage on the corner of the block, there are vignettes of the well-kept store fronts of other cafes, specialty shops, and assorted purveyors of local charm. As evening settles and business winds down, the world outside takes on the faint glow of the street lamps and the cozy lighting of little bistros. The pop standards wafting in the atmosphere of the store add to the 1940s aura encircling the premises.

In between my Katharine Hepburn-infused day dreams, I make any variety of stupid mistakes and constantly apologize for my utter lack of chocolate and/or espresso know-how. An ideal espresso pull lasts 18-25 seconds. Mine is about 2/3 of perfection, clocking in at 12 seconds. An eclair dipped in chocolate should be allowed sufficient time to drip so that there aren't little chocolate pools and tentacles all over the pastry. My fourth attempt was...close.

I realize the patience I possess in dealing with myself when I pipe a cannoli full of ricotta and sugar, dip it in pistachios, drizzle it in chocolate, and consume the confection. In an epiphany, I know that there is a God and that he loves me enough to make even the consumption of food such a glorious experience. So, perhaps it's not magically delicious. Providentially, divinely, generously delicious may be the more appropriate term.

Post-Card Sentiments

I've been dwelling a lot recently on that letter I received a few months ago. It was full of warning signs regarding things like depression, loneliness, and self-questioning in one's life after college. At the time, I found the sentiments disturbing and overly pessimistic. I wrote a reply in defense of optimism. It's been a while since I've heard from my correspondent.

I spend most evenings blurring past the dashed lines of the highway, feeling crushed by the intermittent sensations of boredom and being overwhelmed by my situation. I want to send a post-card saying, "YOU WERE SO RIGHT!" In giant letters, just like that. Defeat in these situations is utterly demoralizing. Sometimes optimism has to take a back seat to reality, I suppose.

I must remind myself, I will always have hope. I will cling to it like a board from a ship-wreck on a stormy sea. I'm grasping at splintering wood, because there's nothing else to keep me from drowning in open waters.

The rubber meets the road an awful lot these days. I pay $14 weekly in toll fare alone, frequenting distant lands like Durham and Franklin. NPR, travel mugs of Yerba Mate tea, and cruise control make the hour and-a-half to two hours behind the steering wheel each day bearable.

This morning, I tore right through the Yerba Mate tea bag when attempting to remove its paper wrapper. A substance like oregano, or maybe something less legitimate, spilled all over the counter and the lip of the dishwasher door. I swept the herbacious green flakes into the palm of my hand, sprinkling them into the garbage can. I was amused.

But, if pulverizing a tea bag was amusing, I was in for a pleasant commuter's surprise. After discovering that, unfortunately, NHPR simply rebroadcasts the previous evening's news in the morning I was drawn into scanning radio stations for something other than morning talk shows. Seeking past another "Unbelievable Trivia blah-blah-blah" I glanced back at the road. I hear this is a good, and even encouraged practice in highway safety. (Cruise control is not synonymous with auto pilot, I was sad to learn.) What to my astonishment did mine eyes behold? Well, a virtually life-sized moose straddling a PT Cruiser, of course!

New Hampshire has a lot of distinctive qualities. Granite, trees, a remarkably small coastline. We boast in an old man that finally took his own geological life, avalanche-style, quietly in the middle of the night. But, people of New Hampshire, I think we have much more to boast in! The ingenuity, the pure genius of a gigantic fiberglass moose traveling the terrains of Interstate 93? Friend to daily commuters and vacationers alike, the moose, I salute you!

Styrofoam

I swipe the last twenty dollars from my plastic Fisher-Price piggy bank. So much for savings. The air is cool, but the evening is sunny and pleasant as I pull away in my Camry. The trunk still has several suitcases left over from college, which ended eleven days ago. Sometimes I could confuse eleven days with an eternity.

The symposium is empty when we arrive, aside from granite slabs and chips of stone on the path between the millyard and the river. Wandering among the sculptures, we assent to return another day. Wait. Are those voices?

The Cuban keeps telling us that the artists are locked up inside the mill building. He is obviously an artist, wearing a painter's suit and what was probably once a baseball cap that lost it's brim. The Czeck brings two styrofoam cups balanced between the fingers of his left hand, the wine in his right. Our polite refusal is ignored, so we take the cups of wine and sit down in the loading bay. We all introduce ourselves.

I need to work on the way I describe my profession. Once social work is out of the bag, people like to change the subject as quickly as is possible. I try grad student instead. What are you studying? I respond, and the characteristic change of subject ensues. My friend talks about the cafe where she works, and the artists listen with interest and try to solicit donations.

There's a lull in conversation, so the Cuban proposes a wet t-shirt contest, just for my friend and me. We laugh. He gets up to bring over the mock-up of his sculpture, a woman's draped figure, and shows it to us. He's persistent, but so are we, so he abandons his proposal and returns to his spot around the table.

Soon after, our steward wobbles away on his bicycle and our brief party starts to wane. We walk back to the car, styrofoam cups in our hands, to the last lights of the sun.

Horizon Hunting, or why I'm a grad student

Horizon hunting. That's what I'd like to call my recent life. Reaching out beyond the present, constantly pursuing a future of unknowns. There was one year of college hanging on for its dear life, to be followed by who knew what. But, as that year became nine months and five months and two months, I began to grasp what the next phase might resemble.

There's something absolutely liberating about graduating with your bachelor's degree. You can check off the last milestone on the "to-do" list your parents drafted for you during your pre-natal state. Finally, you are an individual with a little bit of alphabet soup attached to your grown-up name. Being single and unattached during this phase makes anything truly possible, allowing you to completely re-start your life wherever you can imagine. I mean, once you figure out how to postpone paying your loans.

The blessed irony of my situation is that I took all of that potential, all of those opportunities, all of those venues...and I moved back home and enrolled in grad school. I recently got a message from a friend, "Come to Jordan for the next two years! We need English teachers!" Wasn't that the sort of outlandishly awesome thing I was supposed to do after graduating from college? Grad school, seriously?

Since looking at school in one year terms has become my style, I'm amassing this degree into...anyone, anyone? One year. Since you can't do much of anything with a bachelor's degree except for casework, the Council on Social Work Education has shown us all great sympathy with a little something we call Advanced Standing. You are hurled full-speed into the middle of a two year program, skipping all of the first year courses and probably insulting and irritating standard track students. But, who can resist half-price/half-time? I obviously couldn't.