Lunching in

I think I might actually need to start packing lunches. The past couple days I've been buying lunches, and while I am overjoyed to actually get paid this summer, blowing 1/6 of my lovely paycheck on eating out (yes, I make that little/lunch can easily cost that much) as opposed to practical things like rent, or fun things like shoes, kind of seems to defeat most of the paycheck joy. Paying for work lunches is too much like paying to work.

Which leaves me with packing my own lunches, like a good frugal person. Which I'm not. I haven't consistently packed a lunch since elementary school. My tastes have probably changed a bit from when I would scarf down cold Chef Boyardee everyday. During the past school year I would usually just try to power through with out lunch until I went home for the day mid-afternoon. Or, if that was to much to bear and I got lucky, I could often manage to scavenge a free lunch from the various conferences going on. The conferences, and their free lunches have dried up over the summer. I know, poor baby can't steal free food anymore.

On the plus side, I now have access to both a refrigerator and a microwave, so my options have expanded considerably beyond just sandwiches. I hope to be able to just use leftovers for much of my lunching, but since we are now used to making dinners fit for two, without so many leftovers that things go bad, I can't exactly count on that. Also, I'm lazy in the mornings, so I need something I can easily do the night before without it going soggy - a major flaw for sandwiches. Preferably something healthy. And delicious. I'm not about to go through all the effort of lunch packing for something mediocre. My laziness requires some serious yummy motivation.

Any suggestions? I'm thinking some form of pasta salad sounds nice and summery. And that's pretty much all the ideas I've got.

Sandals

Apparently my beat up rainbows aren't exactly appropriate footwear for an adult, and since I'm kind of hoping that if I keep pretending to be one, eventually the whole grown up thing will just kind of happen, I've been eyeing alternatives lately.

I love the greek, but not crazy gladiator look of this and this, plus the silver feels a little more modern than white, while still being a calm neutral.  After years of getting a new pair of white saltwater sandals every year as a kid, white sandals just feel too juvenile to me. But silver? I can do that. Now if only I could decide between the two. Or come up with $100 for sandals.

I'm also loving the look of neutral wedges, like these. Way comfier than a heel, but still giving a little extra height. Plus, with the beige, I bet they could make even my stumpy legs look long(ish).

Any sandal styles you guys are loving this summer? I still don't see myself giving up the flip-flops any time soon (at least until I can find the miracle triad of comfy, cute and cheap) but it can still be fun to browse.

So this is what a weekend is

I really, really love having weekends entirely free from homework and other nagging responsibilities that tend to float around and mar perfectly good, unproductive fun. I'm going to go do something entirely frivolous now, because I can.

World Cup

Winding through Embassy row on my way to Costco today, I was a little surprised to see several giant posters adorning some of the embassies wishing support for their countries teams in the world cup. Sports and fancy, official government buildings don't usually meet. But then, such is the power of football.

Now, I'm not a sports person. I'm not a fan of anything. I don't watch, play or care. But I do find football fans kind of endearing.

Haven't a clue why. Like sports in general, I'm fairly neutral towards most sports fans. Well, except American football. I used to be just peachy toward them, but after 4 years at BYU of being told that my cougar apathy was almost blasphemous was enough to make me loath American football fans and their boorish superiority complex.

But football? I don't know, the fans are kind of charming. They stay up late to watch games between countries many of us haven't ever heard of. I like the bright jerseys. Ole ole ole is by far one of the least annoying sports chants. Sure, there's the occasional riot, but I can overlook that.

I still don't care about the world cup. But for all those that do, I hope you have a nice time, because I do care about you.

Metro Eloquence

This morning, on the metro, I sat in front of a man who very enthusiastically, and at great volume ranted incessantly for no apparent reason about something that made no sense. Which in and of itself isn't that interesting. While the metro in the summer is usually a decent mix of mid-level professionals and tourists, there is still the occasional vocal  possibly unbalanced passenger. What was interesting about this guy, was he had one of the most impressive vocabularies I've ever heard. Some nice rhetorical devices were thrown in as well. Alliteration, $5 dollar words, the whole shebang. Don't get me wrong, what he was saying so eloquently didn't make a lick of rational sense. But he said it very well.

Why not better?

Zach keeps asking me what I want for my upcoming birthday, and I don't know how to answer. It's not that I'm one of those people where golly gee my life is so perfect, how could I ever want more? No, I can't answer because I want far too much.

I want an awful lot of stuff. Shiny stainless steel pots and pans. DSLRs. A car, the ability to just hop in and go without consulting dozens of bus schedules and routes, praying that everything will run on time. A real home, with real things and a real life.

Really, it isn't about the stuff. It's about feeling stuck in this stage of life. I care about all the shiny things, sure, but I mostly just care about the kind of life they represent. I'm so tired of feeling like we should be someplace other than where we are in life. Everywhere I look and see couples our age or married for as long as we are who are having babies, buying houses and getting jobs. Moving forward in life. And we're just sitting here. Stagnant and terrified that we'll never be able to move forward. We knew that grad/law school would be hard, but we always thought that it would be worth it, we would come out the other side and find great opportunities. Now I just see debt and more of the same. 

One of the reasons I want to move so badly is that when I think of the shoebox, it always feels like the place we are in because we can't do any better. We don't live here because it is good for us, we are here because we fail to do any better. I hate having that constant reminder around me. I hate that every day I wake up to that, come home to that.

It feels the like the Universe has personally stabbed me in the gut and is twisting the knife every time we find a perfect place, get excited and then watch it fall away. There is always a good reason. It's against policy to rent a studio to 2 people. The apartment already rented. But it all sounds like you can't do better to me.

I so badly want to just go screw it, it's only student loan money and just get a decent place. All the other in-school couples I know live in 1 bedrooms, why not us? Why can't we just move forward, just a little bit?
Why can't we ever seem to do better?

Private

Whenever the blog of an acquaintance or a blog stalkee goes private, I always assume that it's because of me and my apparently creepy repeated visits from DC.