hello, September (in which I move to PA for grad school)

Well girls, we gave it a well-intentioned try, and somehow failed so I am going to branch out on my own. (Viva Brac forever though!)

-inside nonjoke
  

B asked me if I liked living by myself after all, since I had been looking forward to it for so long, and I had to think about it.  Yes I do like it very much and I am happier here and now than I have been in over a [long long] year and a half.  But I also miss Greg Smithey and Charmed and pizza aka cheese bread nights and having someone around to do nothing with on lazy boring weekends.  When did we grow up? I don't know, but my best friends are scattered around the world doing grown-up jobs like teaching children, or are going to school in order to be grown-up Halloween-costume-inspiring things like doctors and lawyers. 

As for me, I am living in an entirely new community where absolutely no one knows my past or where I am from, or what it is like to smell fresh corn growing in the summer.  I am taking death defying leaps out of my comfort zone by bike commuting ten miles a day and driving to Baltimore all by myself when I get the chance.  I am confronted with a completely new sense of self and identity

since when am I a geography grad student???

which is an identity that is ridiculously fun and exciting.  Like, ridiculous.

My classmates are going to recover wetlands, discover the science behind the melting of the glaciers, develop new technology that describes how we view and analyze the world, work towards restructuring the socio-economic disparities of American cities, and many other things.

These are the things that geographers do.

So far I am working on projects that deal with the effects of forest fire suppression in California national parks, and have confirmed that I like trees better than prairies (but not as much better as I anticipated. Papa D had more of an influence than I realized after all.)
 

So far, I looove it here