Birthday Eve!

It’s nearly my birthday (July 31st)! It feels cliché to say it’s not that big a deal and I’m not that excited about it, but hey, that’s just how it is. I’ll be 28, which feels simultaneously very old, and yet still farther away from 30 than it feels like I am. I’ll take it!

Times are just really intense right now. It’s potentially the most un-summery of summers. Andy is still trying to find a job, and as the days tick closer to late August, it’s closer and closer to the point where if he doesn’t find a job he won’t be able to establish residency for pharmacy school in Fall of 2010. That puts a real tight clench around my heart, you know? The irony of the situation isn’t really funny anymore: a graduate from one of the most prestigious Microbiology PhD programs in the country can’t get hired? The hardest part for me may be that I myself have never had a job outside of academia. I have no real world experience with job searches and interviews. It’s hard when someone is depending on you to help them with something and you’re not really sure how to help. And it’s one thing for me to decide to swallow my pride and get an hourly job as a cashier or something . . . it’s another to tell someone you love and respect to do it. It’s hard because I know how smart he is, how meticulous, how personable, and it kinda scares the crap out of me that he can’t find something.

All I keep wanting to say is that things are just hard right now. I thought this would be the time for me to hunker down and get my PhD done, that with only one of us in graduate school things would be calmer and less obstructed by worry. But I was just plain wrong.

If I could have anything for my birthday, it would be a job for Andy, or some way to spin the year around to 2010 and be done with all this craziness already. I’m proud to say I haven’t let my worries completely consume me like they used to . . . mostly I just convince myself to not care about it and just keep moving forward. And I’d like to believe that’s all due to a growing inner strength developed from years of graduate school. I just hope I don’t have to sustain this for much longer!