The Somewhat Less Than Great, Definitely Not Reliable, Return.

Why haven't I blogged in a year? I can't say.

Plenty of things have happened to me.

I drove to Montana.
I got my master's degree.
I ran a half marathon (in shoes that looked like the mutant offspring of an Oompa Loompa and a Smurf, no less).
I bought a dog.
I spent over $200 replacing electrical cords/chargers of various types (see previous).
I dated a drug lord. (Okay, so he wasn't exactly a drug lord. He just sold his little brother some weed over the phone while we were at dinner, but I hear Al Pacino wants to make a movie about his life).

There's really no good reason why these various life experiences can't furnish such stuff as blogs are made of.

Laziness is a likely culprit. To take a quick example: This morning I planned on eating eggs for breakfast, but there were no clean frying pans. So I had seven chocolate chip cookies instead and about a third of a jar of cocktail olives (I'm a lemon twist girl myself, so no great loss).

When lunch came around I ran into the same problem. Still at a loss for how to prepare an egg without a pan,  I opted for cereal and ate what I can only assume to be the equivalent of two bowls of Cheerios.
(I mean, literally I can only assume this, because I ate them out of the box as I stood and perused the Christmas cards stuck on the fridge).

**On a side note, I thought the rising popularity of Tasty Videos was going to be my salvation in re cooking, until I realized that it does not in fact take a minute and thirty seconds to make Fettucine Alfredo. And while these videos may give the impression that the hands are disembodied, effortlessly mixing and preparing gourmet meals in under 2 minutes, they are in actuality still very much attached to the cook (me), and that cook is still the girl who doesn't know how to work a toaster oven.**

So I don't want to tout this post as "The Great Return." If my commitment to posting regularly on my blog goes anything like any diet I've ever tried, it will be more like "The Great Return With No Guarantees of Remaining Especially If I'm Supposed to Stop Eating Hummus." (Seriously, what white girl in her right mind can be expected to follow a diet that cuts out one of her major food groups?)

Maybe the question shouldn't be "Why haven't I blogged in a year?" but rather, "Why blog today? Why is Tuesday, August 30, the day for a resurgence of everyone's favorite blog with no unifying principle and nothing inspirational to say about lifestyle, dieting, or cooking?" (And by "everyone", of course I mean my mother. Although she has recently admitted to being an indifferent fan on certain occasions, which in my opinion seems to violate some sort of intrinsic mother/daughter contract. It remains a point of contention.)

It is possibly because I have no time to write blog posts. Which, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, is the time when I get all the things done. Wondering why I haven't thrown a party in a while? It's because subconsciously I am waiting for the weekend when I have a stack of exams to grade and a 30 page paper to write. (This may raise the question in your mind of why the frying pans are still sitting in the sink, as cleaning dishes would seem to be a productive outlet for procrastination, but I make it a rule never to do anything truly practical or necessary in these moments.)

It is definitely not because I have anything to say about the current state of politics, have any dog in the fight with the 1% (or any of the other 99, for that matter), or want to weigh in on the latest Avengers or X-Men movie (I actually don't know if there IS a recent Avengers or X-Men movie, but I'm making valiant efforts to sound culturally relevant and it seems like a safe bet that one of those movies came out in the not too distant past, since they are essentially the millennial equivalent of the Land Before Time movies with their absolutely necessary 22 sequels).

I do want to take a quick minute to acknowledge the courageous steps being made in my professional field of academia, though. Resmiye Oral, a pediatrics professor at the University of Iowa, is making great strides in the fight to bring emotional diversity to college mascots, starting with ameliorating the perpetual grimace of Herky the Hawkeye. (Stay tuned in upcoming posts for updates about my continued battle with the Notre Dame administration over the aggressive stance of the Leprechaun and his shillelagh, not to mention the microaggression to short Irishmen everywhere.)

I think ultimately, I am blogging to redirect my wanderlust as I settle back into the reality of being a starving grad student, on the budget of a starving grad student who now also has to feed a dog. It's the re-channelling of my nomadic desires. **Insert something cheesy about writing being a door into a new land full of possibility and adventure. The Imagi-Nation, if you will.**

The following conversation occurred today:

"I need to go on an adventure."

My roommate glanced over the outfit that I've been wearing for two days, and her brows raised slightly as her eyes traveled over the collection of water glasses, tissues, blankets, and books that have, along with me, ceased to have a separate existence from the amorphous mass of green upholstery that passes for a couch in our house.

"Maybe you should go on an adventure to the shower."

So maybe I could stand to redirect my wanderlust to other things as well, but in the meantime consider this a tentative promise to return to the blogosphere.