Reunion

Lisa V. recently (or not so recently) had a post about imagining where you want to be in 5/10/15 years. [I can't find the post now, either because I'm too tired or it's one of the ones she took down.]

I’m not ready to do that quite yet, but as I am heading off to my 20th college reunion, I can look back.

I did not attend the 15th reunion, because between a wedding planned shortly afterwards and my husband’s recent job loss, we didn’t have the time or money. 2003: We got married. My husband got his diagnosis. I stopped being vegetarian.

At the 10th reunion, I had recently defended my dissertation, but had not yet landed my tenure track job. After I got the tt job the next year, I attended my 11th reunion before driving cross country, since it would be the last time I’d be within driving distance of the college. What? Your college doesn’t have a reunion for every class every year? Your reunion probably hasn’t been on the cover of Psychology Today either. Anyway, I really only stopped by for part of a day, and mainly spent the weekend with a friend nearby.

At the 5th reunion, I had recently been discharged from the “behavioral sciences unit” of a hospital. I was about to take a year off from graduate school for full-time language study in Taipei.

20 years ago, I was finishing up my last semester of college. My senior thesis had been handed in in April, but I had comprehensive exams and term papers to write. I didn’t get the offer of the internship in Old Colony until sometime in May, so I was deciding between that and a position in the Peace Corps.

I only go to the reunions when I am sure a couple of my closest remaining college friends will be there, because I tend to get flashbacks to feeling like a complete social misfit freshman year. The people I know best tend to have a love/hate relationship with our college. When we arrived on campus for the 5th reunion, as we were parking the car, both the people with me said they got stomach aches every time they came back, yet one of them had been back every year since graduation and the other had been to a couple of reunions already. In my case, I think I got an excellent education, but I was also very unhappy a lot of the time. It is where I first ended up in therapy, though I didn’t get the big Major Depression diagnosis till graduate school.

Theorizing Gift-giving

Friends who are not parents: give cute newborn outfits

Friends who are parents: give large-size clothing, 6m at the smallest, 9m and 12m common, some 18m or bigger.

Friends who are grandparents: give cute clothing in small sizes, because they can’t resist it. Also, noisy toys.

The child’s own grandparents: give books and toys, frequently. Also: noisy toys.

Our First Date as Parents

We went to the Big Box Home Improvement store (to look at paint colors and buy painting supplies) while my mother watched the sleeping baby.

And that was five months ago.

Yes, getting babysitters is a project for this summer.

And yes, we have suggested to both grandmothers that they move to our city, but these modern grandmothers have lives of their own.

We interrupt this hiatus…

To announce that the Luo family has survived the spring 2008 academic semester, more or less.

It is rather sad, though, that I couldn’t even pay enough attention to the blog to publish a couple of posts that were 95% written already.

I have 3085 posts waiting to read on bloglines, but if you are reading this, then yours is probably one of the few blogs I have managed to keep up with.