Hogs and Balls

Here are some of the things I learned this week while working my new summer job:
1) How to slaughter a hog. This involved watching several videos that I could show you via YouTube, but I don't think I'll put you through the same horror that I experienced while watching them.
2) How to safely handle, load, and shoot several different types of rifles, including an M1, which is apparently considered a pretty cool gun by gun people. I wouldn't actually know, because prior to Wednesday I don't think I'd ever held a gun in my life. In fact, I know so little about guns that in my notes to myself concerning this particular project I have written the following:
"Shotgun (20 gauge), Remington, least-fancy gun." Luckily, while we spent a lot of time working with real guns, my actual job involves handling guns that have had their firing pins removed. I've been assured that there's absolutely no way they can possibly shoot anything, which is good because I'm pretty much the least-qualified person possible to be handling firearms. Also, the rifle range was pretty much the weirdest place I've ever been in my life. I am open-minded about a lot of things, but I will never, ever be able to wrap my mind around the idea of guns as a hobby. Maybe its an adrenaline thing?
3) How to make it seem like you're grabbing a guy by his balls, twisting them, and giving them a good yank, without actually doing that.
It was a pretty interesting week. And now I'm wondering, "Hmm, if someone who doesn't know me stumbles across this website and reads this description of my job, what on earth will they think I'm doing to earn a living this summer?" Haha.

Although it was an interesting week and I am really excited to finally be working on this job, it has also been an exhausting week. First of all, I'm still working on my other job (the non-paying job) and I feel bad because I've sort of been neglecting them for the past two weeks. It's just hard to bring myself to want to devote much time to a volunteer job when I have two actual contracted, paying jobs to worry about. Luckily the bulk of the volunteer job is over, but I still feel bad for not spending more time on it. Fortunately the people I'm working with don't seem to mind; they hired me knowing full well that as long as they weren't going to pay me they would be the least of my priorities and the first thing to get dropped if life got hectic.
And life did get hectic because while I have started my summer job and am now working from 11:00 until 7:00 and commuting for about an hour and a half on either side of that, I'm still not finished with school. I finished a 20-page paper on Wednesday night, and while I think that will be the hardest of my end-of-the-year projects and therefore I'm really excited to be done with it, I still have two other 20-page papers to write before next Wednesday. Luckily the two papers I still have to write are mostly regurgitation of material I learned this semester (nicely synthesized and articulated regurgitation, but still, regurgitation) and I think I should be able to churn them out easier than the paper I finished this week, which was actually original research. At least I'm hoping it will be easier, because otherwise I'm going to have a really rough four days coming up. Oh, and I still have to proctor two finals and then grade 60 final exams. Oddly, I'm not panicking about this yet. Even if it ends up being a very busy week with an all-nighter or two, if I can just get through the next week I'm completely finished with my first year of coursework. The idea of being able to say that is what is powering me through this.

I'm so ready for summer. I'm ready to read the stack of magazines that has been piling up by my bed since March. I'm ready for swimming and backyard barbecues and absolutely no obligations when I get home from work every day. Mostly I'm ready for summer because it means that Penn will be back from Europe. I miss him more than I thought I would. It's funny how quickly something becomes a routine. I realize it had only been six weeks, but I'd already gotten used to talking to him every day so I feel a tiny bit deflated now on the days when I don't hear from him. Not that I expected to hear from him every day while he was out of town. In fact, every time he e-mails me I write back things like, "What are you doing on the internet?! Go look at some ruins or drink some German beer or something!" But of course I'm also a little bit pleased that he's making time to contact me so often. He left eight days ago and already he has called me on the phone twice and I get an e-mail pretty much every other day. And they're good e-mails, too. I would quote segments, except that they're so new-relationship-cheesy and sappy that you'd probably gag. For the record, I have no idea why this guy can get away with so much romance without it overwhelming and/or annoying me, but somehow it just works coming from him. With everyone else it has always felt fake or cliched, but with him it just doesn't.
The longer he's away, though, the more I keep wondering if I made the whole thing up. It still just feels so unreal to me. I can't wrap my mind around the fact that I'm in a relationship. People say, "Your guy," and I do a doubletake. At one point earlier this week one of my new co-workers said something like, "Ooh, we can use this to test whether or not your boyfriend is a jealous guy!" and I thought, "Boyfriend? What is he talking about?" for a few seconds before I remembered, oh yeah, I am in a relationship now, aren't I? And it has nothing to do with how I feel about Penn, because I think he's really great and I'm excited to keep getting to know him better and progressing this relationship. But it's the fact that I'd formulated this entire identity around being single, and I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of years getting to the point where I was satisfied with being single. In order to do that, it meant that I had to envision an entire future for myself in which I was single...and I had actually started to like that idea. So don't get me wrong, I'm very happy to be in a relationship again. I know that my most ideal life has always involved a relationship of some sort, and I'm very happy that that's an option again now. But I liked the single me that I had developed, too. And I'm not saying that I have to give up Single *A* now, obviously I'm planning to keep and continue to use all of the discoveries I have made about myself in the years of being "alone", but fundamentally I'm having to work on shifting my identity again. When one of the main lifestyle features you use to define yourself suddenly stops being true, it takes a while to get used to it, even if you do think it has the potential to be a really good change.