Pick a Topic, Any Topic

I'm going for a grab bag of topics today because I'm not in the mood for narrative flow.

I've been reflecting lately on how good I feel now that I'm on a normal sleep schedule. Unless I am behind on work and I have a deadline coming up in the morning, I now sleep from about 11:00 until 8:00. I wake up naturally at 8 in the morning feeling chipper! If you had told me two years ago that I would be capable of waking up before 10 in the morning without bitching about it I would have told you that you were crazy, but it turns out I actually like this schedule. I think I'm also feeling good because I've been working out really hard lately. I love the variety of workouts I can do in the summer: swimming, biking, taking the dog for long walks...I'm also back on a yoga video kick at the moment because I've been craving that stretched, elongated feeling. Oh, and the other day there was a stack of coupons in our lobby for free dance fitness classes at the studio across the street, and I've decided I'm going to try a Zumba or Latin dance class. I hope it's good. I had no idea this place does group fitness classes (I thought it was just a ballroom dancing place), but it would be really convenient to have a place to do fitness classes right across the street.

On a health-related note, I made an appointment to get a physical next month. It has been a long time since I had a full physical, and I figured since I have insurance right now and only have to pay the $25 copay to see a doctor I might as well do it. Since I'm feeling healthy right now it will be nice to know what "normal" is for my body. Also, I keep reading all those summer articles about skin cancer and I've realized that I really need to get some of my moles checked out. I have a ton of them, and I think it's just hereditary because my mom and grandparents both have a bunch of "beauty marks" as well, but it can't hurt to have a doctor tell me they're all normal, right?

Penn and I took the Meatball to a beach last weekend. It was so much fun! He had exactly the reaction we predicted: he loved all the people and other dogs, he was annoyed with the water, and he barked and howled pretty much nonstop the entire time we were on the beach. God, I love that dog. He's so funny. Sometimes I wonder what I did for entertainment before I had a basset hound. I also achieved one of my summer goals, which was to visit a beach with a boardwalk. Penn grew up going to beaches with boardwalks so he doesn't find them exciting, but there aren't boardwalks where I come from (or beaches, for that matter) so I thought it was pretty cool. I especially liked it at night with all the neon lights. I can see how it would be a kids' paradise: the beach, amusement park rides, mini golf, arcade games, and an endless supply of junk food all in one place?! Actually, I was thrilled and I'm 26! I get Penn's point that the boardwalk isn't really a beach, exactly. There is a pretty huge difference between the Jersey shore and a white-sand-and-palm-trees tropical beach, and overall I prefer the latter. But if you go with the mindset that you're going to the boardwalk, not the beach, I think it's a fun experience. A different experience, but a fun one. Also, you should know that I bought six pounds of saltwater taffy and I have already eaten 3/4ths of the box. (But I am only eating one serving for dessert every night. Believe me, if I wasn't limiting myself that box would have been gone by Monday!)

I'm making good progress on my comprehensive exam prep. Some friends and I have a study group and it is actually proving to be surprisingly efficient. We each write book reports for each other each week, so each of us is reading a theoretical or historical book each week plus getting the benefit of everyone else's reports. As a result we're all going to be able to cover much more material this summer than we would have been able to cover on our own. I'm still feeling overwhelmed, but at least I get something accomplished every day and I'm not wasting my summer.

I finally managed to get a summer job of sorts. It's a job that I will start in the summer, at any rate. I interviewed for an SAT tutoring job last week and was hired pretty much immediately. My interviewer said she liked my teaching style so much that she didn't even feel the need to bring me in for the second round of interviews. The fact that someone thinks I am an approachable, enthusiastic teacher makes me feel really good (I hope that's a good sign for the future). Anyway, I took the job and I start training next month. It sounds like a job that will work well for me. It's night and weekend work, which I should be able to continue throughout the school year since I'm done with coursework and not taking night classes anymore. Also, the company claims to be flexible and to a certain extent I should be able to pick my schedule (I can at least choose which sessions I want to teach, I think). I should only have to work 5-10 hours per week at most, and that won't even be every month during the year. Plus the pay is really, really good. I figure if it works out, great, and if it doesn't work out I'll just quit. I'd hate to do that, but this isn't a job I really need. So now next month I'll be teaching two weeks of camp and training for the tutoring job. I guess I can't complain about working out of the home a lot in July, though, when I haven't had to work out of the home at all in June.

I can't stop watching the Jon and Kate Gosselin trainwreck. I keep telling myself not to do it, that I'm just helping to fuel a stupid media obsession, but I can't help myself. I have refrained from actually buying the tabloids featuring their separation, but I definitely grab them off the shelf and read them when I'm in the checkout line. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why I was so intrigued by this whole mess. I watch the show's reruns when I'm home in the morning because I find the kids entertaining, but I'd never made a point of trying to watch new episodes. Penn keeps saying, "Who cares!?" and he's absolutely right. Why does anyone really care, and why can't we just leave this poor self-destructing family alone? But the more I think about it, the more I realize why I'm so interested in this: I'm treating it as a vicarious life lesson.
I can see myself in Kate Gosselin. And I can see Penn in Jon. Not to their extremes, of course. For one thing, their communication is awful (it has always been awful, even in the early seasons) and neither Penn nor I have personalities as extreme as Jon and Kate's. I don't have the bitchy, snappy element of Kate's personality and, unlike her, I think I am actually pretty good at going with the flow. As for Penn, he has a much more dominant personality than Jon's and wouldn't stand for me ordering him around even if I tried to initiate that dynamic. But there are definite similarities there. I like routine and organization and order, to the point that I will admit that most of our household (at this point) is run to my standards more than Penn's. I make the grocery list, I keep track of when the bills are due, I'm the one that cleans and organizes the apartment and then tells Penn where things are, I'm the one that decided Monday is laundry day. That's not to say that Penn couldn't have a say in these things if he wanted one, and he does pull equal weight in other decisions in our life, it's just he isn't particularly interested in, say, organizing our closets or cooking dinner. And I hope this doesn't read as a complaint, because it's not intended to be. Our current system makes me happy and I have no problem with it. But I guess what I'm saying is that Jon and Kate may have started out like this, too, and I can see how if you're not careful you can go from a happy situation like Penn and I are in right now to a situation where one party all of a sudden realizes the other party is making the bulk of the decisions and starts to resent that. Not that I make the bulk our decisions as a couple, I don't. Overall I'd say we make decisions together. But at this point I make the bulk of the domestic decisions, I guess, and I imagine once we have kids the care and feeding of them will more often than not fall under the realm of "domestic decisions" and I can see how Jon and Kate ended up in the problematic situation where she was calling most of the shots in the house because she had a "system" and she needed Jon to conform to it. And I can see why Jon eventually got fed up with the nagging. I don't actually envision Penn and I having their same issues, mostly because I hope to keep working outside of the home at least a little bit so once we have kids I think we'll have to split the domestic duties a bit more evenly than we are right now, but still. I can see far too easily how things went wrong for Jon and Kate and how if I'm not careful I could become a bit Kate Gosselin-esque.
Let's use the dog as an example. If I'm going to take the dog on a trip, I pack a bag with his pillow, a couple of toys, a treat bag, a food and water dish, his shot records in case there's an emergency...so here I am running around the house looking for all of this stuff and trying to anticipate every possible worst case scenario, and there's Penn standing by the door saying, "Just grab his food bag and let's go! He doesn't need all that stuff, stop worrying." And this is why I think Penn is good for me, because he helps me to realize that you can't prepare for every scenario anyway so why worry? But at the same time, I am very set in my way of doing things and it's challenging sometimes to admit to myself that he is right and I don't need to compulsively plan quite as much as I do.
I think this is how it will be when we have children, too, and it makes me sad that Jon and Kate couldn't blend their different styles into an equitable partnership. Instead--and this is just my reading of the situation--it seems like Kate persisted in thinking Jon's way of doing things was "wrong" and kept trying to force her will on him, and in the end she couldn't get him to conform and their relationship just snapped because she wasn't getting what she needed from him and he was sick of feeling like he was being dominated by his wife. (I'm sure that's only one element of their divorce, of course, but it's the element that played out most obviously on television.)
Like I said, we're not as extreme as them. We're much better at communicating with each other (for example, I have NEVER yelled at Penn and demanded he do something, and when Penn realizes that I have a reasonable request he actually does it without being all petulant and Jon-ish), and I have no desire to change Penn. I don't need him to always fit into my little organizational scheme. I need to realize that doing things his way sometimes is fine. I realize that in the best relationships both couples cooperate and compromise (in emotionally healthy ways) to make it work, and Penn and I are already very good at that. We're not changing each other, but hopefully we're both molding each other, teaching each other new ways of doing things, and that's a good thing. In short, I'm not actually worried about us. But as ridiculous as this sounds I do feel like I've taken a personal lesson from this Jon and Kate debacle. I've realized more than ever that it is important to not let my routine, structured, organized personality turn me into a nagging, demanding wife. Because it's really just a fine line between having a well-run home and an organized space and driving everyone else crazy with your requirements, and I'm going to have to be careful as I walk that line for the rest of my life.