Onion Say Hello

I'm in Korea right now, and posts are going here.

on the road!

travel posts will be here. perhaps if i can figure out the technology i'll put all the posts here as well. hmmm.

lady of leisure...

...or woman in transition, except the latter description makes me sound like a candidate for gender-reassignment surgery.

i don't even know where to begin, but there has been major upheaval in the starchmouse household. after i described everything that has happened in the last few months to my friend, she immediately exclaimed "it's your return of saturn!"

this is apparently my first saturn return, where i leave youth behind and enter adulthood. or rather, a time of restructuring and reevaluation. the end of a three-year relationship. finishing seven years of grad school. i've only ever been a student my entire life, and now that my immediate daily structure is gone, i have no idea if what i've been doing for the last six weeks counts as celebrating, or running away from figuring out the next step.

friends have told me that i deserve a break. i can't help but have a sneaking suspicion, however, that i'm just running around, avoiding all the thoughts in my head that would otherwise immobilize me. i suppose it doesn't help that i've been overly indulging my impulsive side. making decisions based on what i want right at the moment, not thinking about the consequences, even though i know myself well enough to predict the outcome.

somehow, wisely, i've decided to take a road trip. a sudden longing to see red hills and desert and waves of heat rising off the ground. looking at the weather report, however, i wonder if i have a subconscious death wish. it would certainly fit in with this whole avoidance thing. running away from being a grown-up. acting impulsively.

during my last impulsive act (a trip to DC and NY), my friend's girlfriend told me about how it is important to ask for things in a very specific manner. i won't go into the details of the origin of this advice, but basically, this is something i'm trying to figure out, but it is so dang hard because, honestly, i don't know what it is that i specifically want. i thought i'd have it figured out by now. and thinking about it stresses me out, because it make me wonder what the hell i've been doing for the last seven years. did i peak at age 17? am i capable of surviving in the real world? after a lifetime of being told that i'm something special, is it actually that i'm...just average?

these are the thoughts i want to run away from. i hope they don't accompany me on the long stretches of driving i have ahead of me.

Because you're never too old...

...to visit your parents and raid their fridge. My parents are remodeling their kitchen, and I'm here having had a late night and unable to drive back to SF at 1 am without crashing into the bridge. So as I type away at my (slowly dying, WTF Mac??) laptop, listening to the soothing sounds of power saws, none of this matters, because remodeling the kitchen = no cooking, which means my parents have all manner of awesome takeout leftovers for me to eat. Like Cheesecake Factory pasta.

That's right snobs, suck it. Cheesecake Factory pasta rocks.

You don't have to wait in line at Blue Bottle....

...if you're getting the New Orleans iced coffee.

This, and the chocolate hazelnut croissant at La Boulange (almost) made up for the fact that there was no baby broccoli raab at the farmer's market today. :(

In hiding

Originally uploaded by starchmouse.

So I'm not actually in hiding, but I've realized it will seem that way for the next four months, because I'm not sure I'll have time to do ANYTHING other than make powerpoint slides and teach anatomy.

Having taught a once-a-week anatomy lab for the last three semesters, I guess I got a little cocky in assuming that adding a three-times-a-week lecture on top of that wouldn't be horribly different. Boy, how WRONG I am. Here I've had the entire weekend to prep for the upcoming week's lectures, and I still haven't finished tomorrow's, I still need to START the book for this Thursday's book club (which, by the way, I picked, and therefore need to lead the discussion on), my room is a mess, there's a laundry pile spilling out of my closet, and don't even get me started on my dissertation. I woke up with a panicky feeling, as if I had just had a terrible nightmare, that I was not going to graduate because there are just not enough hours in the day to do all that I need to do and still have time to feed myself and bathe and occasionally sleep.

So what *did* I do this weekend?

I drove my friend and her family home from the hospital - because now, they are a family of three instead of two.

I soaked chickpeas overnight and made Orangette's butternut squash and chickpea salad.

I realized that my jar of tahini tastes absolutely terrible so the tahini dressing for the salad became an almond butter dressing.

I watched a baby sleep for two hours today and it seriously felt like 20 seconds.

I went to Rigolo for brunch and realized there was a reason that the last time I went, I decided I would never go again.

I learned that just merely outlining a 50-minute lecture takes about three hours. God, I hope at least one student is paying attention.

I looked at my pictures from Seattle and felt homesick, even though I've never lived there. Perhaps I was just missing the feeling of being at home with girls who will eat cake, frosting, and melted cheese for breakfast.

I went to the gym, because the lady at a salon in Korea told me my scalp is just like my mother's, and in order to avoid going completely bald from stress I need to drink more water and exercise more. Still working on both of those.

I outlined tomorrow's lecture. Did I mention that already? Yes, yes I did. Because that's pretty much ALL I have been doing when I haven't been sleeping (poorly), eating (quickly), or staring at the baby.

If only I were the type of person who could structure her time efficiently...

leftover pumpkin oatmeal pancakes

Sorry, I ate these already, so no picture. I had a huge batch of steel cut oats sitting in my fridge, and the thought of eating hot oatmeal on an 80-degree day was just too much to handle. So I decided to use them to make pancakes. I had added a cup of pumpkin puree to my steel cut oats so I wanted something that would remind me of pumpkin chocolate chip cake. Unfortunately, Trader Joe's has been out of chocolate chips for the last two weeks. So I decided to substitue...frozen corn. Yup! The corn was so sweet and the pancakes turned out delicious! So here is the recipe so that I don't forget and can make these next week because I'm sure I'll have barely made a dent in those damn oats.

Dry:

0.5 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp baking soda
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

Wet:

1 cup cooked steel-cut oatmeal (mine had pumpkin puree mixed in, but it is fine without)
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp agave nectar
2 tbsp pumpkin butter
2 tbsp sour cream
0.5 cup frozen corn (or chocolate chips)

Mix together dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a separate bowl, mix together wet ingredients, then combine with dry. Butter a griddle pan and cook like you would cook normal pancakes, but watch the heat because the batter is more "goopy" than regular pancake batter and the pancakes brown a little faster.