Life is quite different now.

In my new job, I get to travel a lot. Within the first 90 days of my probational period on this job, I will have travelled to 4 different cities/metro areas within the US and one in Africa (well, this last one is for a friend's wedding).

I'm learning lots of new things, one of which is how to eke out time every chance I get to work on my dissertation. This is actually not a bad way to go with my dissertation, except that I have this bad habit of losing my train of thought when I get disrupted. So that means I find myself looking at my dissertation and thinking,"What the hell was I trying to say here?" To remedy this issue, I have had to write little notes to myself all over my work to remind myself of my train of thought. Sigh, gone are the days of long hours trying to hash out one idea. Happily, gone are the days wherein I get so lost in one thought that I have trouble speaking. This used to be a problem when I would analyze my words before they came out of my mouth to make sure what i was saying would address critiques from various theoretical frameworks. It is very much a problem if all I was trying to do was ask my husband if he wanted to eat dinner.

Another thing I am learning is that sometimes people, neighborhoods, communities, even entire cities, can become stark raving mad if the right circumstances come along. Take for example the event: the Phillies have made it to the World Series. On the night this happened, I settled down to sleep at a reasonable hour (10 pm) and proceeded to drift off into sleep. At 11:30 or so (I can't recall the exact time because, well, I WAS ASLEEP!), I am jolted out of bed by this loud deep wail-like sound. In my sleep haze, I thought it might have been the hounds of hell, sirens alerting people of an impending attack, demons attacking city.... I realized that the noise (which in my estimation was going on for at least a 1/2 hour) was the city collectively expressing joy at the advancement of the Phillies into the World Series. One might wonder how one could mistake expressions of joy with hounds of hell, well, this is Philly. They express joy a little differently here, it seems. It has been known to happen that exuberant sports fans have reoriented cars so that they were parked on their rooftops rather than on their tires.

Life is quite different now.