March Beer Week, 2010

Mid-March comes, as it does every year, with the promise of a week filled with MOAR BEER. To illustrate, here are the next few days:

Tomorrow is St. Patty's, obviously (we're having corned beef and colcannon for dinner tonight - squee!).  Brownie's family is mega-Irish (and mega-Italian:  hello East Coast!).  We're meeting a bunch of his aunts and uncles for drinkie bits at happy hour.  I will play my usual St. Patty's  "how many total strangers offer to buy me a drink because I have curly red hair" game.  For some reason, despite my total lack of Irish ancestry, the hair is sufficient for free drinks (or would be if I were willing to take any of said strangers up on the drinks, which I am not).

Thursday marks the beginning of March Madness.  Thursday is also the day of "the game wherein my undergrad's team mops the floor with my grad school's team."  I cannot wait.  I've been getting a bunch of questions from people who don't know me all that well, but do know me well enough to know which schools I'm referring to.  They always have questions about which team I'll be rooting for.  I figure I'll just answer here (despite the fact that pretty much no one who knows me IRL knows about this blog*):  no one in grad school would EVER root for their grad school over their undergrad.  It's simple: undergrad is fun; grad school is soul-sucking hell.  Undergrad wins, every time.

Friday, Brownie's undergrad team has its first tourney game.
Saturday and Sunday, MOAR BASKETBALL.

In between all of this, I really do need to start grading papers so that I don't find myself grading until 3am Sunday night.  I try to get papers back to my students within a week.  Managing to do so reminds me that I actually am capable of getting things done, which gives me a mild self-esteem boost.  I can go for as many of those as possible. 

On the job front, I contacted an aunt of mine who works in HR at large corporation to see if I could bounce resume questions/drafts off of her.  I'm planning on working on an initial draft Wednesday pre-St. Patty's beers and Thursday pre-game.  Here's hoping the research I've been doing pays off.  I'll be posting general thoughts about the format I'm using and the whys and wherefores as the draft gets going.

Side note: while typing this, I've been noticing that my keyboard doesn't seem to be registering every key that I type - if there are words that are missing letters and I managed not to notice/correct it before publishing, my apologies.

*quickie reason for the anonymity at the moment:  the anonymity is nothing I really want to keep up forever.  However, until the degree is completed and I've got a real, non-academic job, I need to keep it relatively anonymous.  The academy is none-too-friendly about people announcing that they'll be leaving its ranks, and I want to avoid any possible blowback from the actual academics I know about my decision to leave until after I have gainful employment: leaving academics is tantamount to burning bridges big time.

Liver, I am disappoint.

Seriously, I think that in turning 30 my body decided that we're done with alcohol. Two beers has me very toasty. Three beers, as I discovered Friday night, has me near-blackout drunk and hungover much of the next day. Seriously, what the hell? Two weeks ago, I handled three beers no problem. Last Friday night, at my 30th birthday party, I had 3 beers, ended up hiccupping most of the night and sort of hungover in the morning. Last night, 3 beers and BOOM. Liver, I am disappoint.

As an aftereffect of getting accidentally way more drunk than I meant to on Friday, Brownie and I had a talk yesterday about me/drinking. Getting drunk like I did was absolutely nothing I wanted to do on Friday night. I meant to just go out, have a couple of beers with Brownie, and then we were going to make fish and chips and watch the Olympics and have copious amounts of sexx0rs. This sounded like a fantastic idea. Anyway, so this all ended up not having because the beer made me way drunker than I would have guessed it would, and Brownie has taken from this the idea that I'm not being careful enough about drinking and that this lack of care is a) self-destructive and b) a sign of how stressed and unhappy I've been. His solution is that I should go talk to someone about it. I generally figure I should talk to someone anyway, but I don't know that I see the hangover yesterday as symptomatic of anything other than I need to institute new limits for myself, since the old limits apparently lead me to being non-functional. Non-functional after drinking was barely acceptable in college. At this point it's beyond unacceptable. And I really hate that pretty much all I did yesterday was stare in rapt horror at CNN while waiting to see what the tsunami would do to Hawaii.

Anyway, so I will go talk to someone in the therapy sense of things, because if nothing else my attempts at dealing with myself and exercising my way out of depression have done nothing whatsoever and I'd be glad to get a bit more help. Preferably of the non-drug kind, since my last encounter with antidepressants lead to an extreme and total loss of my sex drive. Now that Brownie's finally getting his back in the post-dissertation era of his life, I don't want to lose mine to some drug that locks it up in a straightjacket somewhere in the back of my mind.