Last week was one of early mornings, frantic commutes on I-5, and a nauseating amount of mathematical proofs. All the romanticized notions of being a Seattleite from a couple posts ago have long since bowed to the more pressing concerns of merely passing my classes.

This morning exemplifies quite succinctly how I’m reacting to the math classes at the UW…I woke up to the cawing of an obnoxious crow outside my window. Upon realizing that the crow was not my alarm, I assumed (in a slew of choice expletives) that I must have overslept, missed the bus, and lost all hope of scraping by in math and graduating by the end of summer. In reality, it was 5:45 and my alarm was set to go off in another 15 minutes. In my paranoid state I decided to blog instead of fall back asleep and risk missing my alarm again.

To give you all (all two of you?) an idea of what life has been like on the west side, take a look at the agenda for today:

Wake up at 5:45 to crow cawing.

Catch the bus in Burien at 7:00.

Do homework during the hour commute to the UW.

Spend two hours in Algebra writing proofs.

Spend two hours in Geometry taking notes.

Stay in the library/professor’s office until 5 trying to finish a good chunk of the Geometry homework.

Take the bus back to Burien and relax to the loud couple two seats back talking about their troubled pasts.

Water the flowers at the Haack’s house.

Eat, and work on Algebra until about 10:00.

Collapse into bed, proofs spinning in my head, and nervously set my alarm for the next day.

Buon Appetito!

Just in time for the weekend, a canopy of grey clouds stretched across the Sound to push me inside and away from any hope of summer sun. While the threat of rain may dampen thoughts of exploring nearby parks or long walks on the beach, it certainly encourages indoor creativity. The dismal weather all but forced me into a five hour tortellini-making endeavor.

After I discovered that conjuring up the folded Italian dumplings wouldn’t require a full-blown pantry overhaul, spinach tortellini secured a spot on the Saturday’s dinner menu. I zipped down to the supermarket to grab a couple missing ingredients—prosciutto, parmesan cheese, and ricotta. After reading through the green pasta dough directions as outlined in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Barcella Hazan, I set off on a daring adventure into the depths of la cucina italiana.

Making the tortellini filling was a cinch. I sautéed a handful of onions and prosciutto in butter, added chopped spinach to the pan, and dumped it all into a bowl. I added an egg yolk, freshly grated parmesan and ricotta cheese, along with a couple dashes of salt to taste.

The handmade pasta dough proved to be a much more difficult beast to tame. After cooking about eight ounces of frozen spinach and wringing it of all its green juice, I tossed it into the center of a volcanic mound of flour and whisked eggs. Little by little, I added flour to the egg-spinach mixture until the dough approached the non-sticky threshold. (Stuffed pasta flour should retain a slight amount of stickiness to allow for sealing later on.) I covered the green mass and let it relax for fifteen minutes.

The book called for a three step dough-thinning process involving a long dowel-like rolling pin. However, after an excruciatingly long kneading debacle, I couldn’t be bothered with authenticity. I smashed green blobs of dough onto the counter with my plain Jane rolling pin and cut out square wrappers that wildly varied in thickness and dimension. Keeping the extra dough sheltered in plastic wrap, I placed a pinch of the cheesy filling in the center of each wrapper, folded the squares into triangles and sealed the edges with my fingertips. Before the dough became too tough, I pinched the two points of each triangle (along the folded edge) together and left the beautiful little tortellini on the counter to dry.

By this point my friend Galen had arrived with a bottle of red wine and ingredients for a roasted vegetable soup. We plopped the tortellini in boiling water for a good ten minutes and enjoyed them with melted butter and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese.

While admiring my forest of misshapen pasta, I realized that devouring them alone would have been a shamefully depressing end to a day-long epic tortellini battle. In true Italian tradition, I savored each bite in good company with a glass of vino close at hand. Buon appetito!

I am sitting in a beach-blue painted sun room staring out at Vashon Island across the Puget Sound. In true west side fashion, the sky is slate and promising rain. I, of course, forgot to pack an umbrella.

After a five hour drive from Spokane to Seattle, I arrived last night at my summer abode. In response to a desperate plea for lodging that I had posted on Facebook a couple months back, a friend from high school graciously offered me a spare room in her parents’ house. Apart from doing odd jobs, such as organizing a mountain of CDs into the entertainment system, I’m living free of charge for two entire months while I finish up my Math degree at the University of Washington.

Last night I plopped into a big comfy bed, utterly exhausted from the drive and the Corner House birthday hoopla from the night before. Tired as I was, thoughts ricocheted noisily off the walls of my brain, preventing sleep from overwhelming me until about midnight. I awoke early this morning still buzzing with excited uncertainty regarding the next two months.

I don’t have a single reasonable expectation for what will happen within the next hour, much less within the span of the entire summer. I’m in a big city known for coffee, wet weather, fish, and grunge. I, on the other hand, am completely unknown and open for reinvention. For all Seattle knows, I’m a patchouli-wearing vegan, an aspiring Broadway actress, or an uptight Math geek by day and poetry-reading wino by night. The possibilities are fabulously infinite.

Whether I decide to devote myself to investigating Kabbalah or remain relatively unchanged is yet to be determined. Either way, I’ll keep you posted.

About a year ago I stepped off a plane into Seattle summertime ending a five month study abroad stint in Viña del Mar, Chile. Eleven months later, I still catch myself wide-eyed and stunned by the grandeur of American society. For me, it took that of out-of-country experience to really appreciate and analyze the privileges that we enjoy as citizens of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Cell phones, personal automobiles, and wireless Internet are luxuries rather than necessities outside of our American bubble. Since being back, I have often contemplated how these things—created for our convenience and pleasure—ironically end up complicating our lives and stressing us out.

Take the automobile for example. Almost every adult in my suburban community has a car. As a result, we can make quick trips to the supermarket, easily visit our friends across town, and take our kids to school in the morning. However, our ability to get up and go burdens us with the expectation that we fill our days with endless meetings and activities. We are expected to make a 45 minute commute to work, meet friends in town for lunch, drop off a package at the post office, pick the kids up from soccer practice, and grab a gallon of milk “on the way home.” Add rush hour and that unavoidable stop light that is always red, and the car—once a symbol of personal freedom—becomes the ball and chain tethering us to an inexhaustible list of To Do’s.

It’s fascinating how quickly “I get to…” has become “I have to…” In what other ways does technology turn our privilege into obligation?

I received a text message from a good friend this morning requesting the URL to this blog. After creating the page over a week ago, I hadn’t truly committed to posting my thoughts, feelings, and whereabouts over such an impersonal medium. A skeleton of a blog awaited deletion or a fulfilling first post as I debated whether or not I should add to the overwhelming amount information that the World Wide Web has to offer. Obviously, I decided to appease my text-savvy friend with a post, keeping in mind that deletion is always an option.

The idea to start a blog was conceived via countless conversations with my six housemates during our post-graduation road trip to Northern California. Life After College impatiently waited in Spokane, ready to unload internships, grad school, jobs in far off places, and uncertainty onto all of us the second we pulled into the driveway. A few of us decided that the easiest way for seven busy young women to stay updated and involved in each other’s lives during the tumultuous years to come would be through blogging.

So here I sit typing in Kennewick--the first to leave the Corner House and the first to post. I got home last Monday night after a final barbeque at the Corner House and a Lady Gaga farewell chant to send me off. After arriving home, I promptly went into “retreat.” I turned off my cell phone, avoided the Internet for three days, and spent some time in silence and semi-solitude. I also took on the prestigious position of puppy sitter for our 10-week-old black and tan coon hound, Ginny. In between dropping my brother off at school, taking Ginny on walks, and cleaning puppy poop off the carpet; I prayed and wrestled with task of discovering my vocation by Thursday morning.

Of course, I am no closer to pinpointing God’s calling in my life than Ginny is to learning that my computer cord is NOT a chew toy. My mom, however, gave me a nudge in the right direction by handing me a dog-eared copy of Jerry Sittser’s The Will of God as a Way of Life. On the third page, Sittser explains that in our search for vocation “we pray for guidance, we look for signs, we seek advice, we read the Bible for insight, and we search our hearts.” In a sentence he summed up my three day retreat and went on to offer an alternate approach to seeking God’s will. I’m only two chapters in, so I’ll try and finish it up this week and give a full report on Sunday.

P.S. I’ll keep the posts shorter in the future.