Serenity in the Storm

Flower World!

Yesterday I escaped from the craziness for a while and went with my good friend and neighbor, Elaine, to Flower World. Flower World is a 15 acre nursery near Woodinville, WA. It is huge and amazing!

I had never heard of the place before, so when Elaine suggested an outing, I was delighted to check it out!

We spent several hours there, wandering around talking about plants and discovering plants we hadn’t seen before (or rather, plants I hadn’t seen before—Elaine is incredibly knowledgeable about plants!)

After several hours, we still had only seen about half the nursery, so a return trip is definitely in order. If you sign up ahead of time on their website, you can get a 10% off discount card for Flower World.

In addition to a million plants, they also have pots, planters, pavers and garden statuary, like this gnome and mushroom:

Elaine and I demonstrated extreme restraint when it came to purchasing, considering the offerings at the nursery. I came home with a fragrant evergreen clematis, a pink dwarf butterfly bush, a broad-leaved variety of lavender, a stevia plant, a pink jasmine vine, coral bells and some sedums, all for about $50. Not bad, in my opinion.

After Flower World, I met for the first time the lovely Anika of the Vegan Score (one of my favorite go-to resources for local vegan happenings—if you haven’t checked it out, you should!). It’s a special thing to find a kindred spirit and Anika certainly seems to be one—someone devoted to using her energy to promote justice for all creatures. It’s heartening and inspiring to meet someone with these aims!

Overall, yesterday was a much-needed day of self-care—spending time with good people, enjoying good conversation, getting out of Seattle for a minute, and enjoying amazing plant-life. Now, I have to go teach and then get ready for the arrival of my sister TONIGHT!!

What do you do for self-care?

Weekends: Of Pigs and Gardening

Normally, Eric and I keep our weekends relatively unscheduled and open so that we can have a chance to spend time together and catch up on stuff around the house. The work week gets so busy and hectic that we really need the weekends to regroup. These past few weekends have been busier than usual, though. Last weekend I took a group of students from my class to the auction yard. The weekend before that, I was out of town for the World Dairy Expo for research. And this weekend, I took the entire class on a field trip to Pigs Peace Sanctuary–approximately 25 people came to meet Judy and pigs and see the amazing wonderfulness that is Pigs Peace! It was so much fun to see the students at the sanctuary—asking questions about pigs, what they like, and how they live, giving the pigs lots of scratches and pats. And of course, we fed the pigs carrots and corn on the cob.

Reading about animals in the food system is one thing. Meeting actual individual animals at a sanctuary is another thing entirely. Most of the students had never met a pig before and many had never been in a farm-like setting before. I think there’s something special about meeting animals at sanctuaries rather than on farms. You can confront the animals at a sanctuary with an open heart and mind because you don’t have do the work of forgetting that these animals are going to be used for food. At Pigs Peace, at least, what you see when you visit is the way the pigs live all the time. There is no dark underbelly to cover up or ignore. I’m off to teach in a couple of hours and I can’t wait to hear thoughts from the class on their experience.

After the sanctuary on Saturday, the rest of our weekend was spent playing catch-up. We have a lot going on right now. In addition to the craziness of work and school, the difficulty of the dissertation research and other random stuff, we are welcoming a new canine family member into the house this week if all goes according to plan. I’ll wait for another post to share the details with you, but we’ve been scurrying around getting all of the other animals to the vet for their annual check-ups, cleaning up the house, wrangling baby gates and putting away chewable things. Plus, my dear sister is going to be coming for a visit on Wednesday all the way from Baltimore (yes! I’m so excited!) and we’re getting the house pulled together for her visit.

On Sunday, I planted 50 tulip bulbs in our front yard, and promptly gave myself a giant blister on the palm of my hand. Clearly, I haven’t been doing enough yardwork lately. Twenty-five “Fancy Frills” and twenty-five “Curly Sue.” I adore purple, and I couldn’t pass up these gorgeous tulips at the store. I can’t wait to see them pop up in the spring.

We’ve been working on an ongoing project to develop our garden into a mini-wildlife habitat and this summer especially spent a bunch of time working native plant species into the garden. We’ve been using this great book called “Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest” by Russell Link. This book outlines the ways in which you can design and add to your garden to make it more friendly to wildlife. One of the things I love about the book (in addition to his recommendations for specific plant species) is the way that he reminds you to think about the various levels of the garden, from groundcovers to bushes to tall pine trees. We’ve learned a lot reading this book about what parts of plants various animals will use for various purposes and which plants provide homes and safety for which animals. The tulips were not really part of this plan, but they are an aesthetic accent I just couldn’t pass up. So in the midst of the lavender, elderberry, magnolia, wild lilac, the hens-and-chicks, etc. there will be bursts of purple, pink and white flowers this spring!

On another note, when the fine ladies at Our Hen House were here in Seattle, we went to visit Pigs Peace and they interviewed the amazing Judy Woods (director/founder) and they kindly included me in the interview (thanks Jasmin and Mariann!). If you’d like to have a listen to the podcast, which went up on Saturday, click on over here.

Thinking Animal Emotion in the Midst of Teaching

The quarter is in full swing, which means that teaching has completely absorbed my time and energy. Amazingly, the class has remained full and the students for the most part all seem engaged. It is so exciting to hear their ideas about the readings and watch as their thoughts shift and evolve with the material we encounter for the class. This week is animal emotion week. We read a couple of articles by Marc Bekoff on animal emotion and on scientific methods. He makes a case for valuing alternative methods of understanding animal emotions—namely, that in the case of the study of emotion, anecdote is paramount. Anecdote is generally thought of as being ‘soft’ science or somewhat squishy, less rigorous science. On the contrary, Bekoff argues that it is one of the only ways we can begin to understand the rich emotional lives animals lead.

Yesterday in class, we watched two films about animal emotion. One goes along with The Pig Who Sang to The Moon by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the book we’re reading for Wednesday. This film is 52 minutes and follows Masson’s journey to various sanctuaries to attempt to understand farmed animal emotion. It’s called The Emotional World of Farm Animals.

This other one is quite short, only 12 minutes, and is worth the watch. It’s called “Shirley’s Story” and it’s a beautiful story about an elephant.

I heard more than a few sniffles in the room yesterday as we were watching these films—not because they’re painful to watch, but because of the beauty of witnessing and taking seriously the emotional lives of other animals. We had a short discussion about the films yesterday, but I’m looking forward to digging into a real discussion with the class tomorrow. This week is in preparation for a class field trip to Pigs Peace Sanctuary this weekend, where they will get to spend some time with some pigs and see how emotional they can be. Then next week, we start reading about slaughter.

This past week has been a bit rough for a number of reasons, but the one I’ll share now is that I attended another auction with a group of students from the class. It was a different auction than the one I visited before, and they auctioned off pigs, sheep, goats, calves, cows, and steer all in one auction. The piglets came in first and the people who were herding them in the pen struck them in face with paddles and grabbed them by their back legs and picked them up impatiently to get them to go through the exit door after they were auctioned. A few of them were body-slammed into the wall by the men. The pigs squeeled loudly every time they were struck in the face or handled roughly. If you were paying attention, it was clear that they were terrified and in pain. And speaking of emotions, I found myself shutting my own emotions off immediately, knowing I had to get through another hour of this, and knowing that I had to hold it together to be able to answer any questions the students had.

The auction continued, and the usual suspects came through the pen—emaciated cows used up by the dairy industry, organic and non-organic steers who would be slaughtered for organic and non-organic ‘beef’, pregnant cows who were being sold based on the fact that they were due to deliver calves ‘just after the New Year’…But this time, there was one animal I had not seen at the other auctions. When he first came into the pen on wobbly legs, I thought “Why is there a deer at the auction?!” And then slowly, with horror, I realized he was a day-old calf. He was a Jersey breed calf, so he was a creamy brown color like the coloring of a deer with big dark eyes. His umbilical cord was still attached. It dangled, drying and shrivelled from his stomach. He was tiny and beautiful, the size of Maizy (our yellow lab), and thin. He was silent as he looked around trying to understand where he was. He sold for $15.

I’ve been thinking about what emotions that calf must have experienced being taken away from his mother on the day after he was born. He must have been terrified and confused and so lonely. I’ve been thinking about what the cow who is his mother must be feeling. When I visited a small-scale dairy farm, the farmer said that it’s common for cows to bellow for two weeks after their calves are taken from them. Is she crying for her calf now, wondering where he is and why he’s not with her?

Emotions are the reason why we do the work we’re passionate about. Empathizing with others is a deeply emotional experience. We are all emotional animals and this week in class is all about understanding that and thinking about what it means. What does is mean that cows are deeply emotional beings and why does this matter? How are our own emotions important in our relationships with other animals? And in what ways is emotion a powerful catalyst for change?

Thanksgiving Recipe Roundup

It’s already that time of year again…coming into Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving can be a stressful time for vegans (and new vegans especially). For one, it is incredibly depressing to think about the 46 million turkeys slaughtered each year in the United States for Thanksgiving day alone. That is a lot of individual lives taken for one single meal. That fact, compounded with the knowledge that turkeys are extremely curious, intelligent and social birds and that most people don’t think twice about their consumption of these beautiful animals, can make the day a real bummer to get through. But there are also the positive things about Thanksgiving, like the chance to get together with family and friends and spend a day cooking and eating together. That is really the part of Thanksgiving that I love. I love cooking all day and then sitting down at a table together to share a meal.

We’re just a little over a month away from Thanksgiving and now is the time to start thinking about how you are going to spend the holiday…Time to think about things like negotiating a vegan meal with families full of meat-eaters, deciding with whom you want to celebrate the holiday and finding new vegan versions of the dishes you love.

Last year at this time, I asked for readers to comment with their favorite Thanksgiving dishes and I worked on developing a vegan recipe for each. The recipes that came out of last year’s recipe roundup were:

Mushroom Gravy

Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Savory Stuffing

Pumpkin Pie

Apple Pie

Raw Cranberry Orange Relish

And other recipes not specific to Thanksgiving, but which would be great for a Thanksgiving meal:

Roasted Red Potatoes

Roasted Brussel Sprouts

Vegetable Pot Pie

I am going to go ahead and challenge myself to remake the pumpkin pie because I’ve been thinking about it all year and I think it can be much better.

Now to ask you: What Thanksgiving favorites would you like to see veganized?

Our Hen House Workshop at the UW

Today we have the pleasure of having Jasmin Singer and Mariann Sullivan from Our Hen House here in Seattle to do a workshop at the University of Washington. It should be a fun and productive conversation! If you’re around and would like to join us, please do! Details here:

When: Friday October 12, 2012; 12:00-2:00pm

Where: Room 115, William Gates Hall

Who: Jasmin Singer and Mariann Sullivan (www.ourhenhouse.org)

Animal Studies Workshop: Changing the World for Animals through Academic/Activist Collaboration

Join the brains behind Our Hen House, Jasmin Singer and Mariann Sullivan, for this unique roundtable discussion that explores their collaboration with activists, academics and everyone in between. Our Hen House (www.ourhenhouse.org/), named by VegNews Magazine as the 2011 Indie Media Powerhouse, is a multimedia hub of opportunities to mainstream the movement to end animal exploitation. Jasmin and Mariann, the founders — and the hosts of the popular Our Hen House podcast – will share the path that led them to creating Our Hen House, how the site is influenced and informed by academics’ involvement, and how we can use our own particular skills, talents and experience to build a new world free of animal exploitation. In this intimate workshop, animal law professor Mariann Sullivan and writer Jasmin Singer, will share ideas for turning thought into action, and action into real change. With a focus on ‘The Gay Animal,’ ‘The Legal Eagle,’ and other unique projects of Our Hen House, this workshop also offers the opportunity to explore the intersections of various social movements and our role in moving those efforts forward.

A Little House in the Big Woods

How many of you read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books when you were growing up? The Little House books were one of my favorite parts of childhood. My mom read the books aloud to me and my sister when we were kids and I remember collecting the hardback copies of the books over the course of several years. For each birthday, Christmas, etc. I would be given one or two of the books. Now I have the whole beautiful collection and look forward to reading them aloud to some children someday.

When I was on my way to Madison from Minneapolis last week, I saw a sign on the highway advertising a Laura Ingalls Wilder museum. I decided I would make a detour and stop there on my way back. I’d never been to any of the Laura Ingalls Wilder historical sites, but if it was anything like the Anne of Green Gables museum and the Lake of Shining Waters on Prince Edward Island in Nova Scotia, it would be a real treat.

First, I headed to Pepin, Wisconsin where there is a tiny Laura Ingalls Wilder museum with all kinds of old artifacts of life in the late 1800s/early 1900s in the Midwestern United States.

I poked around and looked at all the stuff in the museum for a while and enjoyed especially looking at a case of old photos like this one of Almonso (Laura’s husband, who she nicknamed ‘Manly’) and this darling one of Laura and Almonso in their old age.

And there was this sweet letter from Laura to her Cousin Lettie as well.

In case it’s difficult to read in the photo, here is the text of the letter:

Mansfield Missouri, January 20, 1948

Dear Cousin Lettie,

Your letter was a pleasant surprise. It has been so long since I have heard from you and as you say, “years and age” have crept up on us.

I am sorry about you having rheumatism. My hands are not as nimble as they used to be, but still I am very well for 81 years old in February. Manly is rather feeble, being crippled in his feet. He is ninety-one.

We are living by ourselves in our old farm house and I am doing all the work for ourselves and the house. We have a good neighbor just across the road and Manly still drives the car so we go to town quite often.

Pa and Ma died years ago and Mary lived with Carrie until her death soon afterward. Carrie was married and living in the Black Hills not far from Rapid City. She died two years ago last June.

Grace had married a farmer about seven miles from De Smet. She died several years ago. As neither she nor Carrie had any children, I am the only one of our family living.

Sometimes I feel lonely when I stop being busy long enough to think. It does keep me hurrying to do the work and write as much as I must to keep up with the people who write to me after reading my books. The books are still selling well. I had more than 200 Christmas cards and letters to answer.

Rose is living in Connecticut. She is Rose Wilder Lane and you may have read some of her books or magazine articles.

Give Alice my love and tell her I will be looking for her letter. It is nice that you can be with her. I was glad to have your letter and hope to hear from you again.

Lots of love,

Laura Ingalls Wilder

This letter made me think a lot about how short a lifetime is and how many people we lose along the way and how we ultimately survive these losses and continue on. My grandmother on my dad’s side is 98 years old. Nearly every one of her friends has died and she has survived all of them. Last time I talked to her, she said that sometimes she wakes up in the morning and lays in bed trying to remember where she is. Some mornings, she’s sure she’s in her mother’s house as a child. Other mornings she wakes up thinking she is in the house where she raised her children. And sometimes she wakes and knows just where she is. I wonder what it must be like to have 98 years of memories, 98 years of waking up in the morning and adjusting to where and when you are in the world. In some ways, it seems so long–like so many things to remember, and other times, it seems like a lifetime must go by in the blink of an eye.

This is one of the things I thought about as I drove out of Pepin to see the site where the Little House in the Big Woods is located. The Big Woods are gone. Instead, there is a cabin on a small hill by some cornfields. The Little House is in the middle of farm country.

It’s amazing how much the landscape can change in a hundred years–how much human influence changes the landscape. How profound an impact the way we and our families and communities live can make on the land around us.

Enjoying Fall in the Midwest

This past week has been tremendously busy with teaching and other work and an exciting trip to the Midwest (Minnesota and Wisconsin). After class last Wednesday, I dashed home, grabbed my bags and jumped the lightrail to the airport to head to Minneapolis. My dear friend from college, Laura, lives in Minneapolis and I combined a research trip with a visit with her. I arrived late Wednesday night, rented a car with only minor hiccups in the process, and finally arrived at Laura’s around midnight. We stayed up late talking and then got up early the next day to go to the U of M, where Laura is doing a joint Law/PhD in Geography program. I tagged along with Laura through her school day and then we spent the evening together in Minneapolis, eating some amazing Japanese food (veggie tempura, shiitake soba soup, and some delicious tofu appetizer). I’ve been to Minneapolis before to visit and I’m always struck by how nice a city it is. It had been two or three years since I had seen Laura and it was wonderful to reconnect, particularly since we’re now both in Geography and have that awesome discipline in common!

On Friday morning, I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove to Madison, Wisconsin for the research component of my trip—the World Dairy Expo! The Word Dairy Expo is huge, with vendors and exhibitors from all over the country and the world showing off their latest dairy technologies. From the latest high-tech milking machines to iPhone apps that test the somatic cell count in milk; from semen suppliers to calf hutch suppliers; from designs for industrial dairy barns to the latest in ear tag identification systems…The World Dairy Expo had it all. I spent a long afternoon there on Friday getting increasingly weighted down by bags of pamphlets and handouts advertising and explaining the various products available. I haven’t had a chance to look at them closely yet, but I know that there are some real gems in there. I tried not to think too much about what I was seeing or hearing—I just tried to absorb as much as I could and collect materials to look at later. Since I had a limited amount of time at the expo and so much ground to cover, I did my best to keep any emotional or intellectual reactions out of the process for now.

I stayed in a motel outside of Madison on Friday night and started driving back to Minneapolis on Saturday morning. I took one exciting detour that took me off the beaten path and up along the river (the Mississippi, I think) through the hills of changing leaves and the corn fields. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to hear what the exciting detour was—it deserves its own post! There’s something really nice about being out on the road, listening to music (or an audio recording of Eating Animals, if that’s more your thing!) and watching the landscape. The way that fall comes in the Northeast and the Midwest is more dramatic than it is here in Seattle. With so many evergreen trees in Seattle, there is green all year round (which I love!), but there is not as dramatic a shift to fall. Certain streets in the city are lined with deciduous trees that change colors, but in the Northeast and Midwest, the overwhelming majority of trees change colors and it is breathtaking at this time of year.

Thoughts on Tradition

Yesterday, in class, I asked the students to shout out responses and we brainstormed on the board. First was…What constitutes home?

comfort
family
love
safety
security
bed
food

Next was… What constitutes food?

taste
nutrition
comfort
community
satisfaction
access

Then I asked the class to think about familiar traditions that are centered on food:

Barbeque in summer
candy at Halloween
emotional eating
turkey at Thanksgiving
fasting for religious holidays
ham at Christmas

These were just a sampling of the responses. Using Thanksgiving as an example I asked, What is important about Thanksgiving tradition? Of course, a lot of the students said it was the turkey in the middle of the table — that Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the same without turkey. I pressed them. Is it the animal and/or the meat that’s important? Is it the familiar flavors of Thanksgiving that are important, which really are constituted by rosemary, sage and thyme? Some remained adamant that they must have turkey on Thanksgiving, that this was the heart of the tradition and “why change a tradition that’s not broken?” Others said that, for them, Thanksgiving was about being with family and friends and that the food was secondary — that the turkey mattered less to them.

I’ve tried to be very careful to keep my own feelings out of the conversation. Something I realized last time I taught this class was that it is much more effective if they don’t feel like I’m trying to push my own beliefs on them. Instead, I try to act as a source of gentle pressure to move the conversation forward—to push them to think more deeply. Through the quarter, I imagine my position becomes clear, just from the readings I’ve chosen for the syllabus. But for now, I don’t want to scare anyone away. And I think change in behavior and belief system is sustained more permanently when it’s something you come to on your own terms. This is, of course, a struggle for me because I want all of them to magically realize that animals should not be used for humans’ ends, period. But this process requires tremendous patience, and also the understanding that some people, when confronted with the truth, will choose to ignore it, or to justify it away, using arguments like ‘tradition’.

This is the reason I wanted to talk about tradition early in the quarter—to get them thinking about what traditions we have, what role they play in our lives, and how they change (or don’t). Yesterday, many students expressed that traditions were static. For instance, to remove the turkey from the Thanksgiving table and change the tradition permanently would take several generations to adopt. My hope for the course is that throughout the 10 weeks, we will work through thinking about tradition in a different way–that traditions CAN change, that they can change quickly, and that we don’t necessarily have to lose the essence of what role that tradition played in our lives. Without a dead bird in the middle of the table, Thanksgiving, for me, is still about being with family and friends. It’s still about spending the day cooking and celebrating a bounty of food. It’s still about those familiar flavors of rosemary, sage and thyme.

What traditions have you changed? What is important to you about tradition?

Comfort Food and Saying Goodbye to a Dear Friend

I know that chanterelle season is coming up soon and I was hoping against hope that there would be chanterelle mushrooms at the vegetable stand yesterday. But alas, they have not arrived yet. I had had my heart set on making a chanterelle and kale risotto. Instead, I found some shiitake mushrooms and spinach and whipped up this risotto for dinner last night. I used a little vegetable broth instead of all water. And I made some roasted brussel sprouts on the side. I’ve been so exhausted this week and we’ve eaten out or gotten take out almost every night, so even though I was really tired yesterday afternoon, I really just wanted some home cooked comfort food. The risotto recipe I posted a while back can be made with any vegetables — the base is the same. Eric took one bite last night and said, with a rather hilarious hint of disgust, “Why is this so cheesy?!” No cheese, my love. It’s just the way this risotto turns out. Rich, warm, comforting, and full of flavor. Just the thing at the end of a long week.

This has seemed like SUCH a long week, with the beginning of school, I’ve been fighting a sore throat and drinking lots of the turmeric detox drink, and my dear friend Tish left for Oxford yesterday. Her partner got into a Masters program at Oxford and she will be writing her dissertation from the UK. I’ve known this was coming for months and I’ve been trying to prepare for the loss of yet another friend to long distance. I know it’s simply a feature of the time we live in, when people move around a lot and when jobs, school, and other opportunities pop up in all corners of the world. And I know that I’m not actually losing Tish. But long distance friendships are different. With physical distance inevitably comes other forms of distance, just by the fact that we will no longer be in the same place doing the same kinds of things.

I don’t know if I would have survived grad school if it wasn’t for Tish’s friendship and support, and knowing her has pushed me to be a better person. That, I think, is one measure of a truly amazing friend–those who push us gently to be as compassionate, kind, and careful as we can be in navigating the world–to be better versions of who we are fundamentally, without trying to change our basic nature. I am very happy to see Tish set out on this new adventure–it absolutely seems like the right thing for her. But I am also sad to say goodbye to such a dear friend. Goodbye and thank you a million times!

And on that bittersweet note, I’ll bid you, dear readers, a happy weekend of enjoying time with good friends and family and resting up for another week!

Teaching in Fall (and More Generally)

For as long as I can remember, my dad (a university English professor) has said that faculty in the English department stumble around in shock at the beginning of fall term — shock that (suddenly!) the school year has begun and shock that (suddenly!) the summer is over and there is a whole different set of responsibilities. When I was a kid, I imagined the English professors literally stumbling around in a stupor like drunken zombies and thought it sounded pretty damn funny.

Now, I’m living through this weird time of year myself. And while we’re not literally stumbling around, it sure does feel that way. Well ahead of time, I made sure my books were ordered through the bookstore for the students to buy, my reader was assembled and ready to drop off at the printer, the syllabus was finished and the plan for the quarter laid out. I had asked the class to read 1984 before the quarter began and I had assigned a couple of articles for Wednesday’s class. Somehow, although I was ready in other ways, I forgot that I actually had to do the reading myself! Whoops! On Tuesday, this dawned on me and I found myself frantically finishing 1984 and reading the other articles before I had to teach on Wednesday morning. I told Eric that I had all this reading to do suddenly — he said, “Wait, so you’re already behind?!” Yup. I finished the reading and made a plan for the class just in the nick of time and yesterday’s class went well, I think. We finished watching Food, Inc., which we had started on Monday and we discussed 1984, doublethink and doublespeak. But that feeling of scrambling and stumbling is not a comfortable way to operate. This week, I’m going to plan ahead better and get things done well ahead of time. Mark my words.

Being on a college/university teaching schedule is, in many ways, a wonderful way to live. Many teachers don’t work during the summer (though they also may not get paid during this time), they have holiday breaks, and may not even have to show up to teach every day of the week. In many ways, it’s a pretty sweet life, particularly if you’re teaching something you love! In other ways, teaching has its challenges. Because there are not the parameters of a 9 to 5 job, you can find yourself working well beyond a normal 8 hour work day. I remember waking up at 2 or 3 am as a kid and my dad would be working away in his study, grading papers and reading and planning for class. On one side, being on a quarter system allows for lots of different teaching experiences as you teach a new class every 10 weeks, but this can also be challenging because as soon as you settle into a class, it’s over!

I do love the fall for a whole lot of reasons — falling leaves, scarves and vests, squashes and pumpkins, apples — you know, all the normal reasons that are flooding the blogging world this week. In the classroom, fall is a special time, too. Everyone comes in with a slight sense of hope for a new school year, new plans, new notebooks, nervous excitement, and a sense of well-restedness that will only be a distant memory come spring quarter. I had this weird moment of realization this week that this was year FIVE of grad school for me. I thought, “Wow, I guess this is my life now,” and I felt a rush of gratitude for this opportunity and nostalgia that before I know it, grad school will be over and some new adventure will begin. For now, here’s to another school year beginning. Happy fall!