Life rolls along

This blog has some catching up to do. I will start with the birthday..

I turned 30 in January. It was a simple, lovely affair. I decided we should bake a cake instead of buying one and I chose a swiss roll. I had tried making one a long long time ago, a classic chocolate roll, and had miserably failed. This time I decided on a lemon mascarpone roll. By the time it was baked and rolled, we were so eager to eat it, that we forgot most of the final beautification steps and made a total mess of writing happy birthday on it. But it came out delicious and I was happy. I was happy that something that Mike and I did together came out so well.

In March we officially got married. The Indian wedding went as well as one could possibly hope for, but it was never really about us, at least from my point of view. We were the glammed up centerpiece to a family event. Here, we went to the license office together, set up the date with the local judge and headed out in the most decent and suitable attires we had. One of Mike's colleagues met us at the apartment before we headed out together. He didn't look too pleased with my navy dress, or my saying that the ceremony was something we hurriedly put together. There was a bunch of white flowers that Mike got me for valentines, in the vase, and his colleague and I decided it was a good idea to use it as a bouquet. The judge married us and told me I was a sweetheart, which made me happy. And I was happy that Mike and I got to do this together again, and it was all about us and our decision to be with each other.

But prior to the wedding, we had some stellar fights, the main outcome of which was that I agreed not to bring my unhappiness into the house, loll about in it, and consequently drag him into it as well. Now, when I have moments of anxiousness, I take some (and not too much) alone time. I also decided to be more assertive at the workplace, because a major reason for the stress at home was my feeling cornered and worthless at my workplace.

It was a tricky thing, especially since I had no job or publications, and that was why they got pushier to begin with. But then I came to understand that the PhD students who were getting along well in the department were getting a lot of help from their advisor - he was writing most of the paper for them, while they did the empirics. I did both for all my papers, not my advisor. So I stopped feeling so guilty.

Instead I have been working and trying to be accountable to myself rather than others. And for once I took the liberty to tell my advisor what it is that I want, rather than trying to accommodate their (the department's) demands and all the compromises they expect of me. I still feel a bit pushed around and uncertain and I can't wait for all this to end, but in any case, I haven't been going into despair. It would have been great if I had gotten a job, but I didn't, and soon I am going to be in the job market again. In the meantime, there has been some decent progress on the research and publication front.

Over the spring break, we went to Pittsburgh. We checked into a sweet suite at Hotel Monaco. It had lots of personality and color. It also had a pretty great restaurant, serving the much eaten sticky toffee pudding. Mike was thrilled with the beef tartare, which I didn't realize was raw meat. I had a couple of spoons and it did not taste bad, but I could not bring myself to approve of it. The other memorable meal was at this place called Meat and Potatoes. I had duck and Mike had a wagyu beef steak, which, based on the bits I ate, I thought delicious (apparently its extra tasty because the fat is finely interwoven all through the meat, rather than just being on the sides of the cut). They also made this really yummy cocktail called the comeback.

We visited the Phipps conservatory and dreamed of building one of our own someday, we checked out Fallingwater and the nationality rooms at the University of Pittsburgh. The India classroom felt nothing like India sadly. We went to the Andy Warhol museum and poked at the silver clouds, which was fun, but didn't make much of his film work. In the end, I think I had the most fun at the aviary. It wasn't like a zoo, where you stand outside and look at the animals. We were often inside, and the birds would fly about. They call it an immersive exhibit. At one stop, we got bird feed and the parrots flew down and sat on our stretched out arms and pecked away. It gave me the tingles. And for Mike's sake we went to a Penguins game (ice hockey), which actually wasn't so bad, they made quite a show of it and Penguins won the game.