DC (yo)pro

At some point in my childhood, my organic lawn-treating, cloth diaper-washing, Tofurky-serving parents cracked and got a basic cable package for our tv, which every-so-often upgraded to more channels only to revert back to the few channels my parents actually agreed to. Fortunately, despite the inconsistencies in my childhood cable coverage, I managed to grow up with some classic tv shows under my belt: American Dreams, Boy Meets World, Gilmore Girls, AND Sabrina the Teenage Witch (also sometimes As Told By Ginger).

I distinctly remember having a dream as a small child, where my finger was hurting because I kept on trying to point/flick it like Melissa Joan Hart did in her Sabrina role when she used magic. My magic just would not work. And the magic was really my favorite part of the show-- until now!

Once New Girl, Mindy Project, Downton Abbey and the other classics were in the off-season, I scoured Amazon Prime for something enjoyable to watch. That search was when I rediscovered the magic (literally!) of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Yes, the magic is still super cool, yes Salem the cat still looks really fake in many scenes, BUT ALSO YES Sabrina the Teenage Witch is also all about the lady power! Hilda and especially Zelda are super cool strong, intelligent, female characters. Hilda is a bit strange but sassy and direct, and Zelda, while also direct, is also this super smart sciency wiz. They always encourage Sabrina to be a smarty-pants and a leader and I absolutely love that and am happy I watched it growing up!

Now in my slightly more mature early 20s, I am able to appreciate MJH in her role in Melissa and Joey where she has developed into a strong, intelligent, though sometimes overwhelmingly materialistic, sassy, local councilwoman! I dig it.

So why do I like Melissa Joan Hart? Because she plays magical politicians on TV. But also because all the lady power and female empowerment stuff too.

What do you think of MJH/Sabrina/Melissa? Do you have favorite strong lady (or anywhere else on the gender spectrum) leaders from childhood tv shows?

P.S. I acknowledge neither of these shows are perfect and both likely include things that might be offensive and/or that I’m not a fan of-- but I appreciate the shows for what they are/were. 

It’s definitely time for an adult chores day. But let’s be real, it’s super easy to feel tired and busy and still not do all (many) of the things you (fine, I) should be doing. In my defense and the defense of all the recent grads, sometimes completing one adult thing generates new ones. Also, yeah no, no more excuses.

Ex: My college bank account peeps finally realized I graduated and emailed to say they would start charging unless I kept a minimum amount in there. I used it as a back-up account so it didn’t make sense to put in requested minimum amount just to have it sitting around in there, so I closed the account. However, my only bank now is at home, 1k+ miles away. So now I have my tax refund, and the cashier’s check from the previous account sitting around somewhere in my messy room, waiting to be deposited. That’s an adult thing I really gotta get on, because losing money, literally losing money in a messy room is really stupid. But also, they totally spelled my name wrong on the cashier’s check so I’m worried it won’t work...

Other adult chores:

Find a Primary Care Provider and make an appointment

Find a general dentist and make an appointment

Bring in my lease to a public library so I can get a library card

Water the plants

Figure out my future

Figure out if I paid my medical bills correctly since the amount doesn’t seem to have been taken out of my account

Figure out if my bank removed the double of the triple charges for the sushi dinner I treated my college friend to when she hosted me for 4 days a couple weekends ago.

I’m thinking Saturday/ASAP These things need to happen.

I finally made it into the closest thing to a hole-in-the wall Asian restaurant I could find in DC. I’ve probably passed it at least 15 times in the past 4 months and this weekend, after a disappointing visit to Loft, I was in the right frame of mind and on the right side of the street to stop in. Also you can see the people making the dumplings in the front windows of the restaurant and one of them gestured to a family next to me looking in, to come in, which was actually super cute and didn’t feeling pressuring or creepy.

Anyways, their marketing worked on me plus I had already read most of the yelp reviews and was so ready to enter 3 months ago. I had settled on the vegetable dumplings when the waiter asked me if that was all, so then I added an order of seafood dumplings. Order was ready super quickly so I was able to hungrily run out to bring my dumplings home and proceeded to awkwardly strap my takeout bag to my bikeshare basket and didn’t have a look at my food until I got home.

Sweating, hungry, but excited to be home and so close to nomming on my new treats, I carefully removed two containers of warm dumplings (veggie ones were fried, seafood were steamed for extra variety) and then you can imagine how psyched I was to discover not one, not two, but four different sauce-type options for my dumplings. I started with the most familiar looking, something brown which presumably had lots of salt and soy sauceness. Then I started mixing it with the red specked one whose oiliness had spilled a bit on the ride home and I presumed was sesame oil with chili pepper. That was a asty combination. Quite a few dumplings in, I had to pause to let the spice digest a bit and decided to dig into the garlic, which I was totally surprised to experience as refreshing. It had such a nice freshness to it including a cleansing after-bite, which was a welcome contrast to the mild fire the chili and sesame oil inspired in my mouth.

Still not sure how I feel about the actual dumplings, beyond that I enjoyed the texture of the seafood fillings better than the veggie ones. I usually fry my Costco-bought veggie dumplings in olive oil so I don’t have much to compare these ones to.

Brief observations from a few weeks of conscious attempts to be positive:

-- I come away from conversations feeling better about my interactions. I am yet to determine how much this is due to the perception I perceive others have of me after the conversation. I do think some of it may be that I’ve actually just framed the topic of conversation in a more positive light in my conscious attempts to be positive and therefore have a happier perception of the topic. Right, now I can’t use perceive or conscious for the rest of this post.

-- You(and by you I mean I) might have to work harder to present something in a positive light. I know, personally, complaining comes pretty naturally. It’s often easier to immediately complain about something than to spend 30 seconds thinking about how an initially negative experience might be funny or a lesson learned. I wonder if you try hard enough to swing everything positively, that the positive interpretation becomes more natural and easier to arrive at than the negative one.

Ex: The dog slobbered all over my black pants as I was rushing out the door to work. (+) reframing 1: Wow, my black work pants clean very well and in a timely manner! (+) reframing 2: hahahahahaha. Yeah, 2 was more realistic, and it was kind of funny.

Still striving towards positivity.

1. Be positive– But first, to get the negativity out of my system, I hate participating in this culture of complaining and being negative. People who constantly complain are generally not fun to be around and, long term, I personally don’t feel great complaining frequently. Don’t you just love being around those people who are positive and complimentary (I feel like in the best situations these characteristics go together). Is positivity contagious? I think it can be. I do acknowledge it’s super possible to be obnoxiously positive and sometimes it can be easy to slip into being superficial when trying to be positive. So, perhaps I should amend my goal to being genuinely and appropriately positive. That’s probably better for my soul anyways.

2. Do stuff– I want to strive to do less thinking (in the not productive way, mainly around barriers to completing goals/activities), less procrastinating and more just doing. Perhaps this can be part of a positive feedback loop with the positive goal; it’s easier to be positive when you’re feeling productive and accomplished from doing stuff.

aka introductory post

When I read Mindy Kaling’s (wow this is already getting super tiring, will revert to just writing Mindy and pretend like we’re on a first name basis) autobiography, Is everyone hanging out without me (too lazy to check actual title now), I totally related. I mean I’m not an actor, nor do I have a Tamil father or Bengali mother (see I looked this up to avoid being ignorant/politically incorrect), and my college was definitely not broey in the way Dartmouth is, but I related to her humorous take one her life experiences, the good and the bad, and also the numerous selfies. And also I think I’m really funny and sometimes other people do too.

Mindy (remember we’re tight now so I don’t have to write her last name) recounted her experiences in a style that made me feel like she was laughing while they were happening, instead of waiting until way after those events to laugh. This may seem trivial, but I think this mindset is probably really good for your mental health (don’t listen if your therapist tells you otherwise, or maybe do because I don’t have any formal medical training). 

Since I left the midwest, America’s heartland, the place with deep fried arteries, I’ve had a lot of those laughter worthy/necessary experiences. Each time I tried to fly to and from the east coast for college and holidays and I taxied for 2 hours, spent the night in the airport, flew to my home airport only to turn around, I had to laugh. Well no, actually, I didn’t but I did mostly avoid getting upset and ultimately tried to get a kick out of the situation by thinking how ridiculous the situation was and how silly my traveling track record had become. I also was able to “get a kick” out of the empty box of textbooks the post-office delivered to my house this summer-- what must the postperson have thought? The weeks that followed were really fun, when I received a letter postmarked 2011 as well as a couple pieces of the second box of textbooks. And I really didn’t want the birthday gift my mother mailed me last week (see empty envelope).

Little did I realize that upon heading to college, the ridiculousness had only just begun. These first few months of “yo pro” but actually just post-grad life, at home studying for the MCAT (aka working my high school summer job, studying, working the OkCupid in my midsize midwestern town, and waiting to receive my final offer letter for the job I supposedly would start in the fall), then moving to DC for my job while still studying, then looking for a place to live (aka marketing myself and writing coverletters to craiglisters but also rushing sororities at open houses), figuring out workplace dynamics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, have been full of times that I’ve been trying to experience with laughs. Or at least lolz when I text my friends (none of whom are here in DC with me) about the silliness. Let this serve as a forum to remember things, fondly, or at least with a tinge of humor.