Here In Katie's Head

I moved my blog to Tumblr because every time in the past three years that I’ve actually felt like writing, my WordPress install told me that it needed to be updated, and updating made me forget what I was going to write about.

My import somehow dropped half my posts and I haven’t fixed that yet. Not everything is redirecting, and I haven’t fixed that either. I will later. Maybe.

I look forward to fewer frustrations.

A few weeks ago, Wichita State University announced a plan to give its student union building, the Rhatigan Student Center, a facelift. Since then, signs urging support of the “Rhatigan Renewal” have popped up all over campus.

As a bit of background, the most important thing about the Rhatigan is that it provides a roof over Wichita’s only Chick-fil-A.

And it has a bookstore and chairs and stuff.

It struck me as odd that they’re trying to rally support now. Construction doesn’t start until next year and doesn’t end until 2013. Current students won’t be here when it’s done, so it doesn’t seem like winning them over accomplishes much.

This afternoon when I was wrapping up my post-exam Chick-fil-A ritual, I discovered a big paper, uh, thing that students were supposed to cover with their reasons why they support the Rhatigan Renewal project.

Now, the fact that someone thought this was a good idea alarms me. This person clearly knows nothing about students.

If they asked for reasons the Chick-fil-A’s safety should be preserved, this would have worked. If they asked for reasons naps are awesome, reasons beer is yummy, reasons pot should be legal, reasons your parents should be legally obligated to do your laundry until you graduate or anything else that APPEALS TO COLLEGE STUDENTS, they’d have received diverse and enlightening feedback.

But when you’re talking about (at least partially) cosmetic improvements to a functional building, well, please wait while I finish laughing.

So I took some pictures and transcribed everything I could. Because it made me laugh.

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I pass through the I-135/US-54 interchange about a dozen times a week. I grew up in a house nestled into its northwest curve. If you are familiar with this interchange, you know how the northbound->westbound ramp arcs high, high above everything else.

I have only taken that ramp once.

In the backseat, two other fifteen-year-old girls were shrieking at the top of their lungs.

In the front passenger seat, the drivers ed. instructor was telling them to be quiet, I was doing fine and they were going to psych me out.

I felt pretty awesome in that moment.

But in the last eleven years, I have not found myself in a situation where I needed to take that ramp again. And every day, when I’m eastbound merging north, I look up at that ramp and hear the “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” of those girls in the backseat of that green Taurus (we thought the green was the prettiest, so we called dibs).

“PLEASE KATIE DON’T DRIVE OFF OF THIS RAMP I DON’T WANT TO DIE.”

“YEAH WHAT SHE SAID.”

One day last fall, I parked my car on campus. I took a few steps along the sidewalk up the hill and stopped to look at a grasshopper on the pavement.

Very gently, I tapped his nose with my toe and said, “boop.”

I walked away and he sat there wondering what had just happened.

I’ve had this conversation with everyone who will listen, so it’s probably time to write it down.

I’m 26 and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life. I’ve found lots of things I *could* do with my life, but no singular purpose. I’ve found things I’m particularly good at, but nothing gratifying enough that I don’t wonder how I might find myself some greener grass. Given all that, I think I’m starting to make good choices, but I’m still not completely at east.

I wish someone had told me, “sometimes you just have to get a job” before I started college. Being told by my teachers that I could be whatever I wanted to be *wasn’t helpful*. I can rant at great length about the unhelpful things I was told as a child and the helpful things I wish I could have heard a decade earlier.

Do I need my hand held through everything? No. And I’m surely being far too arrogant when I assume I’d have found a better path on my own if not for having been poisoned by unrealistic ways of approaching the future.

I hate that I wasn’t always as good at recognizing and tuning out bad advice. There’s too much of it in this world.

I am still alive. I have been very busy eating.

Now, courtesy of my father:

How I would make Bierocks

All ingredients and amounts are subject to change.

• 1 pound hamburger (or ground pork)
• 1 medium white onion
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• cooking oil
• 1 small head cabbage, chopped (or a bag of chopped cabbage slaw) salt
• black pepper
• bag of shredded cheese (optional)
• bread dough (your own dough or the frozen bread rolls)

Filling:

1. Chop the onion and garlic and fry in minimal cooking oil.
2. Add the ground beef and brown.
3. Salt and pepper to taste – usually very heavy on the pepper.
4. Add the cabbage and cook until cabbage is a little tender.
5. Drain in a colander, removing as much liquid as possible. Let set in colander for a while to allow liquid to drain.
6. Add cheese and mix well.
7. Check taste again for enough black pepper.
8. Allow to cool somewhat (or even refrigerate).

Assembly:

1. Roll dough out into pieces ~5” diameter.
2. Spoon the filling onto the center – do not get filling on the edges.
3. Lift the edges up and pinch them together. The grease from the filling will prevent the edges from sticking together.
4. Bake at 375 for 15 or 20 minutes, or until brown.

Good with mustard.

My notes as a bierock eater: I am not sure what the “would” in the title is about — I’m pretty sure this is exactly how he does make bierocks. Cheese is not traditional, and I don’t understand how that oversight was perpetuated by generations of good people. These freeze and reheat acceptably. Mom stockpiles them before the holidays so we have an option besides leftover turkey. And, yes, mustard.

Tomorrow, I go back to school full-time.

At Wichita State. Majoring in Medical Technology. Will be a certified Medical Laboratory Scientist by the end of 2011.

And for now, I’m still at the Eagle for twenty hours a week.

Over a year ago, when I was on medical leave, high on Percocet but still so consumed by pain that I barely left the couch, I followed the details of one round of McClatchy layoffs. From friends at other papers, I learned of at least one web journalist layoff at a McClatchy paper, and it changed things.

I’d watched coworkers say goodbye while my team grew. We were at the cool kids’ table, we were supposed to be safe. We were going to save things, we were supposed to be safe. But we weren’t.

I had a job to go back to once I’d recovered from my surgery. But the what-ifs had started. What if I got laid off next time? (That didn’t happen.) What if they cut the team members who made my projects possible? (That did happen.) What if I stopped hearing from people who wanted to hire me away (that had already happened), leaving me few options if I ever wanted to leave Wichita for another journalist-programmer job?

I was a control freak without the control I had always wanted for myself, and I wasn’t happy.

A couple of weeks later, partly thanks to the drugs I was on to pull me out of my post-surgery funk, I started having a series of strange dreams. I have no expertise in dream interpretation, but what seemed obvious to me was that my brain was telling me, begging me, “I need to do something else, I need to think about something else, I need to churn on something completely else.”

It was the same impulse that left me journalism major half a decade earlier. Exhausted from so many semesters of science classes in high school and the first semester of college, I was desperate to chase something in another part of my brain. Not something trivial. Something important and fascinating. Something completely else.

And then a few weeks later, I noticed how much better my back felt now that it was supporting less weight. Sitting at a desk all day now that I was able to spend more time on my feet felt downright oppressive.

So take all of that and my thought process is:

- Beating cancer the first time was relatively easy. Next time would be much harder. I got a free pass that I cannot waste.
- My brain needs variety. Turning a nerdy hobby into a full-time job was, as I’d feared, not for me.
- I miss biology, and there are health-care-related jobs out there that will tickle my brain and use my particular talents.
- If dramatic career change is going to happen, this is an opportunity to pick something with job security and a better job market. Whatever I do, I want to be able to do it wherever Kyle and I might go, even if the economy is tanking.
- I cannot sit at a desk all day every day.
- There are so many reasons to make a change that I can’t spend any more time listening to excuses not to.

And so I set to investigating my options. I thought about pharmacy school, but it was a big commitment and, at for now, there’s no pharmacy school in Wichita. I thought about nursing, but bedpans. I looked at courses of study and prerequisites and tuition rates and salary ranges. I talked to people and other people and other people. I took a class to see if I could stand being an undergrad again. I filled out my FAFSA as early as I possibly could. I spent hours bouncing what-ifs off my parents and boyfriend. I crunched numbers. I suffered twelve brain-melting weeks of the worst online chemistry class ever.

And tomorrow, I go back to school, and I am going to get myself a job where I wear a lab coat and juggle jars of pee, and I am deliriously happy.