Doesn't anybody ever update this blog?

School started last week, and because it's my second year on the job, I really hit the ground running. We had two major events--an art show called Girls! Girls! Girls! and a Women's Equality Day event--both of which were ridiculously successful, and we also initiated 20 first-year students into the Women's and Gender Studies living learning community. For more info, check out the brilliant new WGS webpage.

Because of all this activity, Biffle and I really haven't had time to reflect on our one year anniversary of living in Charleston--really more of an anniversary for me than for Biffle, since he's only really been living here since June. I have been here one year and 31 days. I have nothing profound to say about that, but I do have a couple of observations: last year, for most of the year, I accepted every invitation I received from everybody. If someone wanted to do something, I said yes. Now I find that I'm being more selective--I'm prioritizing. I've been here long enough to have a sense of which relationships I want to cultivate and which may stay at the acquaintance level.

I also have this observation: living with Biffle is really wonderful. We had a rough couple of weeks before the semester started, when I was irrationally irritable and moody (I got mad at Biffle for eating granola, for instance, and then burst into tears when he called me on it). Then one night at dinner, this microscopic internal shift happened, and I said, "OH! You're not leaving!" Every fall for the last seven years, he's gone away to school, so even though my brain knew that it wasn't happening this time around, my body was preparing for his departure.

Here's the kind of thing that happens now that we live together: Monday was a 14-hour day for me. At the end of that kind of day last year, I would have biked home alone, eaten cold cereal, and gone to bed. This Monday, though, I looked out into the audience of the Women's Equality Day event and saw Biffle there. And after the event was over, he drove me home and made me dinner. I was so grateful I almost cried.