A tough year, and strawberries.

It's been almost a whole year since I last posted something. This past year was a busy time. Working to finish my dissertation and getting ready to graduate. Applying for jobs. Not finding a job. Applying for more jobs. Figuring out what I can do if I don't find a job. Still not finding a job. Deciding to postpone my graduation for another year.

So here I am, still a graduate student, (or a doctoral candidate, if I want to sound fancy), and now the whole process is about to start all over again. Hopefully, however, I'm in a much better position for all of it this time around.

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I am currently visiting my parents. On their back porch they have a little strawberry plant. I picked a couple of the little ripe berries, washed them, and tasted them. They were still warm from the INTENSE sunshine, which was a little odd. They were the tastiest little things I have ever eaten! Fresh strawberries, my god.

It's funny to think that I never used to like strawberries when I was little. From fairly early on, I liked strawberry-flavored things, but not the berries themselves. When I got older, I would eat strawberries if they were put before me, but I never really saw the appeal. But in the past several years, I have started coming across the good stuff. Tasty, juicy strawberries. Not necessarily fresh, but not too old or preserved.

When he was still in grad school with me, my friend Mike and I would often eat at the cafe in Wegmans Supermarket. One day, he realized that besides the delicious offerings of their cafe, which includes Chinese food, vegetarian, sandwiches, pasta, soups, pizza, chicken wings, and varying dinner dishes, we actually had available to us the full wonders of the rest of the market! He took advantage of this more than I did. He would almost always, in addition to a couple of items from the cafe, get several packages of berries of different sorts. He ate more berries more quickly than I had ever seen before.

Even if we were just grocery shopping, he would often buy, for instance, two large cartons of strawberries, and finish off one before I dropped him off at his apartment afterward.

Mike would be very proud of me. I recently brought a large carton of strawberries to school with me to munch on, (as opposed to "to throw at people", I guess). Except for one or two berries that I shared with friends, I ate every last one of them, all within about two hours. I know this isn't too impressive by his standards, but everyone has to start somewhere.