Stress Relief

I've been studying non-stop for the last week or so. I've studied at Profeta in Westwood, Young Research Library, Urth Caffe (both in Venice and DTLA), the Silverlake Library, the Marina Del Rey Loyola campus, my school library, various Starbucks, at home, in bed, on the patio, at the gym. I love the ritual of studying - the coffee, the little tasks, and realizing how much I've learned over the last year.

But of course, you can have too much of a good thing and after a long study sesh yesterday, I hit my wall and had a mini-meltdown that I cured with a few tears and black salt caramel dark chocolate and a great talk with my friend Rob. I think my major thing is that I LOVE SCHOOL. It's what I'm good at. It's what I love to do. But now I have to start making some real decisions about where my life is going to go and those have to be backed up with actual thought, logic, funds, and probably some sacrifice. Ugh. Also during finals, I get these massive urges to restructure my life and remember all the things I wanted to do by now and still want to do that I haven't quite gotten around to and then I get heart palpitations, blah blah blah. But then I take a breather and realize that I can still go to India, create an urban farm, become a yoga instructor, and write a novel in due time. Plus, revert back to vegetarianism, learn how to brew beer, go through my closet, and figure out my career/ if anyone knows an easy way to get a legal advocacy position with an international NGO, that would be greattttt. More on that later, but until then, I've been playing this on repeat. I've been listening to Oh, Daughter since my time in London and it quells my anxieties :-)

Life During Finals

Or lack thereof.

Becker, Kabeer, Deutsch, Bergmann, Hirschmann, Katz, Agrarwal, Murdock, Sen... Theorizing the Household... Plus like five billion more. I took a final on Thursday and then I have one tomorrow and three more over the next two weeks. But I do get some reprieves - like lunch with my cousin and a trip to Oxford. But agh.

Anyway, here are some random shots from the last week.

coffees and notes at Sweet:

new dress but no where to wear it:
sunny day in London
Alina and our banana split:

agh more notes
strawberry daiquiri to celebrate the end of my first final:

Discovering Dead People Around the Corner

I just need to start these finals so I can actually feel like I've accomplished something... three weeks of studying and I have no idea as to whether I would actually pass any of these things, if I have actually absorbed any of the information I've been studying, or if I even care anymore. However, I did spend two hours on Skype yesterday making my mom listen to theories of health planning, so that's productivity for you.

This morning, Alina and I hit up one of my favorite brunch places in the city, The Modern Pantry. I had a coconut and cassava waffle with maple syrup and bacon and two lattes. I was impressed because the waffle wasn't sweet and sometimes you get that awful, sickly sweet stuff and it makes you want to vom like two hours later, but this just had a nice delicate flavor. And then the highlight of my day was the fact that the chef from restaurant is releasing a cookbook in June. It's going to be my apartment warming gift to myself, lol.

Then Alina and I walked back to our building and took a detour through Spa Fields, which is behind Exmouth Market, the location of all those adorbz boutiques, cafes and bars. Spa Fields is a park/church yard about a one minute walk from my building. Anyway, families were having picnics and children were playing, even thought the weather wasn't very accommodating - it was a warm 50 degrees. And then there was this sign. And the sign said something about how the grounds that the park is on used to the site of funeral home and graveyard. And apparently, there was room for approx. 2700 bodies. But the men who ran the burial ground wanted to make more money. So they would dig people up in the middle of the night and burn their bodies and managed to cram 80,000 peeps on the grounds or rather, their ashes once they had dug them up. However, their money-making scheme was spoiled when residents of the area began to get sick off the dead body fumes floating into their homes every night. So then the grounds were empty for a while until 2004 when a project began to bring new life (pun intended) to the area. Spooky and gruesome, yeah?

This is the park house, which stands on the site of the old bone house:

Where unsuspecting children play:

So that story went well with my drizzly, lazy day. I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner but got canceled on due to a stomach bug :-(. So I've now finished the last episode of Glee, as well as some brie, ginger beer and black licorice. Loosely thinking about studying since I just walked into the kitchen and was faced by an obviously awkward couple attempting to turn their study sesh into a pseudo-date. So cute. Kind of. Barf.