The great thing about a year-long grad program is that it's only a year long. The bad thing is that, well, I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up and am suspicious that I won't be any more employable this summer with two degrees than I was last summer with one. Oh, the nails that will be bitten.

But here's what I'm trying to map out. How do people get jobs? Is it a top-down thing, you pick a city and apply to any places you can find that make sense? Is it bottom-down, pick a job title and throw your CV against the whole wall of the country and see what sticks?

If you do move, how long does it take to make real friends - not just convenience friends or polite work friends? Will they ever be as good as your friends back home? Where do you find them? I need an equation here.

When do you decide that you can forgive yourself for uprooting your boyfriend and taking him with you? When do you decide that it's not something that is going to get taken with you at all?

And if you decide to stay in the place you already know, at what point do you stop feeling as though you're somehow limiting yourself?

These questions are not rhetorical. Send algorithms for contentment my way, please. I have a graphing calculator and everything.

It looks like Thursday nights this quarter are going to be Family Dinner/The Office nights. I piggyback Sjanneke's cool (wholesome) teacher-friends and try to rein in my religious-themed swears, which, tragically, are my favorite family of swears.

I brought a bottle of wine, but forgot my wine key. The hostess, Christina, didn't have one, as single ladies in interim living situations often have conspicuous gaps in their housewares inventory. Back at my old apartment, I drank wine out of thrift store mugs until Ana bought me a set of wine glasses for my birthday one year. Determined to have a glass of cheap red wine to conclude my first week back at school, Katie and I knocked on a neighbor's door right as he was heading out into the cold, his face all Kenny-ed shut with hoods and scarves and armed with a case of Rolling Rock. He invited us in and returned from the kitchen, extending a silver wine key toward us. It was all I could do not to break out into "I've got a golden tiiiick-et!".

Then something weird happened. Despite having opened scores of wine bottles both professionally and in my personal life, I temporarily forgot how to. Ignoring the little leveraging widget, I was trying with all my shrimpy bicep power to uncork the thing, going red in the face and feeling defeated. Everyone else, taking my word that the bottle was unopenable without really paying attention to my, uh, technique, gathered to help. At one point, I was standing on a chair, trying to get the cork to budge, while no less than three people kneeled on the floor, gripping the stubborn bottle on the table.

Finally, Katie raised an eyebrow and cracked the case of the unopenable two buck chuck. "Aren't you supposed to use this thing?"

So that's where all this fancy book-learnin' has landed me.

I talked Sjanneke into breakfast at Casa with me this morning, and smelling the smells that were steaming off my breakfast plate was nothing short of a religious experience. I would also like to point out that Sjanneke is genuinely this excited about things 90% of the time. It is pretty wonderful. Yesterday, she held up a couple oversized bobby pins laying on my desk like they were moon rocks, and asked with awestruck reverence, "Where did you get these?"

Athens is really a sight in the fall, but I imagined that once the gray of winter hit, my visits from out-of-town friends would taper off. But as I hamster-wheeled at the gym today, in the glass-paneled atrium overlooking Appalachia, the snow was sticking to the hills and outlining the tree branches and I couldn't wait to hop off my elliptical machine and trudge home through Narnia.

Today I tried to find a secret building that no one has heard of, whichs seems to appear and disappear with the changing of the light and seasons, and in my goggling around like a tourist taking in skyscrapers, I walked very forcefully into a parking meter. Really pounded the metal coin-filled head of the thing into the meat of my chest. Somehow this managed to simultaneously knock the wind out of me, and cause me to involuntarily shout "Jesus Christ!". I imagine that if this had happened in Columbus, an onlooking panhandler would say something like "Even Jesus Christ can't help you!" and chuckle to himself. And I would throw my hands up in surrender and laugh and go on my way. But in Athens, a gaggle of girls in very deliberate sweatpants costumes just stare at me like they've become suddenly downwind of a bad smell.

I found the imaginary building. This quarter is not necessarily going to be much easier than last quarter, but I am taking fewer credit hours, which means less butt-in-seat time.

And we finally grit our teeth and fired up the furnace of this old ship. On the cold days last fall, B and I were depending on our fireplace and space heaters to perform miracles. I can be talked into paying an arm and a leg to heat this place if it means not stepping out of my bed in the morning onto a sheet of basically smoking dry ice.

I'm back in Athens. Mostly, it feels like I never left.

The best way to deal with this is to wash your sheets. One of my favorite things in the world is stepping from a hot shower, preferably my toweled-off skin is still pink and steaming at this point, and slipping into freshly laundered sheets. I'd like to think I'm not very prissy but I cannot do dirty sheets or towels. I would rather go weeks wearing the same clothes without showering than be made to use a musty towel. When a houseguest at my twentysomething friends' houses, I am often caught giving a proffered bath towel a surreptitious sniff-test. Sorry, guys. A dank towel isn't worth the risk. To borrow a phrase, it gags my maggots.

Household neuroses aside, I suppose it is nice to have my very own space and plenty of it. To not feel, however unfounded, like a big ol' mooch. To feel productive. To set my alarm for something, not just out of habit.

Still, with the leaves shed from all trees, I can see headlights on US 33 from my bedroom window. And I want to be on it, heading west.

"Dr. Pizza, PhD! Take two pizzas and call me in the morning!"

I'm not terribly bent out of shape about it, but I failed at spending time with a lot of Columbus people over break. I failed at reading all the books I'd been meaning to get to. I failed at exercising. I failed at eating well. I did not fail at drinking beer. I did not fail at ordering fried cheese, on more than one occasion. I did not fail at sleeping until 2 pm. You know that saying, "If you need something done, ask a busy person"? I totally embody the inverse of that statement - if you don't want to get anything done, ask someone who has nothing but free time. Unless I have obligations and appointments and deadlines, I'm basically a turd wearing clothes.

Maybe I'm not all regretful and self-flagellating about it because I have a warped concept of how much longer I'm in Athens. Or maybe it's because I know I'll be in the 614 area code a lot over these next few months.

New Year's Day is Friendsmas in my circle.

Ana makes a neverending spread for brunch and we all power through our hangovers, drink heroic amounts of coffee, and pack so many people into her kitchen that it'd be uncomfortable if it weren't so damn cozy.

My return to Athens draws nigh. The thought of waking up in my meat locker of a bedroom again is daunting, but with a workhorse space heater at my bedside and a plan for earlier bedtimes, I should be able to make that courageous leap out from under the covers every morning.

It's been excellent to see my boyfriend every day, to be unapologetically idle for a few weeks. People keep insisting that I have somehow "earned" the right to go two days without wearing pants-with-hardware just because I survived a quarter of classes, and I guess I don't care to disabuse them of the notion. Lenny Briscoe, we had some catching up to do. And the Idiot Box ain't gonna watch itself. That said, I've felt increasingly restless and parasitic, mooching off the guys' hospitality and taking scalding hot showers every day. I like to earn my showers and my sleep, and January has found my body in a state of atrophy and lethargy.

2009, I expect that you will give me a Master's degree, send me to Africa, and maybe even find me completing a triathlon. I'm timid to put these goals, among all the unspoken, mostly impossible goals that I have for myself, out there for the public to see. Maybe that will hold me to them. Pie-in-the-sky is the name of the game, right?