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I am almost done with the killer summer semester! I don't really remember college being this hard, but then, I was pretty much in a haze those days. Grown up college is more concerned with the artical callwork, as opposed to what groups you join and what parties you go to in kid college. I do have to admit that this semester certainly opened my eyes as to how many different specializations there are in the field of anthro. And many subsets of my own field of interest, food anthropology. Maybe experimental arxhaeology.......
I've been doing mucho reading about food and food related things lately due to my return to college. What exactly does food and college have to do with one another? Because my degree is in anthropology, and my specialization is food culture. How we relate to food at a species is totally fascinating to me, as well as body size in other cultures. There's a new movement afoot called Fat Acceptance, which pretty much means give up the crap dieting and work on being healthy instead. We have been doing this for the last couple of years, after my partner and I had lost tons of weight during our courting stage, and gained it back after we married. I was in a band at that point in my life, and living the rock star lifestyle, with everything that entails. Little food, combined with large amounts of caffeine, little sleep, and other things produced a 125 pound loss over a 2 year period. As soon as I quit that life, I started to gain again. Funny how cooking and eating will do that to a person. It didn't help that my partner was a budding foodie, after a fairly limited food life, and as a former chef who LOVES to cook, I went hog wild. We also had a string of housemates in the early days to help make ends meet, who all loved my cooking. Even our tweeker housemate gained weight! I began to think about halting the gain when I had to go buy larger jeans once again. As I began to take stock of my life the last few years, I realized that I had been totally happy. Was life easy? Uh, no. Some of the worst times in my life have been in the last 6 years. (But so have some of the best!) I realized that I had been cooking many foods from my childhood, as well as new things. Almost all of these were new to my partner, he really didn't have a 'food culture' like I did. My maternal grandparents were first generation European-Americans. Papa was Italian, with the family coming from Salerno, Italy. Grandma was German, and was a wonderful gourmet cook. Some of my earliest memories are tied to smell and taste, just a whiff of a certain type of spaghetti gravy or barley-beef soup will trigger a memory of my grandmother standing at the stove. I noticed more and more the anti-fat ads, the horrific reports from the medical community, the out and out bigotry caused by someone else's phobias and fears. So it has lead me to a search of not only "Why?", but "How?" as well. Why and how did we come from the Baroque Period to The Stick Period? I'm thinking this is going to be my doctoral thesis.
So, the whole housefrau thing just wasn't working for me, and several attempts at some sort of business didn't do it either. Yea, I made a bit of scratch here and there, but was becoming increasingly depressed and unhappy, so after lots of long hours thinking "What do I want to do with myself?", I have decided to return to school and finish out that particular dream/fantasy. Returning to school took a bit of retraining, as a few things have changed since I was there 15 years ago. Looks like I can take most, if not all of my classes online, which helps with saving gas. So I'm currently working my way through Intro to Archaeology, which means at the end of the course I should be able to at least spell it! More on return to school later, it's time to do homework!
Yea, yea, I know, it's been forever! I totally suck at keeping up with these things! With that in mind, on to news.... I have decided to return to college and finish my degrees in nutritional anthropology. This willb e taking up the majority of my time, but I will try to post when I can.
