the beginning

This is my first blog post ever, joining the blogging masses just 7 or 8 years late. I suppose I like to take things slow. What was it that precipitated this particular move? Why now?

I find myself in a peculiar situation: I am currently a graduate student in Anthropology. I’m planning to take my qualifying exams late this spring. And I am getting married in June.

In the next nine months I will prepare for, plan, and undergo two incredibly stressful, productive, and formative events; one in my career, the other in my personal/family life. It seemed a good idea, you know, to pack all the big events into a two month span, you know, for kicks.

I saw these two events looming in the future as parallel. They both require incredible preparation, emotional, intellectual, logistical. They both mark then end of one phase and the beginning of another. They are both rituals that have deep and storied pasts within the society of which they are a part. That said, I was not considering them together.

Until this week, when they intersected suddenly, while reading for a field statement, when I had a revelation (please excuse the hyperbole), about the wedding.

This blog is the product of that union. In it, I will attempt to weave together these two elements of my life. I will write about theory, and about the quotidian, about details of the wedding, and anthropological concepts. It will be a space to consider how my personal life, the relationship I have with a wonderful man and the life we plan to build together, can incorporate my academic life, the theories and questions that drive an academic pursuit. And it will probably be a space, as most blogs are, to vent, to complain, and to comment on the vagaries and quirks of this modern world.