So happy

I know, I know, I need to blog more regularly!

I am not settled into a routine where I am at my computer for very long. No worries, all my anxious readers, that will change soon enough. ;)

But for now, I will try to fill in some holes.

I love this city. Place really does matter, despite my scoffing at it when I was tempted to blame LA for my limited social network and total lack of a dating life. Well, DC is totally different from LA, and I find it so stimulating to be here.

I went for my first run yesterday since coming here (I know, it has been a long time!) and I ran a loop around the capitol. I made it as far as the Smithsonian castle. How cool is it to be able to measure your running progress by how far along the mall you get? I want to get to the point where I am running regularly all the way to the Lincoln Memorial and back.

Everyone I meet is stimulating and interesting. My yoga class is full of hill staffers and the teacher works for the department of labor. What a difference from the people who attended my yoga classes in Santa Monica!

And I have been on 5 dates with 4 men in the last week (all online dates)! The second date with CH was a bomb, so he is off my list, and my very first date was with a suburban Virginia doctor and my guess is that one won't get very far with me. But yesterday I met two men that I would love to get to know a lot better. One in particular, but really both of them. One is a PhD mathematician and the other is a lawyer who does policy analysis and is thinking about getting a PhD.

When I was in LA, I dabbled in online dating, but always hated it. I got very few emails from guys and felt like I had to tone down my intelligence and that I wasn't quite skinny enough to attract anyone under 50. I was starting to think that by getting a PhD I had made myself unmarriagable. No longer.

I don't know that anything will come of the men I have met so far, but I do know that I will meet someone (lots of someones?) and that I am attractive here. Oh I am sure I will continue to write anguished posts about being lonely, but underneath the loneliness now is a rock of happiness....

The job front is going okay too. I have smoothed over a lot of the weirdness that I was feeling at my school by talking with the department chair. He made me feel MUCH better about my prospects for a tenure-track position here and in general. I have two interviews lined up for ASSA, and I am praying that I net a few more this week and next, though I don't really know what to expect with the timing of everything.

I'll be lonely and frustrated and blocked and confused, but I'll get through it! I'll get a job somewhere, somehow. I'll meet someone I'll fall in love with who will love me back. Maybe I'll even get knocked up....