This Week

Today is genetic counseling Match Day 2024, and it occurred to me in recent days that the day I matched last year was probably the death knell of my marriage.

Because that morning, it was my friend who walked me around the neighborhood like a racehorse the hour before results came out, not my then-spouse.

That morning, it was strangers on the Internet who cheered for me first. My then-spouse said a lukewarm congratulations after I opened the email, and then quickly went to work with the admonition that we "not jump immediately into making plans," which turned out to be code for, "I am making plans without you."

I sit here a year later, finished with about 65% of my graduate coursework, ready to turn in my research proposal, and divorced for the last 6 weeks or so. I've never felt better, supported and held the whole way by friends, family, classmates, colleagues, and faculty near and far. Last year I finally chose myself, and that was the right choice.

As for writing, well, I had the very good intention of doing something with the A Mother Just Knows manuscript every day in April and that absolutely has not materialized. I was astonishingly sick the first week of April, and also the bill came due for some of the schoolwork I let myself put off in March, plus I had an absolute technological meltdown last week which is terribly inconvenient when you attend school virtually.

I did correct the OCR transcriptions of my handwritten drafts I did last spring, and it was exciting to step back into the story. But I'm not entirely sure I'm ready to write the rest of it, so I may pivot into Just One Date since I'm actively acquiring source material on gently disastrous dates lol. (And I am still working on that podcast with my friend, so stay tuned there.)

What I'm Reading

​Let's be friends on Storygraph, the non-Amazon version of Goodreads that comes WITH CHARTS ABOUT BOOKS!

I just finished Hani & Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar, which was cute but the premise felt verrrrrrry slightly forced to me. I did appreciate that the fake dating wasn't immediately belied by OMG THEY'RE SO HAWT from page 2, but I couldn't quite bring myself to care that much about what was important to the main characters. I read a lot of YA so I'm fairly used to (and generally enjoy) the smaller stakes of that genre, but something just didn't quite click for me here.

I did really like Role Playing by Cathy Yardley, and I think it's a good sign for me to make the adjustments to my Pokemon Go story that I was envisioning.

Acknowledgements

I'm drafting the acknowledgements section of my book little by little every week.

Thanks to Star Wars Man and Duckling for the first dates and the practice. Wishing you the best, just not with me involved.