I have only taken that ramp once.

In the backseat, two other fifteen-year-old girls were shrieking at the top of their lungs.

In the front passenger seat, the drivers ed. instructor was telling them to be quiet, I was doing fine and they were going to psych me out.

I felt pretty awesome in that moment.

But in the last eleven years, I have not found myself in a situation where I needed to take that ramp again. And every day, when I’m eastbound merging north, I look up at that ramp and hear the “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” of those girls in the backseat of that green Taurus (we thought the green was the prettiest, so we called dibs).

“PLEASE KATIE DON’T DRIVE OFF OF THIS RAMP I DON’T WANT TO DIE.”

“YEAH WHAT SHE SAID.”

Very gently, I tapped his nose with my toe and said, “boop.”

I walked away and he sat there wondering what had just happened.

I’m 26 and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life. I’ve found lots of things I could do with my life, but no singular purpose. I’ve found things I’m particularly good at, but nothing gratifying enough that I don’t wonder how I might find myself some greener grass. Given all that, I think I’m starting to make good choices, but I’m still not completely at east.

I wish someone had told me, “sometimes you just have to get a job” before I started college. Being told by my teachers that I could be whatever I wanted to be wasn’t helpful. I can rant at great length about the unhelpful things I was told as a child and the helpful things I wish I could have heard a decade earlier.

Do I need my hand held through everything? No. And I’m surely being far too arrogant when I assume I’d have found a better path on my own if not for having been poisoned by unrealistic ways of approaching the future.

I hate that I wasn’t always as good at recognizing and tuning out bad advice. There’s too much of it in this world.

Now, courtesy of my father:

How I would make Bierocks

All ingredients and amounts are subject to change.

• 1 pound hamburger (or ground pork)
• 1 medium white onion
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• cooking oil
• 1 small head cabbage, chopped (or a bag of chopped cabbage slaw) salt
• black pepper
• bag of shredded cheese (optional)
• bread dough (your own dough or the frozen bread rolls)

Filling:

1. Chop the onion and garlic and fry in minimal cooking oil.
2. Add the ground beef and brown.
3. Salt and pepper to taste – usually very heavy on the pepper.
4. Add the cabbage and cook until cabbage is a little tender.
5. Drain in a colander, removing as much liquid as possible. Let set in colander for a while to allow liquid to drain.
6. Add cheese and mix well.
7. Check taste again for enough black pepper.
8. Allow to cool somewhat (or even refrigerate).

Assembly:

1. Roll dough out into pieces ~5″ diameter.
2. Spoon the filling onto the center – do not get filling on the edges.
3. Lift the edges up and pinch them together. The grease from the filling will prevent the edges from sticking together.
4. Bake at 375 for 15 or 20 minutes, or until brown.

Good with mustard.

My notes as a bierock eater: I am not sure what the “would” in the title is about — I’m pretty sure this is exactly how he does make bierocks. Cheese is not traditional, and I don’t understand how that oversight was perpetuated by generations of good people. These freeze and reheat acceptably. Mom stockpiles them before the holidays so we have an option besides leftover turkey. And, yes, mustard.

At Wichita State. Majoring in Medical Technology. Will be a certified Medical Laboratory Scientist by the end of 2011.

And for now, I’m still at the Eagle for twenty hours a week.

Over a year ago, when I was on medical leave, high on Percocet but still so consumed by pain that I barely left the couch, I followed the details of one round of McClatchy layoffs. From friends at other papers, I learned of at least one web journalist layoff at a McClatchy paper, and it changed things.

I’d watched coworkers say goodbye while my team grew. We were at the cool kids’ table, we were supposed to be safe. We were going to save things, we were supposed to be safe. But we weren’t.

I had a job to go back to once I’d recovered from my surgery. But the what-ifs had started. What if I got laid off next time? (That didn’t happen.) What if they cut the team members who made my projects possible? (That did happen.) What if I stopped hearing from people who wanted to hire me away (that had already happened), leaving me few options if I ever wanted to leave Wichita for another journalist-programmer job?

I was a control freak without the control I had always wanted for myself, and I wasn’t happy.

A couple of weeks later, partly thanks to the drugs I was on to pull me out of my post-surgery funk, I started having a series of strange dreams. I have no expertise in dream interpretation, but what seemed obvious to me was that my brain was telling me, begging me, “I need to do something else, I need to think about something else, I need to churn on something completely else.”

It was the same impulse that left me journalism major half a decade earlier. Exhausted from so many semesters of science classes in high school and the first semester of college, I was desperate to chase something in another part of my brain. Not something trivial. Something important and fascinating. Something completely else.

And then a few weeks later, I noticed how much better my back felt now that it was supporting less weight. Sitting at a desk all day now that I was able to spend more time on my feet felt downright oppressive.

So take all of that and my thought process is:

• Beating cancer the first time was relatively easy. Next time would be much harder. I got a free pass that I cannot waste.
• My brain needs variety. Turning a nerdy hobby into a full-time job was, as I’d feared, not for me.
• I miss biology, and there are health-care-related jobs out there that will tickle my brain and use my particular talents.
• If dramatic career change is going to happen, this is an opportunity to pick something with job security and a better job market. Whatever I do, I want to be able to do it wherever Kyle and I might go, even if the economy is tanking.
• I cannot sit at a desk all day every day.
• There are so many reasons to make a change that I can’t spend any more time listening to excuses not to.

And so I set to investigating my options. I thought about pharmacy school, but it was a big commitment and, at for now, there’s no pharmacy school in Wichita. I thought about nursing, but bedpans. I looked at courses of study and prerequisites and tuition rates and salary ranges. I talked to people and other people and other people. I took a class to see if I could stand being an undergrad again. I filled out my FAFSA as early as I possibly could. I spent hours bouncing what-ifs off my parents and boyfriend. I crunched numbers. I suffered twelve brain-melting weeks of the worst online chemistry class ever.

And tomorrow, I go back to school, and I am going to get myself a job where I wear a lab coat and juggle jars of pee, and I am deliriously happy.

And so I don’t write. Because sitting at a desk and typing is work and I want to come home and do something that isn’t work.

I will find my muse again. But for now, patience.

And randomness.

I’ve been knitting a lot. Knit Picks will make a small fortune off of me and Ravelry will have to buy more bandwidth.

I’ve watched entirely too much HGTV. I moved in with my boyfriend in November and somehow the move from apartment to house flipped the desire-to-watch-HGTV switch on. I hadn’t previously thought that was possible. I’m hoping I outgrow it, but then I’d have to find something else to do with my eyes and ears while my fingers are busy knitting.

I make weekly trips to the grocery store, which is about eight times more often than when I lived alone.

I filled out a FAFSA and that’s all I’m saying about that.

When I was in high school and had stopped growing taller and was stuck at a pathetic 5′2″, I heard a woman say she had a growth spurt in her early twenties. So I hoped and waited, and I’m taller now than in college. I have taken this as irrefutable proof of the power of positive thinking, so I am convinced that I will win the lottery any day now, probably tonight.

I hadn’t been to the dentist since I was 19 or 20, not because I’m afraid of the pain a dentist so loves to inflict, but because I was concerned that all dentists were as worthless as the ones I saw as a child. But I was also convinced that after years of neglect, my teeth were surely rotting out of my head, so I went to the dentist. No cavities. Clearly negative thinking has no impact on outcomes.

Now I just have to survive getting my wisdom teeth out. May 7.

And, as a reminder, I can often be found blathering in short form on Twitter. I am told I am entertaining in 140-character servings.

She was the best counselor, though.

My Franken-nipples are now 98% healed. They are marginally less repulsive than when the bandages came off. I still have mixed feelings about the nipple reconstruction procedure.

One, because now they always think it’s cold in here. There is no warming them up.

Two, because reconstructed nipples are to actual nipples as Sesame Street’s Ernie is to an actual man. You see them and you instantly know what they’re supposed to be, but there’s no mistaking them for the real thing. They cartoonish and skewed, a caricature of the real thing. They’re silly.

But over Thanksgiving, I realized where all this started. I wanted a reduction. I wanted no more back pain.

And, whoa, I have that.

I can stand around for hours and not have screaming pain. I can walk to my car at the end of the day and not feel achy. I can run and jump and play like all the other kids.

Also I have this awesome new party trick. Remind me to show you sometime when I’m wearing something low-cut.

The first thing the nurse asked me after I checked in at the surgery center was, “and what are you here for today?” This is, of course, to keep from accidentally confusing me with the patient next to me, who was there to have his adenoids removed and his septum realigned. When I answered the nurse, I heard the father of the patient next to me — the thin curtain between beds affords fantastic privacy — whisper in the most horrified tone, “nipples…???” Yeah, I’d rather have my adenoids out, too.

The surgeon told me that I’d feel no pain at all around my new Franken-nipples. I haven’t felt anything in that vicinity since the mastectomy. And yes, while I continue to feel no pain there, if I accidentally press or tug on the bandages, I faint. So there must be one or two nerves left.

But there is pain elsewhere. Plenty of it.

You see, plastic surgeons can’t make something out of nothing. They scavenge from other body parts to fabricate new parts. So when they need some slightly darker skin to make a vaguely realistic areola, they steal the uniquely-pigmented skin adjacent to the naughty bits.

Whoever invented this procedure deserves to have it done to him. Seriously. Motherfucker. Ow.

And the best part about having a fresh, three-inch incision on the inside of each thigh? There is no position, no clothing configuration, no treatment can make it hurt less.

Although in a moment of pure genius, I bought some boxer briefs so that I don’t have to suffer the panty-leg-on-stitches rubbing. I’m not entirely sure that it made things feel less painful, but I’ve found that thinking I’m doing something to help is a fantastic placebo.

And I have also discovered the awesomeness that is man underwear. I thought girl underwear was, for the most part, pretty comfy. And now I know that it’s just another ridiculous way that women torture themselves. Boxer briefs are awesome. Everyone should have some.