reunited, and it feels so... good?

in addition to recovering from jet lag this week, dabney is also mentally preparing for her 10-year college reunion. mostly this involves silently rehearsing the inevitable spiel about what she does for a living. northeastern women's colleges, as with many institutions of higher ed out there, didn't escape that pesky tendency to produce many a career- and family-minded, high energy, dare we say type-a personality*. as superette chronicles, this is a sharp contrast to ann & dabney's recent meandering path. it's not that dabney is insecure about her current life direction. in fact, the past three+ years have been the happiest of her life.

what's really the problem is that the question of "what do you do" is really a quick and easy proxy for "who are you?" and that's a much harder question to answer in two minutes while standing next to a registration table with a glass of wine in one hand and a name tag in another. oh to be able to smile and say "teacher" or "stay-at-home mom" and be off the hook. dabney has come to realize that there is just no way to say with a straight face that since leaving her job at a university research center a year ago, she re-taught herself to sew and silkscreen, and will soon enter the fabulous, and no doubt highly lucrative, world of alternative craft fairs taking root across the country. and, that this is part of a larger, largely conscious, plan for ann and dabney to cobble together a life of various work and activities that make them happy.

on a very related front, ann recently started another blog venture titled "class notes for the rest of us"- an online newsletter for those who are bored with seeing photos of classmates' wedding parties, enlarging broods and re-printed job offer letters in their alumnae magazine. let's just say that the inaugural posting featured a photo of a wellesley alum bending over with her bare ass hanging naked in the wind.

* many of these over-achievers are ann & dabney's good friends, whom we love and thank publicly here for carrying the mantle for the rest of us.