I spent several years of my childhood in Green River, Wyoming, in the cold desert at least three hours any way from anything pretty. The temperatures dropped to negative 40 degrees in the winter-time. Snow fell infrequently but stayed on the ground, and the blustery wind created blizzards and ice frozen in mid-air. My sister and I looked like the kid from A Christmas Story every time we left the house, bundled up tightly. The wood stove in our basement was a Godsend. We had three months of summer, skipped fall and spring, and endured nine months of winter.

I’ve been in the Houston area for about ten years now. So help me, I love the crazy hot summers and don’t mind that “winter” is very short. I am incredibly cold-natured, so this is a good spot for me.

That is, until I moved into my current house. Our 1920s boarding house turned duplex is perhaps the most poorly insulated dwelling on the planet. The double-paned windows might as well be non-existent because the glass acts as some sort of odd conductor of cold. We live on the first floor, where the pier-and-beam foundation lets in drafts I’ve not felt anywhere else.

To top it off, we have no central heat. We have one window unit in the living room that allegedly has a heating function. Otherwise, it’s space heaters, which are not meant to heat entire rooms. Don’t worry, we have two fireplaces—that are both boarded up and non-functional.

Last night when we got home, our bedroom was 41 degrees. Inside the house. It was 35 degrees outside. This is the second winter in a row that it’s snowed in Houston, a city that snows almost never. I’m pretty sure global warming has conspired against us. It doesn’t really matter, though, because for about three months it will be cold in here, regardless of the temperature outside.

So here’s how we survive:

·       One hour prior to going to bed, we turn the electric blanket to high, the ceiling fan on low (circulating backwards), and the space heater to high.
·       Upon sleep, the electric blanket goes to 7, fleece pajamas and possibly socks are employed, and arms remain under the covers.
·       The morning is the worst, because the rest of the house is what my husband calls a barren tundra. Because I work at home until at least noon, I do my work under the electric blanket. He, on the other hand, has to get up. First, he turns on the one window unit with heat. Then he closes the bathroom door and turns on the space heater in there. Then he goes to the couch, turns on another electric blanket and space heater, and wears a snuggie to eat breakfast. Yes, a snuggie. If you’re judging us for owning and routinely using a snuggie, we’re too cold to care.
·       At night when I work late at my desk in the dining room, I have one heater pointed directly at my feet and another at my back. I also drink hot chocolate and periodically do short bursts of exercises to keep warm.

You would think Wyoming winters would have prepared me for this, but not so. We are experiencing very cold temperatures now, even in February in Houston. My latest solution for fighting the cold? Wearing fingerless gloves while typing. True story.

When Eric and I got married and moved in together, we had long conversations about how to share the household duties. Who would clean what, who would handle the finances, who would cook when. We settled into a nice little rhythm based on a few simple principles: do as much together as possible and divide everything else according to what we are good at or didn’t mind doing.

The pattern we constructed has worked well for over a year with very few hitches. But last week we determined that one particular area— me doing all the laundry and Eric doing all the dishes — was no longer working well. I won’t bore you with the details of why, so suffice it to say we decided to switch.

Sounds trivial, right? Sounds like it couldn’t possibly be a big deal, right? Here’s how week one of this domestic experiment went down.

Our lack of a dishwasher and the weirdest shaped sink of all time make washing the dishes particularly annoying. I wanted to prove that I could do them every day, so I found myself cursing the dishes and the deep-but-narrow sink and the tiny counter at midnight just about every night. We love to cook together, but I made it less enjoyable by suggesting we cut out side items or anything that required multiple pots. And I’m a little embarrassed about how many times I drank out of the same glass.

Whilst a bachelor, my dear husband defined “sorting” laundry by darks, not-so-darks and whites (or one big load of all of the above). Towels and sheets were washed maybe once a month. Maybe. My laundry is much more complicated. I conducted a mini workshop with him on sorting, what washer settings to use for which load, what to hang up and what to dry all the way, etc. When it came time to fold and put away, he (rightly) looked at me like I was crazy.

Eric: So you fold your T-shirts like this?
Me: Um, not exactly, let me show you.
Eric: OK so this tank top goes…
Me: Middle drawer, left side.
Eric: So all the tank tops go in the middle drawer, left side?
Me: Nope… there are tank tops I sleep in, tank tops I wear with jeans, grungy tanks. They each go in a different drawer.
Eric: So these pants go with pajamas?
Me: Nope, with the lounge wear.
Eric: Here?
Me: No, that drawer is knit lounge wear; these pants are sweats.
Eric: How are those possibly different?

Household chores are one of the most banal, mundane parts of life. And that’s precisely why they are so important. They say much about what we value individually and collectively, and about how we choose to support each other in the most menial of tasks. I frequently fight two different temptations: to split it up 50/50 so it’s perfectly equal (which is impossible and creates competition) or to do it all myself (which doesn’t make any sense). We believe marriage is about oneness, and sharing these household tasks is a reflection of that, in the most ordinary way.

I have never, ever slept well. Not in my whole life.

You may hear legends of angelic babies who sleep through the night. I was not one of them.

At six months old, I decided to stop taking naps altogether, much to the chagrin of my poor mother. She devised segments of “quiet time” wherein I at least had to play quietly in my room, so she could have some time and I could at least learn to chill out.

As a kid, I had frequent insomnia. I remember being seven and eight and awake for two hours after bedtime. The walls of my basement bedroom were decorated with dollhouse wallpaper, which I used as backdrops for made-up stories. The night-light cast shadows that were perfect for shadow puppet performances. And my stuffed animals were frequent characters in complicated plots.

As a teenager, I became obsessed with the problems of the world and tossed and turned while I thought of ways to solve them. Sometimes I came up with great solutions, but more often than not I just couldn’t sleep.

And now, as I’m soon to enter the last year of my twenties, I still can’t sleep. Tonight, ironically, REM cycles evade me because I’m preoccupied with writing this piece. However, my insomnia is seldom productive in the get-relevant-work-accomplished sort of way. It’s more of a stare-at-the-ceiling thing. It can be quite maddening.

My mom assures me this problem will not go away. She and my grandma are both uncontrollable night owls, so possibly it’s hereditary. Grandma is famous for staying up until 3 a.m. Christmas Eve to put finishing touches on gift wrapped packages. At eighty, she still doesn’t sleep.

So that’s what I have to look forward to. A lifetime of insomnia. Maybe it’s a sort of super power. Or maybe it’s just annoying. Maybe it’s part of what makes me a decent writer, or a deep thinker, or an introvert. Like Ione Sky’s character in Dream for an Insomniac, I’m trying to find inspiration in the sleepless hours I frequently encounter after dark.

I could go on, but then I really would never sleep.

Eric and I just returned from a three-week European adventure. We saved and planned for over a year to travel five countries. In every city, we painted scenarios of us living in urban flats and taking a daily meal at a neighborhood café. The whole experience was so magical that we found it hard to recognize why the locals often seemed bored with their surroundings.

A few examples:

I took pictures of everything in Barcelona’s Parc Guell, the municipal masterpiece of architect Antoni Gaudi. To me it felt like a wonderland, somewhat Dr. Seuss meets Central Park. Mosaic dragons and sprawling staircases carved into the hills met green space and hiking trails. Barcelonans? Had their nose in a book, perhaps clueless to their surroundings.

In Paris, we ate twice at a small café devoid of tourists (except, of course, for us). Our outdoor table had a view of the Eiffel Tower and we ate at our leisure. The waiter sat with a table of older gentleman who smoked and gossiped until he was needed. We saw at least three Smart Cars come and go, and every other person had a baguette in their grocery bag. Parisians just proceeded through their evening as though this was nothing special, with their backs to the Eiffel Tower.

So now that we are back to our normal life, I am trying to take account of all the magical parts of my ordinary days. What would a foreign visitor find intriguing and wonderful about my surroundings and routine? The downtown skyline wholly visible on our evening walk with the dog? The abundance of independent coffee shops I frequent? The eclectic diversity of my neighborhood?

My house might not look like something from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and the view of Houston’s skyscrapers might not rival the Eiffel Tower, but I love it anyway. I love the color and the surprises and the sense of home I feel. My life here has it’s own brand of mystery and magic that I will try not to forget so often.

As a kid, Saturdays were my favorite day of the week. It meant cartoons and pancakes with my dad in the mornings. But perhaps more remarkably, it was “Junk Food Day.”

My family ate beyond healthy the rest of the week. A maximum of 7 grams of sugar in our cereal. Two chips with our sandwich (natural peanut butter, of course). Steamed veggies with no spices and all the low-fat meats we could eat. It might sound boring but it was normal to us, and we became quite attached to our natural foods.

On junk food day all rules were off. We could eat anything we wanted. My sister and I planned for Saturdays, saving up to eat sweets and chips and all kinds of nonsensical foods. We almost had a heart attack when, shortly before a summer vacation to Houston, my grandfather joked that there were no Saturdays in Texas.

Junk Food Day was fairly easy to enforce with a home-schooled family in Middle-of-Nowhere, Wyoming. My parents devised clever schemes to explain why other children ate desserts at neighboring tables at restaurants. “Their junk food day must be on Thursdays,” my parents would tell us. And there were always exceptions—holidays, birthday parties, and of course, Saturdays.

I really didn’t mind this pattern. I learned to love vegetables and fruit and whole grains and tiny health food stores at a young age. I always had a day of splurging to look forward to. And even on Saturdays, I didn’t go overboard because I realized the effects of junk food. When you eat food that’s bad for you, you feel bad.

Per my doctor’s recommendation, I have recently adopted a high protein and gluten-free diet. As a kid I counted grams of sugar to make sure food was acceptable weekday fare, no I count grams of protein. I owe my parents thanks for giving me healthy guidelines as a kid (even though I haven’t always stuck to them as an adult) that help me to make these current dietary changes.

So what does my grown-up Junk Food Day look like? Three weeks in Europe this summer — all the crepes and waffles and chocolate I want. Until then, I’m counting protein grams and eating rice bread. It’s really not so bad.

I’m about a year away from finishing my doctorate. I have a bachelor’s degree (with five minors… I wanted to be “well-rounded”), a master’s degree, a graduate certificate, and now my title is A.B.D. (all but dissertation). All this before the age of 30. Impressed?

I have been writing my dissertation for what seems like forever. Last year, I tackled the research while planning a wedding and working as a graduate assistant, which meant I made little progress. So this year I’m writing and researching full-time (or dissertating, as we say in the biz). Here’s my work pattern:

Monday—Home/the coffee shop next door (I go back and forth)

Tuesday—Lunch at Eric’s school then a coffee shop and/or the medical library

Wednesday—Home then, you guessed it, a coffee shop

Thursday—Campus library

Friday—Home then a restaurant

I don’t even like coffee. But I go crazy trying to work at home for too long, and I have to be around people. So I have visited just about every wifi hotspot in Houston in search of the ultimate workspace. I should write a Zagat for dissertators.

Most of my days are frustrating. Some days I have nothing to show for my time. Some days I stare at the computer screen, hoping the cursor will move by itself, and it doesn’t. Some days I get announcements from colleagues who started the program when I did (or later) who have finished their work and now I have to call them “Dr.” Some days people ask me if I do anything, because I just sit in coffee shops all day. I sat on my front porch editing a draft one day and my neighbor, a retired English teacher, asked, “Do you even work at all? What do you do?” And some days reorganize everything in an attempt to stretch my chapters closer to that 200- to 300-page mark.

People keep telling me it’s wonderful, and they couldn’t do what I do, and they are so proud, etc. etc. But the reality is that it all feels so painfully ordinary, and not at all glamorous. There is some sort of fight every day, either within myself, or with the research or with someone I have to please. I feel worthless at times without a job. I easily get bogged down in the minutiae of it all.

Affirmation from friends and family are necessary, but it means more when someone I’m writing about goes out of their way to thank me. My dissertation recounts the history of professional women of color, and part of that journey has included interviewing women about their experiences. I interviewed a Jamaican immigrant whose father gave her a doctor bag as a child and told her, “Reach for the stars, because even if you don’t grab one, you’ll still be high in the heavens.” She has incredible stories of perseverance, a positive awareness of all her obstacles and a strong identity. She chose to work for the urban under-served and has pursued a culture of diversity in her professional and personal life. I found her tale so engaging, and was surprised when she concluded our talk by thanking me profusely for my work and for telling this story.

I fell in love with historical study because I felt strongly about telling stories that no one else had told. This experience showed me that

I’m a part of the story because I’m telling it. I will never have to endure racism and half the other hardships these women have faced. But I can bring the story to light, and, and least on some level, that’s commendable.

I guess it doesn’t matter how banal the daily work feels, it all adds up to something pretty extraordinary. In the mean time I’m trying to be all right with days full of coffee shops and libraries and blank computer screens. The daily details are part of the story, after all.