L'homme de bière

I'm close to finishing the second step in my life plan. Yes, I'm so Type Anal that I have a four step life plan. Step 1. College. Step 2. Peace Corps. Step 3. Grad school. Step 4. Moderately successful career teaching at a university and researching monkey brains and leech neurons. (And of course I have extensive to do lists for each step. To Do: Publish paradigm-shifting article in Science. Remember to compliment Markus's new beer.) However, things haven't gone completely according to my plan. I didn't expect that Peace Corps would take four years—one year to apply, two years to actually do it, and one year to quit speaking Franglais and making weird Burkinabé gestures and sounds. And I definitely didn't expect that I'd pick up a pesky husband along the way who'd follow me across the world like a puppy with a passport.

When I decided to do Peace Corps with Markus, some people warned me not to. They said that I'd miss out on the full experience and that we'd get divorced just like 70% of the other dumbass couples who think diarrhea, sweat stains, and copious amounts of vomit is a good start to a happy, long-lasting marriage. I'll never know if I would have had a better or worse time if I'd come as a single volunteer. Instead of guys hitting on me, I deal with guys ignoring me—the moral of the story seems to be that guys are annoying. But I do feel that after going through all this craziness—some good, some bad, some really fucking weird—we can handle the rest. The water bill's ridiculously expensive because Markus refuses to give up his daily bubble bath, but at least we have water. Markus and Joel have been hard at work playing video games and talking about their facial hair all week, but at least Markus isn't out marrying his second, third, or fourth wife. Jill Jr. poured sea monkeys into Markus's new batch of beer, but at least we can afford to buy her pants.

I don't know how closely real life will follow my life plan. The trend in neuroscience seems to be to make a career-derailing decision and accidentally discover something huge. Neuroscientists' success stories are like nerdy Bad Idea Jeans commercials: “Yeah, I had tenure at Harvard Medical School, but I figured why not quit my job, move to New Zealand, and study turtles?” Bad Idea Jeans. So, I have no idea if I'll end up in elbow patches or a scuba suit. But it is nice to know that Markus will always be there to provide me with plenty of beer.