I haven’t seen Failure to Launch, but I’m going to hazard a guess about how the film portrays Matthew McConaughey, whose character is thirtysomething and still living with his parents. He’s probably unambitious, career-wise and otherwise. He’s probably not interested in carrying on a long-term relationship, or taking care of anything that requires caretaking. He probably plays a lot of video games—am I on the right track?

The fact is, there’s a lot of cultural baggage that comes with moving back in with your parents. (That movie I was just talking about? Look at its title: failure is the first word. Failure!) So when I moved back in with my mom two months ago—and brought Ted with me!—I was trying to resist ascribing the adjective to our own situation. We’ve successfully held full-time jobs and become financially independent, but we still needed a temporary safety net after moving cross-country. So I stepped back through the doors of my old house, and tried not to wince while doing it.

But you know what? Even though I can’t wait till we get our own place in the city, it’s been really nice here. And I’m not ashamed to admit that.

My mom buys fresh flowers every week to brighten up our white kitchen table. She has coached both Ted and myself through job-search woes and general transition-related malaise, and celebrated my job-search victory as if it were her own. She has oh-so-graciously let Koko into her home, despite a lifelong fear of cats. When she sensed that I couldn’t afford to celebrate Ted’s birthday during my spell of unemployment, she treated us to a day out in the city so we could feast on iconic Chicago foods: Ann Sather cinnamon rolls, Polish sausages, slices of fruit pie from Hoosier Mama, and pierogi and cabbage soup in the Ukranian Village. At home, she makes a roast chicken every week for all of us to feast on. And she tells everyone she knows how excited she is that we’re here.

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There’s a lot that changes when you move from one part of the country to another: geographical features, regional chain stores, and your neighbors’ accents (though we haven’t run into any of Bill Swerski’s Superfans quite yet). One thing I didn’t expect to change so drastically? The contents of the grocery stores.

Recently, over tea and Girl Scout cookies with a friend, I mentioned that I had been surprised to learn—at age eighteen—that Jews make up less than 2% of the U.S. population. Growing up next to Skokie, Illinois, which held the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, I always assumed that at least half of America was Jewish. The same proportion of my middle-school classmates had thrown bar or bat mitzvahs, after all. He just laughed at me, but after stepping foot in the Skokie Jewel-Osco last weekend, it was obvious why I’d made that assumption. Huge posters hung from the ceiling near the entrance, wishing shoppers a happy Passover. An entire corner of the store had been set aside for Passover foods, and a permanent section held a kosher deli, bakery and dairy case. Growing up on the North Shore, it seemed as normal to anticipate Chanukah as it was Christmas.

It was a far cry from the grocery stores in the D.C. suburbs, which catered to a Salvadorean population; there was no type of dried chile you couldn’t find there. And there was no short supply of neighborhood Vietnamese markets, either. (On a related note, here’s a little public service announcement: if you’re into pho and you’ve never been to the Eden Center, you haven’t lived.)

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As I began my senior year of college—you know, when the only thought on anybody’s mind is “What’s next?”—I thought I had it all figured out. I’d be swooping myself right back to Chicago as soon as I removed my cap and gown, and that seemed to be that. I told my friends and roommates on every occasion that that the subject came up.

But somewhere between first and second semester, seeds of doubt were planted in my mind. I started tuning my ear to a weird internal dialogue that stemmed from a combination of outside influences and my own strange insecurities: “Isn’t the East Coast more cosmopolitan than the Midwest?” “Am I boring for wanting to return to the place where I was born?” Both statements look ridiculous on paper, of course, but can be strangely powerful when played over and over in the ear of a confused young adult. I may not have loved D.C. after spending four years in the place, but it was easy to second-guess myself, especially since most of my classmates were making post-graduate plans in Washington.

So when I met this cute guy and began falling in love, I convinced myself that Washington would be an okay place to hang tight, for a little while at least. If nothing else, it was neutral ground. And maybe the city with imprint me with its intrinsic D.C.-ness, thus bestowing upon me all those traits I had thought were lacking in myself—somehow, I’d become cosmopolitan, important, and powerful. Interesting. Worthy.

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On the way back from work tonight, my usual route met me with its usual, miserable traffic jam. But this time, the cause was different. Instead of the normal volume-related pileup, tonight’s roads were clogged because someone had abandoned his car in the middle of Route 7. I reached, then passed the darkened vehicle eventually, but glancing at it sideways, I didn’t feel one twinge of annoyance. Honestly, I couldn’t really blame the guy.

Because I know what it’s like to feel like cutting and running, too. I’m confined all day by claustrophobia-inducing cubicle walls, y’all. There’s that aforementioned and predictably atrocious commute, plus a no-longer-homey apartment (it hasn’t been the same since my neighbor’s bedbugs invaded my own four walls. Yeah, let’s not talk about that). I have big plans in the works, of course, ones that (fingers crossed) will change all of the above. And I promise you’ll hear about them when the time is right. But until the day my lease is up, I’ve resolved to find inspiration in the parts of my life I still control.

Recently, I’ve found hope in the posts of two new-to-me blogs. At Makeunder My Life, Jess Constable has written about creating a home in the way that Michelangelo created his statue of David. (“It is easy,” he apparently said of sculpting a masterpiece from a boulder. “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”) Instead of finding peace in consumption, Jess talks about finding it through “exfoliating” unnecessary possessions, making her home’s trash-to-treasure ratio more favorable by subtracting, not adding. John and Sherry Petersik, over at the very fun home blog Young House Love (represent, Virginia!), seem to share a similar philosophy. It’s encapsulated in this post on living happily with less. And from their (very smart) posts on frugality, I’ve been inspired to start using and enjoying the things I already have—everything from pantry items to that long-ignored Netflix subscription.

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Somehow, enough time has crept up on me that I’ve been able to establish two fall traditions as a resident of Virginia. They include, for one, a pre-Halloween trip with Ted’s family to a haunted forest, one that’s about an hour outside of Richmond and squarely in the middle of nowhere. After sunset, we take back roads to a huge cornfield framed by dark forest and, probably, serial killers. We board a hayride bound for the middle of that cornfield, where we’re dropped off and left to fend for ourselves. Stumbling our way through a corn maze, we pass a roaring bonfire that marks the entrance to the haunted forest.

It’s a setup that poises you to react like a high-strung Thoroughbred before a big race, ready to shy away at the drop of a feather. So we trot and high-step our way through barely-lit abadoned houses, accompanied by soft but pulse-quickening horror-movie music, accosted and pursued by entirely too many deranged-looking men with chainsaws. Both years, Ted’s family has laughed at me for screaming so loudly. And that’s all I have to say about that.

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When asked what you love about summer, there’s a vast repository of stock answers to choose from. And it’s not hard to appreciate the joys of extended sunlight, the feeling of warm sand between your toes, or the fact that tomatoes now taste exactly as they were meant to taste. But there are times when I revel, just a little bit, in feeling like a seasonal Grinch.

I’m ghostly pale, and require excessive amounts of sunscreen to make it alive through August. I hate to say it, but temperatures over 70 make me feel sluggish and grouchy, and I sweat rather easily. Worst of all is the office: the Arctic blast of the air conditioning, yes, but also the fact that most of the staff is vacation-bound and the workload light. There, I said it: I’d rather be kept busy at work, multitasking and problem-solving and all that good stuff. When you’re the resident Entry-Level Employee at Company X, your work is by definition less difficult and less time-sensitive, which is all fine and good until things get deathly quiet right around, oh, July or August. Don’t get me wrong! I really do enjoy catching up on New York Times articles and blog posts between the occasional paper-filing jobs. Just not until my eyes cross and I realize I’m barely halfway through the workday.

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Show of hands: Who here is excited about the three-day weekend?

Are you ready to stand over the grill flipping burgers, hungry friends gathered alongside? To don your shades and take a bike ride under the blazing sunshine?

To watch baseball, the ultimate warm-weather sport? To spend the first of many weekends poolside? To see the Sex and the City sequel, no matter how terrible the trailer looked?

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It’s been awhile since I attended a bake sale, but I do have fond memories of the events held in our school cafeteria. Plastic tables—heavy with Duncan Hines confetti cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies—were staffed by students with little experience as cashiers, and mobbed by their sugar-toothed classmates. The spectacle was fun enough, but at the end of it all lay the promise of dessert (something not procured from sketchy vending machines!), and the knowledge that you’d helped Mrs. Garcia’s homeroom support a good cause.

If you’re nostalgic too, I can point you to a thoroughly grown-up alternative to the cafeteria bake sales of old. The lovely Phoebe and Cara of Big Girls, Small Kitchen are raising money for The Valerie Fund by baking some amazing-looking peanut M&M blondies through Mother’s Day. Personally, I can think of no more appropriate way to say “I love you” to my wonderful mother (a food-blog reader herself, she introduced me to Phoebe and Cara’s writing). And on this holiday, I feel especially compelled to support families that haven’t been as lucky as ours; the Valerie Fund provides comprehensive care to kids with cancer and blood disease. It breaks my heart that little ones have to go through that kind of pain—and it’s eerily similar to the cause I supported (with particular energy) back in high school.

My senior year, I found small-town life in Wilmette, Illinois to be suffocating, and high school classes seemed to be nothing more than obstacles standing between me and college. Bored and purposeless, I signed up to run a marathon with Team in Training, which meant I’d also be raising money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. It was a bold and probably dumb move: I’d been running recreationally for two years, but I was young and green and in no shape to run 26.2 miles. But the training and the fundraising would challenge me, ask something of me. It became the thing that gave me purpose in what otherwise would’ve been a self-centered year, spent resting on my laurels and waiting for my next life chapter to begin.

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As an ethnic Jew with no serious investment in the religion, Chanukah means one thing to me, and one thing only: latkes! In college, I had a wonderful roommate who, having also fallen from the graces of the Tribe, shared my latke-centric outlook on the holiday. One year, she suggested we spread the love to our friends, most of whom had attended Catholic schools growing up and needed to learn the way of the latke. We would throw a Chanukah party! This was all fine and good until she revealed that her proposed guest list was twenty names long. That meant twenty latke-gobbling humans in our apartment, shoveling potato pancakes into their maws as fast as we could fry them up.

It didn’t turn out to be the epic disaster I’d vehemently sworn it would be. Nevertheless, four pounds of potatoes into our preparation, I was casting evil glares in her direction as I bloodied my knuckles over a washboard grater, the pile of potatoes turning an unappetizing shade of gray as they were exposed to air. Unsurprisingly, I haven’t made a latke since.

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This past summer, I spent many of my Friday nights at an outdoor film festival. In a little park alongside the Potomac River, I sat with friends and countless other friendly picnickers, all intent on reveling in the glow of the 1980s’ finest cinematic offerings. Back to the Future! The Karate Kid! Top Gun! I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen some of these epic, if somewhat cheesy, films before I hit 22.

But one of the summer’s films stayed with me in a different way than the others: that John Hughes classic Pretty in Pink. I can’t pinpoint a reason why; really, it was a number of the movie’s distinct elements, and the alchemy that they all produced when thrown together. There was Molly Ringwald’s character Andie, queen of DIY fashion, who blends teen angst and social detachment in perfect proportions. There’s Iona, Andie’s older coworker, whose hair and wardrobe changes punctuate each scene. There’s the soundtrack, full of ’80s music that evokes big emotions without relying on too much melodrama. There’s Duckie, whose love for Andie goes unrequited but whose lip-synch to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” is a must-see.

Images via StarPulse.

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