My name is Marisa and I just moved to Pittsburgh from Chicago, Illinois. I'm originally from Austin, which you will hear me wax nostalgic about at every chance I get. Pittsburgh is right on the border of New England, between the sprawling farmland of the midwest and the rolling hills of the east coast. I'm slowly learning to live in a place that isn't dominated by steers, Lone Star beers, and Longhorn college football.
I grew up in Austin, Texas, where the summer heat is as bad as Chicago's winter cold (I've yet to live through a December in Pittsburgh but I'm under no allusion that it will be bikini tops and mai tais). Being from Texas, I went to a lot of high school football games and rode in many, many pickup trucks. It was kind of like Friday Night Lights except that we were all awkward and actual teenagers as opposed to beautiful 20-something movie stars who pretended to be teenagers. I have an authentic pair of cowboy boots but no southern drawl, thanks to non-Texan parents and having spent my formative years in the thriving metropolis that is central Texas, which is a place where everyone is from somewhere else and we're all trying to out-liberal each other. I miss it a ton but go back often to eat Tex-Mex and drink margaritas, which are the only things I haven't found successfully replicated in beer and carb-saturated Pittsburgh.
I moved to this seemingly random city at the request of my boyfriend, D, who just left his Nuclear Engineering career to pursue a PhD in Physics. He is actually as brilliant as those two complicated subjects sound. I just shake my head as he explains his coursework to me, and then I go back to working with words, which is all I'm competent enough to do.
I like to read, write, travel, run, watch bad tv, thrift shop, and eat delicious food. I'm still looking for that dream job that will pay me to do all, or even just one, of these things.
You can find my timelines here:
Because I am nothing if not five years behind the times, here are a handful of old memes that further explain who I am, or who I was when I wrote them.
