The Icing at the Top

Vs.

Prospective Career Choices

Meg Murphy, NCHS Student

1. Occupational therapy

2. Nutrition

3. Art therapy

4. Interior design

 ...I guess ‘art therapy’ was the icy, or iced, bridge between nutrition and HGTV. 

These occupation selections used to seem so random to me. Looking at the list now, it makes a bit more sense: service, home, & creativity. They go together more than I thought.  

Cooking and food art is like Home and [vegetable] Garden meets the Food Network meets the RD. As a kid, the idea of putting together a gingerbread house was like a sugar high without even eating any of it. Possibly the best distraction for my parents, ever. Same goes for dying Easter eggs and carving pumpkins without the supervision necessary to avoid staining the kitchen or cutting off my finger.

All I needed was the blank gingerbread canvases and I was completely focused for hours. Maybe it was my "art therapy." 

I didn't completely write off the igloo either. I spent all day with my brother and neighbor creating the most elaborate icy fortress complete with nicely crafted "snow chairs" perfect for sitting and enjoying some hot chocolate.

I got a “taste” of the igloo again today. It confirmed that gingerbread house trumps igloo. And ice trumps active, sober 24 year old in gym shoes. 

When I walked out of my apartment at 4:45am to do data collection on one of my thesis participants equipped with backpack, exercise bag, lunch bag, and box full of chocolates and wine for friends and professors I realized that the Igloo was, in fact, St. Louis.

ICE! Everywhere.

A slide turned slip turned spill left me half way down the steps. It was the fall seen in Home Alone when Kevin McAlister prepped the concrete steps with the garden hose for the “Wet Bandits”-more like ice bandits.
Too late to do anything, hands full of stuff, I went down. Good thing a bottle of red broke my fall!!! ...That was the icing on top of the 5-step, I mean -tiered cake.

Tired, sore, and smelling of booze can really give people the wrong impression of how you’re handling the holiday season. Smelling of wine at 4:50am is only acceptable if one is at a holiday party, decorating gingerbread houses, intensely, until 2am like my dear friend Melissa.  

(Correction it wasn’t gingerbread houses…it was gingerbread villages. That would have given my parents freedom for years).

Walking into my now, chosen profession’s department reeking of wine, I realized what I should have put on my list of “prospective career choices” ... massage therapy.