Twenty-Nine and Feeling Fine

Again, apologies for the rhyming title.  It isn't even 100% accurate, actually, as I have been super sick for quite some time.  I'm on the mend, though--my middle-of-the-night coughing fits are much shorter and much less of an ab workout.  Hence, I'm writing this a week later, and if I wanted to be more accurate and less rhymey I would title this post "Twenty-Nine and Feeling Slightly Better."

At any rate, my birthday was a week ago and I am now 29!*  It's only been a week, but I think I'm settling into 29 quite nicely.  Some highlights:

• Presents!  Because the best part of aging is the swag.  From my family I got a new printer, which I finally set up two nights ago.  My friend PT got me a giant box of fruit snacks (which are actually fruit snacks and not well-disguised gummy vitamins as an attempt to kill me--it's a real concern).  I also got lots of cards and good wishes on Facebook and the promise that one day LT will figure out where the post office is to mail my present (which is also not an issue because I haven't figured out what I'm getting her yet and her birthday is in a week...I should get on that).
• Cake!  My roommate made me a cake and it was delicious.  There was Ganache, which is second only to Diet Coke on my list of "miracle elixirs."
• Activities!  I wasn't intending to have people over or to see people at all due to the aforementioned illness ("come over and celebrate my birthday and also maybe get pinkeye! yay!"), however, my roommate made me text people to come over.  It was very last-minute, and only two people showed up, but it was nice and fun until it was 10:00 pm** and people showed no signs of leaving anytime soon.  Even though I was putting out my best yawning and coughing signals.  It was like that episode of "Buffy" where it's her birthday but Halfrek's "justice" spell is keeping everyone from leaving.  Stupid Dawn.

If you're a Buffy fan, you'll know that Dawn is screaming "Get Out,"
which is kind of a thing she does a lot.
Nonetheless, that's how I feel about late night guests.
But I still think Dawn is the worst.
I mean, really, I think the entire viewership would have been just fine
having her die at the end of Season 5 instead of Buffy.
And don't get all whiny about spoilers,
the show's been off the air for over ten years now.

Anyway...to sum up, my birthday happened.  And now it's over.  Which is just fine because life goes on.  For instance, I've got this crazy cellular and molecular neuroscience take-home midterm to do this weekend.  And I'm going to play my ukulele in public again tomorrow.  However, I would just like to point out that in exactly 51 weeks, I will be THIRTY.  I guess I should get going on my "list of twenty-something experiences."

*Unless you ask my mother, in which case I've been 27 for a couple of years now.
**Because when you're almost 30, 10:00 is considered a late bedtime.

Nightmare at Trader Joe's

Halloween is just over two weeks away, so it's time to start dusting off the scary stories.  Gather round, dear readers, and listen to my tale:

Nightmare at Trader Joe's

(a tale of terror for the socially awkward)

It was a dark and rainy night (no, seriously, it's really raining outside), when I ventured out into the streets of Brookline in a quest for bread and sliced turkey at the Coolidge Corner Trader Joe's.  As I was walking down the aisle, I ran into the professor from my department whom I'm never sure I should call by his first name or not because he's not that much older than I am and he was never my professor.  Of course, it being a rainy night, I was wearing my giant raincoat that makes me look like a petite serial killer and my hair was horrendous and also I may have a mild case of conjunctivitis.  No matter, however, as I was more concerned whether I had anything embarrassing in my basket.  I then thought, what is the most embarrassing thing one can get at Trader Joe's?  It's not like they sell tampons...would Trader Joe's-brand tampons have a special name?  Like "Trader Flo's?"  Ha, I'm pretty clever, I should market that.  Before getting too lost in my brilliant tampon-naming thoughts, I managed to realize that I had nothing in my basket to be ashamed of (apart from a bounty of microwavable dinners-for-one), and proceeded to make the appropriate amount of small-talk before I continued down the aisle.

But I didn't need anything in that aisle.  

But I couldn't turn around!  Because then I'd look like I didn't know what I was doing in my own neighborhood Trader Joe's!  So I pretended to be looking for something in that aisle, which unfortunately was the weird soap/fake deodorant/essential oils aisle.  I landed on a shelf of bottled water, the most benign thing I could find in the aisle, and stared at it until he had walked away.  I spent the rest of my shopping trip looking around corners, because the only thing worse than running into someone you know at the grocery store is running into that person again at the grocery store.  I decided that I was in need of no more groceries and booked it to the checkout queue and hoped to the Virgin Mary that he wouldn't end up right behind me, or worse, that I had forgotten my wallet and we would have stumbled into humiliating "You've Got Mail" territory.  Thankfully, none of those things happened, but it was a close call (with the him being behind me, not the forgetting my wallet).  I paid for my groceries, did not wait for a receipt, and exited the store without further incident.

You know, you see these kinds of things in movies and you read about them happening to other people, but you never think it's going to happen to you.

On "The Working (Mormon) Mother Problem"

This is actually something that has been on my mind for quite some time, but as the urge to actually blog about it was inspired by a particular thing, I'm going to do this in "open letter" format, as those are kind of popular these days.

Dear Leaders of the Latter Day Saint Church/Directors of the LDS Institute of Religion,

First of all, I love you guys.  I really do.  I know we don't always see eye-to-eye on things and sometimes you make me cry and question my self-worth entirely, but hey, I'm a Mormon feminist, so that's just part of the package.  I try to trust in your counsel and believe that you mean well and kind of know what you're doing (your line of communication to the Person In Charge is much shorter than mine, after all), but then I read this (for people who don't like to click on things, it's the chapter on "Mothers' Employment Outside the Home" in the "Eternal Marriage" Institute Student Manual), and I felt a little perturbed, to be quite honest with you.  As a single LDS woman who hopes to one day have a PhD and also a husband and children, this is something that's on my mind quite a bit, and I hope you don't mind if I offer some of my thoughts:

First, this manual was published in 2003; however, the most recent quote in this chapter is from 1996, and the majority of the quotes are from before I was born.  I know that some principles are eternal, but things have changed.  As Dallin H. Oaks so kindly pointed out last October, the median age for first marriage for men and women is on the rise.  A lot of LDS women aren't getting married at age 21 anymore.  And not because we're too busy burning our bras and singing along to Helen Reddy--we're just facing the reality that marriage isn't a guarantee.  So we're following the counsel of Gordon B. Hinckley and "getting all the education that we possibly can," and with that education comes opportunities and careers, hopes and plans.  Imagine what it would be like to plan for several years to build a house, and lay a foundation, and then have to leave it behind.  Getting married and having children would be lovely; but sacrificing our entire careers to do so would feel as if we were abandoning a huge part of ourselves.  It's not that we love our careers more than our families, but we've loved them longer.  Furthermore, with that large amount of education we obtained, many of us also obtained student debt.  Even if I were married to a billionaire, I would still feel a responsibility to pay for my education myself.  And unless my mommy blogging really takes off, that means I need a job outside of the home.

Secondly, many of the quotes seem to imply that the only reason mothers would work (if they have husbands who also work) would be to afford fancy and unnecessary things.  This is not why most mothers work outside the home.  As I mentioned before--we put a great deal of time and sacrifice into developing our talents and our careers.  We find fulfillment and joy in them.  One quote by Ezra Taft Benson wondered how any woman could find anything more exciting and fulfilling than housework and changing diapers, begging the question, has Ezra Taft Benson ever changed a diaper?  Of course there is joy in motherhood, and some women need only that to be fulfilled, and that's great, but every personality is different.  A woman should not be made to feel like a bad parent (or the instigator of her divorce or the cause of gang violence and societal collapse) because she is truly happy being a working mother.

Third, not only are the quotes in the lesson a little outdated, they also lack variety of source.  None of the people cited have ever had the experience of being a working mother...or a stay-at-home mother...or a mother...or a woman.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if women who are trying to make important decisions about their families and careers could hear the perspectives of women who have had to make these same decisions?  I'm sure there are women in the General Auxiliary Presidencies who would love to chime in about their experiences as mothers or as career women (as some of them haven't even been married!).

Finally (though I could say more), and maybe this part is to all of the married or hoping-to-be-married people who read this blog, but I want to stress two words in "The Family: A Proclamation to the World":  "individual adaptation."  Actually, I just want to stress one word:  "individual."  I strongly believe that there is no "one size fits all" approach to raising a family.  I came from the "working dad/homemaker mom" household, but we weren't the Cleavers.  Some kids I knew came from the "two-income family" household, but they weren't the Huxtables.  (I don't know of any pop-culture reference of a family where the mom worked and the dad stayed home off the top of my head.)  Following a tradition out of a sense of societal obligation only can be really harmful and can cause resentment if partners feel that compromises are unfair or sacrifices are unequal.  (Also, they could be limiting to men who are--gasp!--actually better at nurturing than their wives are.)  Husbands and wives should consider together, as equal partners, what situation works best for them as a couple and as a family.

And that's all I have to say about that.  To sum up, maybe just think about updating the Institute Manual a little bit.  Thanks.

Love,

A.

Life as of Late: September 2014

Guys, I've been really remiss with my blogging.  I've just been super busy!  Complete with "Buffy" .gif's to illustrate, here's what's been up:

In mid-August, I started working as a Back and Limbs TA/prosector for Medical Gross Anatomy.  This means lots of teaching students, but also lots of dissecting.

I am not this creepy when I handle scalpels.

Dissection was really tedious.  And also time-consuming.  So much so that I wished there was a magical spell for it.  (This is the part where I would post a .gif of Dark Willow flaying Warren with her magical powers,* but I decided against it because I already posted a Gentleman which is sure to give the ladies from my home ward nightmares as it is.)  The students just had their first exam, so thankfully I have a break for a little while until the Head and Neck module starts.

And by "I have a break," I mean, "I will just be incredibly busy doing other things."  Real school has started up again.  My two "real" classes are "Advanced Kinesiology and Biomechanics" and "Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience," both of which involve a lot of reading and keep me quite stressed out.

Forty-minute presentation on an article about apical-basal polarity of neuroepithelial cells.

Also, this is the year that I take qualifying exams, so you know....

Maybe if I could brain-suck the QE committee...

My summer/fall transition hasn't been completely devoid of fun.  Thanks to some talented and creative people in my ward, I got to participate in a film that will be entered in a film festival for our tri-ward campout.  It was a musical riff-off similar to the one in "Pitch Perfect," and it was quite fun to pretend that I lived in the world where complex emotions can only be expressed through singing.

Yes, we did.

Other than that, things haven't really been all that exciting or great.  I've had some confusing life stuff going on that's kind of put me on a tilt-o-whirl of emotions.**  Add to that the fact that the weather has gotten significantly colder over the past few weeks and I have an upper respiratory tract thing which turned into a coughing thing which means cough medicine.

Even the tablet stuff is icky...how is that even possible?

Anyway, at least it's kind of officially fall now (or it will be in a few days, I guess).  Maybe that will make things more interesting.  At least there's Halloween!

Even Giles is down with it.

*Don't worry, he was a murderer and a misogynist and totally deserved it.
**This is probably stuff that will be written about in my memoirs once I'm dead.

My Music: Rise from the Bottom

I haven't done "My Music" posts in a while, because how could any other song compete with a song I had listened to 25 times?  So I did something uncharacteristic (and a little morally hinky):  I reset the plays for any song I had listened to over 10 times.  That was maybe a month or two ago, so here is my current "Top 25 Most Played" list:

1. "I Want To Be Your One Night Stand" - Jeremy Messersmith (referred to hereafter as J. Mess, because he's on here a Lot)
2. "Scientists" - J. Mess
3. "Bridges" - J. Mess
4. "Ghost" - J. Mess
5. "Someday, Someone" - J. Mess
6. "Skeleton Song" - Kate Nash
7. "the zombie song" - Stephanie Mabey
8. "Across the Universe" - Fiona Apple
9. "21 Guns" - Original Broadway Cast of American Idiot
10. "You'll Only Break His Heart" - J. Mess
11. "A Girl, a Boy, and a Graveyard" - J. Mess
12. "We Get On" - Kate Nash
13. "Merry Happy" - Kate Nash
14. "For The First Time In Forever" - Frozen Soundtrack
15. "Little Talks" - Of Monsters And Men
16. "Wuthering Heights" - The Puppini Sisters
17. "Bring On the Wonder" - Sarah McLachlan
18. "Burn" - Ellie Goulding
19. "Falling Slowly" - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova
20. "My Love" - Irie Love
21. "Death Bed Salesman" - J. Mess
22. "Tomorrow" - J. Mess
23. "Tourniquet" - J. Mess
24. "Sigh No More" - Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon (from Joss Whedon's Much Ado soundtrack)
25. "Cathedrals" - Jump Little Children

In some ways, this is like a jump into the past, as a lot of these songs are ones I haven't listened to in some time, which is fun, but also kind of bittersweet.  Also, if Jeremy Messersmith collected royalties based on my iTunes, he'd be so rich right now.

Honey Bee-YU, or (Very) Small and Simple Things

I went to BYU.  I really liked it.  Being a BYU student was a pretty good experience (probably because the aspects of my personality that I would have had to hide at BYU hadn't developed yet), but being a BYU Alumna, on the other hand, is a different story.

Every so often, on a Friday night around 7:00 pm (because somehow they know I have no life?), some perky returned missionary named Tyler (they're all named Tyler), calls me up on the phone, asks me about my life, tells me about the new developments at BYU, and then asks me for money.  Recently, I've decided to loosen my purse-strings a tiny bit and donate.  They do have a new anatomy lab, and I can support that, and I figured, maybe if I gave them enough cash they would finally acknowledge that my life is cool enough to get a two-line blurb in the "What are the Alumni up to?" section in BYU Magazine.*  This last time, I gave them some money, and I got this lovely card signed by Cecil O. Samuelson's printer:

This is out of focus, but whatever.  It's scriptures (of course).

It was nice enough from the front of the card.  But here's what the card said on the inside:

Keeping with the tradition of assuming people can't read things from photographs of printed words, here's the text of the second paragraph:

"In fact, your gift is much like the contribution the honeybee makes to its beehive.  Over its short lifetime a single honeybee contributes one-twelfth of one teaspoon of honey to its hive.  Because the bees work together and depend on each other, work that would be overwhelming for a few becomes lighter, and the results are astounding."

Um...what?  They could have just been like, "thanks for your donation; it was nice of you; here's a receipt for when you do your taxes," but comparing my donation to minuscule volumes of bee spit?  They should have just been a little more direct, for example:

Dear Alexandra,

Thank you for your small contribution to Brigham Young University.  We just wanted to acknowledge how small your contribution really was.  So small that a poor scholarship kid had to buy a used American Heritage textbook.  If you want some additional perspective, here's what the Marriots gave last week:  [large sum].  They're having another wing of a classroom building named after them.  You wouldn't even get one of the dodgy Cluff Building bathroom stalls named after you with what you gave us.  Nonetheless, we wanted to express our appreciation by sending you this thank-you card that cost only slightly less to design, print, and mail than the wee amount that you donated.  Someone will be calling you again shortly at a very inconvenient time asking for more of your mere pennies. 

Sincerely,

Not even the current President of BYU because that guy only signs cards going to high rollers. 

Again, I liked BYU, and I would go there again.  I just wouldn't graduate.



*They still haven't.  Apparently spending a year identifying the remains of missing American Heroes before going on to get my freaking doctorate isn't as news-worthy as having my eighth kid or publishing a book about upholstery. 

Reasons Why July Was Pretty Fly

Again, apologies for the lame rhyme, but I couldn't help it.  Incidentally, I once dated this guy who would give me a dollar anytime I used the word "fly" or some other lame slang adjective ("dope," maybe?) in public.  I didn't take advantage of that as much as I should have.  Oh well, live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, back to July being good:

7/1:  I went to Toscanini's (a delicious ice cream place in Cambridge) for a friend's going-away shindig, and I ate Grape Nuts flavored ice cream (it was delicious, trust me).  Also I marveled at how late I was staying up on a school night.

7/3:  I made a ton of delicious muffins and it rained spectacularly.

7/4:  I went to an Independence Day breakfast at JM's house and then I rented a Rug Doctor to clean my couch (you should have seen the color of the water afterwards) and felt really good about all of my efforts.

7/5:  I defrosted my freezer and found five dollars (on the street...not in the freezer).

7/7:  I went to Tri-Ward Home Evening for the first time in ages.  We played that game where there's a water balloon and you catch it in towels.  It was actually fun.

7/11:  Some friends and I got together for a burger outing at Burger Dive in Somerville.  I walked across the Mystic River to get there (more accurately, I walked across a bridge over the Mystic River) and it was beautiful.  Burger Night was great as well--it was a great group of people and many laughs and many dipping sauces were had.

7/12:  I went swimming at the public outdoor pool in Brookline.  It was great and refreshing.  Then I got frozen custard in the middle of a really long walk.  I ended up walking a total of over 7.5 miles that day.

7/13:  John Ratzenberger (aka Cliff Clavin) was at church for some reason.  My inner child-raised-on-TV exploded a little bit.  Then Germany won the World Cup and I won a bet (though the party against whom I won got a fairly decent consolation prize in my admitting that I actually got excited about a sporting event).  I stayed up too late this night.

7/14:  Weird Al Yankovic started releasing a million new music videos (and by a million, I mean eight).  They were fantastic.  "Word Crimes" is my favorite.  I also stayed up too late again.

7/18:  I gave my NIH grant proposal a title and a budget and it became an official administrative thing!

7/19:  I bought a cake stand at a secondhand shop in Allston for five dollars (this is exciting because before that I had been serving my cakes on dinner plates like some kind of Philistine).  Then I ate a Lobster Roll for the first time.  It probably wasn't a spectacular lobster roll from any famous lobster roll place, but I just wanted to say that I've eaten one.

7/21-7/25:  I went to the gym every day this week.  I am awesome.  (Although I only went to the gym one day of the week before and one day of the week after, but I blame a weird foot pain on the latter week being a slacker week).

7/25:  I participated in the first half of a "Ladies Night" which consisted of getting frozen custard with a bunch of ladies from my ward.  Apparently we were very apparently Mormon, because a woman came up to us and asked if we were a group of Mormons.

7/26:  After living in my apartment for nearly a year, I finally organized all of my sheet music.  I ate Thai food at Basil Rice with JM.  It was delicious.

7/27:  It was Sunday.  Post-church Munch and Mingle was the most delicious fresh fruit I had eaten in a while.  I probably ate too much of it.

7/31:  I FINISHED MY GRANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Cue celebratory music and happy dancing.)  I celebrated by eating Panda Express and spending money on bargain cookbooks.  One of which is a Kosher Holiday Baking Book.  I'm not even Jewish but I'm really excited about the over 45 Passover recipes.

Even if the rest of the month had been total crap, the fact that my grant is turned in and I no longer have to think about it just makes the month.  After the Panda Express eating and the book buying, I packed my stuff to go home for the weekend.  I'm writing this in Pennsylvania right now.  I'm thinking that August is going to be pretty good as well.