Dear Husband is in the doghouse. In uncharacteristic restraint, I am not going to share all the gory details here. This too shall pass, and I don’t need a transcript of it on the web. Nobody does. Why then, you may ask, bring it up at all? In the spirit of noticing silver linings, here […]
Blog
Self-Absorption
Yes, I blog. About my life. It’s a little self-absorbed, I know. I don’t pretend otherwise. Did you notice that the logo for this blog is me talking to myself? In Don’t Get too Comfortable, David Rakoff writes about his moment of peak self-absorption: My fasting program warns me to stay vigilant against unhealthy ego […]
Women In Math
You may have seen this flyer making the rounds on social media: According to the BYU Math Department, the flyer design was not satire, but instead, well-intentioned outreach. No hard feelings, at least from me. I visit the Math Department on our campus often. The walls have lots of interesting attractions: flyers, posters describing research, […]
Coconut Shrimp
I was at a New Year’s party. It was catered and servers were passing trays. Everything was really yummy, including the coconut shrimp. The poor guy, though, who kept approaching people with his shrimp plate. After a time, he got a lot of polite refusals. As a parent and a person who works with young […]
Three Things That No One Has Ever Said About Me
From Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, Three things that no one has ever said about me: You make it look so easy. You are very mysterious. You need to take yourself more seriously. In 2003, when I was at Duke, the school released a study about the experience of women at all levels of the […]
Is No a Complete Sentence?
My mother-in-law once told me, “No is a complete sentence.” At the time, I mentally filed this pronouncement with other Al-Anon maxims like One Day at a Time, Easy Does It, and I Cannot Give What I Do Not Have. Hard to argue with the helpful vibe, but not clear how to change my behavior […]
Dream Journal, 2017 Edition
I keep a journal. It’s a physical one, usually just a spiral notebook, that I scribble in with a pen. Most of the entries are snippets from books. The journal is where I collect ideas or turns of phrase that I want to revisit. I also sporadically use it to record details from my nighttime […]
Countdown to Halloween: She’s a Scarecrow
Here is one of my favorite memories of one of my favorite people. And, yes, it involves Halloween. I went to college at Harvard. Freshman year, a girl who lived across the hall from me woke up on Halloween, got dressed up as a scarecrow like it was the most natural thing in the world, […]