denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power

March 22, 2017 in self reflective, menstruation studies!

Despite telling myself that I'd find a way stay involved in the world of critical thinking and writing, I've pretty much avoided anything academic since leaving grad school almost four years ago. There was (lolz: IS) so much complex emotional and psychological angst tied up in that world for me and I couldn't figure out how to get around it. Even the smallest foray back towards grad student-adjacent activities triggered intense impostor syndrome, regret, and anxiety. So, I avoided it. Like you do.

This week, however, I'm making a small step (okay, probably an inadvisably dramatic and dangerous leap) back towards that lost world. When I was in graduate school, I took several classes through the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies, which is a really fantastic Boston-area resource (if you're a Boston-area grad student with even the slightest interest in gender and sexuality studies, you really need to know about it). The GCWS sponsors a few classes every semester, and the classes are always team-taught, interdisciplinary, and informed by a variety of feminist pedagogical approaches. The classes that I took covered American Women's Biography, Body Narratives in Popular Film, and Motherhood/Mothering. This year, the GCWS started running a new kind of "micro-seminar," a set of short, ungraded, graduate-level discussion-based classes. On a whim, I wrote to ask if I was eligible to participate as a GCWS alumna, and that's how I ended up signed up for five weeks of Critical Menstruation Studies.

How to See London and Paris in 96 Hours*

December 16, 2016 in reviews/recommendations, self reflective

* This post does not necessarily constitute a recommendation of this travel strategy

It's coming up on the end of the year, so obviously I'm going to write some year-in-review posts about the hot flaming garbage fire that was 2016. Before I get to those, though, I want to make an overdue post about the one big trip I took this year, and some advice/recommendations from it that might actually be helpful to other people. SO! This past October, I traveled to London, England and Paris, France with my mom and my cousin. We spent approximately 48 hours in each place, which was, I can say in retrospect, a ridiculous planning choice. I was the primary planner for the trip, and if I had a chance to do it all again, I know I would do some things differently. It's too late for that, though, so at the very least I hope you all can learn from my mistakes (and from my excellent choices, of course).

Our basic schedule for the trip was to fly out of Boston on a Sunday night, arrive in London on a Monday morning, spend Monday in London, then take the train to France on Tuesday and spend Tuesday and Wednesday in Paris. On Wednesday afternoon we took the train back to England, and Thursday was spent in London. We flew back to Boston on Friday morning. It was definitely an action-packed week.

The Boston University Bridge over the Charles River going from Cambridge to Boston. I took this on Tuesday morning, just after voting, on my walk to work.

What's Making Me Happy This Week/Five Things Friday

November 11, 2016 in self reflective

This seems like the week to revive this feature, even if "Happy" might be an overstatement. Here are some things that have made me feel even a tiny bit better about the world this week.

photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015 — photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015

Back-to-School Blues: Notes from an Erstwhile Grad Student

September 23, 2015 in self reflective

For many of our younger years, the back-to-school season is one filled with turbulence and excitement. Even long after we've graduated and left the academic calendar behind, there's often a certain irrepressible, nostalgic frisson that comes on around the first weeks of September, alongside the clichéd images of fresh pencils and school buses. For me, the magic lasted longer than for most other people, since I went back to graduate school just two years after graduating from college. I started a masters program in English literature in 2009 and moved on to a PhD program just a year later. That meant that starting in fall 2010, not only did back-to-school mean back to classes for me, it also meant back to teaching. If you think fall is thrilling and nerve-wracking as a student, just try it as a brand-new teacher.