adventures
I apparently forgot how to post for a while there, but no matter! I’m back today with some hot hot content for all of you out there who like traveling, or living vicariously through other people’s travel stories, or planning your own imaginary or real vacations, or just appreciating some nicely organized Google Docs. Let’s talk Ireland!
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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.
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* 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.
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NB: The wine and bread didn't actually come from the market I visited today, but they certainly made an excellent complement.
It's the most wonderful time of the year: Spring farmers market season! Don't get me wrong, I love my Winter markets, but now we're coming right up on the time when everything is growing and in bloom and it's just a magical thing. I try to visit at least two markets a week, if not more. My favorite market in the world is the one in Burlington, Vermont. It's huge and it's in the most beautiful state and if you need more reasons to go, it also have more free booze than I've seen at any other market, ever. Pretty much perfect.
Read MoreMy family always goes on one big vacation a year—indeed, often only goes on one real vacation a year, and ever since I was a tiny baby, that vacation has been to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When my mom was a kid she used to spend her whole summers down there, although for my own childhood, we usually made do with a two-week interval, the only major time I'd spent away from home probably up until I went to college. Now that I'm a nominal grownup with a full-time job my own apartment and cats to look after, I don't spend the whole two weeks with my family, but I still manage to get down for a weekend or so every year. And I've been going long enough that I have some pretty strong opinions about what you should do if you find yourself on the Cape, so today I'm going to share some of those. This might be a bit much to actually tackle in one 36-hour visit, but let's be ambitious, shall we?
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