Thanks, Ye Olde Facebooke, for This Classic Weather Report

Condi Rice at BYU

What do you do with a grad student when she stops being a grad student? What does she do when she retires? That is what I have been asking myself since I completed my master’s coursework in December. I followed the trend  of moving back in with my parents until I figure out “what comes next.” And, for lack of anything else to do besides troll the internet for job opportunities, I drove to Provo to hear Condoleeza Rice speak at a university forum.

Rings and baubles and things

Over the Christmas holiday, Amanda discovered a lovely series of jewelry at Deseret Book. The pieces purport to be replicas of early churchwomen’s necklaces and bracelets and are sold under the label Zion’s Mercantile Co., Nauvoo, IL. Featured are Emma Smith (Amanda’s and my choice), Lucy Mack, Mary Elizabeth Rawlins, and Mary Fielding Smith.

Hot Men in History

In my junior year of high school, the other five girls in AP U.S. History and I went through our textbook to decide who the hottest guys in American history were.

Apparently unaware that this picture existed and blissfully ignorant about his stance on slavery, we chose John C. Calhoun based on the strength of this picture. There was also a photo of a guy in Vietnam slogging through a swamp with a gun who was rather attractive but we didn’t know his name, which took him out of the running.

I had forgotten about this pre-feminism, pre-grad school incident until Jezebel, feminist gossip website extraordinaire, announced the launching or existence of a blog called “Bangable Dudes in History.”

The site lists hot men from history and the reasons why they are so attractive.  Dmitri Shostakovich, for example, escaped the siege of Leningrad and wrote a funeral march for the victims of the Bolshevik murders.

The site is obviously a tongue-in-check, as evidenced by its title and probably isn’t appropriate for those easily offended, but I think it’s amazing in its own way.

Hillary Clinton, Graduate School, and Feminism

It’s not often that a non-fiction book makes me want to cry, especially not one about the 2008 elections, but this week I have been reading Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry. A professor of women’s history recommended it to me as a feminist examination of the fervor that had surrounded Barack Obama and the hate and disgust that had been Hillary’s portion in the last presidential election.

I cried because I recognized myself in the book.

Like Traister, I had been raised to believe that sexism no longer existed.  Birth control and the vote had excised it from the American landscape.  My epiphany came, however, not during the 2008 elections but a year later when I entered graduate school.