Merry Christmas

My first Christmas as a married woman in my own house. Needless to say, there have been a lot of Christmas lights, hot chocolate, and some coordinating ornaments involved. Oh, and unusually large stocking stuffers.

Merry Christmas from us to you! 

Quality Solutions to Life's Problems

Me: My professor called me Madeline six times in class today. I thought she would correct herself or realize her mistake, but no! She kept calling me Madeline. Should I say something to her or is that just making it more dramatic than it needs to be?
My dad: What's this professor's name?
Me: Prof. Peacock
My dad: Well, next time you talk to her, call her Professor Pigeon!

Pleased

I really don't want this post to sound like I'm gloating or basking in the glory of myself. Rather, I feel like I've worked hard this past semester, and I've enjoyed the challenges it's presented. I really feel that the Lord has strengthened me throughout these past few months and helped me achieve my academic and work-related goals. So I'm incredibly pleased and thankful and humbled by the experiences I've had.
And because I'm so happy and pleased with my work, which would have not turned out so well without a caring Father in Heaven, I just want to share some things I'm particularly pleased with.

--I wrote three papers this semester that I absolutely loved. One of them was about Berthe Morisot and how she balanced the maternal and political aspects of her life. Another was about images of working women in the 1950s. And finally, the last one was about Maria Janitschek's short story "In Weiss." This last paper was my absolute favorite. I poured my heart and soul into it and tackled a topic that is not easy but nonetheless one I'm passionate about.
--My professor told me to submit my Janitschek paper to the Sophie Journal, and I'm totally going to do this. (It's an online publication run by BYU's German department that accepts papers from students.)
--I made an unlikely friend-ish. He's a student in the class I work in as a TA. At the beginning of the semester he was having trouble grasping the material, so we set up a weekly appointment to review class material and answer any questions that he had. At first, I thought he would be difficult to work with and constantly complaining about having to take this class. He made it quite obvious he didn't want to. But I've learned that some people just need another person to listen to them, and sometimes that's all you need to do to serve another person. I'm grateful that he's proven to be friendly and easy to work with.
--I submitted a paper for my Northern Baroque class, and my professor encouraged me to pursue the topic for a senior thesis. I'm not sure if I will, but I'm considering it. I'm mostly grateful for the direction and possibility it gives me. I've been dreading picking a topic for my senior thesis, but now I at least have an option endorsed by one of the professors.
 --I like to think that I have been able to help several of the students in my class. (I call it "my" class, but really it's Professor Peacock's, and I'm just her lowly TA.) Helping people is a really fantastic thing to do, and it makes me happy.
--I have gained greater confidence with regards to my conversational skills. Seriously, they used to be so bad. But now I'm able to sustain a conversation for more than two minutes. Quality improvement, folks. I still have a long way to go, but it's going.
--I had three papers due in a matter of two weeks and midterms to grade on top of that (midterms consume 20 hours of my week, by the way). But I planned ahead, and was able to not write any of those papers the night before. I'm gaining a greater testimony with regards to planning ahead. It's really phenomenal.

So I'm pretty much done. This semester was busy but happy, and I think I'm allowed to be content with the way I handled certain situations.
Confidence, folks. Can you feel it grow and blossom inside of you? Wonderful, isn't it? Choosing to be confident and letting it show. (But hopefully it never turns into arrogance.)

Temporizing and Modernist Architecture

Last week, I anticipated this week being crazy busy. Two major research papers, one minor paper, and 32 midterms to grade. So I went ahead and cranked out my two major papers that were due this week. It's really cleared up my schedule. Either that or I've already written them, and now it takes a huge amount of self motivation to go back and read through them to edit and organize them, and I just don't want to. It takes so much to get me to edit one of my own papers. It's a weird thing; I love editing papers that aren't mine, but I hate rereading what I've written. Unless it's been months or years, then I don't mind.

So, in an effort to temporize even more, I thought I would blog about something we discussed in Modern Art today. We were talking about the Bauhaus and the new aesthetic--that sleek, reduced aesthetic that consists of basic shapes and form stripped to the bare minimum. I love this modernist architecture. It's just so clean to me and reduced; it's simplicity at its greatest refinement, and I yearn to live in a house like that.

German Pavilion, built for the 1929 Barcelona World Fair

My professor asked who would like to live in this house, and the majority raised their hand. He then asked those who didn't raise their hand why they wouldn't want to live in a place like this. The answers were varied. It didn't seem practical, what was its use, it's an empty monument to modernist architecture, etc. And my professor agreed with them to an extent, claiming that there was no storage space in a place like this and that its practicality was questionable. 

But I disagree with them on so many levels. 

Yes, the Bauhaus sought to integrate art with technology to establish a new machine aesthetic. But to me, I see it somewhat differently. It's simple and reduced, the way I want my life to be. Sometimes there seems to be such a push to have and have and have the latest and greatest or just the accoutrements that accompany a typical, material life. But I don't want that. I want reduction, I want simplicity, I want the bare minimum. Who needs storage space when all you have is what you absolutely need? Why wouldn't this seem practical? Taking your life and stripping it to just the furniture and accessories that you need to function is to me extremely practical.  

I get so drowned by this push to have little sculptures or decorative asides in my house. I see these magazine with amazing color schemes and colorful pillows that adorn a couch with paintings on the wall and vases and figurines and lamps and decorative books (which I have a problem with to begin with, but that's another story), and it's all so beautiful. But at the same time, it's all so much. Who needs those vases and figurines; why not have one or two pillows instead of six? And above all, read those books. Don't use them to achieve greater aestheticism in your living room. 

I am definitely guilty of this myself. I don't pretend otherwise. I have vases and glass bottles in my home; stacks of books, paintings on my wall, and piles of paper. But I want greater simplicity in my life. With all of its hustle and bustle and constant push to keep busy, I want a place free of clutter, commotion, and chaos, a sleek and calm reprieve. And to me, this is the ultimate functionality of the home I wish to have. 

I stand by my desire to live in a place similar to the German Pavilion.  

I just want to put this out there:

Does anyone else think it's weird that people take selfies/any sort of picture at all in bathrooms?

I don't know about you, but a camera is the last thing I want near a bathroom. For multiple reasons.

I just think it's weird.*

*The opinions expressed in this blogpost are solely those of the writer herself, and she thinks it's just plain weird. 

My Kind of Feminism

“It is too easy to allow traditional definitions of power to diminish women’s achievements as they have similarly limited women’s opportunities.”

“That women often play different roles at different stages of their lives is one fact I hope this book illumines.”

“We have wrongly measured women’s productivity in the world by male stages of life.”

"That women must keep on responding to the same problems involving their either/or roles as mothers and workers at different times, in different imaginative ways, must become an accepted reality until institutions change. What we have to understand more adequately are the many ways women have of asserting their own values when they are not included in traditional power structures, and how they often attempt to change things when they are."

Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More

There are some nights....

...where I find it near impossible to do homework. Granted, these nights do not come all that often. But they sometimes come.

Tonight is one of those nights.

In other news, I found this little gem browsing through my pictures on my computer today.

This is just so true for me. 

I actually found several gems browsing through my old images. I'll have to do a blog post titled "My College Career as Seen from the Pictures Downloaded on my Computer." 

Or something. It's a working title.