Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

Okay, so here I give back to the Internet, but this is more of an apology to Krystian because this took longer than I meant it to be. I thought I'd do this with my 10-year-old niece when she was visiting, but it took a lot longer than I thought. It started simply enough with three dollar store toys--two deer and a polar bear. The polar bear split nicely in two with a little effort and a pair of scissors.           Once the bears were split, that's when things got hard mostly because my first kind of spray paint never seemed to dry in the Houston humidity. So maybe not the primer and paint in one for this. Then, after much shame, I just got the regular kind , which worked great. Or maybe it's just better drying outside than in the garage. Anyway, about a month of neglect later, I spray-painted the things, but it was okay because in that time our neighbors had replaced their fence! This means SCRAP WOOD! Just what I had been looking for. ...

I've been doing a lot of DIY lately because Summer I now own a house I am cheap Because of this, I spend a lot of time Googling and Pinterest-searching DIY projects that I think ought to exist. Usually they do. Sometimes they don't. When they don't I have to do my darnest to make it up. Now, while I'm waiting for some wood glue to dry, I've decided it's time to give back to the Internet. I don't think anyone is going to find these, but they might. So first project came because I found some awesome vintage style posters, but then when I looked up poster hangers, you get something like this . Look, you don't have to follow the link, I'll tell you: Includes: • Two 29" half round oak dowels • Pre-attached cord and nail for hanging • Easy-peel adhesive for mounting your favorite Cavallini wrap • Mounting instructions And it's $15. Plus $7 shipping. F-H-no! They are charging you $15 for DOWELS! quarter-inch mold...

Well, we guessed wrong. The only questions were whether it would a close election or a landslide, and whether Trump would concede, and what to do with the angry people when he didn't concede, and how Clinton would start a presidency with such ill will. We didn't anticipate this. We didn't, in fact, a Trump candidacy. I feel as though the whole nation is now as blindsided as the GOP was when Trump starting picking off establishment Republicans from Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz (man, did I just write Cruz was establishment? weird...). How could we not have seen this coming? The "it" book of the political season Hillbilly Elegy is part biography, part political commentary and does a good deal to describe the hidden America of migrants from Appalachia who settled into the steel towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania, then got lost as a changing economy made it impossible to get a good-paying job without a college degree. The book is lauded from across the political spectrum as ...

The following is the talk I wrote for church last week. I stayed up until 1 am because I got so excited to write it. It's called Simple and Powerful Discipleship, but I like to call it, "You don't have to become a martyr to be a saint." I’m Mary Hedengren Perez and my husband Krystian and I moved into the ward just a couple of months ago. He spoke last month. I serve as Primary secretary and Krystian works with the Priests and Cub Scouts. We were extremely grateful to receive these callings because, due to a series of unusual circumstances, we had gone the nearly 4 months since we were married without callings in the church. This disappointed us because we were looking forward to serving in a family ward. We certainly had “real callings” in our singles ward, but we were eager to widen the range of our service. We speculated endlessly, wondering whether we would serve the youth, the children or even the babies. We spoke with friends of...

Every year, the American Library Association promotes Banned Books Week, which tricks kids into reading literature under the guise of being rebellious. I'm not saying this as a criticism. I, myself taught one of a dozen sections of Banned Books and Novel Ideas at my old university, helping students fulfill a fine arts credit and feel like a literary bad-asses. But, looking around at my colleagues' syllabi, I realized that everything has been banned and nothing was. There were books, certainly, like Harry Potter, that had been banned by some fundamental evangelical librarian in some small town in Ohio, and there had been works that have been "soft banned," like when South Carolina's House of Representatives tried to cut funding because Fun House , a graphic novel about coming of age as a young lesbian was required reading for incoming freshmen, but outright bans have been rare in this country. I ended up taking an international approach with my reading list, look...

Some people like to work on one project at a time, seeing it through to completion and then starting the next one. While focusing on one thing at a time can be an effective way to work, there are many advantages to thinking about your writing as a funnel: ______________________________ (here's all the ideas for projects you have)    _________________________ (here are the projects you're collecting research on)          ___________________ (here are the projects you're drafting)                 ___________ (here are the projects you're revising)                          ___ (here are the projects you're submitting) One nice thing about the funnel is that when you submit, you can always turn your attention to the revisions you need to make for the next thing, which keeps you from agonizing about the article or chapter you just sen...

Environment There are a lot of people who will tell you can you (read: they) can only write in the ideal place: quiet, surrounded by books, often in an oak-and-leather study with filtered afternoon light. Sounds great, but that's not the only place that can be effective for you. Stacey Pigg (2014) found that one of the great unteachable skills for undergraduate writers is  learning where you personally can focus . Because you can be so flexible as a graduate student, you're fortunate to have a wide range of options: coffee shops, libraries, home, etc. Try a couple of these and find what works best for you. But also recognize that  just as there are different kinds of writing, there are different kinds of writing environments . For example, I'm sitting at the reception desk of Austin Pets Alive! which is a noisy place where I'm frequently interrupted; it's a bad place for be to do the sustained, focused- writing on a book chapter, but it's great for gramma...