Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

The Adriatic Sea: The Closest I've Come to Croatia At the risk of sounding like an insufferable hipster, I've liked Croatia before it was cool. Heck, I liked Croatia when it was still Yugoslavia. Maybe it was that hottie Goran Visnjic as Dr. Kovac in ER or adolescent fascination with war-torn countries, but I fantasized about the turn-of-the-century glamour of pre-WWI resorts on the Croatian coast, and the fringes of both the Ottoman and Roman empires, and the melting pot of Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim culture. I got a Croatian dictionary for Christmas once and tried my best to leverage my junior-high Russian into self-learning the Croatian language. I didn't grow out of loving Yugoslavia. I watched depressing subtitled films. My undergraduate thesis was on a late-20th century Slovenian war poet. In graduate school, I had to appeal to both my own department and the Slavic department to take a credit/non-credit spot in an undergraduate class where I finally got to stu...

Literally this entire post is spoilers. There.   There are many things that can cause disappointment in a horror movie. Cheesy acting. Gross-out cheap thrills. Bad special effects. But the one that always slays me (no pun intended) is when a movie is saying really interesting things and then falls completely apart in the last ten minutes, not because the monster looks disappointing to what you imagined (they often do), but because of a lack of thematic consistency. A good horror movie is always about the monsters that we experience in real life as much as those that lurk on screen; great horror movie finishes the job it started with some internal consistency. Here are three horror movies that really stuck the landing, in no particular order, chosen at more-or-less random from my Saturday morning nap. I could have found others, but these sprung to mind as having particularly satisfying endings: Night of the Living Dead Theme: The individual, no matter how competent, is no ma...

[This movie poster is misleading, because there's far more naked ugly ladies and goats and other early Colonial goosebumps and (fun fact!) the dialogue comes from actual transcripts of witch hunts!] One of the most spiritually meaningful R-sie movies about Colonial America I ever saw was The Witch , or as I like to call it The VVitch . All kinds of spoilers here that don't matter to the enjoyment of the film, but the general plot is that a family, exiled from the settlement, because of their father's heterodox ideas, finds themselves on the edge of a dark forest. A literal witch literally steals and literally eats their baby, which is bad news all the time, but this dumb family blames their teenage daughter, who does regular teenagery things like tries to scare her annoying siblings. But everything she's done becomes interpreted as witchcraft and one-by-one everyone in her family begins to turn against her.  But the main thing is that everyone --total spoiler--die...

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...