Nancy's Musings

My first boyfriend called me "ice bitch" because I made decisions about him with the part of my brain that calculates and anticipates, and not the part of my brain that indulges in pointless pleasures (these two brain halves have since married and had lots of little halfling babies all of which deeply enjoy the kinds of pleasures that mostly require hard work).  As a thinker and decision-maker, I rely heavily on instinct but never on emotion. Instinct consumes all the data I can feed it and in gratitude hones my superpower. Emotion gets really really bored and flips on my brain-media (basically any sound, image, or story retained by my capacious memory). It's the couch-potato of brain functions. So a thing is happening in my life. I like to include my couch-potato brain in everything I do because it clearly needs a bit of exercise. I mean, jumping to conclusions gets her off the couch, but she can't maintain it long enough for the real cardiovascular benefits. So I...

Everyone, from my parents to my roommates, tells me that I should be looking to date a professor, or "someone smart, like me." Even on this blog I've agonized over "settling" for someone non-academic, though I'm not sure I used those words. Lately, though, I've been rethinking this stance. I might prefer dating an academic (I haven't tried it since I dated a maths professor when I was an undergraduate) because he would have a much better understanding of the horrors I face every day. He would understand teaching, tenure, publishing, infighting, exhaustion, and twenty other minor imps with their torches under my feet. He would understand the words that I use. I don't speak "normal" anymore. I don't interface with average. I can dream of marrying a professor and we can have a cozy little red brick aca-home with the giant library and original wood floors. I can fantasize about evenings in front of the telly, our mutual piles of gradin...

The Universe breathes. Whatever inverted Mobius-donut shape you can hold in your brain, it expands and contracts, filling with light, space, time. . . Everything inside it moves. Everything from the swing of planets, flung by centripedal gravity in wild arcs through dust and clouds, to the Brownian motion of electrons warmed by the glance of a fusion sun. Imagine your body, flung, dropped, Jubal-Early'd into a void. The most frightening sight is also the most comforting: your Earth. Is it close enough to pull you into its fiery embrace? Far enough to being passing on its way around Sol, leaving you behind? Are you gliding like ice dancers, pulling each-other into orbits? You never thought, but the black is full of color. Your naked eyes see the milky way not in shimmering silver sequins, but a spill of Christmas glitter, and not on black velvet, but on a thousand clashing shadows that now bend to catch the light and toss it carelessly, and now swallow it angrily. And you have never...

I live in an anxious/depressive personality, and under the kinds of pressures in my current life it means I have one or two classic symptoms, including persistent thoughts of self-harm. Self harm can come from a number of mental places, and can manifest in different ways. In my case, it mostly comes from the emotional pain of loneliness and feelings of abandonment, coupled with persistent failure and self-consciousness. So far, lately, I have fully resisted the urge to self-harm. (Yay!) This website includes a pretty comprehensive list of causes, for other people who also experience this pathology. I went online to find some coping strategies, and they mostly involve phonecalls to hotlines and bootstrap mood levitation.                   Hotlines are an essential resource for a certain range of emotional and mental difficulties. Mental health professionals also work really well for anyone who can manage to convince them that something is actually wrong. I have tried a handful of times...

For good reasons, I never studied journalism. I have no capacity to anticipate reader interest. It's a flaw in my fiction as well. So I suspect this is a non-story. Fortunately, it's also a personal blog. Something has been happening to me fairly often lately, and I wanted to express my frustration about it. I keep getting 'splained. 'splaining is short for "mansplaining" - shortened because it's not always men who do it. When a person proceeds to offer a personal lecture on a subject with which you are already very familiar, he or she is 'splaining. I suspect that 'splaining is another symptom of over-education, especially with people who are accustomed to needing to explain everything all the time because they have become experts in a field so specialized that nobody really cares. 'Splainers don't even think about it anymore; they just assume you don't know anything and proceed to enlighten you. Particularly pernicious, mansplaining i...

So there's this thing going on in Mormondom. So our lesson in Relief Society yesterday was this . So something occurred to me when I glanced at the words, " Every act or ordinance performed in the Church is done under the direct or indirect authorization of one holding the keys for that function." Many other key phrases, sentences, and whole paragraphs reiterate the basic belief that although our leadership is organized into a rather complex hierarchy, leadership is not superiority. And as we discussed it, I realized that few or none of the other women understood the academic teachings our lesson flatly refuted. They talked rather about where to seek answers, than how to approach the source of a question. But the magnitude of this incredible doctrine is lost without a clear comparison between what we say, and what they say.  What my sisters didn't need to understand to grasp the doctrine was Structural Sexism. If you look at the hierarchy of the church, it is a clear...

If a woman speaks and nobody listens, does she have a voice? I am often concerned and frustrated by the (ill-conceived, in my opinion) strategies of feminist movements like Ordain Women who seem to wish to undermine faith, priesthood, and "established" (quotation marks brought to you by Becky) patterns of revelation. I react to that frustration by encouraging people to listen to what these women are trying to say, rather than trying to shout them down: I can't hear with all that shouting. They're saying a lot of things, some of them contradictory (as befits the feminist movements generally). But a common thread is that women are feeling that they are not being given a voice. Whether they are actually given a voice in church leadership is up for some debate, but it doesn't change the truth that women feel like they are being silenced. And we are, though not necessarily in this context. I realized something last night while praying to a male God. I realized that wh...