Girl Power?

It's Women's Conference.  Ugggghhhhhhh.

For those of you who don't know what that is, I'll break it down.

Women's Conference is when a flood of females (the majority being middle-aged) flock to BYU campus and geek out for two days while listening to speakers, going to classes, bogging up traffic, and ignoring the red hand on the crosswalk signs.  They leave with a new found sense of pride in the fact that they have vaginas...or two X chromosomes...or maybe just a duplicate copy of a DAX1 gene..or some other way of identifying as cis-females.  That's all I really know.  I've never actually been to it, so admittedly I'm not an expert.

I had a moment of true embarrassment for my gender when I was walking through a sports building and there was a sign taped to the wall that said: "Women's Conference: This is a men's locker room.  This is NOT a bathroom" right next to the "Men's Locker Room" sign by the door.

Seriously?  They need a sign telling them an entrance is leading to a men's locker room literally next to the men's locker room sign.

How many times did this mix-up occur that it warranted this redundant sign?

I don't really want to know.

Rainy Days and Mondays

Sometimes I will start out a post by apologizing to cyberspace for my absence.  Then, I think, "mmm....better not."

I think apologizing is a lovely art--don't get me wrong.  The world would be a better place if we could learn how to genuinely say sorry to people we may have hurt.  I also think there's a point where apologizing goes too far.  I find myself throwing sorry around like my clothes after a long day.  Do I actually fold those clothes and put them away? No.  I throw them in the general vicinity of my laundry hamper with the intent of actually thinking about them later.  It would be better if I were more intentional with my language than that.  I think this attitude is where the "sorry not sorry"  phrase originated.  People realized, "hey, I'm not actually sorry," so I'm not going to lie that I am. However, the lack the confidence to own it, so they apologize for the lack of something they "should" feel.

Ah.  There's that word.  Should.  Can we retire this word please?  Should statements are the worst.  Just the worst.  Don't use them.

I had an experience the other day.  It wasn't the best of days.  I watched too much Netflix, ate too much candy, spent too much time inside, and my dedicated productive hours became royally unproductive (four hours of PCR down the drain...)

I can be a lazy person, but I loathe feeling lazy.  One direction I could go with this is to label myself as lazy and then hate myself and then become more lazy the next day and then hate myself.  (Does anyone else do this??)

The point is that this day I didn't.  I had a bad day.  And the next day I showed myself some self love and positive thinking, and moved on.  Sometimes I think we think of progress in a very Alcoholics Anonymous kind of way.  The way that counts each day of success (1 week sober, 2 months sober, etc.) and starts over at one failure.  (I'm not meaning to knock AA; I think it's a beautiful program that helps a lot of people.)  This may work for addiction recovery, but I don't think one day of failure undoes days or weeks or years of successes.  I don't subscribe to the notion of "starting back at square one."

Rather, I believe in collecting successes and holding on to them like bullets to destroy any feelings of self-doubt or dejection that come along with the failures that life deals out.

Love life. Love yourself.  Love others.  And with age and experience, I'm getting better at this.  That's the message.

Dear Blog, It's Me, Tanya

Once upon a time I used to write on this blog.  And I had tons of fans.  [Okay, it was just my mom, but it still felt pretty great.]

Then I felt I ran out of ideas.  So I stopped writing.

Then I lived more life and had more ideas and made the brave (read=narcissistic) decision to put them on the internets.  So here's to a bright and bloggy future!

My life in a nutshell the past couple of months:

--I've been learning how to become a master of developmental biology.  Science can be very slow and confusing sometimes, but I think it's what I still want to do.  My back-up plan is to be a professional hippie.  (But hippies don't have 401K plans, so...)
--I've become really concerned with what it means to be a woman and be perceived as a woman (vs. a girl).  I'm really into owning my adulthood.  Yet, I still need to pay my taxes.  Gross.
--I started ballroom dancing again!  Because I love it. And I just wanted to.  It's okay to not be the world's greatest at the hobby you enjoy.
--I found some great friends and have had some great conversations.
--And I've had some thoughts on occasion.

Well, there you have it!

To be continued...