The Lists that Govern my Life

I was feeling pretty good at 7 months pregnant. Which was the last time I posted on this blog. I had no idea how hard that final 1.5 months of pregnancy would be. About halfway through September, I finished an easy 5 mile run only to find myself crumpled on the ground afterwards, immobilized by intense pelvic pain. I cried and unable to stand, army crawled to our bedroom, where the pain subsided after about 45 minutes. This incident marked the beginning of the end of running while pregnant. I tried a few more short runs, but I could feel that same pain coming back and decided it was not in the cards to run all the way until my labor day. I had logically known I probably wouldn’t run my entire pregnancy, but emotionally it was a hard blow for me to stop with still weeks to go. Thus began the most difficult part of pregnancy for me. I know running is just one thing that I do , but stopping running after running pretty much every day for the past 15 years felt like losing a big part of wh...

I am just over seven months pregnant and alternatively panic between worrying I don’t look pregnant enough or that I look too pregnant.  I kind of expected pregnancy to be awful--to feel tired and nauseous and uncomfortable for nine months. SURPRISE pregnancy has been generally kind to me. I mean, it’s definitely not my ideal state of being, but it hasn’t been the worst.  During my first trimester, I was in bed by 9pm (which is basically my dream life anyways), I had a week where I REALLY wanted hash browns/potatoes all the time, and I was able to keep running about 25 miles a week. The worst part was increasing sweating, which led to uncomfy heat rashes that haven’t really gone away but a dermatologist assured me they would after the baby comes. During the second trimester, I kept running the same amount despite rising humidity until that was rudely interrupted by a mild case of mono and I took a short break. Though I had a killer sore throat for a week, the mono turned out t...

I’m continuing to document my journey through graduate school ( click here for year 3 , year 2 , or year 1 if you missed them ), and this past year was an unusual one! Yes, that’s right, I’ve made it through four years of graduate school and I’ve still got more to go. At the beginning of the pandemic, I admit I didn’t mind the initial switch to all online classes so much. It added more flexibility to scheduling, and let’s be honest here--sometimes I just really appreciated not having to put on real pants or leave my house. At the end of this year though, I am looking forward to slowly getting accustomed to leaving my house again and seeing people as more than little boxes on Zoom. For a year that often felt like a black hole, a lot happened.  I spent last summer taking an intensive Hungarian course, reading a million books for my PhD qualifying exams in the fall, and moving into our new house. I entered the fall feeling a bit drained. I took my qualifying exams (known as “quals”) ...

It's been 50 weeks since the the US began shutting down due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Dallin and I went out to eat on a Saturday and then two days later all restaurants in Bloomington closed for the foreseeable future. We cancelled a weekend trip to Chicago with the expectation that "things might be better in a couple weeks." We had just sent out most of our wedding invites for a May celebration and were still somewhat optimistic we'd be able to party with friends and family as planned. The only accurate foresight I had was the sinking feeling I wouldn't get to spend the summer in Austria with Dallin teaching on a study abroad.  COVID-19 has disrupted our lives and turned them upside down. Many of us have lost loved ones, or know those who have lost loved ones, or have dealt with other devastating health consequences. We have all had to deal with cancelled plans, lost experiences, and adjusted expectations.  On top of those, we've encountered days, weeks, ...

I moved to Bloomington just over three years ago to start a graduate program in Germanic Studies. I want to say I was excited and optimistic, but in reality, I was mostly terrified. Though I had a break for a church mission in Germany, I’d spent five truly wonderful years in Provo, Utah, going to school and then working.  My time in Provo had not always been easy, but it was where I felt I became a real adult. It was the first place where I’d felt deep loneliness, where I sought God behind apartment complexes when I felt too socially awkward to make new friends. It was also the first place I’d learned what it felt like to be part of a community, to understand what it meant that we all belonged to the family of God. It was where my faith faltered and then grew and continued to change in unexpected ways. It was where I encountered people and ideas that challenged my previous perceptions of the world. Provo had become a social, emotional, and spiritual home for me. A place that made m...

The Other and Another: Learning to Recognize and Embrace Difference From Paige Payne I was introduced to the term Othering as an undergraduate in a history class. Ironically, I can’t remember which history class, but I was obsessed with the concept. Did I learn about Othering while discussing Japanese internment camps as a freshman and visiting one in Delta, Utah? Or was it looking at pictures of Huns and noticing how subhuman they looked? Was it talking about Jewish pogroms throughout Europe? About the Holocaust? About the physically and mentally disabled who were sterilized and killed under the rise of Nazis? Was it learning about slavery? Was it learning about colonialism?  Othering refers to marking an individual or group as irreconcilably different and then perceiving and treating them as inferior or as an outsider. Othering is what drew me to classes about American slavery and Modern African history as I struggled to make sense of how people could have...

I did a reflective post after each of my first two years of grad school ( Year One Done and Year Two Through ), so even if I'm a little late, I thought I'd document a Year Three, in Love as Could Be . I've included some journal quotes for your enjoyment, marked in quotes. After spending last summer in Utah teaching a German term course at BYU ( which I LOVED ) and trying to get over a difficult breakup ( which SUCKED ), I returned to Indiana not sure what to expect for this third year in Bloomington. A lot of what happened this year was shaped by an encounter with a new IU graduate student. I showed up to church on the first Sunday in September and after seeing this new guy, I introduced myself. His name was Dallin (which he told me was a very Mormon name, and for the first time in my life I realized Dallin was indeed a pretty Mormon name). We spent the next two and half hours making bad puns, talking about how we were both Ravenclaws, talking about our grad programs in...