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From Silence to Strength: The Rise of Women’s Voices Globally

Women fighting for their voices worldwide has created one of the most revolutionary movements of contemporary times. Through their efforts to destroy political and business barriers women have started to challenge normative institutions as they assert their power while transforming every sphere of society. This transition from being silent to taking strength serves dual purposes by empowering women while establishing a future society that values equal contribution between men and women.

Breaking Barriers in Leadership

Women are now filling leadership positions more frequently to diminish the historical gender inequality in decision-making positions. Mongolia along with other countries has implemented higher minimum requirements for female candidates in political positions and corporate entities worldwide focus on achieving gender balance in their executive leadership teams. Women leaders introduce distinctive viewpoints which typically focus on teamwork and full inclusion and sustainable development over time. Women leaders create better results in addition to motivating younger generations to overcome social barriers and achieve higher goals.

Economic Empowerment

Gender equality needs economic empowerment to fuel its international progressive advancement. The workforce participation of women has expanded substantially while multiple obstacles continue to exist. Women receive an average of 20% less pay than men across the world and they account for greater numbers in informal job sectors. The gaps between genders are being addressed through gender-responsive financing together with investments in care systems. Through educational programs and financial assistance and entrepreneurship support women can establish businesses which enables them to sustain families and create economic development.

Education as a Catalyst

Education stands as the most influential instrument that strengthens women’s ability to express themselves. Millions of women have gained access to careers along with innovation and social leadership opportunities through expanded educational opportunities during the past decades. Women in low-income areas continue to face education barriers because poverty and cultural traditions limit their school access. Government entities together with organizations work to resolve these challenges by providing scholarships and community-oriented projects and technological platforms for e-learning.

Advocacy Against Violence

Advocacy Against Violence

The worldwide empowerment of women depends significantly on the elimination of violence which they experience. Gender-based violence continues to be widespread since it affects millions of women throughout each year. Feminist organizations together with advocacy groups maintain continuous efforts to fight violence against women through their work for improved legislation and survivor support programs and awareness initiatives. Through the #MeToo movement women worldwide acquired a strengthened voice to step forward and pursue justice.

Amplifying Voices Through Technology

Women have discovered technology as their strong partner for raising their voices. Through social media women can publish their experiences while building connections with others who support their activism efforts across the world. Digital tools give people access to education alongside entrepreneurship prospects and activism even if they were impossible before digitalization. Female entrepreneurs use online crowdfunding platforms to obtain funding which supports their innovative projects that disrupt established business industries.

A United Movement

The worldwide growth of women’s voices reaches its peak point through coordinated community initiatives. Feminist organizations from around the world unite to solve major systemic problems by using cross-disciplinary solutions for poverty reduction and inequality elimination and climate change mitigation. Through united action across national and cultural boundaries these efforts demonstrate how collaborative work results in true systematic improvement.

Conclusion

The worldwide increase of women speaking up has remodeled social systems while establishing ways toward gender equality. Women have begun to dominate every domain through their leadership positions while building economic power and launching educational programs and fighting violence and leveraging technology to establish themselves as change agents. The future of 2025 and beyond will produce highly accelerated social progress through investments in women’s voices while simultaneously building an inclusive society that embraces equality for everyone.

The 6 emotional stages of creating a Target wedding registry

Ignore the tackiness of my talking about my gift list on the internet. Apparently Target and Amazon give new couples 15-20% off anything that doesn’t get purchased from their registries. Several friends have told me that, even if we don’t think anybody will purchase certain items as gifts, we should still register for them if we think there’s a chance we’ll buy them ourselves after the wedding. (Workin’ the system.)

The past week has been CRAZY BUSY with wedding stuff. Andrew and I went apartment hunting, got our engagement pictures taken, AND crossed an item off my bucket list: creating a wedding registry at Target. Oh, and NO BIG DEAL—today I also said yes to a dress! But back to the topic at hand.

Pretty much every time we’ve ever gone to Target, I’ve turned to Andrew at least once and said swooningly, “Wouldn’t it be fun to create a wedding registry!?” (To which he was always like, “Yes, Kate.”) But until this past Saturday, I never actually got to do it.

The mug I’m sippin’ on as I handwrite another blog post #cubitaltunnel

It should be known, of course, that even though I’d never created a registry before, I did have excessive experience in walking through Target, admiring items, envisioning how they’d look in the imaginary future home I might one day share with my imaginary future husband.

This is what Target does so well—because it is run by veritable marketing geniuses (notice I didn’t say PR geniuses): It gives you a glimpse of the life you could have. You could be the type of hostess who has gold bakeware exclusively for the fall season or the type of homemaker who puts her feet up on a crocheted pouf while a robot vacuum cleans her floors. This is all available to you at Target. And on Saturday, it was all available to me.

Stage 1: Excitement

Before we head to the store, I try on at least three shirts before deciding to go with full-on exercise clothes and running shoes. This is a marathon after all.

For this reason, the obvious first stage of registering, which starts days before we get to the store, is excitement—nay, fantasy. I stay up late scouring Pinterest for registry guidelines and texting my mom about her houseware recommendations. Even Andrew repeatedly expresses his eager anticipation of the day. A sense of euphoria overcomes us as we consider the possibilities.

Stage 2: Dread

The euphoria is short-lived, however, ending just about when Andrew and I arrive in the Target parking lot. Now faced with the very possibilities that once sounded so exciting, we suddenly become aware of just how much decision-making is going to be involved in the day. I am filled with dread as I anticipate the overanalysis and arguments just waiting to happen. Registering for a wedding at Target has got to be like the IKEA test on steroids.

We stop by the customer service counter and pick up the red iPhone used to scan barcodes and then gird our loins by getting caffeine at the Starbucks in the entrance to the store. “And give me whichever Kind bar has the most protein,” I say to the lady behind the counter. I’m going to need it.

This sense of dread is probably also somehow manufactured by the Target consumer experience geniuses because, look, it just got us to spend $11 on coffee and granola bars.

Stage 3: Overanalysis

As Andrew and I make our way from Starbucks to the apparent starting point for registering, the Crockpot aisle, I say, “You’re walking too quickly.”

“Are we going to register for shampoo?” he asks, motioning toward the aisles he was passing “too quickly.”

Andrew demonstrating excellent registry form

“No,” I say, “But they have, like, mirrors over there. We have to consider everything.”

Consider everything: the mantra of the inexperienced register-er. I am now doing the very overanalysis I feared I would do, and we’re not even to the Crockpot aisle yet.

I rule out mirrors, and we proceed. One cute thing about Andrew is how much he loves Crockpots, so I let him do the thinking in the first aisle. He scans our first registry item with the red iPhone: a programmable Crockpot.

We round the corner into the coffeemaker aisle. A coffeemaker is a top priority for me because right now I use my roommate’s every day. We are greeted by approximately 37 coffeemakers from which to choose. Do we want 12-cup? Filterless? The fancy, expensive Ninja kind that might be fun but also might be crazy to register for? We choose one in the middle and register for it. Andrew says it’s a good brand.

“Let me just check the reviews,” I say. Terrible. We un-register for it and select another.

On to the blenders. “Maybe you should text your mom,” I say to Andrew as both of us stare at a row of ostensibly identical blenders. “She has a blender.”

The paradox of choice

So many questions run through my mind: What’s a good blender? What’s a good blender price? Will we really use a blender? What will we blend? Where would we store the blender? How would we clean the blender? 

“Or maybe we should read some reviews,” I offer.

“We can’t read reviews about everything,” Andrew says. He is right—we got three aisles in before realizing that if we read reviews of everything, we will be inside of this Target until death do us part. We skip the blender.

Stage 4: Bickering

Because we cannot continue to research everything, I decide on a new mantra to help me make decisions faster: WWJD? Except Joanna, not Jesus. What would Joanna Gaines do? Would Joanna Gaines register for the teal hand mixer? NO, JOANNA GAINES WOULD REGISTER FOR THE WHITE MIXER. I put the white mixer on the registry.

One aisle later, Andrew speaks up. We are examining Dutch ovens, which I saw on many a must-register-for lists.

There’s a reason Target uses the white one in the ads

“Let’s do the red one,” Andrew says easily, as if choosing a Dutch oven color is not a major life decision.

“I like the gray,” I say, loyal to Joanna.

“Gray is so boring,” Andrew says. “The red is on sale.”

“The gray is also on sale,” I point out.

“I’m just worried everything in our kitchen is going to be gray and white,” he says.

These are fighting words.

“When we know where we’re living and what our apartment looks like, we can return the white things for the color we want to go with, but until we know, we need to get white,” I say. “Maybe we’ll want to do red. Maybe we’ll want to do French blue. I don’t know yet, but white and gray will go with both.”

He reluctantly scans the barcode for the gray one.

The tension is growing as we turn our attentions to the cooking and baking tools against the back wall of the kitchen department. I am examining measuring spoons, and he is sidling farther away from me, already looking at graters.

The utensil wing of Target

“I feel like you are annoyed at how long I am taking,” I say, “when you move down the aisle without me.”

I anticipate annoyance from him, but he returns to my side to listen to my thoughts about measuring spoons. We register for mostly KitchenAid spoons and spatulas, then delete them all and register for OXO ones instead. This is the life of the register-er.

We turn into the silverware aisle, and I squat down to examine the subtle differences in handle design.

“I don’t know much about choosing silverware, except that apparently weight is important. Like, the heavier it is, the fancier it is. … There’s no way to tell how heavy these are,” I say, trying to tug a single spoon away from its companions inside the box. “But I do like this one,” I say, lifting the box of Oneida utensils.

Small fork, trying to be different

“The small forks are weird,” Andrew says, standing above me. “And I will only use small forks.” Who knew my weightlifting fiancé eats his 4,000 daily calories with only the small forks? I put the silverware back. The small forks were kind of weird.

“Maybe we should just get silverware on Amazon,” I say. “Then we can read people’s reviews about how heavy it is.”

“I do not think people will comment on how heavy the silverware is,” Andrew says, showing his lack of Amazon experience.

Having abandoned hopes of choosing silverware, we progress through the bakeware aisles quickly. I just register for everything my mom has. In the towels and potholders aisle, I unsuccessfully try to convince Andrew that he needs an apron for Thanksgiving. We register for all gray everything and make our way to the dishes.

Just add chili

I already know the dishes I like because I’ve admired them ever since they were released: the Threshold beaded porcelain plate set. I picture my friends sitting in my imaginary future home, eating chili from the beaded bowls. We are so cozy and quaint. I show the beaded plate set to Andrew.

“Yeah, I don’t like those. Sorry, babe,” he says.

“You really dislike them? Or they’re just not what you would pick?” I ask.

“I really don’t like them,” he says.

“Okay, that’s okay. We can get the plain white ones,” I say, being a really good human.

I swallow my hopes and dreams as we round the corner into the plastic dishware aisle.

“These plastic dishes almost seem too nice,” Andrew says, lifting a blue plate, already having forgotten the beautiful plates we left behind. “Can you imagine yourself eating frozen pizza off this?”

Is this a trick question? I will eat pizza off any plate on which you hand it to me.

Stage 5: Ascent

“Andrew,” I say, “I can’t stop thinking about the beaded plates.” My good human-ness has lasted for approximately half an aisle. “I’ve admired them for years.” I want to concede, truly, but WHAT ARE CHILI PARTIES WITHOUT BEADED PLATES?

“Why didn’t you say so?” Andrew exclaims, being an actual good human, and thus beginning his ascent to the final stage of registering. He wraps massive arms around me (seriously, how did he get so big eating with only small forks?) and whispers into my ear: “Get the plates.”

My heart wells up, full of love for those plates. Just kidding. FOR THE MAN.

Leaving kitchenwares and heading toward bedding

I know you’re not supposed to keep score in love and marriage, but at this point, he has conceded on the Dutch oven, the color scheme of everything we’ve purchased, and the plates. I have conceded on the grater, which I thought we didn’t need and he thought we did. So I think he’s winning. By which I mean, I’m winning. Like I said, we’re not keeping score here.

Having completed the first major leg of our marathon, the front of the store, we now head to the bedding section. We are going to keep his queen-sized mattress, which means my beloved current crushed-white-linen full-sized duvet cover will not fit.

“Okay, you pick your favorite, and I will pick my favorite, and then we’ll show them to each other,” I say.

We both peruse the aisle. I stop to read the labels on only the white and gray ones because I am nothing if not consistent. “Do you have yours picked?” I say, having chosen my favorite, which is—surprise, surprise—a white linen duvet cover, but queen-sized!

Decisions, decisions

“Yes, this one,” Andrew says, pointing to a bedspread that has stripes made of faint patterns of pale blues, oranges, and browns. It’s fine (hard to go wrong with Threshold), but it’s not something I would pick.

I tally our concessions, knowing my turn to give something up for his sake is long overdue. But we need our bedroom to feel like a European spa! Also a rustic farmhouse! Both are achievable with crushed white linen. “Is it okay if we don’t get that one?” I say, ignoring my turn.

“Yeah, I didn’t mean we have to get it, just that it’s my favorite. You asked me what my favorite is,” Andrew says, being MY ACTUAL FAVORITE. “We can get yours.”

We register for the white linen. I have never been so in love with this man.

“I’m really hungry,” Andrew says. Being selfless and amazing burns a lot of calories.

“We’re almost done,” I say. This is not strictly true. We are probably 30% of the way through the register-able sections of the store. “I’ll move quickly. Let’s just finish the housewares, and then we can go eat.”

Stage 6: Nirvana

At this point, my starving, selfless fiancé reaches the highest stage of registering at Target: nirvana. He has ascended past the overanalysis and bickering and reached a point where he no longer feels any pain or suffering. He feels only sheer bliss—or at least this is how it appears to me because approximately twice an aisle he stops me in my decision-making to hug me and tell me what a good job I am doing. This puts me in my own state of bliss.

He cheers me on as I debate shower curtains, unsatisfied with any of the options. I repeatedly “decide” on one, only to undecide and then decide on a different one. Each package I lift is met with a hug and a “Good choice” from Andrew.

“That one looks great,” he says about one.

“I like that one,” he says moments later, wrapping his arms around me as stare at another.

He has become an affirmation machine, existing only to comfort me and applaud my choices. It’s awesome.

My flashlight criteria include not only the ability to shine, but also the heaviness: If I hit an intruder over the head with it, will it knock him out?

We complete the rest of the housewares department—baskets, lamps, ironing boards, flashlights—in this state of mutual bliss, distracting ourselves from the task at hand with squeals about the fact that WE ARE GETTING MARRIED AND MOVING IN TOGETHER AND GOING TO HAVE AN APARTMENT AND EVENTUALLY BABIES AND LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER SURROUNDED BY STUFF FROM TARGET.

It’s truly not fair to guys completing registries with their fiancées that the grilling supplies, sporting goods, games, and electronics are all in the back of the store. This is normally the stuff Andrew wants to see when we go to Target, but when you’ve reached nirvana, you don’t need anything anymore, so we don’t register for any of it. Andrew and I even walk through the grill aisle, and I make suggestions, and he is like, “I’m good. I don’t need any of this. And let’s look at electronics a different day.”

The man is ready for some food.

It should be noted that before we leave and get said food, he dutifully tries on t-shirts in the men’s clothing section at my request because we are getting our engagement pictures taken a few days later and he needs a gray (gray!) t-shirt. WHO IS THIS MAN!?!?!

The next morning as we drive to church, I comment to Andrew about his nirvana-like state the day before.

“I wouldn’t call it nirvana,” he says. “I would call it, like, the last stage of hypothermia. Did you know that before people freeze to death, they start feeling warm all of a sudden? And they’re like, ‘Ah, I’m warm,’ and they like start taking off their clothes?”

So maybe Andrew had not, in fact, reached nirvana, but rather had reached a state of warm and cozy delusion. Either way, it worked out pretty great for me. And after a day full of decision-making and planning for the future, I found myself feeling excellent () about at least one decision: the man.

Kate plans a wedding (Alternate title: An exercise in rapid-fire decision-making)

I got engaged.

I know most of you already know, but it also seems like an excellent reason to dust off ye olde blog and regale you with my thoughts about things. (Seriously though, sorry for my absence. I’ve been dealing with cubital tunnel in both of my hands, and it makes my keyboard feel like a medieval torture device. Writers gotta write though, so I’m penning this by hand, and I’m going to make Andrew type it like Tertius typed Romans for Paul. Actually scratch that. Andrew did not end up typing this for me because I took too long to write it. So now I am using the dictate tool on my computer to type it, and my roommates can probably hear me in here and think I’m super weird.)

ANYWAY, I know I owe you a thoughtful recap of our engagement, and I’m working on it. I want to write a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at our past two years if only because Facebook makes things look so much easier than they actually are, and there’s something to be said for sharing your relationship without the filter. (The Instagram filter, people. I will still have the other kind of filter.) But for now I’ll answer the question people keep asking: Were you surprised?

YES! Yes, I was surprised! Andrew literally had to convince me to change out of running clothes to join him for the walk on which he proposed, and I still didn’t see it coming—but more on that in the next post.

For now, I want to talk about wedding planning. Remember this show?

Let it be known that planning an actual wedding is far more fun than planning a theoretical wedding, which I have been doing since I was approximately 12 and first discovered A Wedding Story on TLC. (Yes, the predecessor to Say Yes to the Dress.) My middle-school best friend and I would watch it in our separate houses and then send wedding and bridesmaid dress links to each other on AIM. I saved my favorite options in a FOLDER on my computer like some kind of barbarian because this was B.P., Before Pinterest.

I’ve been at the actual wedding planning thing for less than three weeks, so my opinion may change, but so far I feel like it is super underrated. I’ve had numerous people sympathize with me over what a stressful season this will be, and in some ways it is, but mainly it is SUPER FUN! (I’ve also been told by a bunch of people that they didn’t like being engaged because they just wanted to be married already, but I’m enjoying this stage so much that I’m actually kind of sad to be three weeks into what will end up being only about a 4-month engagement.)

That is right. We are getting married October 21, 2017. OCTOBER TWENTY-FIRST. Save the date. (Unless you aren’t on the guest list, in which case let me pre-apologize. We had to shorten our original list by more than 100 people because apparently things like “area in a room” and “number of seats” are determined by, like, “math” and “fire codes,” which aren’t nearly as flexible as I would like them to be.)

In addition to making guest list decisions, we have also already managed to:

  • Pick a ceremony location
  • Pick a reception location
  • Pick a date (which, conveniently for my family, is Georgia’s bye week)
  • Pick a photographer
  • Pick our bridal party (another area in which the number included was far less than the number I wanted to include, which was 24)Andrew being a dreamboat and listening to my thoughts. We booked this venue, guys. Don’t worry. My color will not be split pea soup.

As a chronically indecisive person, I am finding this rapid-fire decision-making oddly freeing. It’s not that I’m being flippant—I literally made a spreadsheet with like two dozen photographers and gave them all quality and price grades so I could find the best ratio for heaven’s sake. It’s just that, in being forced to make decisions after only limited research, I’m finding myself MORE satisfied with said decisions than I usually am when I’ve evaluated every facet of every option, which is my M.O. If time were more flexible, I would’ve doubled my photographer spreadsheet, talked to half on the phone, and interviewed past brides of the top 25 percent. And I still wouldn’t be sure about my final choice. For the sake of time, I talked to one on the phone. I also only visited one reception venue. And I didn’t even visit ceremony venues—I just worked off my memory. (WHO AM I!?!?)

As it stands, however, I feel happy with my choices, mostly at peace with my limitations and—more profoundly than usual—the sense that I’m being guided. This is the paradoxical part of chilling out.THIS COLOR. Not the purple cranberry sauce you plop out of a can — the pinkish red cranberry sauce you plop out of a plastic box from Kroger’s prepared foods section. (The fancy kind.) Image via.

This does not come naturally to me, however. I’m still combating my innate indecisiveness, as evidenced by the fact that I keep texting my mom and sister new color ideas. I will almost certainly end up doing cranberry seeing as I think the color of cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving is the warmest, most multi-dimensional color in the world. But then I see blush bridesmaids on my Facebook feed and steely blue bridesmaids on my Pinterest feed, and I start calling into question my visions of red. The true test of my decisiveness, however, will be not my bridesmaids’ dresses, but my own, the hunt for which begins this Saturday. (Actually, as I said, it began when I was 12, but perhaps it will culminate this Saturday.) We’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out.

Other decisions still to be made include: how to structure the timeline of the wedding day, what music to play in the ceremony, what food/catering to get, what music to play for the reception, what decor to use for the reception, whether to send save-the-date and invites (Or just one? Or a hybrid?), what to register for, where to honeymoon, how to do my hair, how to do my makeup, what type of flowers to use, where to get them, where to house out-of-town bridesmaids, whether to put the groomsmen in red or black ties, #whatourhashtagshouldbe, oh, and yeah, WHERE WE’RE GOING TO LIVE. The list is endless. My brain starts doing this every night as I fall asleep—and every morning when I wake up at 4 a.m. and can’t fall back asleep. Still though, right now, it is far more fun than stressful.

Carve me in marble and call me a masterpiece: Paris Days 6 and 7

You may remember hearing that the Seine River flooded a few months ago. Because of this, the Musée de Louvre was closed during our first few days in Paris, which meant we couldn’t visit it until our last full day in the city.

Before hitting the museum, Marie and Taylor and I started the day with pastries again because Paris. (White bread is basically protein there.) We took the metro to the Louvre and met up with our friend James at an adjacent Starbucks. (This would be our real fuel for the day.) James was one of our good friends from Asbury and just happened to be in Paris briefly after touring Turkey and Iraq and Italy and I can’t even remember where else. (Let’s just say he got questioned at U.S. Customs when he returned.) It was perfect timing to meet up with him.

Exploring the Louvre

Here are some tips for going to the Louvre:

  1. Finish your Starbucks before you attempt to enter. For some reason, the curators don’t want any coffee stains on their ancient, priceless art. When my Starbucks was spotted, I had to get out of line and chug it.
  2. Use the downstairs entrance (the one from the metro). It’s approximately a thousand times faster than the main entrance through the famous glass pyramid. Thanks, Marie, for the insider knowledge yet again.

Though the Louvre has been a museum for more than 200 years, it had previous lives as a fortress, a castle, and a palace. Its initial construction began in the 12th century, and it played home to the kings of France on and off until they moved to the Palace of Versailles.

These days it plays home to artwork. We saw pieces by Michelangelo and Da Vinci and Delacroix. We saw colossal ones like the Wedding at Cana and diminutive ones like the Mona Lisa. And we saw lots and lots of sculptures (and paintings) of naked people.

To see a human body carved out of marble is amazing. The detail is unreal, by which I mean it is very real indeed. The skin, the toes, the leg muscles and back muscles, the belly buttons — everything is accurate. It looks as though someone poured liquid marble onto an actual human — that seems more believable than that each groove and ripple was carved out of stone.

And I know this probably isn’t the takeaway you’re supposed to have when you go to the Louvre, but what struck me most about all the artwork we saw there was not just the lifelikeness of the sculptures, but the shapes of their bodies, the females in particular.

Granted, I see mostly naked female bodies more than I would like. I am assaulted by images of them whenever I walk past Victoria’s Secret or stand in the Kroger checkout line or get the #%$& mail. [There’s a certain wave of feminism whose adherents would criticize me for saying I am assaulted by female bodies, but I prefer the wave that calls these particular images what they are: exploitation, objectification, a body as a product, an unattainable ideal, a singular standard created by marketers and played upon by pornographers, all of whom are selling you not just stuff but ideologies, and inconsistent ones at that. (That’s a rant for another day.)]

I hate them, and yet, oh, I want to look like them. I have found the best thing to do when I see images like that is look away. Let your eyes linger on the perfect stomach in the Victoria’s Secret window, and you’ll inevitably start regretting the soft pretzel you ate in the food court 15 minutes ago. It’s better just to grant yourself (and her, perhaps) the dignity of looking away.

But if you go to the Louvre, you should look at the bodies — because these bodies don’t look like those ubiquitous ones, though they are familiar in their own way. If these bodies had brains in their marble heads, brains accustomed to 21st-century standards, they’d likely feel they needed to lose 20 pounds. And it isn’t just their thickness that defies modern expectations — it is their proportions themselves. These sculptures wouldn’t just need to lose weight in 2016; they’d need to remedy their very ratios somehow — they’d need narrower hips, flatter stomachs, bigger this, and smaller that. Not because the artist made a mistake, of course, but because the artist depicted bodies as they actually are, sans Photoshop.

I wish every girl who’s ever thought her ratios were wrong could stand in the Louvre, in one of the many sculpture rooms, and realize that all of the bodies up on the pedestals looked like hers. And I wish she could feel, like I did that day, that perhaps her proportions weren’t wrong at all. Perhaps they were carefully carved, formed by skillful hands, worthy of display in the world’s most famous museum, lauded for ages.

If they let you eat soft pretzels in the Louvre and you were munching on one as you looked up at a sculpture and marveled at the marble, you’d almost certainly think, “This pretzel looks pretty good on me.”

[In case you’re wondering, the male sculptures’ bodies were far less fascinating to me. They look exactly like the 2016 standards for males, which is not to say that male body standards do not exist, only to say that they appear to have been roughly the same for the past few thousand years. I’m under no delusions that men can’t also feel intense pressure to meet cultural beauty standards — in fact, I’ve taken those standards to task on this blog before — but I do find it interesting that we still compare men’s bodies to those of Greek gods (“He had the body of Adonis!”), but not women’s. I assume that’s because the 2016 standards for women are so over the top that not even a god could meet them.]

Playing Parisians

Anthony Bourdain-approved

We could’ve spent multiple days perusing the Louvre, but with limited time left, we decided to do something we hadn’t yet done: spend an afternoon relaxing. We lunched at Le Verre Volé, which Marie informed us was a favorite of Anthony Bourdain, then hit up another boulangerie for treats to eat on the canal. (If you’re keeping track, yes, this was my third treat of the day.)

That afternoon at the canal was one of my favorite memories from our time in France. We’d been going-going-going all week (which is the way to do Paris for sure — there’s so much to see — but still tiring), so it was nice to slow our pace for a few hours. I felt like an actual Parisian that afternoon — eating more white bread, dangling my feet over the canal, taking my time at life.

We see London, we see France: Paris (er, Europe) Day 5

Not six hours after we’d crawled into bed following a day in Versailles, we rose again to continue exploring Europe. My sadness over our abbreviated night of sleep was lessened by the fact that we were GOING TO LONDON, the city I’d always most wanted to see. We got ready groggily and walked through mental and literal fog to the metro, which we took to the train station. For some reason I’d been worried, yet again, that we would be stopped attempting to move from country to country (because we look so menacing and everything). But after getting our passports stamped without a hitch, we arrived at our Chunnel train with seven minutes to spare.

The Chunnel is an underwater railway that connects England and France. Its trains barrel across the European countryside — and through its waters — at up to 186 miles per hour, which means you can get from one country to the next in a little over two hours. I recently learned that the Chunnel is one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, and it certainly deserves this status. It was one of many experiences that left me marveling at human ingenuity and history during our week in Europe.

We did our best to sleep on the Chunnel train and, when that failed, drank their horrible coffee. You would think it would be harder to build an international underwater tunnel than it would be to make coffee, but Europe somehow succeeded at the former and still struggles with the latter.

All aboard the Hogwarts Express

Our train arrived in London at the St Pancras railway station (apparently Brits don’t put a period after “St” the way Americans do) full of hopes about how many British sights we could squeeze into a single day. London is, as you know, the site of many important historic events and the home to many important historic figures. And because we are Americans with limited time and healthy priorities, we started with the most historically important place of them all: Platform 9 3/4 of King’s Cross railway station, where the famous wizard Harry Potter once pushed his trolley through a brick wall.

Actually we started there because King’s Cross was just across the road from St Pancras, BUT STILL. It was my top priority of the day.

After a running start, Marie and Taylor and I each successfully pushed our trolleys through the wall as well and boarded the Hogwarts Express. Just kidding, but we did pose for pictures at the wall King’s Cross has designated with the Platform 9 3/4 title. I would like to shake the hand of the marketing genius who decided to build a Harry Potter store there. There are employees who lend you props, help you pose and take your picture. They even toss your scarf to give you that mid-jump look. This is undoubtedly because they are trying to sell you a $15 photo like they do at an amusement park, but they are also quite willing to let you take your own photo and even aid you in that pursuit. (You can expand any of my tiny pics below by clicking on them, btw.) We briefly browsed the Harry Potter shop before venturing outside and underground to buy day passes for the Tube, which we took to Piccadilly Circus.

Piccadilly Circus looked just like the London I’d imagined — the double decker buses, the British flags, the historic buildings. It felt so surreal. It should’ve felt new, but it felt familiar, like somewhere I’d been in a dream or perhaps like somewhere I’d come from but never visited (or, more likely, like somewhere I’d seen in the movies a million times). These are my people, I kept thinking. Maybe it was because I was finally back in a country where I spoke the language. Maybe it was because I have a lot of British blood in me. Either way, we had a fast-paced day overall, but every once in a while, I’d stop and think, “You’re in London.” Pinch me.

Time travel of sorts

Being in Europe also had a weird effect on my perspective of time. Somehow, the world seems older and newer there simultaneously. Do you, like me, have a fuzzy timeline in your head against which you make sense of all parts of human history? I have one. On the far right is a line marked “Present.” There’s a line 300ish years to the left marked “America as we know it.” And then there’s a line 1,700 years to the left of that marked “Jesus wuz here.”

(I have some faint lines in between, too, like “Serfdom, I think,” and B.C. lines on the far, far left — like “Moses” and “Dinosaurs” — but they are super fuzzy. To the left of Jesus, my timeline basically fades into oblivion like those vanishing points we had to draw in seventh grade art class.)

All that to say, pretty much everything I see in my day-to-day life in the U.S. falls to the right of the “America” line. It’s all less than 300 years old, so mentally, I stay zoomed in on that little portion of human history almost all the time. In Paris and London, I think people must stay zoomed further out on their mental timelines. How could they not, when you can turn this way and that and see structures that are 600, 700, sometimes 1,000 years old?

In Europe, I felt newly aware of the fact that humans have been around for so long, doing their human things — so much longer than we usually think about in America. Here is all the evidence, entire cities worth of evidence. I felt small and finite there. But, simultaneously, I felt as though a thousand years didn’t sound quite so long anymore. I’d been made to zoom out on my mental timeline, and suddenly the whole of human history seemed shorter. Once you’ve stood in a building that’s 1,000 years old, 2,000 years become conceivable, and from that perspective, the “Jesus” line is a lot closer to the “Present” line than you ever realized before. (In related news, I really want to visit Israel now.)

That was quite an aside, so now I’m gonna need you to zoom back in with me to June 2016. From Piccadilly Circus we started looking for a place to breakfast and ended up walking to Trafalgar Square and stopping at a pub called The Admiralty. (We didn’t actually realize at that point that we were in Trafalgar Square and spent quite a bit of time later in the day trying to find the square only to realize we’d been there earlier. Whoops.) The Admiralty is themed after the HMS Victory, a Royal Navy ship from the late 1700s, so it basically feels like you’re eating breakfast on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, we did not see Orlando Bloom. Maybe next time.

Westminster

We then walked toward Westminster, stopping to marvel over Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster (a.k.a. the Parliament building). It was rebuilt in the mid-1800s following a fire, so the building itself isn’t mind-bogglingly old, but its site was home to the kings of England from the 1000s to the 1500s, so it has quite a storied history.

Across the street was Westminster Abbey, which puts the Parliament building to shame, its construction having started in the 1200s. (For those my age, Westminster Abbey is likely most memorable as the site of William and Kate’s famed wedding a few years ago.) The detail on both the Parliament building and Westminster Abbey is unreal. That such structures could’ve been planned and built before computers and electronic calculators and CRANES for heaven’s sakes — wait, this just in … I just looked up cranes, and apparently they’ve been around since the 400s. I retract my statement. BUT STILL. These buildings were amazing.

After Westminster we took the Tube to London Bridge. At this point we’d been up for eight hours and on our feet for five days, so we stopped in a Pret a Manger for some caffeine and pain killer. It felt so good to sit, you guys. I’m not sure it’s ever felt so good to sit. BUT WE WERE IN LONDON, so after this brief respite, we powered through — toward the Tower of London. (It started to drizzle on the way, which would normally seem like a bummer but actually seemed fitting. What’s a day in London without a little drizzle?)

Tower of London

When we were almost to the Tower, we passed a church building with a sign that caught my eye: “All Hallows by the Tower,” it read. It listed its historic connections — among them, William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania.

Those who know me well know Penn is my middle name. William Penn is a distant relative on my mother’s father’s side. (As far as we can tell from family trees, we are not William Penn’s descendants but, rather, descendants of his brother. I wasn’t named for these Penns, but I was named for some women on their side of the family.) Obviously we had to go in.

Inside I learned that not only is All Hallows the oldest church building in London (Anglican, obviously), having been built in 675, but that it owes the very fact that it is standing to William’s father, my great-great-great-great-I-have-no-idea-how-many-greats grandfather — Sir William Penn, Admiral of the Royal Navy — who saved it from the Great Fire of London in 1666 by having surrounding buildings destroyed to create fire breaks that blocked the flames. My little raised-Anglican heart swelled with pride.

(I mainly hang out with Baptists these days, who love to be like, “Anglican? Is that kind of like Catholic?” No, lol, it is not. C.S. Lewis and John Stott and J.I. Freaking Packer were all Anglican, thank you very much. Anglicans were Calvinists before it was cool again. I think Paul would get mad at me if he read this paragraph.)

We continued toward the Tower of London — where the younger William Penn, the famous one, was actually imprisoned for heresy at one point (whoops). The Anglican church’s early days are not something to be particularly proud of, so I’m not sure whether he was actually being heretical or whether he was just being persecuted for telling the TROWTH (as my roommate pronounces it), but seeing as he was a Quaker and all, I’m gonna guess that he was in fact being heretical. Regardless, Penn was known as an advocate for religious freedom, which was not a thing back in England in those days and seems increasingly threatened even in America these days, so I definitely admire that about him.

We bought tickets to tour the Tower grounds and spent a couple of hours there, choosing first to see the Crown Jewels. The curators have actually created a pretty cool tour leading up to the jewels that tells the story of their being passed down, destroyed, recreated, etc. What I found most interesting, though, was the video being played (on repeat) of the current Queen Elizabeth at her coronation when she was just 25 years old. What a strange life — she looked rather unhappy. Monarchy is so un-American that there’s something very foreign to me about the idea of being born to rule, whether you like it or not.

We also walked through the armoury in the White Tower (which was built in the late 1000s, no big deal) and saw, as you’d expect, an incredible amount of armor, for both humans and horses. My favorite thing in the White Tower was actually the old-school toilet, which I took a picture of for your viewing pleasure. I was amused that their bathrooms didn’t look quite as different from ours as I would’ve expected. Fortunately for us, we have plumbing, whereas they had just a hole in the floor and, presumably, a massive pile of poop on the ground below. (Ah, living like royalty.)

Before we left, we also saw this super weird monument that had been created to commemorate all the people who’d been beheaded at the Tower of London, including names you’d recognize like Anne Boleyn. There’s something very strange about standing in such a location, where a human was executed. Names become people there, and history becomes sickening. So much of human history seems to be a mix of magnificence and wickedness — I felt that profoundly while in London and at the Tower. Whether it’s the history of the Anglican Church or the British government or William Penn or the United States, there are things to be proud of and things that should bring us to our knees.

Final stops

The day was winding down, but there were two more spots we really wanted to see before heading back to Paris: Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square (the latter we’d unknowingly been to earlier that day). We took the Tube to the palace first. For some reason I’ve always thought of Buckingham Palace as the queen’s house, but apparently she actually lives at Windsor Castle, which is about an hour away.

I was also surprised to find that Buckingham Palace does not have a massive green lawn in front of it à la the White House. To the contrary, its front yard is more like a giant roundabout with a huge fountain in the middle. Lots of tourists like us were standing around, peering through the gold-capped gates and taking selfies. I half-expected “Pomp and Circumstance” to start playing and Wills and Kate to step out. Wills and Kate did not step out, and apparently they don’t live there either. (They live at Kensington Palace, if you’re curious.)

At this point I started getting super sad that our day in London had gone so quickly. We trekked back to Trafalgar Square, only to realize we’d been there at breakfast. Now, though, the square was bustling with people, and the sun was lower. It felt surreal to be there and strange to be leaving. I tried to soak it in and willed myself to return.

All throughout our day in England, I’d kept thinking to myself, “Why in the world would we ever have broken off from this wonderful country?” Why would anyone want to revolt against such a quaint and storied people!? Taxation without representation doesn’t sound so bad. (Just kidding.) Seriously, though, being in London made me think that, were I around during the American Revolution, I might’ve been a Loyalist. (This would be supremely unsurprising to anyone who knows that my enneagram type is literally called the Loyalist.)

Next time I go to Europe, I want to spend several days exploring England. Something about it just feels like home to me. We had a Chunnel train to catch, so we grabbed dinner at a place called Garfunkel’s right off the square. (We surmised that it was like the Applebee’s of England, catering mainly to tourists looking for fish and chips.) As we made our way back to the train station, I felt a strong sense of sadness about leaving London, but when we finally made it back to Paris, back to the metro, back to our apartment, I was quite happy indeed to be crawling back into bed.

All that to say, who wants to plan a trip to London? 2018?

How to Make Your Last Name Plural This Christmas Season

Nothing quells my Christmas cheer as quickly as a stray apostrophe. Every year they assault me.

Usually it’s in the middle of an otherwise quaint moment: I am padding around my parents’ house, wearing pink slippers, sipping on some hot chocolate. Snow is falling outside the window, and Josh Groban’s Christmas CD is filling the downstairs with peace on earth and mercy mild. My mother is baking a pie. She’s about to ask if I want to lick the spatula (which, duh, I will).

First, though, I find a stack of Christmas cards and begin to flip through them—pausing to marvel at how big so-and-so’s kids have gotten. And then I spot it: an apostrophe in a last name that isn’t supposed to be possessive.

I shudder, flipping past the unwarranted punctuation. But as I keep flipping, the apostrophes do, too—flipping me off, that is. They defile Christmas card after Christmas card, last name after last name with their presence. Gone is my Christmas cheer! All my glad tidings, replaced with fury.

“Did no one teach these people how to make their last names plural!?” I scream as I chuck the cards into the fire heretofore crackling peacefully beneath the mantel.

I watch the cards curl and disintegrate in the flames, and I wonder if I’ve overreacted.

Is pluralizing last names more difficult than I realize? Apparently so. Because we get these cards every year—these cards with their adorable photos and their apostrophe catastrophes.

This year I’d like to preempt the pluralization problems. It’s mid-November now, time to order Christmas cards again. I have created a brief guide to help you pluralize your last name. It is my humble attempt to preserve not only apostrophe protocol but also the dignity of the letter S.

The Definitive Guide to Pluralizing Your Last Name

Last letter(s) of last name What should you add to make it plural? Does it need an apostrophe?
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h (see exceptions below), i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, t, u, v, w, y -s  NO
s, x, z, ch, sh  -es  NO

Pluralization FAQs

Q: What if my last name ends in a “y”? 
A: Add an “s.” Do not add “ies” or an apostrophe.
Merry Christmas from the Murphys. 

Q: What if my last name already ends in an “s”? 
A: Add “es.” Do not add an apostrophe.
Season’s greetings from the Simmonses.

Q: What if the end of my last name normally functions as an irregular noun? 
A: It is not irregular when it is part of a last name.
Happy holidays from the Hoffmans. Warm wishes from the Wolfs. 

Q: What would adding an apostrophe do? 
A: It would make your last name possessive.

Q: Is there ever a reason to add an apostrophe? 
A: Only if you want to make your last name possessive.

Q: Why do people add apostrophes? 
A: I have no idea.

If your goal is to make your last name possessive, then, by all means, use an apostrophe. If your goal is simply pluralization, however, forgo the apostrophe. In the spirit of the season, I beg you.

Bad Advice I Read on Pinterest: Vol. 2

I’m kind of offended that my first Bad Advice I Read on Pinterest blog post did not eliminate specious advice from Pinterest altogether. Seriously, do I not hold this kind of sway on the Internet yet? What I am doing wrong if people are still pinning pretty nonsense with captions like “So true”?

Does the Internet need more examples? Is that what it needs? Here you go, Internet: more examples of Bad Advice I Read on Pinterest—from the questionable to the facepalm-worthy.

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But he’s totally ready to share all of your married friends.

Nothing is more profound than something profound.

Like whether they is concerned with subject-verb agreement.

Beauty comes from within—except for prettiness, which comes from your face, and sexiness, which comes from your body. But, yeah, mostly from within.

Aww, that’s so sweet and romantic and not true.


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Like chest pain . . . or arm pain — two weaknesses leaving the body. Also, shortness of breath. Wait, call an ambulance: You’re having a heart attack.


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I’m primarily concerned with your 100th problem, alcoholism.


Because it never loved you to begin with. #logicalfallacy


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False. I’m writing this blog in sweatpants.


Because you are literally never wrong. Ever.


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Imagine a man so focused on God that he’s not waiting for an audible go-ahead from the sovereign of the universe to make a decision that a bit of wisdom and some good judgment should render him perfectly capable of making. Seriously somebody stop me before I get on my Christian dating soapbox.


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Stick that in your perfume and spritz it!


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“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten — the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm — my great army that I sent among you.” – Joel 2:25


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Sometimes all it takes to do better next time is to shame yourself this time. Wait . . . no.


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. . . that escalated quickly.


The strongest women say “Why the &@%# am I wearing shoes that hurt?” and pull out their flip-flops.


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This is only good advice if you want every kiss to be super awkward.


This is basically the opposite of the gospel (and, obviously, not what 2 Corinthians 12:10 says).


Ugh, friendship. Never worth the effort.


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Ugly, dumb women deserve nothing.


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FYI your inner voice is just another random opinion.


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Okay, people are literally just attaching Bible attributions to random sayings at this point.

(Someone please make a Pinspirational version of Revelation 22:18.)


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(Submitted by my friend Marilyn)

Words of wisdom from . . . a mob boss.

What bad advice have you seen on Pinterest lately? Send it my way!

 

Dear Gaspard Ulliel

Dear Gaspard Ulliel,

I know we don’t know each other, but I think you are just darling
—that you have a certain je ne sais pas—
and that you should move right on over to America.

The only thing I will be able to say to you in your native language is
je t’aime,
but I will say that a lot.

Actually, I can also throw around such terms as

rendez-vous

au contraire

and genre

potpourri, voilà, and encore.

(Oh, and I also know a few lines from “Lady Marmalade,” but I will refrain from repeating those.)

I will give you a tour of America, s’il vous plaît.
Okay? Okay.

A très bientôt j’espère.