personal

I’ve been debating donating my hair for the past while, and honestly, I’m still a bit nervous about it. From what I’ve read, you need to have a bare minimum of 8 inches of hair to be able to donate it, and it’s typically more like a foot. Since hair grows on average about a half inch a month, that would mean I’d need to grow my hair for around two years to get there. That’s . . . a long time. And it’s a particularly long time for a person who doesn’t like to do any sort of maintenance

I’ve been reading a book for a discussion group here on campus. (The Spark of Learning, by Sarah Rose Cavanagh) Today, it introduced a topic I hadn’t seen verbalized before: Surface Acting. This is when you suppress everything you might be feeling (stresses, worries, physical condition, etc.) to present an “everything is wonderful” front to the world. As the book says, it happens during teaching quite regularly, but I think it’s something most people do on a daily basis. Certainly if you’re interacting with acquaintances or strangers, you’re more likely to try and come off as “everything’s great.” (Or is

Not a ton of time to write today, but I did want to briefly discuss something I’m reading about in my Psychology of Personality class. I’ve long believed that people generally don’t change who they are. They might tweak a thing or two here or there for a while, but they almost always return back to their norm. Not that I thought that was a hard and fast rule, but I thought that for people to actually change, it took a whole ton of work. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read today an article that provided studies showing that

It looks like it’s that time of year again! My Facebook feed is exploding with well wishes, and I’ve got people knowing about my birthday left and right in person. (I have many complaints about Facebook, but this is not one of them. I think it’s great that it gives people something small like this to connect over, though I am a habitually terrible Happy Birthday wisher.) When you’re a kid, a birthday is an extremely exciting event. I mean, cake and presents? How does it get any better? I think it’s also big, because people pay extra attention to

I’m still on my language learning kick, trying to study Slovak once a day. (Well, Slovak on Mondly. Duolingo still doesn’t do Slovak, so I do Czech, instead.) I’m up to 250 days in a row, as of yesterday. Is it working? Um . . . definitely not as well as actually taking a class in it, speaking as someone who’s taken a number of languages. However, some of that is because I don’t devote an hour a day to the lessons. Usually it’s more like 10 minutes. On the other hand, it’s definitely teaching me the language better than