Florence Onassis the Second

While I'm away, here's a photo of my mom, my grandpa, Ruth, and my hero Uncle Carl.

It was a different time. Back then, you walked to school without a parent. I was supposed to walk with KC but I didn't really like talking to her and I suspect she wasn't that interested in me. I ended up walking by myself a lot of the time, which, even then, was something I liked to do. I liked having time alone in my own head. I don't remember the actual walk. We moved halfway through my kindergarten year, so it was never part of my routine, the way the walk to my future grade school would be. It was a suburban Detroit neighborhood, full of houses like the one I lived in. I believed that the world was like this: house after house. What did I dream about back then? What went through my head? One day I came home and there it was, in the center of our lawn: a huge monarch butterfly. I froze. I was terrified of butterflies. They clearly weren't natural: they were large and colorful and flew in random directions. I was pretty sure they had teeth. How could I possib...

If you're on twitter, you're probably aware of the #MeToo that's going around. If you're not, briefly, it was a hashtag started to increase awareness of sexual assault and harassment. If women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted posted "#MeToo", the numbers would help raise awareness of how common this is. I posted "#MeToo." Like so many women, it happened to me. It happened on the train. I was taking the train I took every day for my ride into school. This train was packed until we reached the stations downtown where most people got off. The university stop was after all those stops. Most days there were only a few people left in each car. That day, there was just one guy. One guy sitting in the seats across the aisle from me. He locked eyes with mine, then started stroking his exposed penis. It took me a moment to even understand what was happening. I just froze. I honestly didn't know what to do. Do I leave, which let him know ...

I am consolidating bank accounts, and some (most) have a name on them that differs from my current legal (married) name. This is something that a lot of women go up against. We don't own our names the way men do. I have many feelings about this. I really do love linking my name to my husband's. I love how that makes us into a unit. We share this, and it makes me happy. I understand the history of women as property and all of that, so I completely understand when someone decides to keep their maiden name. For me, I choose to view my personal decision to change my name as romantic. However, I want my professional name to remain my maiden name (an aside: "maiden"? Really?) I earned my degrees with this name, taught at high schools and colleges with this name, worked a number of jobs with this name. It has been a constant thread throughout my life. This is the name that is a scientist. This is the name that does the work. For some reason, my current workplace ...

This song always makes me cry. In a good way.

When I was 21, my dad got transferred to the Philadelphia area. I had just graduated from college and was ready to start my teaching career in Toledo. Before school started for me, my family went house hunting, and we made it into the family vacation. The Piggie siblings took a separate car so that we could go site-seeing while Mom and Pops looked at expensive, East-coast houses. At this point, I wasn't sure if I wanted to move out East. In fact, I was thinking that I wouldn't be moving. I had my friends, I liked living in Toledo, I could visit my family. But it was fun to see Philadelphia and to consider it. Anyway, for whatever reason, my brother decided that we should go to see the Tom Petty concert at the Spectrum that night. He was in town and we weren't doing anything else. We found a Ticketmaster (ah, remember those days when you had to buy your tickets at a Ticketmaster), and that night we were on our way into the city.  I remember being at that concert and...