Eleven Random Facts About Moi

1.) When I was a little girl, I loved watching Muppet Babies. While watching the show, I noticed that Miss Piggy frequently referred to a person named "Moi." I assumed that Moi was an elegant French lady who wore beautiful clothes and who powdered her nose white. Boy, was I disappointed when I found out who Moi really was.

2.) I hate pancakes, waffles, and anything else smothered in maple syrup. I despise most breakfast foods.

3.) I am very good at the following activities: typing really fast, playing Boggle, and naming the nations of the world off the top of my head.

4.) I am awful at the following activities: physics, figuring out directions, and telephone interviews.

5.) In 2005 I slept for 20 hours in one day. I guess I was really tired.

6.) Mitt Romney gives me the heebie-jeebies. I hope he will never be president of the United States.

7.) One time at the doctor's office I knocked over my urine sample in the bathroom and had to say to the nurse, "I accidentally spilled my urine sample. What do I do now?"

8.) One time at work I walked around the office with a huge period stain on my bum. I didn't find out about it until the end of the day.

9.) I am a feminist. It makes me sad that some people view feminism as a bad word.

10.) Interesting things I've done in my life: ate sea cucumbers in China, sang in a choir at Notre Dame Cathedral, and touched Buzz Aldrin's spacesuit that he walked around the moon in.

11.) I'm a huge fan of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." In high school I even convinced my family to take a trip to Nevada so we could go to the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton.

The Life and Death of Herbert the Cyst

Three weeks ago I went to my doctor's office to have a cyst removed from my left hip. Technically the cyst was on my "left flank," which alludes that it may have been located on my derriere. But I didn't want people thinking that I had a tumor on my ass so I decided "left hip" sounded better than "on the upper portion of my left flank."

In the past few months Justin and I have grown a little fond of the small bump on my left hip. My husband even named it Herbert and he would often ask me how Herbert was doing. But alas we couldn't keep Herbert for long. Although he posed no real danger to my health, I found it annoying to have a little bump on my body so I made an appointment to have Herbert removed.

So at ten in the morning I went to the surgical clinic with my husband in tow. He was there for some moral support, but mostly because the nurses cautioned me that I shouldn't drive after the procedure. Justin had his own reasons for coming too---he wanted to see the surgery firsthand. Surprisingly, the nurse was incredibly accomodating and made room for Justin in the surgical room.

My doctor was a barrel of a man who looked like he could have lived in the Wild West. He had a white bushy beard and a double-wide chest. For a moment I thought he would give me a shot of whisky and a stick to bite down on before he hacked away at my body. But luckily he was a little more modern than that. He numbed up my bottom with a pint of local anesthesia and I felt absolutely nothing as he chopped away with his scalpel.

Now the gross part. It turns out sweet little Herbert was not sweet at all. It turns out he was an oil gland gone awfully awry. Once the cyst was removed, it was nearly the size of a golf ball! I can vouch for the size because Dr. Frontier showed it to me after he took it out. Gross. That was in my body? Suffice to say, my iron-stomached husband looked a little green after the surgery was over.

Three weeks later the stitches are out and I am now the proud owner of a nasty-looking scar. Justin says it will fade in a few months, but I think it looks kind of cool. It's my battle wound.

R.I.P Herbert

Ouch!

Yesterday afternoon I went to my doctor's office to have my stitches removed (more on my surgery later). I was a little nervous because I've often heard that taking out stitches can be pretty painful. But my loving husband, who had his appendix removed a few years ago, reassured me. "It kind of tickles," he said.

Yet I did not feel any sort of tickling when my doctor yanked the stitches from my body. Ouch! They kind of hurt. They kind of hurt a lot. It's a good thing I only had three deep stitches and a few superficial ones. Owwww...

To my beefy Army soldier husband, having stitches removed feels a little ticklish. Maybe even enjoyable. But to a little wimp like me who cringes at the sight of a paper cut, removing stitches ranks up there with menstrual cramps and stubbed fingers. Perhaps not the worse of pains, but definitely not ticklish.

So very excited...

I love perusing the articles on Slate.com---especially today. It turns out that one of my favorite historians Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has published a new book and the good people from Slate have offered a book review of it already.

Back in the 1970s, Ulrich was a recent doctoral graduate from the University of New Hampshire. Her area of focus? The lives of ordinary women in colonial New England. She combed through archives and libraries to unveil what life was like for these overlooked women. In her first published article, she bemoaned the lack of resources about this important---yet seemingly invisible---group of females. "Well-behaved women seldom make history," she wrote as the opening sentence of the piece.

Since the article's publication, Ulrich's words have come to grace t-shirts, cups, stickers, and bumper stickers. Anarchists and hedonists have eagerly adopted the slogan as their motto. All of this attention has deeply intrigued Ulrich and she has centered her newest work on three unconventional women who have made history, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf.

One of the reasons I admire Ulrich so much is because she breaks the commonly-held stereotype that Mormon women are docile and even oppressed. Here is a woman who teaches at Harvard and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Here is a woman who avidly studies feminism throughout history. Here is a woman who I definitely look up to.

I'm so excited for my copy to arrive!