This weekend I celebrated my 28th birthday the best way I know how- I didn’t do any homework, for all of Saturday. Nothing. I caught up on Scandal, I ordered takeout, and I napped with my cats. It was glorious! My actual birthday was bookended by adventures with some of my West Philly and Bryn Mawr friends. On Friday night we went to Stimulus, one of the larger gay parties in the city, and had a great time. Lots of dancing, lots of strobe lights. I don’t go out super frequently, so going out for my birthday, with people I enjoy, was excellent. Then, on Saturday night, I went to a Friendsgiving feast with the same group of people. I didn’t cook (remember, I did nothing on my birthday!), but I did grab some wine and bring that over. Easy and delicious housewarming gift.

My friendship soulmate, Katie, had asked if I wanted a cake, and I didn’t- I love having a birthday that falls around/on Thanksgiving, because while I don’t love the holiday (violent colonialism!), I definitely love eating my weight in side dishes and pie. So, I said no to a cake, but yes to a bowl of stuffing with candles in it. Here’s a picture of Katie telling everyone to sing!

Then, yesterday, we went to see Mockingjay in the University City theatre. It was great- the theatre wasn’t too crowded, and we got a bunch of dollar candy at the grocery store across the street. I haven’t been to the movies since before the semester started, because it always feels like such a crazy luxury. I’m so glad we went! I’d love to discuss the movie with some more people, because it left me with a pile of feelings that I wasn’t entirely sure how to process.

This week, I’ll be traveling to New York to see my parents and my sister, and eat a second Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps con my mom into making me an extra pie. Truly, folks, once it gets a little chilly, I just want to eat pie for every meal. Also, my dad is a clown in the Macy’s parade! If you watch it, keep your eyes peeled for a very, very tall bearded skinny guy- he’s apparently a “breakfast clown” this year, but no one knows what that means.

What are your holiday plans? Tell me!

Many of my Facebook friends have taken to posting lists of the things they’re thankful for, and it has been lovely to see a little bit of positivity in my feed. I tend to not post my lists to social media, but I do keep notes in my Slingshot about the good things that have happened every day. President Cassidy just wrote a blog post about gratitude, and how it feels to thank others and receive thanks yourself. She ended the post with a suggestion that we, the campus community, should perhaps try to bring back the lost art of the thank you note. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but a friend that I’ve been working on getting to know better handed me a letter that same day, and I was blown away by the emotional generosity and kindness of it.

At work, a few years ago, I was brought into a meeting wherein my boss told me that I had really excellent hard skills, but that my soft skills were a little bit lacking. I wasn’t really sure what she meant, because the conversation was held almost entirely in retail managerial parlance, but when I asked for clarification, her answer surprised me. She told me that I needed to be a little less intense when I acknowledged people- that receiving validation or praise from me was like a gift from some kind of higher power, because I was so seriously focused and genuine when it happened. That this was a critique took a little while to sink in, but I eventually realized that what she meant was that saying thank you didn’t always have to be a giant event, and that I could probably loosen up a little and have the same impact.

After that, I worked on thanking at least one person every day, often for tiny things. I know how good it feels to be noticed, and I thrive on that kind of acknowledgement. Lots of folks do. So, sending that vibe out has become one of the things I most love doing- telling the people around me how excellent they are at being themselves, at doing their jobs, at being scholars and activists and friends. After reading KCass’s blog post, and receiving a note this week, I think I’m going to step up my thank you game. Get ready for some handwritten notes, friends.

As promised, here are some photos from the Seven Sisters Conference at Wellesley College. Fun times had by all, including Athena!

This past weekend I had the amazing chance to travel to Wellesley College with a handful of other Bryn Mawr student leaders for the Seven Sisters conference. After some frantic e-mailing and a meeting that was bookended by videos of tiny hamsters eating burritos, we took off on Friday morning for a roughly six hour road trip to Massachusetts.

Wellesley has a student body that is a little more than twice Bryn Mawr’s, and the campus reflected that. Not only is the space stunning (especially with the leaves turning a million different colors), but it’s also huge. Well…comparatively. It’s not Rutgers huge, but it did take a little getting used to. Stay tuned for pictures of our adventuring! We definitely took some amazing group shots that belong in the admissions materials.

On Saturday morning, I attended a workshop on self-care for student leaders. It was incredible- informative, validating, happy. The facilitator talked a lot about the different kinds of self-care, and about going easy on ourselves when we have to say no. More than the maintenance kinds of things (eat, sleep, drink water), this was really specifically geared toward productive changes and healthy ways to deal with stress when it inevitably happens. There was also some focus on harm reduction, which I am a huge fan of generally. I got a lot out of it, and I’m excited to share the things I learned there in my community at Bryn Mawr.

The afternoon breakout sessions were split up by leadership roles, so I was with other “Campus Resource Positions.” Bryn Mawr was unique among the other colleges in that we brought community members (after an application process), rather than just folks on the E-Board. In a stroke of weird Mawrtyr luck, both of the community members (myself included) are above-average involved in SGA, so it worked well for the breakouts. We talked a lot about the Honor Code, and how it works and what confrontation looks like- students from the other colleges were blown away by how much control we have on campus, and the things that students are responsible for without faculty or administration oversight. It was a beautiful experience to explain personal responsibility and buy-in at Bryn Mawr, and have people from other colleges say that they might want to model new policies based around those ideas. We also found a lot of common ground- most of the other colleges have also had racism at the forefront of their campus conversations recently, and it felt useful to be able to talk about those issues and incidents with students from colleges that have similar environments to ours.

I also got to speak with an Ada Comstock Scholar from Smith! Ada’s are the Smith version of McBrides- really similar, except that there are so many more of them on their campus. Smith isn’t that much larger than the Mawr, but they currently have 120 Ada’s on campus! We talked about our struggles with representation and legacy, finances and community support, and I felt like I was talking to a kindred spirit. It was truly lovely to be able to bond in that way with someone who understood the very specific needs of the non-traditional student community.

I’m really excited to be able to move forward from this weekend and use the things I learned, and the connections I made, to create a stronger connection between the Seven Sisters, and on our campus as well. It felt like a real gift to be able to spend the weekend with a bunch of other hyper-involved, passionate, committed students who are working as hard as they can to make their communities better.

Usually I’m not really into this particular holiday- dressing up used to be super fun, but has gotten less so in the past few years, and school is almost always kicked up into high gear right around this time in the semester.

This year, though, I figured out a last minute costume and made it happen. Halloween on a Friday night doesn’t happen very often, and I wanted to make the most of what might be my last Halloween in Philly. The spooky stars aligned, and I embodied Spinelli, cute, kind of aggressive tomboy from the Nickelodeon cartoon “Recess.” Awesome.

Also included, just for kicks, what is probably the best episode of this show- the Ashleys find out that Spinelli’s first name is Ashley, and work to turn her into one of them. The episode includes a killer “Freaks” reference- “One of us! One of us!”

http://youtu.be/cvDxwOvSVE0

Happy Halloween everyone!