I am actually more on the girly end of the spectrum than the tomboy side, though I think that binary is absurd. I refuse to leave my house if I don’t look showered and generally put together, I own a ton of hair products, and I’m happy to get free makeup samples when I buy my Clinique moisturizer twice a year. But I’m also very forgetful, so my relationship with makeup is generally the kind where I’m walking to the T and then I remember, “Oh, shoot! I was going to put on mascara today so that I would look pretty!” I own a lot of it, and I’m always happy when someone competent is playing with my hair or putting my makeup on for me, but I guess I don’t have the gene where you naturally know how to do your hair and makeup yourself. Also, not being particularly gifted with my optic sense, I am fascinated by people who cut my hair or people who can look at a magazine photo and copy a celebrity’s makeup, because I honestly don’t know what it is that they’re seeing in the follicles or eye folds, because I literally cannot see that kind of detail.
Anyway. This summer, when I was teaching high schoolers, I noticed how much makeup they were wearing. And I came to the realization that at 22 (now 23), I have reached the point where it really is important to kind of bow to society’s demands and wear a little makeup and present myself in a way that will not hinder my ability to get job interviews, be taken seriously, be seen as my age (I got carded for buying a lottery ticket on New Year’s Eve and was told I didn’t just look under 21; I looked under 18). Also, my body seems to have gotten confused about when you’re supposed to have acne, and instead of giving it to me when you’re supposed to get it, when your life already sucks as a teenager, I have it now. Anyway, I’ve now gotten mostly used to being a little more primpy on a somewhat regular basis. My eyebrows are always at some level of plucked, which is good, because I actually like the way they look now. I also wash my face at night before bed. In summary, I do all kinds of things that normal American girls have been doing since they were 12, except I started when I was 22. Continue reading
(Veera Hiranandani) is one of the better titles for these books, I think. Especially for a middle grade novel. This novel focuses on the life of Sonia Nadhamuni, a sixth grader who is half Indian and half Jewish, and whose father has just lost his job, forcing her and her sister to leave their private community school for regular public school. Like in any good middle school story, Sonia has to navigate the shark-infested waters of popularity, friendship, and academics, and she of course makes iffy choices along the way. She joins a cheerleading team, has to decide whether to sit with the black girl who likes books and writing like her or sit with the popular kids who exoticize her, and has to deal with being the formerly rich girl who now goes to public school. 
. Excellent talk, must read his book. Neuroplasticity is like neural mapping–it’s that part of neuroscience that I understand conceptually without having to remember without drawing a cell, so I love it. Also, I wonder if the current tendency towards multitasking and multimedia extravaganzas is linked to what I see as a rise in more of my peers choosing multiple college majors in disparate fields or going towards interdisciplinary studies. Hyperlinking gives us access to so many new ideas, and I know in my experience, it has made me more interested in investigating other areas of study. Could be interesting to look into…
by Joan Steinau Lester. I would throw it more on the lower end of YA, for its language, treatment, and plot. Most simply, it’s about a 15-year-old biracial girl, Nina, in Northern California whose black father and white mother are separating. Her father is going on a sort of back-to-Africa kick, and Nina is beginning to become cognizant not only of racial difference itself, but also her privilege, assumptions, and appearance when she rides the bus through the black section of town to get to her father’s apartment, when she finds herself angry at her mother for trying to relate to Nina’s feeling of ostracization and discrimination, and when she begins to branch out from her white group of friends but then realizes that everyone expects her to choose either the white group or the black group. At the same time, there is a parallel story through the frame of a novel-in-progress written by Nina’s father about his great grandmother, Sarah, who escaped slavery. Nina begins to identify strongly with Sarah’s journey and struggles, and there’s an inkling that Sarah might actually be biracial, too, so we get the parallels with being biracial and told to choose, and being biracial by way of being the product of master-slave rape. Nina becomes totally overcome with feelings of guilt (it’s hard when you’re friends with people whose ancestors were slaves with your ancestors but also you’re friends with people who owned people like, again, your ancestors might have, etc. etc.) and confusion, and that is coupled with trying to comprehend the result of the Oakland fires and the portrayals of looters by the media.
