Breast Cancer Awareness

I'm not going to say much, but I love the campaign that DDB created for Associacao de Luta Contra o Cancer in Mozampique! Super heroes are women too, they need to do regular monthly exams! I know it's not breast cancer awareness month any more, but I am totally changing my Facebook cover photo to the Wonder Woman one!

I'll leave you with a couple of examples that I like best, but follow the links in the Boing Boing article above to see them all!




R

Legos or Barbies?

So, it is a strange day when every single one of my blogs write about the same thing. SO I just figured I HAD to write about it. It says something when it is at least something fairly relevant to my life.

Apparently Lego is making new Legos, for girls! These Legos are curvier, girlier, and a lot more human looking than normal Legos. The part I like the most is that they are taller than the regular Lego and have a much more Barbie-like face. Either way, these articles are interesting, do we really need a Lego for girls? Can't girls just use regular Legos, and there's a store in the UK that is integrating boy toys and girl toys! I love it, even though I played with Barbies forever, I still loved to play with toy cars, and dig stuff up and build train set too. I think the gender-specific toys tend to push children into a corner instead of allowing them to develop the way they want. Who says girls have to like pink curvy Legos, maybe they just want to build things! (However, I did love Polly Pockets.. maybe these would be just as good if not WAY better)

R

Volunteering

I remember in high school when my English teacher told me that it is very important to have extracurriculars and volunteer activities on college applications. I don't know how much the small amount of these activities helped me get into college, but I hope that it is true these are helping. According to this article in Good Magazine (of course...) volunteering is becoming more and more important on college applications. But more so: dedication to a volunteer activity. So start sending students out to volunteer somewhere once a week, or a couple hours a month. Not only does that help their college applications (hopefully) it gives them more friends and helps the community more than just the occasional volunteer hour. 

R

Keep your legs closed!

 

I have only taken Plan B once. Maybe that's too much information about my life, but I had a similar experience to many of the girls in this article. It was scary, frustrating, and mostly embarrassing to have to go ask the pharmacist for it. But I can't imagine what it would be like if I had to get a prescription from a doctor to do it, and I am still grateful that Plan B is available at the pharmacy down the road. The condom broke, we were trying to be safe, and so we took precautions to protect ourselves afterward. I still felt judged by the lady at the counter next to me, but I am a strong independent woman, and I should be allowed to choose my sexual endeavors, as long as I am safe and choose wisely. However, I do feel that even today there is little education on how these pills work and when they should be used. They should NOT be a normal form of birth control, your body can really only handle so much of that, but they should NOT be hard to get access to. Anyone who needs a "morning after" pill should have access to them, otherwise we are perpetuating the problem of unsafe and unprepared sexual adventures that people are too shy to take care of. We need to provide better education to our youth about sex in all forms, but protection from STDs and from pregnancy is one place that we still (even though that's the only thing talked about in many sex ed classes) barely scrape the surface on.

R

How do you get the seeds out of these things?

I love pomegranates.  When I lived two blocks from the best grocery store in the world (well maybe that's an exaggeration, but Berkeley Bowl is pretty amazing), I ate a pomegranate a day during that season. I always sat down with my pomegranate for about a half hour while I pulled it apart and ate each seed separately.  I always kinda felt like a weird bird.  But the other day I found this video (on thekitchn), and it is revolutionary (at least for people who spend 45 minutes a day eating one piece of fruit)!  I have since eaten a few pomegranates, but it's hard to find good ones in Texas, I bought a California pomegranate yesterday and it was delicious and the seeds came out so easily it only took me about 5 minutes to eat a pomegranate ... well at least 5 minutes to get the seeds out, I still enjoyed every seed individually.

S

Everyone is donating organs now

In Wales, they have made a new system where, by default, everyone donates organs when they die.  You can opt out easily, but this will make more organs available to the community in need.  This article states that 67% or organ donors last year were not on the organ donor list, meaning most people who support organ donation are just too lazy or for some other reason have not gotten on the list (for me I know if it wasn't so easy when you apply for a driver's license I would not have done it).  This will not only make more organs more readily available, but it will also force people to think about whether or not they want to be off of the organ donor list, as opposed to the other way around.  Making the decision to not donate is too easy now.  

The need for organs has provided great motivation for research (with 3D printing and other tissue engineering techniques, which I have mentioned here before) but this is slow and has a ways to go before any of these can be implemented with larger organs.  By putting everyone on the donor list and only removing them if they ask, doctors will be able to quickly transfer organs.  The Welch government says patients' families will still be allowed to refuse the removal of their organs, but this will give a more full list of donors, as people who actually do not want to donate will remove their names. 

S 

I have to pee!

I remember back in high school when they started closing all of our bathrooms. Now I can't imagine not having access to a bathroom in every building on campus (because I do pretty much know which buildings have the good bathrooms on campus at UIC now) and I shudder at the fact that they made about 200 girls use the same 3-stall bathroom. But this article brings up the same point, from another school that did basically the same thing!  They started closing the bathrooms because of smoking..not that it stopped anything because the smokers would just wait in the only bathroom that was opened. I even remember getting glared at because I used the last open stall, which happened to be their ash tray, once. I agree that something needs to be done to stop vandalism, illegal activities, and harassment in the bathrooms, but there must be a better way than forcing people to wait for the only, DIRTY, bathroom available. That obviously isn't stopping anything. 

R