Let’s all welcome Stephanie back to the blogosphere…

Why, you ask? Because today at 12:42 pm I bought a Macbook. Anybody have a suggestion for a name??

Yes indeed, my IBM is breathing its last few labored breaths and making its own funeral plans (I have a few ideas for how I might “mourn”…)

I’ve [...]

“If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and broken-hearted, for we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men than we would from a dog; but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men.”

-Oswald Chambers

You don’t often pick up a biography and start reading in Chapter 8. I don’t at least, if you do I stand corrected.

But that’s what we do with almost all of the people we meet every day, isn’t it? We start reading on page 582, at that very moment. We get written into their [...]

It’s amazing how easily I forget how much I enjoy some of my favorite activities. Reading, for example – I was a bookworm of a kid growing up, and it’s probably my favorite relaxation technique still. Unfortunately, it tends to be one of the first things I give up when I get busy. A couple [...]

We have lost much of our ability to believe in fairytales.

We know and believe in heartbreaking tragedy, loss, horror, and pain. We readily accept the worst, comforted by the idea that life never was fair to begin with.

Yet somehow, we can’t allow ourselves to believe in outright goodness. We used to imagine that [...]

-Whether it is or is not possible to be happy I cannot say. I see varying levels of happiness as corresponding levels of blissful ignorance of one’s misery.-

I took a basic ethics course my freshman year of college for which I was assigned an article on the issue of subjective happiness, stemming from the [...]

Never look back, and look forward only when necessary. Instead, look around.

I think it’s safe to say that just about everyone has had to get over things in their past. We know that those things can shape you, but they should never control you. Don’t walk forward while looking back. We KNOW that. What [...]

Psychologists tell us that most people presented with a decision tend toward the “anchor and adjust” method – take what you think you know (your “anchor”) and make small adjustments until you arrive at a desireable answer for the question at hand. For example, if you are asked in what year Pocahontas died [...]

I’ve recently been made fun of/criticized (I don’t know which, perhaps both) for being “young and ideological.”

Apparently that will all end when I grow up. Right now, I’m just too inexperienced to know that my opinions are impractical.

That might all be true, but of course my young ideological brain cannot accept it. This [...]

As an intern, I was expecting to get experience that would teach me that people with more experience are smarter than I am – and it has, to some extent. More than that, I’ve learned to have confidence in my own ideas.

I have a tendency to rely heavily on the advice of those I [...]