Thoughts from an American Female

Mythology is rich with depictions of female warriors. In Greek mythology we have Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Her Roman counterpart is Diana. In Norse mythology there is talk of female warriors called Shield-Maidens.  For centuries these women were assumed to be the product of fantasy until last year. "New DNA evidence uncovered by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University shows that there were in fact female Viking warriors. The remains of an iconic Swedish Viking Age grave now reveal that war was not an activity exclusive to males – women could be found in the higher ranks at the battlefield." ( Ancient Pages.com ) llustration by Evald Hansen based on the original plan of the grave by excavator Hjalmar Stolpe, published in 1889 The  mythical female warriors known as Shieldmaidens may have been the basis for the mythical ‘Valkyries.’  Somewhere along the line, I'm assuming after the fall of a prior Matriarchal society, men b...

The day before Halloween, 1922, in Jamaica, New York a baby was born to an African-American couple with roots in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The young baby was named Marie Van Brittan Brown and she would grow up to invent the very first home security system. Marie worked as a nurse and her husband, Albert, was an electronics technician. As one can imagine they worked irregular hours and their lives probably closely mirrored the family dynamic of today. With two young children, and the slow response time of police to her neighborhood where crime was on the rise, she became inspired to create a device to make herself feel safer in her own home. Using four peep holes, a camera on a slider and a television, she was able to see who was on the other side of the door without fear. She also enabled the door to be unlocked via remote control. All of this took place in 1966. She and her husband were granted a patent for the system in 1969. What I enjoy the most about Marie's st...

This woman was an inventor. She created an invention that helped enable Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. She was also a Hollywood Starlet. Her name was Hedy Lamarr. The reason I chose Hedy Lamarr as my first woman is because men simply found her too beautiful to be smart. As my grandmother used to say, "Many a tear rolls down a pretty girl's cheek" and this is part of the reason why. Beauty and brains are not mutually exclusive. In the 1940's she invented frequency hopping device that jumped around radio frequencies to avoid a third party from jamming the signal. She donated this device to the United States military to fight the Nazis. The kicker? The military didn't use it. Why not? They, like many of the men in her life, discounted her intellect because she was just too pretty. It wasn't until after World War II that the device was used and it paved the way for what all of us now take for granted.  Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna on Novemb...

There's too much. All of it. It's just too much. I feel like Republicans assessed whatever the average tolerance level humans possess for bullshit before they shut down, and just decided to go full throttle. If someone is a good citizen and tries to be a good person most of them time, one slip up looks like a dinosaur ending meteor. When someone is a bucket of suck, a lifetime of mistakes and borderline criminal behavior, it's like, "What? Shit, where do I look? There's shit all over the place. I can't...I can't see normal through the shit." That's where we are. We are inside a glass box that is covered with shit and since we are inside, we can't even clean the shit off to see through to normal. I know that's a crass description but I just want one day where I can ignore the news. I want one day where I trust that our leadership will do the right thing. I can't. We elected a criminal and republicans are so disgusting that they are...

No one knows what they would have done in my shoes, or anyone else's shoes for that matter, because they weren't in my shoes. When I was 19, incredibly drunk and wanting to go home, I trusted a guy I worked with to give me a ride. I didn't expect that he would drive me back to his apartment. In fact, I don't even remember getting out of his car and into his apartment. In retrospect, should I have gone with him? No, probably not. Should I have drank in excess? No, especially not at 19. Should I have demanded he take me home as soon as I saw that his apartment clearly wasn't my home? Yeah, most likely. But that's not what happened. When I was 21, at a party, intoxicated, passing out in an upstairs bedroom should I have locked the door? Yeah. Should I have told my friends where I was going? Yeah. But I didn't. We can't "should" all over ourselves. There's nothing I can do to change what happened but I sure as hell can fight to change...