ONE|UNO|ОДИН|BIR

Dear Everyone,

This is a blog by Justin and Karin. Mainly we thought it would be a good way to keep in touch with our family members and friends who we don't get to see a lot.

It’s been two months since the beginning of perhaps the most significant union since the yankees shot up all those racists or slave owners or whatever. I guess to be more specific, a reunion seeing as how this union has a history of separation also. Never again though. We promised.

We've settled into our home at the foot of BYU. This is official today I guess because we finished making our curtains—kind of. That’s what we're saying but the kitchen doesn't have any... yet. We like our house a lot—well really we only have a basement, but we sure do like it. Except that it's always cold...and that the kitchen smells some kind of funky.

More significantly, Justin is still saving the world one delinquent at a time, at the treatment center where we met almost two years ago. I (Karin now) am working for an organization that is affiliated with BYU and only The Largest database about the status of women. It's called WomanStats (womanstats.org). My job is to get pumped up with feminist angst and appalling trivia via reading government documents and news articles. I pull out important information and then categorize it into one of 300+ categories so that researchers can go onto the database and type in a country and a category (such as domestic violence or voting rights) and retrieve a ton of cited information on that topic. Pretty sweet.

Justin still gets his rant on about the vices of two party systems, the IRB, racism, sucrose, motion control running shoes, and linguistic prescriptivism (how dumb is it that database is one word whereas a lot isn’t. When was the last time you used the word lot. You didn’t). He is working on some research, which he received a grant for. Something about words and side effects, he thinks it’s important and hopes to get published. Wouldn’t that be special?

Karin is trying to find a high school who will pay her to practice teaching on their students (also known as an internship) so that she can finally be done being a student herself. She is also getting a bunch of 10-year-old girls ready for their dance recital in April. Please cross every appendage you have for me! (Woops I broke character—now you all know whose writing this vaguely 3^rd person paragraph.) It’s a good day when we get through dance class and no one has cried or gotten hurt…Our show is the first weekend in April and it’s gonna be big. I’ll be playing a mime who provides comic relief between dances. Note: I said mime. Not sideshow.

Don’t forget to spay and neuter your pets.