"Have you ever been interested - have you ever become interested in something just because you had a really good experience with a particular person? One of our team members was not interested in math until they had a class with a teacher that made it exciting." Yeah, a great teacher is one of those great experiences in life for me. That's cool to hear you had that kind of experience. Yeah, branching outside math a little bit 'cause yeah, I've definitely, I remember like almost all my math teachers and what I learned for them - from them. There was always, there's almost always like some central thing that I remember about that class. Or something that they said to me. But yes, have I ever become interested in something just because you had a really good experience with a particular person and maybe something that I wouldn't have been interested in otherwise... I mean, hopefully not too on the nose, but I didn't know what sociolinguistics was before I started contributing to Michigan Diaries. I had a broad understanding of what sociology was and linguistics. And I guess you know, I'm still a lay person. But yeah, definitely have, I would say an interest in linguistics, more than I would have had I not participated in Michigan Diaries.

I want to talk about a holiday that I invented several years ago, and I am doing my darnedest to promote it. My darnedest meaning that I post about it every year on Facebook. So I guess that's not really like a lot of effort. This holiday originated on a Tuesday in October roughly five years ago when I was just having a bad day. I was feeling grumpy and I was feeling weird. And so I decided, "you know what, you know what today is? Today is Disenchantment Tuesday, that's what it is." And I was in a strange enough mood that I not only declared that day Disenchantment Tuesday, but I put it on my Outlook calendar for the second Tuesday, the next October. And every year when that time rolls around I do that again, I put it on my Outlook for the next year. And how do you observe Disenchantment Tuesday, you ask? Well, this is how you observe Disenchantment Tuesday. You try a food, TV show, song, whatever; something from your personal yesteryear that you used to love, ideally when you were a child, and you try it again to see what it's actually like. Sometimes this goes cheerfully and your Disenchantment Tuesday is derailed, and that's okay because that's a good thing. When you find out that something actually was good, that's great. But in my experience, more often than not, you find out that, "wow, that was a piece of junk. Why did I ever love that?" I'm not going to mention the specific things that I've done this with because I don't want to bad mouth companies whose employees depend on the revenue they get from selling the things that children think are awesome, that you grow up and find out are not so awesome, maybe, as you thought they were. But that's that's how you do it. That's what you do. Sometimes you're pleasantly surprised and sometimes you're not so pleasantly surprised, so, tell your friends.

And today I wanted to talk about a new word that I learned today. It's - I was listening to a podcast titled, "How To Be Impeccable With Your Words," and it was kind of discussing mental health and how your words play a role in your mental health and the host used a term called toxic positivity and she stated that that's when you put on this facade that everything is great and fine. However, it's really, um, it's really not and how that can be really exhausting and degrading to like your - your own self if you aren't able to own your own words, and I think that is a really interesting term. I feel like I am pretty socially aware and like personally aware of my own feelings and how to express them and who I can express my feelings with but I also noticed that a lot of times like especially when talking about grad school I tend to put on this facade like, “Everything's great. I love it. I am just enjoying and soaking up every moment of being in grad school.” When in reality, I'm burnt out and stressed and disappointed and sleep deprived and isolated and... and I want to say that I'm thriving and having a great time because I have this support of family and friends who are cheering me on and happy for all that I've accomplished, but grad school is hard and I mean, there are... I'm sure there are other like deeper connections that people can make to the term toxic positivity, but 'cause it for sure can apply to like mental health and identifying when you need help and things like that, but I think it also is just a good word to describe a phenomenon that people use all the time.