Confessions of a happy person

Back in December, I was working on an application for a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and it's this prestigious award that pays for the tuition and stipend for doctoral students like myself and looks good on your resume. It took me about a month to put together and it's a pretty extensive application including your proposal with preliminary data, information on how you'll be trained, academic history, etc. As part of the application there are these things called BioSketches, which basically is a resume where you include papers you've published, projects you've worked on, your academic history, and a couple of short personal statements about yourself and your project.  In undergrad, I went through a period of depression and my grades weren't that great so I thought I should address that in my personal statement by mentioning it. When my advisor reviewed it, he suggested that I should probably take it out. He's

Teens... love is more than just a feeling  Early twenties... love is respectful Late twenties... love lets go of expectations Current... love is possible

The other day I read the letter the Stanford victim wrote to her attacker.  Before I go into my thoughts, I want to make one thing very clear: I think there is absolutely no excuse for Brock Turner's behavior. With that being said, I couldn't help but think that part of the problem with rape culture is the ambiguity in dating culture. Where people (both men and women) are not upfront with their intentions and play games. In the letter, she wrote, "The night after it happened, he said he thought I liked it because I rubbed his back. A back rub." While her intentions were to show how ridiculous it was that he thought a back rub would be a form of consent, I've actually heard very similar things from conversations that I've had with multiple people. If you know me, I'm very straight-forward because I just don't like to assume. Which also means I miss the small cues and meanings that people send (or perhaps I'm just totally oblivious). So I