I'm thankful for Regina

this picture is from last night from my very own camera.

I am thankful for Regina Spektor the singer.
I am thankful that her concert in Salt Lake was last night and that I got to go and stand huddled up against the back of some tall boy who was huddled onto his short boyfriend's back in front of him.
I thought if height order was fair I probably should have been between them. But I could see Regina out of my left eye over the guy's shoulder about half the time, so I was good.
I guess if height order was correct and fair and just I probably should have just shoved Tawny in front of me.
I am thankful that Regina played Poor Little Rich Boy and Eet and Dance Anthem of the Eighties, and the song that is very special to me (The Man of a Thousand Faces) that nobody even knows, and that she was as sweet and charming in concert as she was the last time she was here. She really is incredible live. And I wish she'd played Somedays but oh well.
I am thankful that her opening band didn't suck at all. They were really awesome. They were Jupiter One.
I am thankful that she was wearing a cool patterned housedress-type dress with faces on it, because she is cool.
I am thankful that I could go with Talley because he is my friend. We went to Moochies to eat Philly cheesesteak sandwiches and Carl's Jr. for shakes beforehand, and I am thankful, because both were super delicious.
I am thankful that after five hours of standing in that blasted arena, with my knees tired and wobbling, and sweaty, we went to Maverick and I got a sweet, icy Sierra Mist from the fountain which quenched my thirst like nothing ever has before.
I am thankful for the kind of tired that's like when you're leaving Disneyland and you're ten years old and you feel like you won't even make it across the cement to the Mustafa parking lot and you'll just die right there on the ground full of tired Space Mountain-y happiness, because that was the kind of tired I was last night and it felt so good to crawl into bed so tiredly and so full of Regina Spektor goodness.

Thank you Housedresses Across America, Sierra Mist, Talley, Katie, Whitney, Tawny, and Makena, Jupiter One, Moochies, and Carl's Jr. for existing on yesterday, the sixth of November, two thousand and nine.

And thank you Regina. Awesomeness.


Following: I am thankful for People Who Met in My British Lit Class Whose Relationship We All Got To Watch Bud Who Are Now Getting Married.
(and yes I barely know these people, and yes I might be a creep (See: Jenny's Creep Wednesday) for writing about them, but they just make me joyously happy.)

I'm thankful for A Good Remedy for Beard Rash

The definition of beard rash is not on the internet.
So don't look it up.

The definition of beard rash, as defined by me (take into consideration my limited experience), is this:
An eruption of smooth, newly-exfoliated pinkish-red-sometimes orangish kind of unpleasant lingering tenderness on the bottom half of a non-bearded face when it has been in close, frictioned contact (kissing) with another face that is, on the contrary, bearded.

Bearded, or at least covered in two or three days' worth of stubble. One day of stubble is enough sometimes to give one the Rash, especially when you're dealing with someone who is particularly bristled. None of those pansy wisp beards ever cause real trouble.

I have experienced beard rash. And for all of you shaking your heads at me and scurrying off to think pointless derogatory things about my affectionate habits, I say, Boo You. Beard rash can occur from just two or three seconds-worth of kissing, if the person's face is sandpapery or foliagy enough. Just as it can occur from twenty minutes of kissing across the console or kissing through a movie and 45 minutes afterwards until you open your eyes, roll them, and wonder what in the heck you're doing. You're hungry. You want a pizza.

So, beard rash. I don't always get it. There seems to be no correlation between when it happens and why except for one perfectly wicked correlational device we like to call Inconvenience. It shows up like an awful cramping stomachache does when you're at the mall. Or how you all of a sudden have to go to the bathroom as soon as you get to someone's house at which you don't feel comfortable using the bathroom.

This beard rash thing sometimes is no problem at all, and sometimes flares up into a hugely conspicuous bright pink ring or beard-shaped little guy on your face. Sometimes it doesn't leave for hours. Days. Sometimes it goes away almost immediately. I have friends who experience beard rash in a crusty manner, which cannot be fun at all. Other friends actually apply things like Neosporin. I don't know if they're kissing a piece of sandstone or something with barnacles on it, but this always concerns me a little bit.

Once lately I was engaged in frictioning faces with someone very pleasant for a relatively short amount of time. Really quite short. It was kind of a goodbye-see-you-later-nice-to-see-you-Goodness-I-like-you-please-kiss-me type of thing. I had to be somewhere in a little while but I was sure I'd make it on time. I don't know why I was sure of this, why in the world, because I am always late to everything, somehow, even when I leave on time.
So I engaged in face frictioning with my fairly bristled friend--right, he has super rough facial foliage--and at some point we discontinued the activity. At some point directly after that, I looked at the clock and realized I had five minutes to be somewhere that would take me twenty, at least. No biggie, I thought. No biggie. I'm always late.

I sauntered calmly, my face tingling a little, to the closest mirror, to wipe the smudges of mascara from under the outer corners of my eyes that inevitably show up every few hours of every day.
I screamed. I looked like a clown. My face was totally orangish red pink on the bottom half. Bright and tingly and like a giant lightbulb that just says I KISSED I KISSED I KISSED I KISSED VERY RECENTLY. LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME. OW OW OW. MY FACE HASN'T EVEN COOLED OFF YET ARE YOU EMBARRASSED TO BE LOOKING AT ME?!?!

This place I was about to be late to was the last place you go with a big fat BEARD RASH on your face. The very last. I would have rather been meeting up with my grandparents with an army of hickies, the beard rash, and a cloud of angry Democrats behind me than going where I was going with the beard rash alone.

My pleasant bristled friend (shall we call him, the PBF?) stood behind me as I looked into the mirror, laughing a little, as though he had known about this all along. He was worried for my sake though. Who wouldn't be. Gulp. We stood there in front of the mirror for a while and then I felt indignant because it wasn't going away. In fact, it seemed to be getting dark redder as the blood rushed to my face from frustration and lateness.

I stomped into the dark kitchen of his little house to be indignant, but then opened his freezer, grabbed a bag of frozen peas, and smacked them onto the bottom half of my face. I stood staring at the inside of the open door of his freezer, stacked with numerous things. The kitchen was black except for the frosty light coming from the back of the freezer. I sighed. My face stingily accepted the cold from the peas.
PBF came and stood in front of the door and put his face close to mine (on the other side of the peas) and touched my ear and made a little speech and we laughed helplessly a little and I iced my face as well as I could with the cold, cold vegetables. They made it feel better and get less red. And everything was all right, and I went to where I was going.

Thank you frozen peas. I like to eat you sometimes too.
And thank you PBF for touching my ear and being leveled while I was freaking out.


up next: I'm thankful for Regina, as long as her concert doesn't suck, which I know it totally won't.

I'm thankful for Sue and Nail Plastic

Across the street from my parents' house is a house that old people live in.
Well, most of the houses on the street are occupied by old people. There are the ones with the lap pool in their backyard that makes their house worth like 12,000 more dollars, who always bring over huge bunches of daises when they're uprooting for the winter, then there are the ones whose house is next door and yellow and covered with ivy, but they're always gone on missions. There are the ones who have pink fiber optic-laced carpet in their living room. There are the ones who are crazy and used to call my parents in high school when I got home late to make sure my parents knew. They'd hear and peer at me driving by super late and call my parents. Every teenager in my neighborhood has a special eye-roll reserved for those guys.

The house directly across the street used to have a man named Dick Davis living in it, but he died when I was younger. I don't remember anything about him except for when the circus came to town and he let my little sister and I come over early in the morning to watch the elephants setting stuff up in the Provo valley below the cliff of his backyard. He was old, and he died. Now Sue and Jerry live there. They are old, but not quite.

Sue is 68 and has brown hair and brown eyes. She reminds me of a little sparrow because she's very spunky and round and knows a lot. She runs the ward newsletter. She knows all about computers. She knows a lot, and she talks a lot, and since she talks a lot, we get along very well. She and her husband Jerry have lived in the brown brick house across from mine for about five years. They have a cat named Stinky and another one whose name I have never actually asked, but when they talk to it, they call it something that sounds like "Skanky". I'm pretty sure that's not the cat's name, though, so, who knows. They have other cats too. They also have a candy machine with Jordan almonds in it sitting in their front hall.
Sue and Jerry both graduated college as old people, and their little neck banner things from graduation hang on the railings of the stairs just inside their entry. Jerry's is embroidered with a message to Sue. They really love each other.
Sue and I sit together at church sometimes. We've just begun being good friends this year, and this summer, she started doing my mom's nails. Sue does nails. Sue is very good at nails. My mother pays Sue to do her nails.

I've never really been interested in having Nails, that is, long ones that are hard and scratchy and take maintenance that you can't get dirt underneath. They're for people who don't fall down and scuff their shoes all the time, people with clean cars and perfectly coiffed hair. I'm more the do-a-crappy-job-of-painting-my-nail-stubs-bright-orange kind of girl. But, towards the end of the summer, Sue offered to do my nails for free. Because I needed "a lift". Now that I'm becoming a grownup and stuff, I figured I could take a few lessons from having long ladylike elegant nails of elegance. So, I decided to go ahead with it. Sue puts this stuff on them that makes them grow crazy long. Mine are getting long now.

Sue went on dialysis about a month ago, which she was hoping she wouldn't have to do. It's no fun, she tells me. I wish she didn't have to be on it, but it is making her feel a lot better. She's got this crazy bruise on her left arm from where they poke her. She's there at dialysis for five hours a day, three days a week. She really likes Ben, one of the nurses, and asks me if she can give him my phone number. The alternate days she's not at dialysis are when I go over to get my nails done and to chatter.
I go over every ten days or couple of weeks, now, and sit and talk with Sue about my life and her life and what she does with hers and what I should do with mine. Stinky sits on my lap and Sue and I sit in her bedroom with a folding table between us, and Law and Order humming on the TV in her background, and she paints thick clear plastic carefully onto my nails with a clear paintbrush. I always want to make cookies for her but she's not supposed to eat a lot of stuff. Sue's bedside table has an open box of Milk Duds on it, always. Her giant Apple computer sits on her desk and there's a plaid fleece blanket folded on the chair under my bum.

I alternate my hands in and out of this little light box which cures the plastic on each nail, and Sue tells me about her granddaughter and her sons, and health insurance and how ridiculous it is with dialysis. I looked at her wedding pictures the other day, and told her how my best friend had a veil just like hers--a little poof right up on top of her head. Sue tells me how she thinks I should go on a mission, how I need to finish school, how everything will happen in good time. I tell her about being nervous to finish college and about who is talking to me, and who isn't, and how much I miss people sometimes, and about a new restaurant I went to this week. I ask her how she knows things. She tries to convince me to put Halloween stickers on my nails, and I say a vehement no, and we laugh.

I'm very thankful for the "lift" Sue gives me each week or two, for our friendship, for the life she's lead so far that I learn from, for her wedding pictures with bridesmaids in pink dresses and little pillbox hats, for how similar I have found myself to be to this grownup who I was pretty sure I had nothing in common with, for my nice long nails, for Stinky the cat, for the open box of Milk Duds that reminds me I don't have to be old when I get old just because I'm old, and for Sue.

Thank you Sue.

Up Next In The Warm Leaves/Crisp Cider Thankfulness 2009 Installment:

I'm thankful for A Good Remedy for Beard Rash.
and the definition of beard rash, if you're not quite sure what that is. But no details.

Crisp Cider and Warm Leaves, or whatever

It is November, and as several (or probably thousands) of other bloggers are doing, I am having a good think about thankfulness and what it is that I am thankful for. I would tell you that I'm going to spend each morning this month devoted to writing you a short, perfectly-formed blog about something I am thankful for, like crisp autumn leaves or warm apple cider or whatever, but as soon as I make goals like that, I end up missing days and feeling very discouraged. So let's just say that, for the entire month of November (minus a few days at the beginning...good planning, Julie) whenever something very thankful happens, and I happen to catch the whim of it, and I happen to be at my computer, or I happen to be feeling extremely full of words that need to be let out to describe my thankfulness, I will tell you a small story about something that happened to me that I am very grateful for.

Deal?
Ok good.

For the visual learners.

This is Halloween.

I'll be getting my Ghost Hunters on with some people and some Thai takeout. I hope you all have lovely Halloweens and don't dress up like skanks for no reason, unless you're artfully-outfitted skanks. Then it's OK.

Zombie Girl Saved by Yo-Yo; Devil Defeated with Laughter

I became completely attached to and taught important life lessons by a computer game called Nightmare Ned at the tender age of eleven or twelve. It was a very special game.
I'd played my share of Magic School Bus (awesome), Dr. Quandary, Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, etc, but this Ned was different. Less flashy. Deeper. More mature.

It came as one of those little cardboard-cased discs that was a really unexciting bonus surprise in the box with the computer game that your parents actually paid for, the one that you always carried around longingly at Costco that you didn't get until Christmas or your next birthday. You carried it anyway and pointed eagerly at the two tiny screenshots on the back of the box and tugged on your parents while imagining the hours and hours of delight the game would give you.

No cardboard sleeve game that snuck along in one of these boxes was ever played by me but one. And that was Nightmare Ned.

This particular cardboard sleeve game, NN, came in the box belonging to the original Disney Villains game, which I loved but wasn't totally enthralled by. I didn't really relate to it. I've never had a literal mad Queen of Hearts chase me through a badly animated whispering topiary maze, as unusual as that may sound. Neither have I, in real life, mixed any kind of potion or fought anyone with a sword...through arrow keys...and a spacebar. On a crappily animated pirate ship. And I'm pretty sure I never will. Strange right?

When I was on a break from the villains once, after a frustrating three hour sojourn into their dark but predictable world, my eleven-year-old self decided what the heck I'll go get myself a new plastic cup of rootbeer and fistful of pretzels and load that Nightmare Noodle or whatever the heck it's called game onto my computer and give it a go. It looks easier than this villains game, because the graphics look crappier. And it didn't cost $20 like crappy dumb Disney villains can't even beat Captain Hook with mindless clicking when I try a hundred times. Nightmare Ned didn't even cost anything and it doesn't look like there is any swordfighting.

Here. Watch the intro to Ned. It was too long of a paragraph to explain it myself. It's conveniently on YouTube. See if you don't fall 100% in love with Ned from the start. See if the music doesn't creep you right out.



Ned, after this intro, has five worlds to conquer and defeat in order to get out of his nightmares. They're set in the stereotypical environments an overly nervous little boy (or, overly dramatic little girl?) would worry about--his school, the echoing recesses of his home bathroom, a spooky haunted graveyard, a chilling attic, and a hospital. The school is Alcatraz-inspired, slanting, bars on windows; the bathroom is composed of toilets that want to eat you and electric razors acting like sharp-toothed rodents. The doctors in the hospital world are comically-animated corpses who plunge their hands into you to steal organs as you wheel rustily by on a gurney, there's also a demented dentist who shows up randomly to electrocute you with his drill. The attic is full of really eerie circus performers and odds and ends of furniture and tears of wallpaper across the walls. The graveyard is full of zombie moms, ghosts, funerals, and the most poignant part of the whole game, in my opinion: a tiny zombie girl clutching her knees and rocking in the corner of her room (some unexplained bedroom) while a bat with slitted eyes holds her nightlight hostage in an upper recess of the room.

You have to rescue it for her, being Ned, with your yo-yo.

You flick your yo-yo at the bat a few times, letting the creepy little guy know who's boss, and he eventually drops the nightlight and flutters annoyedly away. The positively eerie scene turns simply cheerful and the little zombie girl plugs her nightlight in to commence dancing around happily with a doll of hers.

Yes, Ned's weapon is a red yo-yo he holds in his pocket. Not the most powerful weapon you could imagine. But that's the point. The game was made for little children to play. I remember very recently sitting next to someone who remarked, as I space-barred and arrow-keyed my way through Ned's world, at how scary it was. He wondered how a little kid could play a game like that without having horrifying nightmares.

This is how.

Each world in the game has many different things you have to defeat with your yo-yo or your spellbinding wit. In your socks and purple boxer shorts. At the hospital, you win your organs back from a spinning Wheel of Organs and you get the chance to knock the dentist right in the face. In the bathroom, you have to make your way across a fleet of dancing rusty tubs, who are floating in the air. You have to jump, timing perfect, so that the rats throwing radios down into the tubs don't electrocute you. In the graveyard you pass a fleet of wisecracking ghosts, meet a skeleton in a smoking jacket who propels you out of his grave on a the lid of a jack-in-the-box, save the zombie girl, and defeat a big craggly monster with an exposed heart. At school you avoid trampling masses of students zooming around, connect with your personal bully, and wander through a blackboard maze with a teacher trilling times tables insanely in the background. The attic is definitely the most disturbing, and seems the most pointless, full of scary scary stuff, but you get to fly out of there in a car, so I believe it's ultimately worth the terror.

After each piece of darkness is defeated, there is a poof that appears in the air before Ned. From the poof comes animated sparkles (little plus signs) and after the sparkles appears a familiar figure in Ned's life. In the graveyard, it is his cheerful grandfather, in a pair of green and purple plaid pants, reassuring Ned and telling him everything is going to be OK. In the attic, it's a little girl named Sally that Ned knows from school. In the bathroom it's his toilet, which talks (strange, but strangely comforting) and at school, it's the bully who turns out to actually want friendship, although he definitely didn't know how to approach it. Ned politely asks the bully to quit calling him "Melonhead" and their friendship is off to a start. At the hospital, the familiar face is a nurse friend of Ned's.

They're all there to reassure, and while Ned acknowledges and faces his fears, he has an army behind him. He just doesn't know it's there, the army, until he's done. Which is important. He has to do it himself. But they're there all the same. And they show up when he needs them. And he gets out of his nightmares, and his parents wake him up in the morning.

Remember at the top where I was talking about Disney Villains not being relative to the life of a small child? It's true that I've never had a dream about dancing tubs or zombie girls, or been a little boy, just as I haven't fought villains, but it is true that I've been in situations seeming endlessly terrifying in which my own apparently useless childish/childhood strengths have come to great use in defeating great amounts of cloying darkness. And that is what Ned does, too.

And that's a great thing to remember. That one has the power to do that.

I went to see a play this week in which the antagonist character, who is actually a mercenary of Satan, who is named Mr. Dark, is actually defeated by laughter. Laughter, plain and simple. Laughter, with which the protagonist reminds himself that he is in charge of his own destiny, that the devil cannot Make Him Feel Sad. Cannot make him Die. Because behind that sadness, that darkness, there is always the light waiting to come out.

So that's what I learned from a little animated boy named Ned and the devil and some zombies and the UVU theater department this week.

And Happy Halloween.

Sassy Cookies

Last Thursday, I sat in a red faux leather booth with my friend Adam at Rice King on Center street in Provo. Rice King is a Chinese restaurant that has a $5 lunch special. It's ten times better than Demae, and that other Japanese place, and India Palace, and about equal to Los Hermanos and Ottavio's, so, you should go there. Adam and I go there sometimes, and the waiter is either Victor who doesn't even give us a menu or a HUGE football player from BYU who's like a giant golden Viking. He's so nice. So is Victor.
It was a gold day because the leaves were swirling down from the trees, and we ate delicious golden orange tofu, which Adam paid for, for which I am eternally grateful. We ate white rice with our tofu, and both had water. This is weird because customarily he orders rootbeer. With our water, crispy tofu, and white rice, we also ate a delicious vegetable dish that comes in the clear sauce that looks questionable (a little bit like snot or something) but tastes like a little piece of heaven. I'd never had it before and I fell a little bit in love with the baby corn and broccoli and carrot shards and lettuce. I don't like the mushrooms, though. Adam took the mushrooms.

We spent time at Rice King, and then we skipped up and down Center very vigorously for 45 minutes or so. That kind of skipping where you're jumping really high and the people outside of ABG's are all standing around with their cigarettes (at 4:00 PM) and staring at you. And the one homeless guy with fuzzy gray cornrows stares at you too and kind of hums happily to himself. I kissed my hand and smacked it onto the wall of ABG's as we passed by, just for some love.

We sang all of "Light My Candle" when we were west of University, and remarked about pink leaves on a bush east. We sat in some grass and almost went inside some scene-y cafe to sit on their squishy couch, but we didn't because Adam explained he felt bad using their couch when he wasn't buying any of their snacks. But the point of what I was going to tell you is back at Rice King. We sat there for a while and talked. That's what Adam and I do, is talk. Sometimes we are quiet too. Sometimes we sing. We used to sing a lot more.

We got our check at Rice King and I felt slightly embarrassed again that Adam was paying. I felt bad. I don't know why. But he's my friend and he is nice, and it was nice of him to pay. On the little black tray that the check comes on was our two fortune cookies. I did something I hadn't done before, I held them both out and said "pick one" so I would know which one was really mine. So Adam would have decided and I would know my destiny. You know, which paper fortune was actually Mine. The Fortune That God Had Chosen To Place In The Cookie That Adam Did Not Choose In Order To Start Me On The Rest Of My Life From After Thursday. It's not like I really believe that, but it's fun to pretend. And kind of believe it. Because a place that makes the most delicious tofu on EARTH could NOT MISLEAD me. They couldn't.

I don't know who makes fortune cookies these days. I noticed the wrapper was different than usual when I picked mine from Adam's palm.

Here is my fortune:

"Enjoy yourself while you can."

Here is Adam's fortune:

"Your legs must be tired, because you been running through someone's mind ALL day."

Are you being serious right now? You don't just throw either of those into some unsuspecting, slightly superstitious person's fortune cookie. Fortunes are supposed to say "Your plans will work out" or "Follow the business path you have been recently pursuing" or "how to say THE SUN IS SHINING in Chinese %***#@#@".

I mean, I guess Adam's was harmless. And very amusing, because it actually says "you been" and not "you have been". It is actually written in ghetto gangster speak. Mine, though? I guess death is in my near future. Or I will be officially Unenjoyableified and things will not be enjoyable anymore, very soon. I don't think that can happen. Regardless, I have since begun enjoying myself. And I like it.

I just wanted to tell you about that.

And that my death or Unenjoyification is imminent. Haha. Or something.