that brave, unbalanced woman

The Dinner Table Thing

2011-11-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

I used to read a lot.

Golly, I used to read a lot. I couldn't be bothered to show up to the dinner table unless I had at least three books under my arm--the one I was halfway through, the other one I was halfway through, and the next one in case those two weren't enough in the eleven minutes it took to hold my nose and gulp down the steamed squash pinched from the watery vegetable dish that I had to finish before I could leave the table. Sometimes the eleven minutes would pass and I'd sit there for an hour or more with one edge of my barstool bumped up against the counter and the squash or salad or whatever it was growing slimy and cold on my plate.
Reading was the background, the wallpaper of everything I did growing up. I pined for books in the car at night when it was dark and I wasn't allowed to turn my reading light on for my parents' fear of lower quality night driving vision. I read them at intermission in plays. I spent entire vacations in a house on the beach filled with rambunctious cousins reading paperbacks I had brought, and then reading all the paperbacks they had brought, too. At the end of A Wrinkle In Time, I cried for days. When I came upon A Girl of the Limberlost in sixth grade, I checked it out weekly until I had practically memorized it. I finished Les Miserables, unabridged, 1800 pages, in the middle of a peer tutoring class in eighth grade and slumped over with the weight of it, both front and back covers of the cheap Penguin copy having been replaced with packing tape. I bought Harry Potter 7 at midnight, barefoot, in a Wal-Mart, and was still awake, nauseated with sleepiness, by 4:30 AM, playing the just-one-more-sentence game. I took A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and East of Eden in as my own, MY books, respectively, and hoarded three or four copies of both. When I'd meet a person, a new person, anywhere--rehearsal for a play, a new class, work, anywhere--I would automatically relate them to somebody I knew in a book. Contrary to popular belief, I was incredibly and still am incredibly shy. I would much rather watch you than talk to you, most of the time. No offense. Really I'd rather just read about you. I still really, really, really, really love you. I just know much better how to interpret dialogue than to participate in it.

The dinner table thing kept happening until I was about eighteen, when my grandmother looked across her water-repellent tablecloth at me and said, "Hey, Julie, you're eighteen. Stop." And I thought, "Ohhhh, this is going to suck" as if something hadn't clicked until then, as if I hadn't realized that I was a big Grownup who wasn't supposed to be reading teen historical fiction over my baked potato and ham. I put my book down, painfully, and spent the next few weeks trying rather pathetically to learn to eat without reading, which was hilariously unfun. Chewing only came naturally with the flipping of pages. Conversation-while-eating was a whole nother awful thing to learn. Do you know how many conversations you can read in the time it takes you to actually have one?

So, I stopped reading at the table. And then there was college. And then I kind of stopped reading altogether.
I was still reading 500 pages a week--I'm an English major, after all--but all the smelling and touching and feeling and seeing went out of it. Suddenly I wasn't reading the books I was still checking out of the city library. Suddenly I was required to remember not what I had read, but the exact words, and the "syntax" and the "cultural significance", and page numbers, and "themes", and I was so angry, so angry that I couldn't seem to absorb the life of books the way I had used to. I got over it, eventually, the disconnect I felt from my old world. I still enjoyed things occasionally. The Member of the Wedding hit me hard my sophomore year, and Possession and The Things They Carried had me lying in bed until 12:30 on a rainy fall Sunday crying over the both of them. But otherwise, I was racing through books, scratching quick, indecipherable (even by me) notes in the margins, and trying to think in a flash to make the most insightful comment about them every fifty-minute class period. And the worst part was, I never went back and read any of them again. I forgot a lot of them. Left them, embarrassed, on my bookshelf, to collect dust. Reading's been a pain for years.

This weekend, I was in San Diego. I almost missed my flight there and as a result had nothing to do on the 1.5 hour long plane ride, other than write a letter to Financial Aid and read through two hyper-depressive plays that I'd chucked optimistically into my bag. Both had already been read, quick, for my English 495 class. I got it. I got the themes. Got it. Done. Done with them, no rereading, what was I thinking. Window seat. Clouds. Boots. Hungry. I looked at the two sleeping married guys next to me, out my window, drummed my fingers on the back of my other hand, mangled a pen with my teeth, drank a ginger ale, wrote a list on the back of a study sheet, and considered pulling out some of my own hair and braiding it. Thought about turning my phone on to see if it would crash the plane. Finally I gave in to staring into the distance, boring my eyes into the blue vinyl seat in front of me.

And then I felt a familiar tickle. A rusty tickle, but a familiar one.
I just wanted to read. Read about somebody. Read something with colors on the cover, with pages that made my hands too dry. Read something that snapped me out of my life into someone else's for a while. When was the last time I read something without thinking about the stale mint gum smell wafting from my school bag or the kid sitting next to me or the class I was teaching in an hour? Why hadn't I bought an $18 book at the airport? Why hadn't I bought a book lately. Wait, when was the last time I bought a book? I had bought several at a campus booksale three months before, but had removed them from their shopping bag and robotically placed them onto my bookshelf. One was about the Yellow Fever, and one was about..what was it...someone named Calpurnia or something? Carolinia? The cover was yellow. Before that, what was the last thing I read and liked? I shook my head. Oh, I disgust myself. So many blogs. When did I start watching so much TV? I don't even take a book to school anymore? I have fruit ninja on my phone? I saw three previews for movies based on books last trip to the movie theater, none of which I've read? The last eleven books I've finished were for a class? Falling asleep after surfing the internet for hours? Pictures of patriotic pinwheels and puppies on Pinterest have become more interesting to my feebled mind than even a basic essay or two? What happened to Francie, to Cal and Aron, to Cosette and Meg and Charles Wallace and Frankie and Maud and Roland and Elnora, for crying out loud?! To PHILIP?!

I smiled stupidly at my bewildered seatmate. "I need to buy a book," I said to him. He continued sleeping.

Needless to say, a trip was taken to a seedy Barnes and Noble just before departure, on Monday, on Halloween, and a book was boughten, and I spent my flight home with a pile of airport candy, an entire row to myself, and an entire book.

Here

2011-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

“Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.”
― George Eliot

You.

2011-07-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

Last weekend,
when everything had calmed down,
you--you left me a half-gallon of Graham Canyon in the freezer at work
and I bought a fresh pizza on the way to the theater, mouth watering at the combination.
Pepperoni, with garlic dipping sauce I'd probably put on waffles it's so good

I clocked in, punching my yellow striped card
And you--you smiled brightly down and let me talk to you about yoga, now that we went together,
and you noticed my greasy cardboard box
jumping enthusiastically into an explanation of the pizza oven you built in your backyard

My sandals were unbuckled
and you--you invited me out to the raining parking lot
to run my hand over the smooth black shell of your new car
and laugh excitedly and nod my approval
and after that
I clutched the warm pizza box to my chest, the ice cream freezing under one armpit,
gripping a fistful of spoons
and tromped down to the office I work in, and plopped onto the carpet
in a safe space between the desk and the wall, next to the mirror

And you--you followed me quietly down to the basement, and sat on the other side of my pizza
as I wolfed it down, cross-legged on the carpet
and you ate my crusts and asked me how I was
And you--you sat in the computer chair next to us, eating spoonfuls of ice cream from the carton
and laughing.

I looked at myself in the wall-sized mirror next to me, marinara in the corners of my mouth, ice cream in the lines between my fingers, observing myself, and I thought
You--you are lucky.

Mr. Bundles

2011-07-05T23:03:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I was at a fancypants dinner, wearing a blue dress with purple roses on it and orange high-heels. I thought I looked nice. My hair was clean and I shook everybody's hands and led over two hundred of them to their tables.
The dinner I was at is held in the ballroom of the hive of my college campus, and there were eight hundred people there. As is customary, I sat at a table near the back center of the hall with my sister, grandparents, and four strangers who are different each year but always surprisingly good at holding sincere but temporary interest in conversation with me.
I appreciate that.

My parents sat nearer to the stage--the stage where the usually threeish men and oneish women that my mother has carefully selected receive their awards.
The dinner is for recipients of an award that comes in the form of a crystal eagle mounted on a wooden pedestal, and is for freedom. It's pretty neat. The dinner was long, and good, and there was some kind of mango salsa on the salmon that was making fireworks in my mouth. Could have used another roll. I was there alone, without you, sitting next to Jenny, who sat there in a comforting way, that way that sisters are comforting in, with lacy sleeves on her black dress and a ready smile for the overstarched mothers of beauty queens that kept coming over to exclaim about and run a hand through her waist-length blond hair.
Dessert was a disappointment this year--some kind of pear with almond paste inside a pastry crust--and I hacked at it with my fork, licking the powdered sugar off the dry pastry bits that I then sucked at until they slid back into and down my throat. Jenny eyed the uneaten dinner roll of the squinting man next to me, its perfect pat of butter leaning into it a little bit as it accustomed itself to the room's temperature. I read the program three times. The awards went on, and on, and my feet found themselves aching inside the stiff brown leather of my shoes. It was suddenly unbearable to sit, and I pressed my fork into a blob of sticky almond goop and quietly moved back into the clacking hallway behind the ballroom, where I could stand next to a blue polyester curtain with my shoes off and watch the end of the ceremony with my head against the wall.
Two others were in the hallway as my red, pounding feet found relief pressed into the cold stone floor. I kicked my shoes into an orderly position next to me. A bald man stood against the wall fifteen feet away, watching the proceedings with a lolling neck, and another young man with bright blue eyes carried something as he walked back and forth, ten feet to the left, ten feet to the right. A little bundle held in front of him. My feet hurt, and they were getting stiff and swollen against the ground, and I saw red behind my eyes for missing you so much. But my head cleared from the standing and I thought once more about sitting down in my seat for the remaining ten minutes of the program, after which I'd be off to the hospital cafeteria (open all the time) for a raspberry shake with some cheshire hipsters from my freshman year who winked ironically at me from across the ballroom floor, in their unironed tux shirts and bowties and sequined, thrifted dresses.
The man with the bundle passed in front of me as my chin started to tremble and I recognized him from years previous, from other patriotic awards galas, because of his strange coloring--white skin, black hair, and bright blue eyes. He nodded at me, vaguely recognizing me too, and passed the opposite way in front of me again as the speakers in front of us blared with the sounds of old war clips. It's not like we've ever exchanged actual words, me and this strangely glowy pale man--just that we're always at the same events. He'd gotten married over the last few years, I think. But I didn't really know him or his name, just that he was always around at these things. Just that he was related to somebody on the board like I am. Just like a hundred of the other people there that night. I feel indescribably lonely at these moments.
While I bit my lip and sucked in a breath, licked my hand and smoothed the flaring baby hairs on my forehead, ready to sit back down at the table you weren't at, I glanced at him one more time, and noticed a tiny pink and white hand, wrist encircled by one of those infinitesimal baby bracelets, reach up and out of the bundle he rocked back and forth and tenderly place itself on the upper park of his neck. He smiled down at the bundle and hugged it close to him, smiling and closing his eyes as the tiny hand patted his cheek.

And my heart ached.

But at that moment, I knew things would get better. Because they always do.

And it's contagious

2011-06-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you just wake up and feel
better.
sometimes the wind is blowing through the trees outside
and your hair tangles and blows around your head
and you finish the half-full ginger ale on your desk from last night, sweet and flat
and you miss your morning run because you're just smiling out the window.

Brrring brrrring

2011-05-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

The other night I was having a phone conversation and hanging up clothes.

I have this giant computer phone, about as big around as one of those packs of playing cards they make especially for little kids, and I squish it between my shoulder and ear ever-so-lightly because it has a touch screen and hangs up on itself more often than not.

The other night I was having my customary phone conversation while my person drove home from their evening engagement and I hung clothes up in my closet. Whenever I take something off, I can't help but place it on the floor. I don't even toss it on the floor, or smoosh it up and throw it into a corner-I take it off, over my head or over my feet, and carefully put it on the floor. I can't put anything away.

But, weekly or so, I scoop piles of clothes up from my brown carpet and hang them while I'm talking on the phone.

I was having this phone conversation and hanging up clothes, trying to move things off the carpet and balance the phone ever-so-lightly under my ear, and I was putting things on the dowel that hangs on the inside of one of my doors, and I was maneuvering tight collars around hard plastic hangers, and my phone was just beginning to get too hot on my shoulder, and I was smoothing the wrinkles out of pants. I watched the hangers clacking all over each other in the closet and everything blue all over the floor, talking, hanging, talking again, then hanging. My room is so small that if there's two things on the floor it's covered, and there was ten times that amount. I was surrounded by things to clean up.

His drive home continued on and I continued to clean up, keeping it all together and close and tidy in the closet that I never close. As I continued to move things into one corner of my room, the phone service started to cut out. It happens all the time when you talk on the phone far away and one of you is currently in motion. The conversation began to spatter, and we stopped making sense to each other.

We can never tell if it's me or him, sometimes it's the Spot (we call it the Spot at this one place when service always goes out) but usually, who knows whose phone it is. I don't. I wish I did.

Sometimes the call drops automatically and my phone makes a dull beep. Sometimes he can hear me and I can't hear him, or I can hear him and he can't hear me. Sometimes when I can tell the call is going to drop I take the phone away from my face (once we can't hear each other) and stare dully and patiently at the screen until the red call button turns gray, which sometimes takes almost a minute.

There's always this period of time right after the call drops that neither phone can call the other, which is usually spent trying to hang things up without the brick wedged between my head and my hot shoulder.

This night, I hung, and chatted, and smiled, and stopped in the middle of a response to the familiar ring of whiter noise across the phone line, which meant the call was about to drop and that he probably couldn't hear me. My face got hot. I stopped in the middle of what I was saying, hearing him say

"Jules?"

and then, quiet.

I dropped my hanger
and I said

I'm here.

"I'm here," I said, louder, more impatiently, more to myself than him or anyone, more to the lonesomeness I felt, hanger at my feet. I said it again as the call dropped and my voice bounced off the insides of my room and screeched in my ears.
"I'm here," I whispered.
I'm here.

He Keeps It Out Of Sight

2011-04-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

(photo via)

How do you feel about starting over?
Here it is the beginning of April, and this entire semester has felt like one big long day of, unfortunately, getting absolutely nothing done. I have no steam, I have no idea where the steam went, I don't know if I ran out of steam at some point and didn't notice or if I've never really needed general human steam until now and have just discovered my natural lack.
When I was a kid, we had our rich-person Christmas tree in our front window every year, super-tall and covered in little mini wreaths and birds and garlands of sparkly gold stars. Underneath laid a circlet of quilt batting and a lit-up porcelain village. A train choochooed around the village, on the batting, under the tree, and real steam came out the top. My sister and I were equally thrilled each time the train came around the track, puffing its white fluffy steam into the air.
The rich tree still goes up every year. A fresher layer of cotton snow and the glowing village have been relocated to the hearth a few feet away, and the steam-puffing train hasn't been out for eight years or so. The steam stopped working, and while the train still chugged around the track, we just never got it out of the box again. I feel like the train.
None of this means that I haven't learned about seventeen invaluable lessons this semester (as usual) or that I haven't been able to push through at work and in most of my classes (luckily).
In so many ways every day of this semester has felt like Groundhog Day--when I wake up in the morning, it's as though I've always been waking up on that morning. Each walk from my car to class is identical, and the rice cakes I crunch down at work are the same rice cake, over, and over, and over. Every habit I've made this semester I seem to make daily again and again. (The amount of chicken burritos I need from Taco Bell to eat through each hour at work explodes exponentially every day that the sun doesn't come out and the breeze doesn't blow warm) (my morning and evening prayers become an auto-tuned droning blur in Middle Utahn English) (every comment I make in class contains the same five adverbs) (I wash the same three shirts every week and feel sheepish wearing my pretty bright scarves). I try this semester to break out of mundanity, out of sleeping on my floor because I don't feel like moving all the stuff off my bed, out of underachieving in the classes I planned so carefully to get into, but I end up sliding back into it every morning as I wearily put my earrings in and trudge to the bathroom to slide on a headband and wash my face. All my energy is elsewhere. At nights I attend a Bikram yoga class, hoping to sweat out the semester and wake up in the mornings with a desire to do my homework. And it helps.
I know it's just a part of spring, and especially spring in Utah--that gray unending dizziness that was finally and relievingly broken yesterday morning, after the snow melted, after conference, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw that the soft little caterpillars had all fallen from the cottonwoods and been replaced by tiny, green, nourishing buds. In that flash of green outside, that little gasp of color, I snapped out of the grayness for a second and thought that maybe it wouldn't be so bad to shove the clothes and papers off my bed and lie in it for a while. I laid there, in the bed I made, thinking about the amazing opportunities I've had this semester. I thought about the ones I've taken and the ones I haven't. I'm thankful that I have chosen to spend my time in the way that I have this semester. All of it. And I'm thankful especially to those who have helped me to know what I'm worth. So thanks, you. You know who you are.

Things are getting greener.

The Moon Upon A Stick

2011-02-25T16:02:00.000-08:00

I turned 22 last Monday morning.
I wondered for weeks beforehand what I'd buy myself for this landmark, what Last Doll-type item would transition me from Birthdays to The Day Every Year That I Was Once Born. A veil? A dramatic haircut? Something that wasn't a present.
Chuckle at my solemnity, go ahead, smile knowingly at the unearned age I am loading onto myself, but it really feels as though I have been projected into ageless space. Up until now, I savored every birthday, waited for them in the morning, planned them, felt them, smelled them coming. When I turned nineteen, I felt nineteen. Eighteen scurried off immediately upon my waking. When I turned six, I felt six. When I turned fourteen, I unfortunately felt fourteen, and it felt uuuuuugly.
I've always been very uncomfortable about pictures of myself, and shied away from them being taken unless I was smeared in sweaty stage makeup or had at least one fist in my mouth. If there is a picture of me looking directly at the camera, I'm usually grimacing, or guffawing, or smiling and popping my hands.
It's embarrassing, but I practice (and often) the habit of bringing pictures of myself up onto the computer screen. I stare at myself, getting close to the image, looking at my face, at my teeth, at my eyes. At all of them together. I wonder where I am, in there.
If you friend me on Facebook, you'll notice that I am grimacing like an overexcited baboon in a good number of the photos tagged of me. Do you all feel comfortable in your own skin? I certainly haven't, up until recently. Up until the last few months.

This February fourteenth I smelled coming as usual, but it didn't smell like a birthday. It just smelled like a day. This confused me. I've always anticipated my birthday for weeks beforehand, self-importantly glowing at the piles of red and pink cellophane and the candy cropping up in grocery stores towards the end of January. I've always picked and taken home a birthday shirt each year, and laid it out on the chair next to my bed, I've waited for balloons to show up in my room early the next morning, and daydreamed of cheese enchiladas and chicken chimis from Los Hermanos until arriving there at five pm to avoid the date rush, and I've expected twice the birthday messages than your average person receives throughout the day because my birthday is on such a miserable, lovable holiday.

Last Monday morning, it was Valentine's Day again, my birthday.
And I woke up, and instead of feeling twenty-two, I suddenly just felt like me.
Twenty-one didn't scurry off into the recesses of learned lessons, but it also didn't do a flashy dance in the front of my mind like it's been doing for the last year.
And that was that.
And that morning, I decided to buy myself something that would remind me how comfortable I gratefully feel with myself.
And something that would remind me of who I was when I was 22.

(what I ended up purchasing for myself was a chronicling of me, feeling like myself. At 22.)
(a huge thanks to Justin Hackworth, the most genuine human being one ever met, for shooting me, looking like myself, at 22.)

best plan ever, here.

An Opinion

2011-02-09T21:41:00.000-08:00

We're reading Oliver Twist in my English Novel class, as you can see by the unecessarily large cover art lurking down there under what I'm currently reading.
The beauty of this book, besides the uncharming fact that it causes me to burst into unfortunate bits of the musical (within my own head--WHOOOO WILL BUUUUUUUY or FooOOOOOOOooood, GLOOOOrious FOOOOOOooOOOd) every ten minutes or so, is that its chewy, farcical center helps me to laugh even when I feel completely and totally in over my head, or discombobulated. While Oliver is being whaled on by childish adults, and people are starving all over the place, and whaling on other people, and missing most of their teeth, and building coffins (whe-eh-eh-eh-ere is love, anyway?), funny things are happening in between enough of the terrible bits that I can keep reading. Things in the book are so bad that they can't get much worse, and it's self-appreciative enough to turn around and laugh heartily at itself every few chapters or pages.
I mean, I have to keep reading anyway, because it's the only grade we're accountable for in this class, but I have the gumption to do so because of how worth it life is to not complain between the hard parts. And even during the hard parts. I just don't have that much to fuss about, do I?

The other day I was facilitating my Facebook addiction through several dozen consecutive minutes of refreshing my home tab and looking at pictures of people I feel like I've missed out on, when a friend posted a status (that she's since removed, rethinking her position, like the Jimmer girl) about how tough it is that she had to grow up in Utah county.
Thirty-plus comments followed, rallying comments, anger directed towards all kinds of bubbles we've been delicately encased in for years, poor us, lots of "hells yeah"s and "I know, I gots to get outta here"s and so forth. Other commenters popped up, brave, uncomplaining people, defending their bits of home and scolding the others for expecting imperfection (read: everything and everyone) to be perfect.

In no mean way, can I just say that perhaps we should all take a look around us again at clean, running water, and loving people who may occasionally parent us in an imperfect way, and spring coming, and opinionated colloquialisms that we allow to bother us, and flu shots, and literacy, and the internet, and rubber-soled shoes, and just shut up for a while?
I'm an overreacter--you know that monologue that Steve Martin does in Father of the Bride at the bar about how he comes from a long line of overreacters? So do I, and so am I, my life is apparently falling to pieces at any given moment as I thrash dramatically about the grocery store, but no one is accomplishing anything by whining about anything. Everyone's trying their hardest, and if they're not, they have before, or they're taking a break to be awful, or, they'll try hard later.
As some TV writer once wrote, and Hugh Laurie then lisped in his strangely attractive American accent,
"People don't get what they deserve, they get what they get. And there's nothing any of us can do about it."

Sitting here in bed on a Wednesday night, missing something I really really wanted to go to because of an ear infection running rampant through the right side of my face that probably came from the cute and totally viral cherubs I assist Sundays in taking their snack sabbatical, two episodes of Glee and no homework down, coffee Heath bar crunch peeled open, feeling guilty about asking someone to sub for me tomorrow, long weekend of not much to look forward to coming up, can I tell you that my ear really hurts and that I'm a little unsure of myself and feel way less intelligent than my coworkers and love my latest religion professor and am not looking forward much to school tomorrow, but that I'm feeling pretty pleasant anyway and that this ice cream is super delicious and that my homework will get done and tomorrow the sun will rise and it will be Thursday?
I just wanted to tell you that.

I wore hard contacts

2011-02-05T22:55:00.000-08:00

all throughout junior high school.

My eyesight was declining steadily and rapidly enough that my soft-spoken optometrist decided to place me in iron lenses that hurt like hell and had to be cleaned before and after use with this stinging white solution that came in a bottle with a red lid.
I, being thirteen and uncomely, ignored the pain, because I was just overly excited about the shedding of my spectacles. I could do nothing immediate about the state of my teeth, hairstyle, wardrobe, height, or propensity towards immediately bursting into tears when scolded for talking in class, but I could do something about my four eyes, and I was finally allowed to when I entered the seventh grade.

Having grown up in the town next to the college town, I go to college in the college town with everyone from the town next to the college town. Every fiftieth person I see on campus is someone I grew up with. I enjoyed this thoroughly as a freshman, and continue to do so, kind of, because it's nice to remember that you have people.
Lately, though, it's become a little sad to run into everybody every few days like we are all wont to do--because the more time goes by, the less our teenage sleepovers and vandalizations and shared class projects and school dances and extracurricular activities seem to matter. People don't seem to gush animatedly over each other's accomplishments anymore, engagements, kids, degrees; even those have somehow become routine, (yes, I know I'm barely beginning this phase of my life) so that when I see my oldest, dearest acquaintances on campus, we share a short greeting and not much else. Sometimes there's a dual lack of effort to go even that far, and either a small smile is exchanged or we both promise ourselves to stop and say hi another time. It's like we're all afraid to be kids now, or something. Further and further away are the weeks of six-hour rehearsals we danced through, the traffic cones we stole to place around a favorite teacher's car upon inspiration at three am, and the choir classes, dressing rooms, and rolls of mic tape we all picked off of.

In rehearsals for a junior high version of The Pirates of Penzance, I played one of fifteen or twenty daughters of the major general. The boys played pirates, the girls played daughters, and the boy-girls and girl-boys that could dance played the policemen. I walked about the stage, happily snuggling into groups of each of these categories on breaks, rubbing my new contacts with the heels of each hand like mad until I looked perpetually dazed. Man they hurt. And everyone else had soft contacts, because their corneas could be trusted.
I see or speak to, on a regular basis, about a dozen people from this cast. Two of them work in my office. It was ten years ago, this play, and I could probably tell you what three-quarters of the entire ensemble (about forty people) are doing with their lives at this very moment. Alas--few of us ever see each other, or talk. We Facebook, and text sometimes, but it's like this unbroken stretch of non-communication, because while we've shared all these experiences, nobody has time for experiences anymore. You know what I mean?

One of the policemen in our show, a girl, with long brown hair, was named I think something like Ashley. I think that's what it was. We had our first conversation, I remember, sitting along the false garden wall at the back of the stage, touching the edges of the scrim shyly with the tips of our feet. I pressed my fingers into my eyes as we talked, drawing the lids out to the sides of my face and snapping them back, itching my vanity-blinded eyes until the discomfort receeded for a few blurry seconds. Ashley asked me if I had contacts, and I proudly said yes, and she proudly said me too, and impulsively I blurted out that mine were different though, they were smaller, and harder, and hurt all the time, and turned my eyes from a muddy hazel to a muddy blue, because hard contacts are bluer.
Ashley had hard contacts too, and really blue eyes in a cheerful round face, and we laughed over the lavender tint our eye bags had taken since we'd gotten our lenses and begun twisting our eyelids around to itch at any available moment.
Finding another person doing the uncool version of the cool thing was intensely comforting, and we developed a quick bond to each other based on nothing but the fact that our corrective eyewear was identical and like no one else's.

In the hallways at the junior high, the two of us began signaling to each other whenever we passed--never talking, never really delving into a friendship--but every time we saw each other, she would raise one solemn forefinger to the soft skin beneath her right eye and draw it downwards to wackily reveal the wet red eyesocket beneath the eye itself. This I would quickly mirror, and that was it.

About a month ago, I walked quickly, late as usual, from my office to the library, across a hundred-foot span of cement, clutching a flying swirl of lesson plans and frantically magneting my nametag to my right chest. As I looked up, a flash of face caught my eye, my old friend, or whatever we were, Ashley, walking briskly in the other direction, a bright recognition in a sea of Tuesday. We made eye contact.
Without thinking, I raised my right forefinger immediately to my eye and made our signal, the wacky one-eyed mad scientist-type thing we'd expressed our frustration and fellowship through ten years ago, and without blinking an eye, she nodded ceremoniously and returned the signal, and then she was gone.

It's happened a couple more times since then, over a month, and we've never stopped to talk or even to make sure we ever knew each other's first names.

Whatever your name is, probably Ashley, thank you for remembering.

Flavor

2011-02-03T20:54:00.000-08:00

Last night's frosty walk from campus to car

Ever been to Sunflower Market in Orem?
I haven't been there very much either. I can't really cook. I'm a great bakeress; I can whip you up something bake-ed pretty much any time without high levels of anxiety. I like my hands to be covered in flour. When I was a kid, I loved the taste of raw flour so much that when my mom was making cookies, I'd grab the flouriest handfuls of dough from the outside of the bowl instead of the mixediest ones from the inside.
I can't really cook because I've never taught myself how, or been taught. I also find great conflict in the fact that as soon as I've started to cook something, I lose appetite for it, or by the time it's finished, I've eaten enough cookies not to want it anymore. This especially happens with foods cooked in skillets. Stir it around a bit, and I'm done. For some reason.
But for someone who can't really cook, I sure enjoy grocery shopping.
Especially when it's beyond scentless outside. Nothing growing out there. I crave the days when the temperature creeps hesitantly above freezing, when the rotting leaves and mud become thawed enough for me to smell. In organical grocery stores, it smells delicious all year round.
At Sunflower Market, it smells like Good Earth, which is where I used to go in high school to get mango smoothies. Like henna and pills and raw honey and dirt and fruit and recycled packaging.
Ending up at Sunflower Market last night after work, phone squished between ear and big woolen coat, I took a little green arm basket from the front and pranced back to Cereals.
I always skirt the Asian Flavors table and all the actual Food. Sometimes I buy things like fruit and trail mix at Sunflower Market, and sometimes I buy (and then eat with my fingers in my car) the "fresh" sushi, but what I usually buy is this Irish oatmeal that I really like to eat at work. Last night I also picked up some slippery little Vitamin D capsules, because apparently I'm deficient, three organic yogurts, because they're delicious and have kangaroos on them, almond milk, and a soy lavender candle that was in the sale cart.

I lit the candle in my room last night before a shower, so that while I stood in front of my mirror listening to this, brushing mascara onto my eyelashes, I was wrapped in a clean, purple, springy smell that absorbed itself into my drying hair. Made it easier to go out into the cold again. Having a candle to light is almost like having a pet to feed. Makes walking into my room to do anything more like a ritual.
This morning, on a quest to eat more D and to eat more in general, I peeled the thick foil off the top of a kangaroo yogurt while driving with my knee, ten minutes late to a test, still squishing my phone to my ear with my shoulder. Licking the sweet yogurt off the foil, I resisted the urge to then stick said foil to my marbled dashboard, sat it gently on the floor of the car (progress) and pulled a spoon from my pocket to enjoy the rest of my breakfast.

Five dollars and eighty cents for the candle and the yogurt, and a lavender evening and strawberry morning because of them.
Hear hear.

Here You Are

2011-02-02T14:12:00.000-08:00

So little has not been going on around here that I have forgotten to blog.
I often tell myself that I like writing, because I know that I like writing. I often tell myself to blog every day, and follow up with myself the next day by blogging. I've accomplished, I think. But then, the next day, I end up brainstorming layers of sweaters to fight the Superman cold that's happening in Utah right now, or teaching, or reading, or nibbling on the abundance of snack foods that make up a mountain in my work cubby and have completely overtaken my diet, or lack of, or walking out of the office to pick up a call on my Fancy New Smart Phone that I bought myself for Christmas and still hate, or plotting how quietly I can play the music at my desk without a yelp of impertinence from the guy across the room who I love to teach Illustrator with but who unfortunately listens only to crap.
And who just came over to try my poncho on and who threatened to teach his next class in it and asked me if it was alpaca.
But the point here is.
I'm taking a writing class which is incredible but has also made me realize how incredibly scary it is to write about yourself.
I'm also taking a reading series where I go listen to people read their publications every week.
So I should be writing, even if it is mostly blogs about my own mundaneaeity, or snack foods.
I learn lessons every day. And I should talk about them, because that's why I was here in the first place. I sit through classes, some of which I have problems with and some of which I am completely enthralled by, and I am always late to class, and I learn lessons driving in my big car, and sitting at home reading, and I learn lessons at night, where I've had no time for anything but falling in love.

POINT IS.
I am here, to blog, every day. I'm back. I'm doing it. And I'm telling all of you six people who're here, so I have to do it. I want to do it; I miss it. I read Mandy and Brittany and this guy and whoozit and I'm back, so.

Read me.
Tomorrow.

Strolling

2010-12-30T10:40:00.000-08:00

I've always been afraid of being alone, and then I learned differently.
Not afraid like Black-Swan-paintings-rolling-their-big-white-eyes-at-me-afraid, just afraid like I'd burst into a thousand pieces over finding Something To Do, With People. Nervousness would send me over an edge into a fast-moving river of people who consoled my loneliness as long as they were people and I was with them and I was a person with people and we were doing something that people do with other people.

But like I said, I learned a little differently. To crave solitude and the quiet usefulness of wandering alone and uninhibited through great crowds of people.
I took a plane, two planes, four planes, two layovers, to and from Florida. I took these planes alone, in jeans and a white t-shirt and sandals and a little gold necklace belonging to my mother.

I was visiting two friends.

By generous gift of a wonderful woman, I was treated to a week in Florida with two people who are dearer to me than mostly anything in the whole world. The minute I ran into their arms, everything unpleasant got less unpleasant. Huge release.
We went to the beach, to breakfast, to drag night, to a club, and to a confusing delicious restaurant that served nothing but appetizers. During the day, we did Disney.
These two friends of mine were working like mad, dancing their faces off in the stifling heat of the parks, and I was left with most of most days to walk about alone in these gigantic terrariums.

I was in Disneyworld for a week. It was really hot and really overstuffed with people wandering determinedly in and out of lines and stores, enjoying the bajillions of dollars per family they'd shelled out to dream the dream. I was there for free, beyond giant Mickey-shaped suckers and other food, and felt unpressed for time or experience because of this. I stayed in thin dresses all week and kept my overhumidified shrub of hair held back by a stretchy drugstore headband. Each morning I would have breakfast with Bryant, having slept astoundingly well, and then we would head to one of various parks. We'd part at the gate and I'd have an entire day to do as I pleased.

I milled about the parks, fanning myself with a colorful map of my surroundings. Sweat poured off of me like it did off of everyone else. For some reason, the heat didn't bother me. Every morning was cool again, and while I was warm during the day, it was comforting. It wasn't the killer dry heat of home, but a softer, wetter, enveloping heat that kept me sleepy and smiling for seven days without sunburning me or sucking my energy. I walked slowly for hours, turning brown, sometimes circling the entire park several times without entering one gift shop or ride or attraction, just walking and walking through so many people on my own with nothing but a map in my hand. It was there, in a totally foreign place, with no pressings for time, that I first experienced the deliciousness of being alone. Alone with my thoughts and my ever-fanning wrist, taking a slow gait through thousands of people.

While I still love a good gathering of people, this casual turnaround in my nature allows me to crawl out onto my roof with myself and a quilt and the radio, and to study in the library, alone for hours, on a date with my brain. And while those two things may sound like things you already do, or are good at, they are new for me and I marvel at them every day.
Happy New Year you guys.

Simple Lists

2010-12-28T11:27:00.000-08:00

I have all kinds of goals for the new year.

I always do.

Something I like more than mostly anything and that makes me feel more productive than mostly anything does is to make lists in nice, rectangular handwriting (which takes some concentration) on either long yellow post-it notes or clean pages of a notebook. These lists crop up around finals week, in doldrumous weeks of boringness, at the beginning of summer and at the end of the year. Sometimes I tape them to the wall next to my desk, where hangs a picture of a ladybug and my tag from running a 10K, and sometimes I leave them in my work shelf so both I and my shelf-sharer can see RUN EVERYDAY, READ YOUR SCRIPTURES, HAVE HOPE, BE NICER hanging next to his ties and my big white mug.
Very often three or four or five of these lists go by with no accomplishments, no lines through them, and then I bust out the big accomplishment guns and surprise myself by finishing an entire list. Does it really take two weeks to make a habit? I can never make it past day six or seven, heaven help me. What is it like to be one of those people who accomplishes things easily? Do you exist? Can I meet you?
Sometimes the gigantic dash of my Buick ends up peppered with my precious post-its, and that kind of works, too. At least as a sad cubist reproduction for the passerby, if not so much as a reminder to do things I'm not doing.
I've often wondered more than a little frustratedly how people seem to do all of the things they do.
At the advice of a friend, I tried making a simple goal of one word, wrote it landscape on a piece of printer paper in red marker, and tacked it to my ceiling right above where my head hits the pillow, hoping that it would stick better.
It did stick better. I took it down after a while, but even now that spot of sandpapery ceiling reminds me of the one word that reminds me that life is simply good and should for no reason be lived as though it's not. I went by one word for months, and it stuck. And now I always go by it.
That's one thing I've learned in 2010. That things stick better one at a time.

I'm still working on my list for the beginning of the new year. Ironically, by force of habit. Adding a few things every day, crossing others off when I realize they're entirely laughable.

Like vegetable consumption.
I have a multivitamin.
Tomorrow, the second half of the two most important things I've learned this year.

Ode to Mr. Leeper

2010-12-09T12:12:00.000-08:00

In the third grade I had a teacher who wore red plaid shirts and corduroy pants. He played basketball with us at recess. He read A Wrinkle in Time out loud to us. Smelling like tater tots and basketball rubber, we would settle back into our green plastic molded chairs as Mr. Leeper circled the front of the yellow-lit classroom with the waxy paperback folded open in one hand.

His reading voice was like the voice I used in my head to read to myself. Either that or my reading voice originated in his. It was a deep, quiet, rollicking voice. Nobody would budge. He read that book to us for a month or so, "It was a dark and stormy night," and I longed for a farmhouse and a dog named Fortinbras, an attic bedroom and a little brother in blue pajamas. I fell in love with Calvin and adopted Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which. The tesseract was real, and Meg's mother had violet eyes. "No, Meg. Don't hope it was a dream. I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be." "Oh, my darling, of course not," Mr. Leeper would read, in Mrs. Whatsit's soft voice, and "the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers." I sat quietly through Camazotz and cried when Meg found her father in the transparent room. I couldn't look for too long at the Man With Red Eyes on the cover, or I'd get too scared. I was dually terrified of and comforted by Aunt Beast. Perched at the edge of my seat, I gasped in terror at the description of the giant, seething brain, in joy at Meg's triumph in saving her brother, and at the end of the book, I collapsed onto my desk, face to the spongy-smelling wood, and breathed hard.

It has always been easy to pay attention in English 380 this semester because we arrange our desks in a circle every day.
It has always been easy because I like reading and talking, and we read something and then we talk about it. And because the classroom is two feet from my office, and because the class is at one, which is an easy slot to make it to and a difficult one to not be around for.

But the real reason it's been deliciously easy to pay attention in British and international English literature from 1950-present this semester is because my professor reads aloud like Mr. Leeper.
Not exactly like him, you see, he's louder and rolls the words around more in his mouth, but he reads with the same enthusiasm.
I don't know quite how to describe it, but this professor of mine reads out loud, in a rollicking voice, like I'm still eating a hot breakfast every morning and having trouble zipping up my own coat and don't have funds to worry about, and like I still have art class once a week to paint watercolors of peaches in. It's like he still reads because he likes to read. Like I could plausibly believe that this man would go home and pick up something recreational after grading our papers all day.

We finished class yesterday by his giving a little presentation on each author we'd read this fall, and by his reading a segment from each book. Return of the King, Midnight's Children, A House for Mr. Biswas, Omeros, Possession, The Famished Road, Translations, and The Cure at Troy. As my teacher read out loud to us this semester, I was happy to find myself perched unconsciously on the very edge of my chair, feeling like a nine-year-old again.

Thanks, Mr. Leeper.

Teatime

2010-11-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

Show's over.
The question I get the most when shows end is if I miss them.
The answer is, no.
Of course, I would like to dress up in 18th-century finery every single day, and have long curly hair that hits me mid-back and is exquisitely styled atop my head, and I like to go to balls, because they're beautiful, but today I am happy to sit here at work being a little dull with my hair in a ponytail. I will miss the little girls looking wide-eyed at me after the show, touching my dress. I already miss the people I shared a dressing room and eyelash glue with. But dullness, I think, facilitates more creativity for me. There's time to think about lint and piles and the piles of paper on my desk and the way things sit. I embrace dullness this week, normalcy, cereal in the morning. Life will return to normal little by little over the next few days. There will suddenly be all this time in which to really focus on things instead of skimming them between scenes.

getting down with our maid selves, dress rehearsals

Last week I had my first real onstage blunder. During a garden-related scene filled with topiaries and tea cookies, I played the part of a maid. There were three of us maids, me, Misha, and Melissa, bopping about in our green calico dresses and white aprons. We were on and off the stage, back and forth, laughing and listening to the gossip being shared by housemates. The south side of the little theater we performed in has three exit/entrances, one in the middle and two on either side. The middle entrance is ground level, and the two side doors are up five stairs apiece. As we made our beribonned exit up the southwest stairs for the last time in the scene, I did what I have had the goal not to do for the last four months, which is to misjudge the height of the step in front of me and trip in my giant pilgrim-buckled shoes. For 55 performances, in pitch blackness and high-heeled shoes, I never tripped. But then I did.

I tripped, mid-giggle, and fell a short distance onto my forearms and elbows. Curls flying, white hair ribbons flapping, yards and yards of fabric, thunk. As I landed, my shins smacked the step below me, unfortunately un-padded by the voluminous petticoat I was wearing. I plopped to the ground with my face inches in front of the red exit curtain, and somehow, thinking quickly, using my first logic, I decided that it would be quicker to simply crawl off the stage and draw less attention to myself than standing back up and exiting like a human. So, gigantic green calico backside in tow, I proceeded to slither immediately offstage, under the curtain, and tumble down the stairs on the other side of the curtain, face to the blue plaid carpet.

This is ponytailed, purple-shinned Julie, signing out to dullness for a while.

ADDENDUM: Meagan M. Downey is the greatest stage manager and dancer of all humans.

Brighten my northern sky.

2010-11-25T07:59:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for my infallible mother, my resilient dad, for my sister and for my sense of humor which seems to match nobody's but hers and that we could make a nest of blankets in the family room last Sunday to watch Inception together, I am thankful for the gold Rococo mirror hanging in my bedroom, for my down comforter, for my boots and the three books I got in the mail yesterday; I am thankful for a kind and understanding boss, an amazing job, and outstanding co-workers who bear-hug me, occasionally tease me, and who help me learn new programs. I'm thankful that miss Josie, miss Michelle, and Mister Tom came to visit at intermission and Josie told me about wearing big girl undies and clutched my fancy green mask and petted the damask of my dress excitedly for ten minutes while I got to chat with my outstanding sister and her outstanding husband who got diagnosed with leukemia two months ago and for whom things are looking far up. I'm thankful for lessons I learn and the bamillion bits of useful knowledge honed from blogging. I'm thankful for Casey and David and Bryant and Jeffrey and Trevor. I'm thankful for my birthmother and for the life that she has given me. I'm thankful for hope. I'm thankful for Kaitlyn Flanagan for making me write. I'm thankful for growing up and laughing and noodles and Emily. I am thankful to have spent the second half of this year in league with a cast full of good people that make me laugh and hold me up every day while we're performing together. I am thankful for the friends I know I can call in a pinch, the friends I admire so much I could explode, and the ones I see every few weeks or months that I wish I had entire lifetimes to hang out with. I am thankful for my grandparents and their raspberry bushes, for writing, for the DI, for A.S. Byatt, Derek Walcott, Brian Friel, Salman Rushdie, Zora Neale Hurston, and Emily Dickinson for making this semester dreamy, for enamel jewelry, for teas of the cinnamon apple spice and tension tamer persuasions. I'm thankful for prayer and oatmeal squares and all simple carbs while we're going there and House and for this song, which I would like you to imagine I am singing to you, but in a woman voice, because if I could, I would sing it to you. Because I love you. And I'm thankful for you.

I'm not a speed reader. I'm a speed understander.

2010-11-07T23:52:00.000-08:00

Did you ever repose in your rocking chair on a Sunday morning before 9:00 with bright yellow leaves outside the window of a room covered in dishes and syllabi and race hungrily through the last couple hundred pages of a book because of how good it was? Today I did.

"Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge."
--A.S. Byatt, Possession

(To everyone that has raised their hands in reader-friendship, thank you for your sweet words and camaraderie. Please accept this tingly bit of a book as a symbol of my love and affection. I hope it brings a lightness to your Monday that I know it will be bringing to mine.)

People and Their Blogs

2010-10-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have run into an astounding number of people over the last few weeks
whether I've been standing in line after the show greeting patrons in a three-cornered hat,
or walking around on campus twirling and avoiding being inside,
or whatever
and people keep telling me that they read my blog.
Sometimes people that I didn't even know!
And I know what usually happens is like this:

You: I read your blog!

Me: [Ducks head into right shoulder or covers face with hands, lets out embarrassed, excited, nervous, kind of unattractive snort while attempting to take in this incredibly loving moment]

Silence

Those of you who have contacted me via e-mail or Facebook have had the advantage of missing out on my awkwardness and receiving a much more polished e-mail reply.
But how it should go when I see you, is:

You: I read your blog!

Me: [Screams] Thank you for reading because I love your guts and I love to share something with you, you magnanimous individual that I am lucky to know! [Screams again and hugs you]

I think sometimes I at least get the hug in there.

Thank you thank you thank you for reading.
It makes me as happy as a clam that you come here and read my way-too-long sentences and extreme exhaustion of the word awesome.
It's awesome.

If you ever come here to read, and I don't know you, or I don't know that you've been here but I know you because I know you in real life, please come out of the woodwork and leave a comment or follow or call me or hug me in person or friend me on Facebook--and most importantly, if you have a blog, please link yourself in the comments! There is nothing I love more than people, and their blogs. I would love to know you.

And on that note, I am going to go eat some oatmeal squares and a banana and then I am going to carve some pumpkins with my family. I suck at carving pumpkins, because I am impatient.

Two smells and a baby

2010-10-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Something about sleeping late always brings the prettiest dreams.
I ran my hands over my stomach and it was round and tight and there was a little person greeting me with their hands and feet from inside of it. Strangest feeling ever. Best feeling ever. I woke up elated, missing that little person who doesn't even exist yet. And loving them to pieces.
I just woke up after a long week and a beautiful dream to drizzling, tapping rain on my half-open window and windowsill and to the smell of baking applesauce swirling up from my basement, where my mother, grandmother, and aunt are churning away at it until the entire family has enough to last through graham crackers and pork chops and granola and cottage cheese for another year. I woke up with a hankering for a pumpkin to carve and a scarf to wind around my neck, because fall has finally completely arrived, with a rain shower, applesauce, and a dream of a future nugget.
So lovely.

Lighting Candles

2010-10-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

I thought for a while about deleting my blog.
That's why it's been so long.
And because my last post was about Skype, which doesn't exactly facilitate a lot of imagination.
Also it's been so long because when one is dating someone who is not a fan of/familiar with the blogosphere, one apparently self-consciously doesn't blog at all, except to guiltily check a couple dozen of them every day, as usual, including visiting one's own to live wistfully amongst the cobwebs of one's former crackling, comforting fireplace for a few moments.

I love to blog. I love to read blogs. I love background colors, usually whites and creams and yellows. I love stupid playlists, and good playlists, I love blog templates covered in raffia and buttons and stupid stupid polka dots. I love lists of things that make people happy. I love writers and picture-posters and mothers and over-emoters and crafters and seamstresses and fathers and siblings and ethnographers and scholars who blog their experiences.
I love the part of blogging that most non-bloggers are uncomfortable with, the part where people blog about their grilled cheese sandwich or their cat's first bath, or they link a song and a few lines of a quote they like, or they copy someone else's post sneakily and deliberately, or they want to be a singer, or they get mad at someone, or they dedicate their post to someone, or they say thanks for reading them, or they pick a side of the abortion debate, or they're trying to get published, or they took thirty pictures of their kids swimming on the opposite side of the pool and want everyone to see them, or they just got some new pinking shears, or they just talk about themselves and share too much information for sixty lines in maroon font that's bolded with innumerable spelling errors--
these are the things I love about blogging.
That you can blog things nobody in the whole universe has ever thought or cared about, besides you.
And if they have, or haven't, it doesn't matter. You're blogging it because you want to blog it. For yourself.
For the record.
Yes, it's human, and very weird, and detached, and quirky, and you can seem a trillion times cooler when blogging the "right" things, and people blog their meals and their new haircuts and their aversion to highlighters and their knee-jerk reactions to religion or politics that aren't always well-organized or sensitive, and they blog a picture of their ear that they took on accident, or how much they hate Facebook, or how they're gay and brave enough to tell everyone, or what their take on a controversial sermon is, or why the smell of a certain store or the upholstery in their car brings them relief.

This morning I hopped merrily (yes, merrily) down the stairs next to the bell tower while it played "God Speed The Right" and I admired the cologne of the man walking in front of me as it wafted through the cold air and up the steps.
Because somehow, this October, after being unbearably hot for weeks, the air has suddenly hit the perfect temperature in the mornings, as a gift to all of us who have to be out and about early and also to those of us who appreciate fall to the point at which we take deep, dizzying breaths of it before nine AM and daydream about it in the fluorescently-lit basement of our office building in the afternoons and race home to light pumpkin candles and watch the sun set before rushing to the theater at night.
That is something I wanted to blog, so I blogged it. Go team fall.

School is school. Work is work. Show is show. Come see it. You can see me getting hysterically carried to the guillotine every night, Monday through Saturday, until Thanksgiving.

Technology

2010-08-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

When little sissy goes away (forty miles) to college, and I'm living back at home in my fourth year, it's a good thing we can still hash over the events of my evening, the concert she went to, what she ate for breakfast, her super hot French teacher, and the greasiness levels of both of our hair.
Thank you, Skype.

Crowded on a Velvet Cushion

2010-08-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

Summer closes, even though the hotness lasts until mid-October. Summer closes when I go back to school and stop worrying about fast food and sleeping in until the next summer I'm not in school, when I will have the time and stomach again for both.

I have been working in a basement on campus all summer, with lots of time but a poor sample group for people watching, and will be happy to have new streams of squirming pink freshmen to watch wiggle upstream past the library and the X building to reach devotional every Tuesday. I'll be happy to again be properly scarfed and folded into the middle of a crowd of anxious students, like a piece of chewy meat into the corner of a wonton.

I will not appreciate you new fishies for a few weeks, it's true, I will be pseudo-bitterly mumbling at your excited screams and overloaded backpacks jutting into my ribs at first, like a cranky man defending his porch (my ribs). I would like to assuage your dreams of a freshman year by playing the part of the grumpy old college senior, while at the same time confusing you by playing the part of a grumpy old college senior as a round-faced 21-year-old with floofy brown hair who is often mistaken for the younger of the two when she goes anywhere with her seventeen-year-old sister and who doesn't actually own a rumpled plaid shirt or pricey leather school bag. Grumble grumble.

For now, I'll enjoy sitting on my usual bench to pass very quiet lawn mower-moments before nine AM and very beautiful dusk moments at dusk, without people. I'll sit on that bench to enjoy the comparative silence of campus without anyone on it yet, when you can still hear singular laughter across a lawn and the bell tower tolling doesn't make you instinctively believe you have forgotten something. I'll do zig zags and the mashed potato across the sidewalk, just because I can. If I tried that in a week, I'd be mowed down so quick you could use me as fertilizer for the hundreds of pansies growing just inches away from where I would have fallen. I will twirl occasionally and admire the little threes and fours of people dotting the gray pavement with color that will eventually become marching bands, giant continent-sized moving things whose corners you certainly cannot cut when trying to pass, unless you want a carabinered Nalgene or thermos in the face.

I gather my books, I empty the gum crumbs from my satchel bag, and I wait for you, crowds. Your wardrobes, comments, and acts of kindness will make excellent brain food for the unbearable last eight minutes of any class and will inspire me, I'm sure, to stay in the library longer, to try a little harder to help people when I see you opening a door for me, and to stand a little taller, because that's what you freshman do--stand a little taller in the adversity and winds that whip you in the face when you get here. It's scary to be a freshman, and I commend you in advance. Thanks for making campus cozy.

And for now, I'll do my mashed potato.

Dime, tierra quemada, no hay agua?

2010-08-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Doesn't the rain make everything feel so different?

If you're not living around here like I am, let me tell you what--it's been a Heart of Darknessy jungle the last few days. The wind blows all day and all night and the lightning is like a strobe light, that's how often we're seeing it. The thunder is loud and the rain isn't actually coming down a lot but when it does the splots on my windshield are the size of silver dollar pancakes and are so heavy and many that I'm afraid they're going to crack the glass. Then after it rains the sun comes blazing back out for four minutes, glazing everything wet, pulsating, and turning all greens brighter until everyone on campus is walking about the lawns in a daze, mopping their foreheads and wondering where they've been transported to. Then the sun goes back out and everyone feels comfortable to return to the hot, wet sidewalks.

I go to work, I sleep, I make shakes, and I drink them. I run in the mornings and read books and watch movies, and maybe it's that antsy end-of-summer feeling, but it just feels like nothing is happening as much as the storm is happening. I do have eleven mosquito bites whose itching takes up a lot of my time, but the wind and lightning are still winning. I will be sad to see the storm go and return to blazing hotness that makes my car seat burn my legs and the walk to work from my vehicle almost not worth it. The rain makes it feel like we're on a trip.

Even waking up when it's storming is a completely removed experience from waking up when the sun is shining. When I woke up this morning to loud thunder humming through my headboard, I felt compelled to take the day slow and to recognize everything. This is the best way to take days, to smell everything and notice the wrinkles in peoples' shirts. Does that make sense? To squeeze with thumbs and forefingers the textbooks that come in the mail, to run my hands through my hair and shake it over my face to smell it, to walk slowly through the raining leaves even though they sting a little when they hit my uncovered legs and face. It's been thundering like crazy out there for the past few days, but mostly in the mornings and evenings, as though the thunder is waiting to shout until more people are asleep to notice it. The lightning demands attention. My sister walked outside at four am the other morning to watch the lightning, and people continue to tell stories of what they were up doing at five and six am in regards to the weather, too. We made breakfast and hot chocolate last night and I watched the wind blow my curtains horizontally. It just feels like we're all waiting for something. Some little stragglers are continually firing off in diagonal lines over the mountain, not striking anywhere, but just ripping purple into the clouds like a firework. I like to think the great and powerful Oz is over behind that mountain twirling wheels and honking buttons and flipping levers.

Listen to this song. It's about rain. Actually, it's a rainstorm in Spanish. Admire Brianna and Cameron, two unmatched soloists. Listen to the rain sounds we make, and snap your fingers like rain when you walk around, and wait for something, if you want.

Glowworm

2010-07-05T17:45:00.000-07:00

I've never been camping in my life.
Despite growing up seven inches from the lush, rocky mouth of Provo Canyon, I have never gone up it with the intentions of sleeping up there.
My father likes to say that my mother's idea of camping is staying at a hotel without an in-house restaurant, which accounts for the lack of canyon throughout my childhood. More canyon, I say.
Somehow I also eluded dozens of camping instances throughout high school while accidentally (if methodically) dating my way through a sizeable portion of the Unified Studies lineup.

This weekend I went camping. So I guess my header sentence was kind of a lie.
I was kind of pissed I'd be giving up my interesting-thing-I've-never-experienced, because everyone has one like that--they've never been to Disneyland, or they've never eaten sushi, or they've never run a mile, or they've never wanted an Easy Bake oven (but that last group is lying).

I was pleased as punch as I removed my sleeping bag from its spot in the window seat this weekend, only previously removed once for Lake Powell and for Girls' Camp a half dozen times. In the side of the mummy bag's own little carrier sleeve, I proceeded to stuff toothpaste, my sunglasses, a pair of hiking socks, a baby tub of Vaseline (NEVER WITHOUT!) and some fruit snacks. CAMPING, I thought. I'm going CAMPING. With PEOPLE. At a CAMPSITE. I will sleep somewhere that is a mountain, I thought.
Having been picked up in a car that shares my name, I grinned with camping happiness. I wove my hand out the window and enjoyed even the party I was obliged to attend as a stop along the way, even though I knew none of the people there and continue to dread hip strangers with vintage carpeting and ironic party hats. I hummed contentedly as the vehicle I rode in took a lengthy ride up a road that they must have modeled Indiana Jones' simulated jeep-jerking after, because it was identical. We all hummed Michael Jackson's Bad, because that was one of three CDs in the car.

Camping goes late at night and is cold. Even in July, it is cold. I like how dark it is out there, because the group I was with opted to go pretty far up the canyon. I like how everyone is playing their guitars, which I prepared to hate. I like the darkness and how once you get out of the car and begin walking you can't see ANYTHING for minutes, and then your eyes accustom and everything is blue and you can suddenly see it. I have always enjoyed getting campfire smell in my hair and my jacket, and I tried to get as much on me as I could this time. People ate handfuls of dry cereal. I learned how to pee in the woods, laughing so hard that I could barely keep from falling bare-bottomed onto the dirt.

I really liked to be in a small rectangular tent with ten other people, yelling unnecessarily and hysterically for a good twenty minutes while rolling and jumping around like a big synchronized swimming team of nylon caterpillars trying to form a respectable sleeping formation. I don't think I've giggled that hard in months.

As the team of little cocoon people finally settled down, let me tell you, the SECOND we thought about getting comfortable (about 4 AM), Big-Mitted, who was directly to my right and never meant anything but well, leapt up in his sleeping bag (having removed his pants, preserving his modesty by forming a kind of lava-lava bag skirt) to fiddle somehow with one of the three glowsticks that had been suspended from the ceiling of the tent to provide us with light. As I laid on my left side, facing the other way, with my nose buried into the shoulder of someone on my left, Big-Mitted's flailing metacarpus knocked down the stick of glow, which broke midair and splattered directly into my open right eye.

It's four AM. I'm in a canyon. My feet are freezing, I have my contacts in, I'm still on politeness level with every member of the tent but one, I'm guessing I have bad breath related to fish tacos and sticky toffee pudding, and I am just tired enough that I'm having trouble forming sentences. I've been laughing maniacally for just under an hour, so my energy is depleted, and I am out of energy packs.
Then toxic neon death hits my eye/face. A good quarter-cup of it. (hot dog-sized glowstick).

Of course, some hit my hair, forehead, and cheekbone, which distracted my savers from medical attentioning me initially, because I looked and acted like some angry plant right out of Avatar: the musical.

Luckily, my quick sobbing and theatricality were understandable, because getting glow in your eye is like unto--well, it's like unto getting glow in your eye. It HURTS.
Shoulder-Nose took a water bottle to the eye, flushing it four or five times, and Big-Mitted bashfully wiped most of the rest off of my face and hair with a hoodie doused in my mascara and snot. Everyone else waited to see if I'd go blind or mutate, but luckily, I didn't.
I sniffled in my continued fluorescence. I took sulky pride in my pretty new lit-up state, and the way it smattered onto the sleeping bags on either side of me.

The stinging went away, I pulled out the offending contact, (which probably saved my cornea) rolled it between my fingers, and flicked it away, and a really nice young lady lent me a spare yellow sweatshirt to trade for my now-soaked sweater and tank top. I sank back into my star-patterned sleeping bag, taking a moment to enjoy its new glowing pattern. I received a reassuring finger squeeze and closed my eyes, falling asleep on my left side.

Around six AM, I felt a gentle hand on the side of my face and kept from appearing awake when it softly moved a thumb over the area of my temple still covered in glow, then over the line of my jaw and chin. I glowed and fell back asleep.

I woke up before everyone else to stare at the mesh ceiling/morning sky and listen to all the sleeping noises around me.

I loved camping, and I am not blind, and I opened a fresh right contact when I got home. All is well.

Time is love

2010-06-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

I very recently watched Forrest Gump for the first time.
Gchat always opens so many things up for me. And so does Lanee. Therefore, as you may imagine, the combination of the two is pretty dynamic.

me: I had a dream Lieutenant Dan was my birthfather. Please interpret.
Lanee: ahahahaha
Lanee: umm...you secretly wish to punish yourself by assuming there's some drunk badness in you but at the same time you know you can overcome it and marry a nice Asian lady and get magic legs.

The Cure

2010-06-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

I was sitting at Lake Powell this weekend, or rather, floating, because I was actually perched on a houseboat called the Beach Leech that was stretching up and down in some beautiful green water that nobody really wanted to dive into because it was cold and filled with thigh-sized carp who leapt out of said water to chomp stray Cheezits.
I prepared for the great float by packing many non-drowsy Dramamines to avoid uniting the Cheezits in my stomach with the Cheezits in the water, because I grew up one of those children who would hurl if they even thought about a car, Space Mountain, or a sailboat. My aunt teasingly recalls the innumerable times she unsuccessfully attempted to catch my barf on its way to the car floor from my carseat when she was my age and I was three, and I am sure I have many months of upchuck to look forward to when I am pregnant. In Hawaii (at thirteen, in the ugliest week of my life) I went on a whale watch and ended up smooshed survival-mode into my mother's armpit for three hours, half green and half sunburnt, moaning and mourning my sailing career before it had even begun.

I stretched up and down on a boat for three days this dreamy weekend. I didn't cause any Cheezit reunions, in fact, I was surprised to find myself incredibly soothed by the rocking instead of endlessly uncomfortable and tinged the color of the water. My stomach never sent the whoaaaaaaaa message to my brain that it usually does upon being jiggled, and I never once felt nauseated. Conversation was often fallen into on the rainy bits of the day, but just as often, quiet dominated in our little group, and I would stare out the window. The rocking put me almost to sleep every time. I have come to find that rocking is good for chewing and thinking, and chewing thoughts. I have a rocking chair in my bedroom that has also served to rock me lately, instead of holding clean socks and underwears. I put new sleeves on shirts and dresses, and I rock, and I chew. Suddenly I am a champion rocker.

The rocking of a boat continues far after you've left it; even as I sit here at work, my monitor tips lazily from side to side and my brain swishes in its juices. My lips are sunburned, a little swollen; they tingle when I eat savory things, and that reminds me, too. I have matching hickies from each strap of my bathing suit, where they rubbed against my collarbone as I jumped up and down on the jet ski. I ate pieces of avocado with salt off the sandwich tray and drank cream soda after cream soda as I watched the straight dock line move up and down through the front window. I rocked and slept out under the stars this weekend, big stars that looked icier than usual. I tried to stay awake for these stars, but I was lulled asleep by the gentle motionings of the house.

You're reading at the writing location of the newest member of the community of rockers.
Happy to be here.

Semisonic, Feeling Strangely Fine, Track 01, for Casey

2010-05-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Earlier this morning I woke up and put some pants on. I had a bagel with some Nutella on it. My feet made their way reluctantly out to my car, its wilting Orem High pride sticker winking at me from the back window. Driving down my windy street, my Regal accelerated slower than usual, unresponsive to my pedaling, a problem stemming from its recently celebrated sixteenth birthday. I like to think it was humanly sluggish in its efforts to not bring me to the school I didn't really want to leave.

But I'll probably not get another chance, so I went.
I went because Trent gave me a tip day before yesterday that the drama department was having quite a bit of trouble trying to get everything to the new school before demolition on Tuesday. The new school is built in the parking lot, finished and waiting like a big mean software upgrade. Everyone else has moved over there successfully, all the teachers with regular teacher stuff, but the drama department has apparently been moving like a big collective t-rex, with little tiny arms and little tiny attention spans, trying to move dozens of gigantic setpieces and rooms and rooms full of costumes and dusty boxes of shoes and big flyaway piles of sheet music towards the new building that I probably couldn't count on myself to muster up the composure to enter until the original is completely gone.
But I went.
I forgot that I come from a superior group of laid-backers, these Oremites, who don't do the schedule thing, or the morning thing, or the organized thing, which is probably another contribution to their relocation speed. Lately I have been spanked into the grownup world, where I wake up early and eat breakfast and shower and work until afternoon, which I enjoy, but formerly and probably always within my heart I will be one of these people, who can sing, do cartwheels in public places, shovel down Cafe Rio leftovers at three AM, and sleep till two PM like a champ.
So there was no one at the school this morning.
It was very quiet this morning, as I drove past the high school. Yeah, I drove past it. I didn't stop. I kept going, then scolded myself for being so dramatic, went back, and parked in one of the lunchlady parking spaces. Then I sat in my car.

I was angry. The new school built in the parking lot makes no room for any kind of vehicular access to anywhere within twenty yards of the auditorium, and I was angry about it. I felt shut off. Once again, my grandmother--who lives in the real world but also perches a mini version of herself on the canal of my left ear--scolded me for being so dramatic, and I got out of my car.
It was very quiet there.

I kept unconsciously glued to the south side of the original building, avoiding eye contact with any of the gigantic machinery and especially with the new maroon school. I held close to the orange, rougher bricks of my building, making my way silently towards the back of the auditorium.

Logically, I yanked first on the double blue south doors, near the band room. They were locked.
Next were the east doors, just inside which I had practiced my competition monologue, senior year, with Jana, my coach.
They were locked too.
After these, I got nervous and walked to the other south doors, by the counseling center, which didn't budge.

I heard baseball announcers from across school property, hopefully mistook their bouncing voices for a group inside the scene shop to belong to, and hit the shuttered metal door eagerly and hard with my left hand.
I felt very alone.
I moved calmly before leaving to perform a traditional rustle through the bags and boxes of "absolute crap" that Trenton had informed me were waiting outside the scene shop and east doors to be taken to the thrift store.

As many of you know, it is a possibility that I am a professional Oremite also in the fact that I collect junk. Not in the way that I have a ton of it, but just in the way that my car at any given time is home to three or four buddyless shoes, an overcoat, two broken umbrellas, half-eaten anything, and bank statements and receipts on end. I feel secure in stuff, in stuff with a history, in the history of stuff. This is something I learned to do in high school, in the dark dungeon which specialized in shoes and furniture, in the back room in the little theater, in the scene and costume shops, rifling wide-eyed through the glittering piles of brocaded dresses and cracked enamel purse handles, through the hundreds of lampshades, red phones, and thickly-framed paintings in heavy stacks, through the vases, through the music stand doorstops, and crowns, and wallpaper samples, and suitcases, and leisure suits, and carpetbags, and jewelry, and typewriters, and cabinets, and leg-lacking furniture of the theater department. Amongst these piles of stuff, and history, with my dearest friends, I felt the best I've ever felt.

It was still so quiet. I wiggled the knot in the top of the first dusty black garbage bag loose and unwove it. I congratulated myself at keeping so composed, at feeling so normal, feeling just fine.
Inside the bag I glimpsed and felt the familiar thrill of polyester, of thin yellow pioneer cotton and terrycloth and calico. I reached one hand into this bag, pulled out a brown skirt with a bustle, held it up before my face to quickly inspect the length, the clasp, the fabric, the size, and before I knew it, I was holding the skirt tightly to my chest, standing behind my school, eyes squeezed shut, alligator tears moving quickly out from under them. I stood and clutched that skirt like there was no tomorrow, and I didn't open my eyes. The baseball announcer stopped speaking, the wind blew, and all I could hear was my story now--there in my ear, telling the story, was Wes, was Eric, was Casey and Dave and Trevor and Syd and Alec and Alex and Spencer and Nessa and Adam and Bryant and Romney and Kristin and Tina and Jenna and Jeffy and Mr. Downs and Patti and Emily and Jake and Cate and Pam, Mr. Keyes, everyone. I leaned heavily against the brick of the auditorium, hugging that skirt.

And I wasn't alone.

Never had to have a chaperone, no sir.

2010-05-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

Sissy, where would I be had you not rubbed my toothbrush in dad's deodorant when you were five and I was nine?
Beginning my oral hygiene routine each evening and morning, I always think of you as a sunny little five year old, calmly smiling, nursing your cup of cherry Kool-Aid and plotting your next activation plan as your feet dangle loosely in the Maine air, bangs shaved crazily off in a fit of Barbie-related grievance. I know that one day you will replace my beloved Jasmine Barbie you so cruelly scalped, along with yourself and Skipper, while our redheaded babysitter was watching MTV in the next room with a handful of my favorite potato chips.
I think of you, wackily shorn, gallavanting about the kitchen with mom's bra tied on, stealing house keys to keep in your room. I think of your strong little brown feet kicking me in the shins, and your little brown hands carrying an entire cucumber around the house to gnaw on throughout the day.

In the dorm's communal bathroom, in my apartment bathroom, in the homes of others, at girl's camp, I think of you. I think of you and wonder in shivering anticipation if you chose to reprise your brilliant prank and have once again added flakes from that stick-shaped wetness protector to the bristles that will soon massage my oversized carnassials. I wonder this even when there is no physical way, minus apparating, that you could have gotten to my toothbrush.
Although it has been twelve years since you did this to me, each morning, without fail, I wince as my toothbrush makes its way to my mouth, wondering if it will greet me with that terrifying sensation of sucking dryness, clapping my gums together in a bunch so tight that it takes two hands to get the toothbrush back out of my dryly-locked lips and dozens of rinses to remove all the active deodorizing ingredients and gelling agents from in between each tooth.
Without you, I would be void of a sense of patience, of humor, of intense periods of hyperactivity, and I would be disbelieving of the fact that one human being under the age of ten could think to combine deodorant and mouth.
To my sister on her graduation day: be good, kiddo. I'm proud of you!

Salutations. And here's a picture so everyone can see how stunningly beautiful you are when you stop pinching me for seven seconds and hold still to take a picture.

(photo courtesy of alyssa cook photography)

The More We're a Merrier We

2010-05-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

I am a moderate enthusiast and practicer of the haha.
People harbor pretty strong allegiances for or against hahas, right? I obviously don't use them in my blogging (much) but I sure use them in gchat, in MSN messenger, in Facebook chat and the occasional tweet.
It's a laugh word, yes, some people have actual laughs that actually phonetically sound like haha, so it can be officially used to underline funny things, which I do use it for sometimes. More often I find myself using it as a don't-quote-me-on-this card. Very useful.
Someone texts me, asks me my opinion on something I really know nothing about that should have a strong opinion given towards it/asks me my opinion about something I'm going to get in trouble for telling them what I actually think about it, and all I have to do is insert my good old haha and a period directly after my reply. This simple five-space lifesaver allows me to express exactly how I feel, or exactly how much I don't know, about absolutely anything, no matter how offensive or uninformed I may be.
I know we all know the people who insert the haha SO often that texting or messaging them feels kind of like texting or messaging a dishrag. You become suspicious of their level of brain activity, and begin to think you might actually be communicating with an anemone or a shy toddler because suddenly, everything is a shoulder-shrug and an eye roll and an uncomfortable giggle-and-slink. You ask them who they went to lunch with, and they respond Carl haha. Who is this Carl? Why does Carl inspire laughter? Is Carl a funny person? Is Carl annoying, tiresome, does he always pay for you and you're feeling snarky that you went to lunch with him because you only went because he always
pays for you?

I have a great respect for the singular ha users. The people with very sarcastic senses of humor who are either great pessimists or realists (or occasionally, Eeyores) who insert their single syllable laughter either as an indication of their sense of entire life failure, or, insert it into something that may actually be funny.

Most people I've encountered who are users of the hehe are just creepy. While the hahaers don't actually find everything funny, they're just wishy-washy, the heheers not only find literally EVERYTHING funny, they somehow insert a creepy-funny funniness into the funny. Every single time.
Example: you looked pretty after church today :0D I'm sorry your shoe broke hehe.
What...I....don't...my feet...thank you?
Even worse is the heh heh, which I won't even go into, because my sample group with that one is just too small.
The hee hee is mischevious, and luckily usually used by people respected enough to be allowed to act like little elves every once in a while for a second. This family of haha is usually shared with a cute link of a puppy, or a glittery heart.
The hahahahahahahahahahaers are either easily excitable, like puppies, or are those people who're unfortunately and completely hysterical about everything, all the time. The ones who need three hours of sleep and love SWINGING and WATER-SKIING and take great joy in writing epistles about leaves they brushed off their front walks that morning that reminded them of the progression of relationships and seasons in their life.
Or something like that.

I will always proudly pledge my allegiance to the haha, rather than to the hehe or the heh heh or the ha or the hahahahahaha.
Three cheers for us wishy-washy purists.

P.S.
Did you know Mary Poppins was Dick Van Dyke's second movie ever?

Ralph and Roberta

2010-05-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

The internet out here in the boroughs of San Diego is slower than cold molasses, so no pictures up here until I get home.
Why I love spending time with my father's parents:

They're 86 and 84, and every time my grandfather leaves the house, he still gives my grandma a big kiss on the lips and she says "see you later, Tiger" which ends up sounding more like "see yah latah, Tigah" because they're from Worcester, Massachusetts.

My grandfather arises a couple hours before my grandmother, takes a couple mile walk about the neighborhood, feeds all the neighbors' dogs who he knows by name, and comes home to make my grandmother breakfast. He carefully cuts the crossword out from the newspaper and lays it alongside her place setting every morning.

Their wireless network (whose password is a mythical beast lost on some fabled crumpled bill envelope in the recesses of their split-level home so I'm sitting on the far right side of the house and scalping off the neighbors' internet) is named BORTYG, after their springer spaniel, who died thirty years ago back east and was named for one letter from each of their children. (B for Beth, O for Scott, R for Mark, T for Heather, Y for Holly). (G for Garbutt).

My cousins had a dog named Ammon who lived with them for a long time and then died, and his ashes are sitting out in my grandparents' garage in a little white box, and my grandpa has been propositioning me to go out and dig a hole in the backyard and bury the ashes the whole time I've been here.

Three of my cousins have become engaged and are getting married within the next year, in California.
While I continue to refuse to bury the dog, as we speak, as I write this blog and eat my grapefruit, my grandfather is standing at the stove behind me making my grandmother's oatmeal and making up this song, which he believes we should sing in one of the wedding processions as we carry Ammon's box with us, which song I am typing as he is singing it:

"Ammon, Ammon, you cannot walk down the aisle,
because you've been gone quite a while,
but we'll keep walking, we won't stop,
because you know, you were the top.
Oh oh oh oh, ohhhh Ammon,
Oh Ammon,
Oh Ammon,
Oh oh oh oh oh, ohhh Ammon,
You were the very, very top."

If you want to imagine him singing this and have the delightful experience that I am having, you can just click here and watch a video of him speaking. Just imagine the same voice, singing.

And if you ever wondered why I am incessantly singing everything, there you go.
And who doesn't like Ronald Reagan?

All my ladies

2010-05-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

Janice--
thank you for teaching me the value of food, how to perfectly scramble an egg, how to keep a clean house; thank you for hugging me and telling me stories about dating college men when you were fourteen. Thank you for not killing me for spilling multiple stuffs on your carpet throughout my entire existence, for letting me read at the table, and for secretly laughing when I make inappropriate comments in public. Your unconditional love is something I will always strive for! Your example and no-nonsense approach have taught me how to live my life.

Bud-d--
thank you for always being so interested in my life and believing I can do anything. Thank you for making me tea and for your intuition. Your intelligence amazes me and I will always keep caught up on world news because I want to be like you. You make me laugh until my stomach hurts with your dry humor, I can't wait to come visit you this week.
You have been through so much and are so strong and remarkable because of it. One classy broad!

Lula--
thank you for teaching me style, teaching me love, for letting me play your piano and giving me chocolate-covered raisins, and for not letting my parents bring my newborn self into your house until you had changed into a nicer blouse to meet me. Thank you for your sweet and exemplary marriage, and your straight-up elegance. Can't wait to see you again.

and the Vickster...

Mom, I love you. I could not have gotten through last year without you. Thank you for pushing me and being proud of me, and for teaching me pure charity. Your faith in the Savior and in the gospel will never cease to amaze me. Thank you for your listening ear, your advice, and your understanding. I love you and your pirate face.

(one day I will learn to keep clothes folded in drawers. I promise.)

I'm from the South and I'm a gangster.

2010-05-06T18:35:00.000-07:00

Writer's block is frustrating and a painstakingly uncreative time where you find yourself in your sweats in your kitchen reaching for your eleventh spadeful of raspberry sherbet right from the carton.
Luckily this isn't like that.

I actually give the credit for this most recent hiatus to:

my really fun new job.
the DI.
the weather.
finals.
rediscovering "hanging out".
school ending.
my first summer without school since 2007.

I often have spent hours sitting against the carpeted walls of the Wilk, watching people go by eating their Subway sandwiches. During this time I would usually do my own version of blog brainstorming, that is, pick something funny that had happened to me during that day or the week before it, shape it in my brain with my word hands, and draft little word strings in my head before coming home to write it.

But today, after less than a month but more than three weeks gone from blogging, I don't have a lot to say about chicken nuggets, or the show I closed with a great huffah, or my fantastical job, or the glorious weather.

What I have to say today is, hey.
I'm around. I'll be back soon enough.
And isn't life glorious?
And I'll be back soon, with a real something about something.

Thanks to all y'all (yup) who manned up and became my newest twelve followers. It made my week.

(below, see me in my contented state after my week has been made.)

The Lost Gummy Rollerblade That Made Me Cry At Church On Sunday

2010-04-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

A little girl in the congregation of my church got up to the microphone. She was about nine years old. I've never actually spoken to her before, but she was wearing a black dress with white polka dots and a smooth black headband in her hair.

Her grandpa is a small, silver-haired man who also lives in my neighborhood, in a long, wide brown house next to a field with a barn that Davey, Robert and I used to hold vigils in with potato chips. This old man was a home teacher to my family until I was about ten, bringing me birthday cards covered in teddy bears and candy and giving me big hugs and letting me draw pictures in the brown rows of carpet at his feet in my family's living room. He listened to me play the piano.
He was married to the most beautiful little woman, even tinier than he was, no more than five feet tall and no more than ninety pounds--she was brunette and I never heard her say something above a whisper. I remember when I was very young, she would press her cool fingers to the sides of my face when I would pass her in the halls at church. The old man, her husband, loved his wife so much. He would talk about her often and many times they walked quietly alongside each other.

She had very severe arthritis, and was tiny without a lot of room between tiny bones and tiny joints and tiny tendons anyways, and as the arthritis got worse, she stayed in their long, wide, brown house most of the time. Sometimes I would take things over for my mom and knock on the big heavy door and squish one of my eyes into the pebbled yellow glass beside it, trying to see inside. The more she stayed in, the more her husband did, and took care of her. I would pass the house every day and feel more that she was becoming a part of it. Robert and Davey and I would stand in the field next door, and while they argued about whether or not we could swipe some candles to light in the dry-wood barn for our vigils, I stared at the long house, wondering how she was doing.
Eventually, she passed away, melting peacefully into the walls of their home. He was composed, but walked as though he wasn't quite sure where he was. He was missing his half, his wife, and it was hard for everyone to watch. He continued to smile and hug me.
He spent more time in the house than he ever had.

"I just wanted to stand up at the microphone and say I'm really glad families are forever because I love my grandpa and grandma and a few years after my grandma died we were all having a barbecue at my grandpa's house and I was playing with my Polly Pockets on the floor and I found this pink Polly Pocket rollerblade that I thought I lost. I knew the other one was at home so I was glad I found it but then when I went back to get it it was gone again. I asked my grandpa if he could help me find it and he said he would just ask my grandma where it was. And she told him where it was and he went to get it and it was there just where she told him it would be. So I'm glad they love each other and that my grandma is still here even though she's not. Amen."

Smelling Nuggets

2010-04-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

I have been missing for 20 days, approximately. I did not go anywhere new, I actually just went to my delicious postmodern lit class and my Living Prophets class that is taught by the nicest member of the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

I went to a job interview.
I signed up for a free Barbie catalogue.
I went to a movie that reinforced my undying girl crush love for Rosamund Pike.
I went to McDonald's once, at 10:30 PM, and got ten chicken nuggets. Any loose cash in my car will surely always be traded for either McDonald's' chicken nuggets or an In-N-Out synthetic strawberry shake.
Eight of these late-night nuggets I gobbled in quick succession, dipping and driving all the way down state street. The extra two golden blobs were still waiting all nuggety in the wide bucket passenger seat for me the next morning when I was on my way to class. I ate both of them. Protein.
Is that rumor about McDonald's having their own secret Coke recipe true?

At nights I went to my show, which has exactly fourteen performances left. If you didn't attend one of the first 47, I don't think you have an excuse, unless you were at one of the 47 wedding receptions that I was missing eating some of the 47 servings of free food that I was missing.
Two nights ago, after our Friday show, an audience member asked my partner and I if we'd been dancing together for years. I felt like an ice skater, and asked my partner to pick me up by my waist and hold me in the air like Swan Lake. He didn't want to.

There was an old lady in the audience yesterday matinee that felt the need to define everything that came onstage as soon as she saw it. And she pointed. "COWBOYS" "HIS HANDS ARE TIED WITH ROPE" "SPARKLY TABLECLOTH"

Last night, after our second show, when we were lined up outside the theater, a man who'd been sitting in the front row came out to shake hands.
He nonchalantly handed me a giant pink jewel covered in gobs of dried hot glue that had popped off my prop tray of wealthy jewels and rolled over the stage to his feet. I thanked him and picked the hot glue off with my fingernails. And promptly lost the jewel five minutes later.

Then he moved down the line to our lead girl. They matched kind of because she was in her final costume of black-and-white zebra stripes and leather pants and spiked heels that look like armored cars. He was entirely white-haired, and it was spiky, and he was wearing a tight black t-shirt and tight black pants over his can-shaped frame. It was like the final scene of Grease.
He proceeded to ask her,

"Can I smell you?'

Blink blink.
We all waited, in our zoot suits/sundresses/sparkly imitation jewelry, to see what she would do.
She tugged anxiously on her Britney wig. The beautiful 60-degree wind fluttered by.

Then it got even creepier.
"He wants to smell you!!" peeped his little brunette wife from behind him, with their two teenaged children in tow.

Graciously, she let him smell her. He bent to a spot near her left armpit, just below her shoulder. (Boob area).
And he asked her what perfume she wore, and she told him, and then they left. The keen-sensed man and his wife and two almost-grown children.

Benefits of sitting on the front row: besides getting your knees repeatedly kicked, and lap dances from me, and loads of flying enunciated spit, you're apparently accosted with all kinds of smells, too. Wonder if he could smell the baked ziti we ate in between performances. Or Carson's Listerine, or how the armpits of Greg's vintage brown suit smell like the curry-scented insides of a sweaty Thai restaurant.

Postscript: If you break the Great 75-follower Complacency, I will give you a cookie.

Heather

2010-03-22T21:49:00.000-07:00

It was the rectangular cup dispenser.

The little, plastic, forest green kind that hold those baby cups you can use for mouthwash, or to rinse after you brush your teeth. My mom always tried to make me keep the same cup the whole time we visited. Heather told me she could care less, as long as I threw the old ones away. I’ve always used a new one every time I brush my teeth, as long as my mom hasn’t been standing next to me making sure I don’t ‘waste’.

I smiled and squinted in the dim light, my eyes directed at the cup dispenser for a good five minutes. I swept my gaze from side to side to view the soft blue towels, the toothbrush holder, and the lamp with the tiny beach chair. Nothing had changed--the brassy, stringent Neutrogena soap still sat on the counter. The tiny toilet was still barely off the ground.
The magazine rack was full of Entertainment magazines, even the most recent one that my grandpa must have placed there out of comfort. In the drawer I opened, there was a Ziploc baggie full of bobby pins, hairclips, and a hairbrush covered in red hair. Behind me was the shower that dominated the entire right side of the bathroom, a giant handicap shower that they put in the house when they moved to San Diego. I glanced back down at the cup dispenser and slid a cup out. It came out with a short whoosh into my hand as always, and I looked at it, turning it around and smelling it and crumpling and uncrumpling it as I stared into the mirror, watching my jet-lagged self, waiting for something to happen.

My father was born the second of five children, with one older sister, two younger sisters, and one younger brother. The two littler sisters, Heather and Holly, were both born with arthrogryposis, an extremely rare type of spinal muscular disorder that appears at birth. The disorder involves the gradual deterioration of the voluntary muscles in the body. When Heather was born in March of 1960, it was very rare for a baby to be born with the disorder. When Holly was born a year and a half later with the same problem, it was shocking. As far as my family knows, two with the same disorder in one family had never happened in recorded medical history.

Heather was born with a double curvature of the spine as well as with arthrogryposis. The shortening of the tendons in her joints caused her baby hands to be clenched into tiny, unmoving fists, and her feet to be “rocker-bottoms” with no heels. My great-grandmother was a nurse and would stuff little bundles of fabric into Heather’s clenched fists. The bundles went slowly up in size until Heather could use her hands, but they were never completely straightened out. She was attached to a stretcher for six weeks when she was eleven years old, with screws in and a halo around her head. There were also metal rods through her femur that were attached to ropes and weights. Another rope was attached to the bottom of the board she laid on, to flip her tiny body occasionally so that she could continue to stretch. Her breathing capacity was only about 38% of a regular human being’s, and when she slept at night, she slept with oxygen. She grew to be four feet six inches tall, with a curved back and crooked fingers. Heather could never come visit me at home in Orem because of the high elevation. Earlier in life, she had gone to BYU, but couldn’t visit Provo later in life when her breathing capacity had diminished. My family would go back to Nashua, New Hampshire, to see her, Holly, and my grandparents, along with other assorted relatives, as often as we could afford.

I would dress up in my aunt's tiny clothes at seven and eight years old and have a grand old time. All the nieces and nephews would play office in Heather and Holly’s papers, and ride on the special chair that went up and down the stairs so Heather could get from floor to floor. Heather and Holly played cards with us, told stories to us, watched movies with us, and adored us beyond all loving capacity.
After Holly died when I was very young, Heather and my Poppy and Grammy moved to San Diego, along with my cousins who lived just around the block from them in Nashua. They moved in just around the new San Diegan block, and we got to visit more because they were all closer. Visiting them there was my favorite vacation each year.
Heather was my favorite person in the world, the only grownup who really understood and actually listened when I spoke. We would go shopping for hours and hours in big California malls, Heather on her scooter with me walking happily beside her. She would always slip me twenties and fifties whenever my grandparents weren’t looking, and I’d have to spend them while we were shopping so my parents didn’t know either. We sat and talked for entire days about all the twelve-year-old love problems I was having. She never failed to be completely interested in everything my parents were sick of hearing from me. When I wasn’t in California, we e-mailed and talked on the phone regularly.

Every time we went out in public, people stared. When Heather was little, a child saw her and said “Look, Mommy, it’s E.T.!” It didn’t seem to bother her when she was older, when we were out to eat or shopping. If people stared, which they always did, she didn’t mind. Sometimes she just stared right back. They especially stared when Heather (at four feet six inches) needed assistance walking, and would hold onto my six foot, ten inch dad’s hand. I loved to see them walking down the street together.
Heather was smart, a little sassy, and more opinionated than the rest of our very stubborn family put together. Whatever she said went, on any subject and in any circumstance. She knew everything about everyone in our family, every grade we got, and about everyone any of her nieces and nephews ever dated.

In November of 2006, Heather began to have problems getting enough oxygen. My aunt Beth started to sleep on Heather’s floor, getting up periodically throughout the night to make sure she was still breathing. One night, Beth woke up, and Heather wasn’t breathing. She died quietly at the hospital.
The funeral was quick and not very painful. It had to be arranged quickly so that it wouldn’t become a big, organizational mess with scheduling. We had the gathering at the church, trucked back to my grandparents’ house, and ate. A lot. There was enough food in that house to last the thirty or forty of us a month. All of Heather’s nieces and nephews sat and giggled ourselves silly, stuffing our faces and trying to think about other things.

About nine months later, in August 2007, my family returned to San Diego for our yearly visit. I was so excited. This was my favorite vacation. The best vacation. I’d had a hard summer and was so relieved to be going to my safe haven to rest!
I got to my grandparents’ house, hugged them hard at the door, and ran inside. I dropped my bag in Heather’s study and ran into her bedroom.
The walls had been painted, the oxygen tank was gone, and the single bed was replaced with a queen. The closet was empty, the drawers were bare, and the smell of pill capsules and Cetaphil was gone.
I ran into the bathroom. There was the rectangular cup dispenser. The little, plastic, forest green kind that hold those baby cups you can use for mouthwash, or to rinse after you brush your teeth.
I stood there in that bathroom, in her bathroom, holding that paper cup, and I cried.

Today is her 50th birthday. Us girls miss and love you, Heath. Happy Birthday.

I am a Neon Yellow Fat Clown.

2010-03-15T10:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many of you go to BYU.
And I don't know how many of you actually park on the north side of campus in student parking.
But getting out of the car and getting to class from that parking lot is kind of like the Ten Commandments when they put Moses in the desert and are like "Ok. Go. See ya."

Unless I have 2+ classes, a quiz, and my iPod is charged, this trek is almost never worth it.

This pretty hip guy I know, a senior, actually circumnavigates the entire campus car registration system and just parks in visitor parking at the campus art museum every. Single. Day. I don't know how he doesn't get recognized by the snotty little parking guy in the snotty little parking box thing (excluding my friend Ben who is decidedly unsnotty and works in the snotty box sometimes. Not you, Ben.)

There are most certainly a large group of those kind of people that seem to slither out from under all kinds of campus rules and get to park within a mile of campus because they're slithery and somehow more unnoticeable than the people in my category, which is apparently collectively wearing a big fatty neon yellow clown suit and waving its arms ME ME I'M ILLEGALLY PARKED.
These snakey people are in the same category as the girls who don't wear any pants to campus (thin, butt-bearing leggings instead) and don't get in trouble. Me, they basically tackle to the grass and cover with a big modest sheet.

When I do that.

But back to parking.
The slitherers don't have to trek through the stinging wintery sands of the Marriott Center parking lot after spending forty-five pathetically hopeful minutes weaving their vehicle through the first seven rows of parking when they know there really won't be a spot--but they'll ALWAYS look. Because wasting time looking for a space is worth the 80 extra feet you won't have to walk if you actually find one.
They don't have to despair when they get out of their car and realize their iPod isn't charged, because they don't have to walk seventeen thousand miles up one hill and down another and across the street and by the big X-y building. They have to only saunter quickly past the X-y building, so it doesn't really matter if they have tunes accompanying them.
They don't have to get whistled at by construction workers working on that new multimedia building, or get burned by the sparks shooting dangerously from their big sexy power tools.
Ok, I made the power tool part up.

Me, I'm a pansy, and a respectful-of-the-parking-rules pansy at that.
I actually am not that respectful, I just have luck bad enough that I get parking tickets if I'm parked in 30-minute parking for thirty minutes and seven seconds. Even if I'm running full-out at my car and waving my arms and screaming not to give me a ticket I had to turn in a paper stop chalking. My car. Get away from it, Mr. policeman friend, and go be one of the fourteen squad cars dramatically surrounding the next fender bender on University next to Fat Cats.
I know people who park in 30-minute parking every other day for three or four hours and their cars aren't touched.

Is it because I drive a custom Buick? That is a very outstanding color of teal?
Are you telling me that someone who parked in faculty parking would not drive a boat of a car with a giant dent in the right side? I don't think they really get paid that much.
Is it the little Disneyland sticker in the back window.
Is it the little devil head with diamond eyes hanging from my rear view mirror that Trevor brought me from Japan that is supposed to ward off traffic.
Is it the litter of broken sunglasses (I keep sitting on them) in the backseat?
Probably it's because part of my license plate number is the acronym for a certain Phencyclidine.

Give me a dark-colored, conservatively undented, drug-free car any day.
If it means I can park closer than ACROSS THE FROZEN TUNDRA.

Self-profiling

2010-03-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

Five things I am not:

1. Short.
2. Slutty.
3. Patient.
4. Demure.
5. Pushy.

My vote for number one most terrifying Bond villain:

(Diamonds Are Forever...and I think it's because he cross-dresses and has a giant cat
oh and he REPLICATES HIMSELF)

Two videos I love:

Five things I'm good at:
1. Singing.
2. Driving with my knees.
3. Popping my knuckles.
4. Writing in my journal.
5. Talking to seven-year-olds.

A picture I laugh hard at:

Skills to acquire:
1. Fry tofu.
2. Make donuts.
3. Do a flip on a trampoline.
4. Snowshoe.
5. Emboss.

My feel-good movie:

No really it is. I love it.

The Dance of the Lap

2010-02-26T10:32:00.001-08:00

see Ruthie in the green dress and John 1?

Last night was opening night. And it was a blast.
We'd already had four preview performances (less money for tickets, more wigs likely to fall off and mics to make funny noises and lyrics to be botched and set pieces to fall over) and two dress rehearsals without an audience (half-dressed, occasionally, and breaking into laughter in the middle of scenes, and calling out "I'm sorry my fault!" from backstage when something's forgotten).

But last night was opening night! The real for-reals one.

It was so fun. I mean, performing the show is always fun, and our last preview audience really spoiled us by thinking we were UPROARIOUSLY funny while last night's just chuckled appreciatively. But hey, I'll take an appreciative chuckle. Who wouldn't take an appreciative chuckle? Last night was fun and grueling, but not completely grueling, because changing over and over and over and over and over again, and running up stairs, and down stairs, and moving setpieces, and stretching wigs over my giant cranium--all of these things have all been getting easier. And funner. It's like doing two hours of pretty regular cardio every single day, and I love it. I even have two of the six-pack. Please bow to me, for I have two of the six pack. I could basically be a bodybuilder at this point.

There's a particularly dancy dance number in the second act, involving lots of dancing, and I have named it a Notorious Danger Dance Zone of Dancing Death, not because it is particularly hard, but because it has ripped my dress, killed several bracelets, given me a gash down the front of my tummy, blistered my feet bloody, and detached my wig from my head numerous times. And those were just the preview performances.
Last night I basically superglued my wig to my head, made sure all my parts were lodged correctly inside my dress, checked for snags in the fabric of my dress, adjusted my bracelets carefully, and tried to convince myself that I'm not clumsy. I was going to conquer this dance number. I was going to be the queen of dancing.

So I was dancing onstage, as I regularly do in this number, with the seven other members of our ensemble. Andrea was in her pink dress as usual, and Janell in the ever-present eggplant dress, Ruthie in green and me in blue, and Carson and Michael were sailors in their cute little sailor hats and John 1 and John 2 both had their shirts unbuttoned.

We were past the most Danger Zone-ish part of the dance, almost to the end, and I was triumphant in no screw-ups.
Trying to balance myself on my teetery shoes with a continually-trying-to-take-over-my-life long black wig on my head, as usual, I did a couple of really quick little turns towards the north side of the theater, as usual, spinning around in front of the audience, and as I lost my balance and had no time to think, I definitely plopped my booty down onto a dad guy sitting in the front row. Just, you know. Landed right on him. Hello audience man. Here's some feathers from my feather headdress hair-poof to land in your mouth. Plegh plegh plegh. Hello your ten-year-old daughter sitting next to you. Hi. I'm just made up like a drag queen and sitting on your dad's lap. Luckily, there was just as little time to think as there was to stay on his lap, so I hopped right back out of my lap-sit and continued to dance ever-so-gracefully away from my new friend as Michael and I grabbed each other's arms and burst into giggles, he in his sailor hat and I in my Jasmine wig.

Got it? Jasmine wig sailor hat sit-on-a-dad get back up run away to the stage.

So I will continue to conquer this dance. But I won't be surprised if next time, I somehow am launched into the third or fourth row headfirst. Or if I spear someone in the eye with my heel, or something.

You ever sit on somebody on accident? Or hold the wrong mom's hand in the grocery store? It was like that.

Je vois la vie en rose.

2010-02-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

I know nobody ever listens to anybody's playlists.
But this one will help you feel happy Valentine feelings.
These are songs full of good love.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.

I am a Seven Beautiful Blogger

2010-02-12T11:37:00.000-08:00

In honor of the fact that I am currently in my bed with a fistful of tissues and the Family Sick mug and my cat, having caught Andrea/John/Ruth's cold, and in honor of the fact that I have discovered Mucinex and don't know why I ever took anything else, and in honor of the fact that it's my birthday on Sunday and I'll be turning 21 and am having a small but not unpleasant life crisis about it, and in honor of the fact that I've already blogged twice this week

(whoa)

and in honor of the fact that this sweet girl bestowed upon me my First Ever Blog Award

I would like to share with you seven pictures that make me happy.
Because apparently when you get a blog award you say seven things.
And because Emily's been doing this thirty days of blogging thing and I really like it when she posts pictures.
I considered sharing my seven favorite blogs, but you've got all fifty on the side there, and I read a hundred and fifty more than that even, so there really aren't just seven.

Last night, having given up trying to fall asleep while breathing through my mouth, I laid on my side and flicked through my iPhoto album. There aren't scads of photos in there, just back to the summer after I graduated high school.

But here are seven. Some old, some new.

This is when my beloved Bry came to visit me, and Missalicious was there too.

This lady was my piano teacher for fifteen years.

This is my family walking to the park at a reunion two summers ago.

This is...well, this is just a very attractive picture of Chase and Ames when I left my camera on the table during our 2009 New Years Party.

This is Mr. Benjamin. Obviously we are kindred. Look at our faces.

This is the night before my high school graduation, when Casey and Dave and I decided to lie in the middle of the street.

And finally, this masterpiece comes after two days in Disneyland. Caitlin, Mel, Sarah, and Emily.

Let me help you please with your shoe.

2010-02-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

I have this very sophisticated professor.

She's probably (as I've been spouting to Tracy for weeks, who has the class with me and has to listen to me gob on all the time about how SMART this lady is) the most well-read professor I've ever had. And let's say I've had about forty professors thus far.

This professor of mine wears buttery red leather jackets, loops and loops of smooth gold necklaces, has perfectly manicured dark red nails and perfectly tailored pants and crisp white button-up shirts. She even wears one of those eight million dollar old-lady slithery track jackets sometimes--leopard print. The shiz.
And she has an accent. Of course...I wouldn't let this accent make me believe anything she's saying is more useful than it really is, because it all IS that useful, because she IS that smart.
One of those people whose every sentence you covet because you know you get one of those smart sentences out about once a month.
But the real basic reason she seems to be so Proper and Admirable to me is because of her knowledge. This professor of mine was educated formally by tutors, went to a legit university, she's the head of a bunch of national forums of ethnic literature, and she'll soon be in charge of an online database so popular amongst the pool of literary people I swim in every day that I won't even mention it, because of the sensitive (or maybe just a little squirmy) nature of the story I am about to tell.
It's not even sensitive, this story, maybe just irreverent is the right word, and it's really just kind of squirmy because it's one of those uncomfortable experiences where you never thought you'd see the person you're seeing in the situation you see them in. You know what I'm talking about?

See: your elementary school teacher at the grocery store with her daughter. Makes your nine-year-old heart swell up with jealousy because you forgot she had children of her own to attend to.

See: a boy from your 314 writing class entering the same group therapy you're in. Shrivel. Hey buddy....

See: your very soft-spoken, put together, buttoned-up American Lit professor MOSHING with his wife at the concert of this silly little techno band that you are currently moshing at. Oh hey professor, just...you know...moshing here with this boy that I came with and yes he is kind of drunk but I'm not! Sweaty! I'm in five-foot proximity with my professor who is also sweaty! Too close! What in the world are you doing here? See you in class Monday when you aren't wearing that caftan thing!

See: anyone important, particular, or proper in any kind of communal bathroom. Teachers, church leaders, people's parents, girls you kind of knew in high school but don't...all in all, anyone in the bathroom who isn't a stranger or your best friend is just plain Weird.

Which is where we come to my story.
This professor of mine.
In her class, we set the desks in a circle. Usually this fails, at least, in my previous experiences--everyone feels a little too kumbaya and is just as silent as ever--but in her class, it works. The extra desks are corralled in the middle of the circle, and everyone is out against the walls with a lot of space to themselves.

Except if you get there late you end up sitting right next to her. So I'm usually late. And I sit on that late side of the classroom more often than not. It's more awkward to raise your hand in these positions because you kind of have to wave it in front of her face to get attention. And people are looking at you a lot more because they're looking at her because she's talking.

I sat in my desk the other morning, my late desk right near la profesora, my nose and fingertips still numb from outside, and as I kicked around at my coat under my desk, my scarf came lose from my pile of crap and flitted partway across the space in front of me. I bent under my desk to grab it and, as I usually do, took a glance around at the shoes around me. I looked at my professor's right pump, black, leather, respectable, square toed, and then I looked at her left one, and awkwardness overcame me.

Because there was a small rectangular wad of toilet paper flitting from under the toe of it.

She often waves her tiny feet around for emphasis, being a shorter, spunky woman, and that piece of tissue waved like a little white flag, over and over and over. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed this little pinwheeling of white, but if they did, they were artfully ignoring it while staying concentrated on her face.

This class is 75 minutes long, and I can tell you that I spent a good part of the 65 minutes I was there in time for trying to convince myself that it wasn't toilet paper, it was a piece of a plastic bag, or something, or...she'd stepped on...something white and...soft and pliable...that wasn't for toilet purposes...but the perforated lines were visible and I couldn't deny it. That generic toilet tissue they use at my school is just too distinctive.

Did you just get that squiggle up your back?
I guess everyone goes to the bathroom. But my goodness, how uncomfortable those 65 minutes were.

Zingela siyo, zingela baba

2010-02-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm currently missing my first class.

Don't give me a hard time, my subconscious is already doing so and I've only missed it this one time so far.

I'm eating oatmeal.

Do you know what an accomplishment that is? Not the oatmeal. That I have this class three times a week and didn't miss it once in January? My goodness, that almost deserves some kind of award. I guess skipping it this once was my award. It's deceptively sunny out this morning, pretending like it's warm out there when I know it's really not and it probably really won't be until the middle of May. Or the weather will follow suit of the weather in 2008, when it was infamously rainy and freezing until the middle of June. JUNE. I was walking to my spring term classes in a coat and boots in the middle of June, and I wasn't having it.

Growing up here I always thought "wow, we have such great weather" until I visited other places like Hawaii and San Diego and Seattle (oh BEAUTIFUL SEATTLE!) and even St. George. Then I took another brief look around here, Orem, UT: Freezing November-May with a few scattered days of perfect temperature. Like four. Boiling hot late May-October, with the same amount of good temperature days. But hey, these few days of pseudospring in February are what I live for in the winter, when I can stand on the steps outside a class building with the backs of my jeaned knees to the sun and feel them warm. My kneepits get warm, I'm good for a few days. It's amazing what the sun can do.

Like make me miss class this Monday just because I woke up, on time even, to see it shining whitely through my window onto a three-day old cup of tea on my desk and the cat sitting in the sill, and the sunshine made me feel so darned cheerful that I didn't mind the glopping gluey protein powder I stirred into my hot cereal or the amount I Didn't get done this weekend or that I traded nine extra minutes of sleep for getting to class on time or at all.
Mondays sometimes have that nice air of newness about them, like it's January 1st every week. Like today even though I missed my class, I'll be happy to stroll onto campus late in a new pair of trousers I bought over the weekend and get some classing done. Like rehearsal will be fantastic tonight and somehow I'll find time to get to bed on time and I will wake up tomorrow morning feeling completely refreshed and I will look out my window again like Cinderella does in the movie, except my hair won't be as fluffy. I do have the hoardes of chirping birds though. Eat that.

At least when I'm feeling optimistic that's what Mondays feel like, and that's how I'm feeling today. It's sunny. I woke up with a song I haven't listened to in weeks stuck in my head and have since listened to it about twelve times. It may be from The Lion King, and it may be about hunting. But it makes me happy.
So here it is Monday again. I'm off.

"Kneepits" is the word of the day. Chant it to yourself. What an awesomely gross word.

January Review, Scrambled Eggs-Brain

2010-02-01T12:13:00.001-08:00

Note to self: stop taking ten-day or longer sojourns from blogging. I like it here. It's Februaryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I have a little black moleskine notebook for each class. Not the fancy bound spined ones, just the smaller ones (Lanee). They're about $5 apiece in my campus bookstore, but it's worth spending a little more because the notebooks are so pretty that they cry out to be written in, thus, I actually take a very respectable amount of very well-organized notes in them. Also, I bought a pack of those squishier-inked Pilot G-2 pens in a nice forest green, which just looks beautiful on the yellower pages of these moleskins. I jump to take notes each day.

It's really worked out, this whole idea. At least for the first month of school. I surprised myself, and hope I continue to do so.
I try not to make any of them my journal, though, try to keep doodles to a minimum and lists of people and facewash products I need to buy and small, paragraph-sized rants about my life out of them. That way they don't turn into half-used journals like I already have several piles of. Who doesn't have those piles? I have piles and piles and piles. Journals with moons on the front and hand-pressed Indian paper on the insides and even some of the ones with locks and keys you could buy at booksales in elementary school. Many wasted journals that could have been used by small children somewhere to learn their math instead of being cast aside by me after several weeks of their Newness had gone by.

One of the moleskines has crept into being my journal though. Halfway.
It's the one for my postmodern lit class, OK? It's not for Living Prophets or History of Psychology or Psychology in Film or Math Death. If any notebook is allowed to be emo, it's a postmodern lit notebook filled otherwise with notes about war books and What Is Identity and PTSD and caste systems and the Catholic church and its system of filthy filthy arbitrary power.

OK?
Ok.
In this notebook, between scribbles like "DECONSTRUCTIONISM: RESPONSIBLE ETHICAL RELITAVISM" and "Freud who said it was helpful to talk about your problems? Huh? Huh?" and "NARRATIVE WESTERN PHILOSOPHY PLATO CAVE->rationality culture spirituality above the line nature below hmmmmmm The cave the cave the cave the allegory the big scary shadows" I write things about my feelings. Like you do in a journal. Like it's kind of a journal. I make sure (as my new, impeccably organized self) to separate journaly things from real relative grownup learning. I bullet everything I write about my life and leave everything note-worthy not bulleted. This seems opposite, but hey, I can't go back on it now.

When I'm bulleting instead of paragraphing or sentencing like a regular person, it seems that very strange things come out. Maybe a better representation of the way I think, though.

This is all working out fine and grand, but sometimes I go back to view my bullets and just get confused because I seem to have seven different brains all working at a mile a minute, and about really, really weird unimportant things. See an assortment of my month in fragments below.

"people with yellow in their eyes Romney"
"Perhaps in my magic closet that I will have someday!"
"how do people my age know so much? I don't know wars and dates and things Someday I'll know more "
"Why doesn't anybody else's bookbag smell like stale gum like mine does? Am I more absorbent? Or my bag I mean"
"things smell better when it's warmer outside. In the winter you can't even smell things."
"cranium size is very important to me. Not intelligence--actually the size of someone's actual head. I can tell when I'm gripping the back of your head to kiss you"
"is it better to lie than to tell the truth when you know because of their personality they'll just distrust the truth and your motives anyway? They're not going to believe me even if I tell the truth"
"it's awesome when you find yourself picking up habits from the people you know, like the disgusting way they eat string cheese. Check. I do it."
"this dude just sat at my table and smelled so good, like a combo of the clean lobby of a building, and detergent, and rootbeer"
"who needs mystery anyways? I need mystery, like people who are shady"
"no money"
"now you KNOW a guy who brings a plate to campus to dump his tupperware onto is just that much more civilized than the rest of us. Who is this guy"
"I love chocolate pudding. I also love the color teal and calzones man I love those pepperoni calzones!"

These moleskines just seem to inspire my already hoppy brain to turn into a regular fidgeter.

Happy Brain-Hopping Monday, Happy February. February is a beautiful month and I am glad we are in it.

Tell me you have things like these bullets written in the margins of your planner, or on napkins, or at least in your brains? And look at these green trees again and feel a little spring a little early if you want.

Yum Yum Trash

2010-01-19T10:57:00.001-08:00

Ok people. Sometimes I make fun of Stephanie Meyer.

I really don't make fun of her, actually, I guess, because she always comes up in conversation at the awkward moment when you don't know what the other person thinks of her, and I really don't like to offend people, so, usually I just wait until they say what they think of her and then tailor whatever I was about to say to neatly fit in the discussion they are about to have about her. No worries, I don't lie about my actual opinion, I just turn the level up or down. I know you were worried about my opinion getting lost somewhere in there.

In my experience, there are
A. THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE TWILIGHT and for whom it was their first long-term reading experience/relationship that they are very attached to
B. The people who appreciate it only because it's a book and they just like books so much so it's ok that it exists
C. The people who secretly love it but have read a lot of other books and feel like culturally they are not allowed to like it because it's worse than everything else or something
D. The people who simply cannot ignore the sentence splices and thumbs-up to emotionally dependent relationships that the book spits at you because they feel entitled to be these people who make these judgments about books
E. The people who hate it to go along with everyone else and be in the club
F. The people who like it to go along with everyone else and be in the club
G. Mormon housewives, who seem to actually be a combination of A and F.

Now.
I have noticed these things, and I fit into one of these categories very plainly, and I don't even know Stephanie Meyer so I'm not even allowed to dislike her. You can't dislike people unless you know every single thing about them and have made a perfect, educated decision to do so, or unless they've killed one of your family members. Even then.
But I do make fun of Stephanie Meyer sometimes, and for that I feel bad. I feel bad because I took a swift look at the books that were MY first reading experiences, MY first hooks into the delicious world of literature, the pieces of writing that really got me into the pool, and I have to laugh at myself because I read a lot of trash. (Trash is not derogatory here, it's more like "easy reading". Like "easy listening". Think "easy listening" music, the creepy but basically harmless jazzy piano trumpety grocery store music vs. a symphony or Elton John or something.)

My trash was books from the Orem Public Library with premises like this:

"Someone Like You depicts a year in the life of two sixteen-year-old best friends. Although Scarlett is much bolder and more self-confident than Halley, the two girls immediately become friends. Scarlett has fallen in love with a boy named Michael Sherwood over the summer, and the day after she sleeps with him for the first time, he is killed in a motorcycle accident. Halley, who has been going through a phase of separating herself from her mother after a trip to the Grand Canyon earlier in the summer, comes home from camp to be with Scarlett and attend the funeral. Halley has the new experience of supporting Scarlett and being the strong one, instead of the other way around."

or this one:

"Sixteen-year-old Laurie finally has it made: She has a handsome boyfriend and a popular group of friends. Things start to fall apart, though, when Laurie's boyfriend swears he saw Laurie meeting another boy, even though Laurie was home sick.Other unexplained sightings convince Laurie that she has a double, and when the mysterious figure claims to be her twin sister, Laurie investigates. Laurie discovers that she was adopted at birth, although her sister Lia was not. Instead, Lia bounced from foster home to foster home, growing more bitter--and more dangerous. Now, although her body is confined, Lia visits Laurie through astral projection. When Laurie's friends start to get hurt, Laurie suspects Lia's trying to take over her life. Will Laurie embrace her newfound sister, or will she protect her adoptive family?"

No biggie. Astral projection and all that.

Books with covers like this:

Yes, that is a bleeding hourglass. Yes, I have read this book over fifteen times. Yes, it is about a teenage girl moving in with her father and new stepmother in the deep South, and about how the stepmother actually is a hundred years old but made a deal with a Cajun witch to never age, and how Lenore the daughter has to fix this with the help of her super hot stepbrother who is also ageless.

And this:

Yes. I remember every word of this one. Really I do.

...and after taking this small journey into my preteen and teen and maybe I read Locked in Time again last summer years, I have really started thinking twice about running about yelling angrily about someone who wrote blockbuster books about werewolves and vampires and vampire babies with apples and creepy white hands on the covers, because I have a dozen brown cardboard boxes of books like the above shoved in my basement. So, who am I to say?

Jaws

2010-01-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

I am a nibbler.
Some people seem to grow up eating three fairly large meals a day. That's probably the goal of all time-consuming parents, so you aren't having to clean up ziploc baggies covered in cheerio dust and stray cheerios and snaking fruit roll-up wrappers and things all the time. It's probably easier to feed children who consume Serving Sizes and only consume them three scheduled times a day.
But me, I'm a nibbler.
I don't eat these entire-meal things everyone speaks of. A meat and a potato and two vegetables and a jello and a roll and a drink and a dessert and maybe even some salad or beans or something thrown in there if you get crazy. I cannot eat this, I have to eat half, rest, eat the rest later. Or just get rid of it and get hungry again twenty minutes later but then I only have ice cream and a handful of peanuts.

I take three or four ziploc baggies of different snackies and a banana and string cheese and sometimes a can of soda to campus almost every day, because every twenty minutes I feel the need to gnaw or sip on something. It's been nice to have Christmas, because even now there are leftover butterscotcharoos and chocolate-covered pretzels and cheese biscuits that I can replace my regular wheat thins and potato chips and apple slices and chocolate chips and stuff with.

I think I have always gotten away with this nibbling because the only exercise I ever do since graduating high school and going to college is walking to and from class. Less exercise=less need of calories to burn, and to create muscle (what muscle?), protein especially. My mother used to shove a piece of peanut butter toast down my throat every morning throughout junior high because the PROTEIN would give me ENERGY.
My schedule starting this last Monday is about six hours of school, one hour homework, one hour break, about four hours of rehearsal, more homework, sleep, redo. Every single day. Apparently my body decided that 3:00 this morning was when it wanted to let me know that if this was the new schedule, some things were going to have to change. And apparently my body has read "The Tell-Tale Heart".

Last night I had rehearsal and then very sillily went to Denny's, because I've been being very good about sleeping my first couple days of school, so I thought, sure, let's just go, there's only four of us this time, we won't be there long. I only have one little homework assignment.
So I went to Denny's. Four of us were there until about 1 AM and then I came home.

I laid down in bed with my laptop on my lap and a book propped under my chin to write a quick paper. I felt good, I'd gotten to each class, enjoyed them all, taken a bath and iced my ripped quad OW that was feeling a lot better, and had gone to a very, very fun rehearsal. Type type type type. I typed my paper after finishing the last sixty pages of The Uncommon Reader (which made me laugh out loud, READ IT) and as I got to the third paragraph of the paper, lying almost completely flat on my back with my computer on my chest, totally relaxed, my hands and arms began to shake uncontrollably. I stopped, puzzled, kind of fascinated, and held my hands up in front of my face with the fingers spaced wide apart, trying to figure out what was going on. And then my vision got fuzzy, and my hearing got staticky, and my legs went a little numb.

and all of a sudden the word Calories flashes impatiently across my brain. Just the word, in word form.
As though it was on one of those message things in big red letters.

My brain says to me, Calories Calories Calories Calories Calories Calories Calories Calories Hungry Hungry Hungry Hungry Hungry Hungry HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY
HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY
and at this point, listening to my brain, I'm a little puzzled, to say the least. At this point my brain has never had to directly signal this at me before in my life. At this point it's 3 AM and I am flat-out in bed.
But my body almost involuntarily stands up, steadies itself, marches down to the kitchen, and chomps down the following:

an entire jar of salsa with half a bag of chips.
a leftover burrito hanging out in the fridge.
a bowl of leftover sweet potatoes.
two string cheeses.
a peanut butter sandwich.
about twenty baby carrots with ranch.
a twix bar.
a bowl of strawberry mini wheats.
another bowl of strawberry mini wheats.
more chips, but with hummus this time.
a toblerone bar.
a glass of milk.

I stood there on the side of the kitchen island Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomp Chomping away, listening astoundedly to my jaw as it moved robotically to masticate all of this food. I didn't really even feel like I was present for the activity.
And, as soon as this part of my brain was satisfied with the food I had stuffed in myself, I walked stoically back up the stairs, got in bed, was really confused about what had just happened, and fell almost immediately asleep.

My body was in need of more food to burn through class and walking to and from class and studying and stretching and four hours a night of dance, and it was darned tootin' going to tell me so, even if it had to march me down to the refrigerator in the middle of the night.

Please tell me this has happened to someone else before? I feel crazypants. Did I just get so busy my body forgot to remind me that it needed extra food? I wasn't even hungry.
Was my brain resorting to speaking caveman?

Goodbye, first entire decade I can remember

2009-12-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

Here it is. It is the end of the year here.
I listen to the same song every single time I write a brave and unbalanced blog. It's only two minutes and fifty-two seconds long, so it repeats probably about forty times each time I write a blog, which has been 144 times, counting this one. From going through the motions of doing the terrifyingly complex math with my math brain, I have gained the information that this means I have listened to my blog song approximately 5760 times. That's a lot of times to listen to one song that is a lone piano. But it works out for me, especially when I'm feeling puky verbose. Which is a lot. Not puky in a bad way, puky in a goodness-me-some-words-must-burst-forth-presently way. The song helps me to release this bursting in a timely way, usually.

Guess what the song's called? It's called The Engagement.

I stand here at the end of the year. I am tired.

Yes, I had mononucleosis at the beginning of this year. Actually, I had it starting with a tearful blood test in the studen health center last December--and the strain agitated my liver/gallbladder/everything else so much that in February I had to drop out of school, move home, and be in bed for two months. I laid in bed and watched House and read some books for two months. Hepatitis Hepatitis Hepatitis Jaundiced. Sleep Sleep Shower Lay In Bed Ouch.

THEN I became engaged in April to Mr. Andy Sherwin after knowing Mr. Andy Sherwin for 2 1/2 weeks. Months later, on a cool night in July, I became unengaged from Mr. Andy Sherwin in another whirlwind of events, and then flopped around like a really pathetic gasping fish for a while. Then the relationship finally ended completely and I was dumped back into some water.

At first, looking back at my year and seeing only two big fat ones slapped onto it--

"MONONUCLEOSIS MY LIVER HURT AND I WAS SOOOO BORED AND FELT USELESS AND UNFULFILLED"

and "MARRIAGE THAT WAS THE EPITOME OF RUSHED INTO AND DIDN'T HAPPEN"

felt terrible. I thought, "how am I ever, ever going to share these experiences without sounding like the sorriest Sally in the whole world?"
But I figured it out. Not that bad, I realized.

The First was an annoying health issue that has yet to have healed itself completely, which has erased forever my former ability to get next-to-no sleep, eat crappily, exercise 0%, and take poor care of myself. I have had to retrain my body to attune it to a stricter regiment in order to not keel over once again. Once a serious strain of mono bug, always a serious strain of mono bug. And after being the same way for twenty years about my almost anti-health regimen, it has been a growing pain in the nethers to try and change.

The Other was an embarrassing mistake. Embarrassing for other people, I mean. They get embarrassed when they ask about it, and then embarrassed for me that it happened and then didn't happen. People continue to walk up to me and ask "hey, when are you getting married?" five months after the fact. A woman in church actually asked me about a month ago how my husband was doing. I laughed. I didn't mean to. If I had a dollar for all the award-winningly OUCHIE OUCHIE cringes I've received in the last few months, I'd have eight bazillion dollars.

I have come up with a clever catch phrase regarding the x-ed nuptials, which I shoot at any inquiring minds as quickly and tactfully as possible, peppering it with as many "it's OK"s and reassuring hand-waggles as possible. It's clever enough without being insensitive to him or me or our situation that they usually titter on and on about it, which is a helpful deflection from their feeling terribly insensitive for asking.

People get it. Some people get it, and some people don't. And that's OK. I know that the experience is something I have learned from. I know that I'm feeling quite a bit better about all of it. And I know that I am eternally grateful to him for recognizing the differences that just wouldn't get us through an entire life together (or months, even) and for making sure that we would both be on the paths that would make us the happiest.

I see the two experiences I have put myself through this year with my eyeballs and with my heart. Like I said above, they weren't pleasant at first. Neither of them (regarding the unengagement process, not the engagement itself) were ever pleasant in the slightest. They sucked big time. Sucked more than anything hath ever sucketh in the history of my really short life.

But.

I feel as though I have learned more this year than I've learned in my entire life.
I feel as though I learn one hundred times as much in each month of each new year than in the entire year beforehand.
And if that's how it's going to continue to be, I am getting the whole "eternity" thing a lot better than I used to.

I have learned better this year to perceive what I really believe, because my "beliefs" were knocked flat for the first time by the littlest baby wimp breeze and I had to grope around in the slimy dark for the things that really meant something to me, what I really inherently knew. It was scary. But I did it. And I can do it again.
I have learned better this year that I cannot continually beat the crap out of myself with no sleep, fried food, candy, and laying around. That I can actually eat salad. That it doesn't taste that bad. That I feel better doing what is better for my body.
I have learned better this year a fraction of the infinite and understanding love that God has for me.
I have learned better this year how to be more considerate of the feelings of other people.
I have learned better this year about the true value of people who care about you, and how to love them in spite of their imperfections, whatever they may be.
I have learned better this year to stop dreading alone time and start valuing the quiet hours in which I can be alone with my thoughts.
I have learned better this year what I might be good at doing for the rest of my life, in fact, I am quite sure of what I want to be. And that is a big deal.

I have learned to wake up each morning and remind myself of the blessing that my life is, of the blessings that include pistachios, my little sister, burned CDs because those of us from the CD generation still do that sometimes, raspberry-almond tarts, and David Sedaris.

in 2010, I shall
perform in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels February-April with probably the most talented cast that I will ever have the privilege of being a part of
transition from major 1 to major 2, which is considerably harder and involves 6+ more years of schooling
convince Emily and Ames to have a baby
meet my birthmother
turn 21
greet dozens and dozens of friends arriving home from various places around the world
attend the wedding of my BEST Lanee and be her bridesmaid
go on a mission?
become a master chef?
learn to reupholster?
conquer the earth?
invent the internet?

I'll see you then.
Thank you all for the love and unending support you've shown me this year by stopping by shortly, following, leaving a comment or two, or just plain being a friend. I can't tell you how much it means to me.
Check out my year just below. Lotsa pictures.

Just the six.

2009-12-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

There's this very, very popular blog that I'm sure most of you females read, as I do. It's called the Rockstar Diaries, and the author often writes "little letters" to different things/people. While it isn't exactly an essay, or my usual formatting at all, I've been writing letters to people in my mind a lot lately. It's kind of like tweeting, but better, and you get to say more if you want. It's also simpler, and not full of metaphors, although I am quite OK at the usage of metaphors.
Jenny's blog also does this letter-writing thing, in fact, it revolves completely around these letters. Emily wrote a letter to someone on her blog just the other week. People are really on to something with this whole idea.

So, I just have six today. And then I'm back on the longer-form bandwagon.

Dear YouTube,

Leave me alone so I can study.

Dear College Algebra,

Please do not slaughter me next semester. Be gentle. I changed my major and I'm nervous, so please, be gentle.

Dear PBF,

Thanks for the money. Really.

Dear Kangaroo,

I would like to move to where you are and live in your house with you and go thrift shopping like we talked about today. And I like your nose. But alas, I have to finish college and get on with my life and all that jazz. Unfortunately. Really unfortunately.

Dear Diet Coke and muddy buddies,

You do not make for a good singing voice, and I wish I hadn't eaten you all morning and then remembered that I have an audition tonight. But you were still delicioso.

Dear Friend,

The way your Celtic bracelet fits your right wrist makes me crazy for you. Were you thinking the same thing I was thinking about those little jellybean-eating boys on the row in front of us?

Does anybody else ever write little letters in their heads? If there are three female bloggers doing it, plus me, that means there are at least two hundred other people out there doing it. According to my calculations. Try it, it's rather fun.

Friday Morning Booty Shakin'

2009-12-04T11:19:00.001-08:00

There's a hallway in the building that I have most of my classes in that is like those big fatty aquariums at PetSmart in which 400 goldfish reside because the people are just rubbing all over each other on accident every second because it is so crowded. And looking stupid about it, as goldfish do.

All. The time.

You know how those goldfish look--very, very confused. Swimming in circles and banging into the walls sometimes. Boggling their eyes around everywhere. Sure they're meant to get somewhere eventually, but not really sure where that is, so they just keep flapping around and mooshing with each other on accident. The hall is not a zoo, but worse, an aquarium. A holding tank. Bursting. As though nobody ever gets out the ends to the bathrooms and elevators. As though the ends of the hallway are narrowed, which they aren't. It's full to the brim, especially now that coats and scarves and hats and snoods (OK there are no snoods) and boots and mittens and earmuffs and even-heavier-backpacks are mixed into the soup.

If you attend BYU, I am talking about the north hallway in the basement of the JFSB. I do write about the JFSB a lot, because I am always in it.

Throughout your progression down this hallway, you're likely to get wiped in the face accidentally by about three different mittens if you're short, leaving you with a mouthful of fuzz. Or you'll be sorely hip or boob-checked by the tops of books poking out of short girls' shoulder bags, if you're tall like me. Ow. Your heel will be clipped twice, and your toes stepped on at least a half a dozen times. You will simultaneously smell lasagna, hot tupperware, breath, stale gum, books, string cheese, and the insides of nalgenes. You'll trip over at least three pairs of irritating legs jutting at odd angles from the walls, and see ten people you know, only four of whom you can come up for air long enough to say hi to. I've considered bringing goggles into this mix, only I know that the many who breathe through their mouths would fog them up.

Maybe a snorkeling mask.

This morning, late as usual, I crept down the steps, as usual, and entered this hallway, as usual. I was over ten minutes late this morning, which is even LATER than usual, and I whipped 'round the corner to this hallway, wrapping my scarf tightly in order to avoid snagging individuals I'd soon be rubbing against, ducking with my hood over my head, bending my knees and shooting my arms out to launch myself into the crowd I am ready for each morning.
But there was nobody there. Not one person. Not ONE. I thought it was a lie.
You're all jolly good fellows for getting to class on time this morning, because I cranked up my music and shook my booty down that block-long hallway to my class.

Who knew shaking it on campus was so liberating? Do you guys shake it on campus?
Why didn't anybody tell me?

I'm thankful for the robe

2009-11-29T12:06:00.000-08:00

There are two more days of November. I have about ten hundred more stories to tell you, but it is almost December, and I haven't been pacing myself. This has been fun though, and it's kind of changed my life. I keep looking at things when I see them and exclaiming how thankful I am for them, which some in my surroundings think is way weird. Others enjoy it. I enjoy it.

I will tell you a story today, and perhaps one tomorrow.

I am allocating myself one hour right now for Recreational Internet Purposes (RIP), after which I will return to the mountain of unfinished homework meowing at me from upstairs in my room. The only way I will get through said homework is by perhaps imagining how good it will feel to wake up tomorrow morning knowing that all of it is done and that my iPod and I can skip frostily to class in good conscience. I believe, at this point, that I am going to be a high school English teacher. Maybe next week I'll again want to attempt grad school, or go to culinary school, or quit school and procreate like mad until I'm 30 and have seventeen kids. I'm not really sure. Today, I want to be an English teacher. I want to teach kids stuff. I want to teach them awesome books that they will like for the rest of their lives. I want to have theme days at the intro of each book with snacks and I want to help them prepare for the ACT and I want to give them spelling tests (I get excited just thinking about spelling tests) and vocabulary lessons, and I want papers to grade! I want them to read King Lear and LIKE IT. And they WILL.

But I digress.

Two items before I Robe:

See my new banner with the birdcage? BRYCRASCH made it for me. Go here to follow him, and please take notice of his artistically skillful blogging and artisticness. And if anyone wants to find me a big bag of money so I can visit him in Florida and see him perform at Disney World for free for two weeks, that would be kind of cool.

Liesl has become my fiftieth follower, and deserves a cookie for it, as she told me the other day. She's also a SERIOUSLY funny writer, who I worked with on the high school newspaper staff, who has a better hold on sentence structure than I will ever possess. Go see her.

Today's story is the story of The Robe. Not the lame movie, just a robe that I have.

In 2003, there was a very humongous fire in California. My dad's parents live in Scripps Ranch, San Diego, and hundreds of homes in their neighborhood burned to the ground.
My grandparents spent the majority of their lives back east, but moved to California with my aunt Heather in 2001 because the weather would be better and there was more family there.
When my grandparents and my Heather moved to California, they met a neighbor of theirs who lives just across the street. His name is Dieter, and he's from Germany. His license plate spells the name of his hometown, just three letters, and his wife had passed away just previously to my grandparents moving in. Dieter never had children, and he and my grandfather soon became best friends. They gab like ladies and take their morning walk together. They go out to eat and they go to the temple together. Dieter works there on Friday nights and also has an enormous bowtie collection. He conducts the music at church in these bowties.
He's like another grandpa to me, or an uncle, or something. I just love him.

When the fire happened in 2003, and the flames were literally feet away from my grandparents' section of the neighborhood, Dieter threw a few things into a duffel bag, ran across the street, and drove my grandmother and Heather away from the fire. My grandpa was still at church. Dieter's house burned to the ground and everything was lost besides his duffel bag. Dieter saved my family, and he is my family.
This last summer, I was in California to see the California Garbutts/Keyworths/Dieter. Dieter built a new house in the old one's place, and it is very big, and blue inside. It's quiet and clean. There are big framed photographs everywhere. There's a red leather couch in the kitchen and the most luscious wood flooring in the office. The freezer has like ten cartons of Dibs in it all the time.
As we took a tour of the cool, still house this summer, we stopped momentarily in his bathroom/walk-in closet. I laughed and pointed at the good leather office chair Dieter keeps in his bathroom just for shaving. We laid eyes upon his fantasmically large bowtie collection. The marble in the bathroom was tan and cool.
As we left the bathroom, Dieter pointed at me and said

"I've got something for you."
He retreated to the recesses of his enormous blue-carpeted closet. What in the world? Is he giving me a bowtie? Does he think he is going to die or something and has to give me a bowtie now? He's only in his sixties. Geez Louise.

He came bustling forth again with an armful of white frothy towel material and shoved it into my arms.
"I was in Cancun this summer, and I got this free robe from the hotel, and it's too small for my girth," he crisped, with a smile on his face.
Ummm....Dieter why are you giving me a robe? I guess you probably just don't need it, and don't use it, so you're giving it to me, I guess. Yeah. It's cool, a robe. I like robes.
I stared at him confusedly and said "OK, thank you! This is so nice!". I pictured Dieter trying to fit the robe around his well-fed stomach and smiled, turning the heavy thing over in my hands. It was one of those big old expensive-hotel ones, with the name on the cuff. The towel material was like two inches thick, and plush. The thing probably weighed five or ten million pounds. I'd never held one before, or tried one on. I carried the bundle back over to my grandparents' house and thought, well, cool.

A robe. Cool. Old people.

I came home from the vacation, as people do, and I took a shower, as people do when they haven't for a day or two. When I got out of the shower, cold, as people are when they remove themselves from showers, I grabbed Dieter's robe, which I'd hooked absentmindedly onto a towel rung, and slipped it around myself. It was big, and thick, and heavy, and warm. It reaches my ankles and the cuffs cover my hands halfway. I've had robes before, and used them when getting out of the shower, but this was like stepping into a warm room directly after showering. No in-between nasty cold. I have always immensely disliked that feeling directly after you leave the shower, when you can feel your skin tightening in the wet air and your entire body is covered with goosebumps, and it makes you remember how you'd rather stay in the shower--or even better, your bed--all day. Never liked that feeling, the early-morning chilly grumps. Ucgh.

The robe Dieter gave me turned out to be less like some weird thing an old person in my family gave me weirdly, and more like something that keeps me warm and comfortable every morning and makes me feel a little more optimistic and cozy about starting my day while I finish up last-minute homework, gobble some non-breakfast food, apply mascara with one hand, and put a sock on with the other.

Thank you Dieter. For the robe. It's not the cure for cancer, I know, nor is it some life-changing thing, or a meteor, or a baby, but it makes me extremely happy every morning to have that robe to slip into.

I'm thankful for The Itch

2009-11-22T22:50:00.000-08:00

I don't write on a schedule, nor do I write very frequently at all. I write the most when I'm dissatisfied with something in my life, and the least when I am not busy and am moderately happy. Well, that's not true. I write worthwhile things when I'm sad and boring lists of the things I do from day to day when I'm happy. They're not interesting to read, but they're nice to have, so I can remember what I was doing at a specific time in my life.

The times that I do write something that I really end up enjoying, or saving or posting or treasuring, it's usually because something completely random happened that set a lit match to some fast-burning wick in the wick-lawn of my mind and caused me to whip something out in a half hour like a maniac. It itches. My fingertips actually itch to type. I love it when this happens. I love it when I'm sitting on a bench looking at someone walking by and the crook of their elbow wrinkles in a certain way and it reminds me of someone I used to know and I have to write about it. I love it when I eat a peach and get the juice all over my face and sticky in the spaces between my fingers, and I think about the fuzz, and somehow I automatically have five pages in my brain that I have to write about it. I love it when three Christmas lights arranged in a triangle configuration catch my eye and explain some philosophy I was arranging in my mind earlier over a bowl of Teriyaki Stix with Sierra, and I have to write about it. I love it when Bernadette Peters comes on Pandora and somehow some lump forms in my throat about some statue I saw one time and I have to write about it. I love it when I have a crazy bowl-me-over deja vu that seems like it actually couldn't be happening and I have to write about it.

I don't draft, and I don't formulate, and I don't outline--usually, when I write something like a blog, literally the entire thing appears in my brain at one time. It all flows out, the faucet is turned to all the way on, and then all the way off. There's no trickling. I rarely change things, I just gush and finish and wipe clean the edge of the story and let it go.

When I get the itch every once in a while, I treasure it. When I don't get it for a while, I miss it.
Today I sat in church, and somebody got up and said something that gave me the itch. It sent a thrill through my chest down each arm into my fingers, like the one when you miss a step walking up stairs. I took a twistable blue crayon from out of my bag and scribbled a couple notes on the back of a white piece of paper.
My friend was talking in church today about how you can have a testimony of all kinds of things. In my church, we bear our testimonies frequently, or at least, we're encouraged to. Our testimonies of our church, I mean. And I love to do so, though it's scary sometimes. We believe that it strengthens our testimony, to share it with other people. I believe this. And I also believe that my friend was right--you can have testimonies of all kinds of things.

It has come across my mind that today I have a testimony of flossing. They're not lying--it really does become habit and stop hurting like a mother after you do it for a while.
I have a testimony of tomato soup and pizza as the best November lunch.
I have a testimony of a good quiet round of reverse spoonage with PBF, a perfectly nice reverse-spooner.
I have a testimony of Bob Le Flambeur. (Lanee, I watched it again. Bob.)
I have a testimony of the little old lady sitting in front of me in church today, her gray spun-candy hair done up in a Gibson Girl, who was clutching a white lace-edged handkerchief embroidered with blue daises to her brimming eyes when they announced that she and her husband had just celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary this weekend.
I have a testimony of flying on planes and crunching pretzels and ice between sips of plane ginger-ale while feeling unearthbound for an hour or so.
I have a testimony of cocktail sauce.
I have a testimony of the dollar movie. Some movies are good to see there. In a good way.
I have a testimony of singing really loud.
I have a testimony of God.
I have a testimony of how some of Ikea's furniture is just really crappy but how it's fun to walk around.
I have a testimony of "Moments In The Woods".
I have a testimony of laughing and falling on the floor about it.
I have a testimony of people who don't try to pretend like they get it but just try and get it as much as they can without worrying about everything.

And I have a testimony of The Itch because it's what made me want to think about flossing and peaches and God and what made me start this whole blog in the first place last January, when my next-door dormmate inspired me by creeping into my room like a snow monster and ruining my life.

She really didn't ruin my life.
But I am thankful for her actions, and all the other itchy actions out there.
Bless you.
Keep 'em coming.

I'm thankful for Mark and Jenny

2009-11-19T22:40:00.000-08:00

This is my dad and his brother Mark walking on the beach last August in Coronado.
Mark isn't particularly short, in fact, I think he's about 6', it's just that my dad is almost seven feet tall.
Mark is my dad's brother and we see him when we go to California. He wears Tommy Bahama shirts, and he's a doctor, and he laughs high and wheezy just like my dad and their sister do when something is unbearably funny. I like to talk to him. More importantly, my dad likes to talk to him. Although my dad and his brother could probably not be more different in some ways, they love each other, and they are brothers. They talk on the phone because they care about each other and sort of level each other out. When they were little, my uncle Mark used to start screaming in the kitchen that my dad was beating him up even though nothing was happening and my dad would get in trouble just because he was the big one, and Mark was the little redheaded one.
I love that story.

Jenny and I were also on the beach that day. We've always fought a lot, but she is my sister and I love her. Lately we have been getting along fairly, which is more than we can say for the rest of our lives up to this point, and I am so thankful. I love her so much. She levels me out, because she is not crazy, and I loosen her up (or I pretend I do), because I am. See in the picture how I'm flailing and she's calm? Yeah.
Tonight she let me use her report card from this term to get free Krispy Kremes, and for that, I was extremely thankful. When we were little she would make bite marks on her arms and pretend I bit her, which I didn't, but I'd get in trouble anyways. But I don't really care.

I'm thankful for Mark and Jenny tonight.
This hasn't been particularly profoundly written.
But I am.

And for good measure, a sweet picture of Jenny and my Poppy (father to my father and Mark) in 1996, when she was four and he was not. I'll have you know, he still has those red polyester pants.

I'm thankful for Them

2009-11-14T15:11:00.000-08:00

Click this song before you read and listen to it while you read. Otherwise you're lame.

I popped the collar of my teal corduroy bomber jacket yesterday as I walked briskly out of my last class. I wrapped my purple scarf and zipped the jacket, because I knew it was going to be brisk outside. I raked my hand through my staticky collegiate mess of short hair and plucked my headphones from my pocket as I walked, placing them in their appropriate ears. Placed my thumb on the front of my iPod. Shuffle. Shuffle shuffle. Sam Cooke Little Red Rooster, no, Jane is a Groupee Sly and the Family Stone, Ain't Got You, Barbra, Emiliana Torrini, no, Border Song, no, Queen, Daisy Eagan, Mr. Moonlight, no. Aida? Definitely not. Thumb thumb thumb. Not Pink Floyd, no, Vertical Herizon, no, thumb thumb, Keane, Don't Ever Change by the Beatles? Closer. Close Up Frou Frou, My World Ray Charles Noooooooo The Pogues? Too....Irish. I'm Irish. Anyways.

Simple Minds. Don't You (Forget About Me).

I looked up and smiled, remembering.

I cranked it up, flipped the lock button, stuffed the iPod into my back pocket, yellow leaves rained everywhere. It was windy. I ran pell-mell past the Hinckley building, staff parking, across the crosswalk, past the stretch of lawn, over the Marriott Center, and as I ran up the stairs to my car, and closed my eyes for a second (yes running up stairs with eyes closed and headphones in try it sometime) my hair whipped long around my shoulders and my clip-clip-clipping high-heeled boots were my dirty old brown Converse for a second, and I was wearing bellbottoms and a raggedy polo shirt and my patchy old jean jacket all of a sudden. As I hit my car and zoomed home, I transferred the iPod to my radio and blasted the song Slow change may pull us apart when the light gets into your heart baby don't you forget about me Don't Don't Don't Don't again and again and again, and down University I left my windows rolled down, drove with my knee, and threw my arms out to my sides. I flew at 65 mph. It was flying. I flew home to the weekend to see them.

In high school, three people and I dressed up as the Breakfast Club. Then we decided we could be them. Even though we were all in drama. Do you know who the Breakfast Club is? I sure hope you do. If not you're missing out on some quality.

The four of us were the Breakfast Club for Halloween in my junior year of high school, Trevor in his jean jacket with a bandana affixed somewhere, Casey with a paper letter tacked to the front of his white track jacket and a blue wife beater inside of it. Dave wore a sweater, and I wore the parka and the dirty Converse. We were missing a princess, but we didn't ever find somebody.

We were in high school together. And the three of them meant very much to me. Very much more than I can say. Trevor drew me funny pictures and I always had him on the phone crooked between my ear and my shoulder telling him every bit. And Dave listened and knew all the things I didn't and corrected my grammar. And Casey, well, we fought a lot, but we loved each other a lot too. He always gave me piggybacks in the grocery store when I was tired and danced with me in parking lots. We all did plays together. The four of us. The four of us had a balance.

We haven't all been together since 2007, because people have been being grownups in all kinds of ways. And things are obviously a lot different now.

But last night Casey came home from Florida and Trevor and Dave and I were here waiting for him today. We ate lunch and slurped frosties and wandered Target together. All four of us.
Today we were all together. And today I am so thankful for that. It was magic.
(YES MAGIC.)

I'm thankful for PWMIMBLCWRWAGTWBWAN Getting Married

2009-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

Last fall I had the opportunity to be enrolled in an English pre-req we like to call ENG 292, or the second half of all British literature. 16 weeks to cover all of it. In the English major at BYU you have to take British Lit 1, British Lit 2, and American Lit before you can take any real classes. Think of them like classes named Biology or Physics or Health. Very very very broad.

I had a man named Westover for British Lit 1 last fall. It was his first semester teaching, and he hummed in vibrato a lot between sentences. Emma can confirm this. We read Frankenstein and talked about Mary Shelley a lot in that class.

It was a good class. We talked about things that I liked, so, I liked the class. That's usually how it works. It was also a class full of pretty laid back, pleasant people. There was the redheaded guy with the last name of Snyder with whom I exchanged favorite brands of designer denim, a girl who worked upstairs in the same building as the class who was smiley and always in secretary clothes eating something out of a tupperware. There was another girl who was tiny and round, always with a giant Mountain Dew, and somehow she always had one headphone in--she was everlastingly indignant and talking about her mission. Our discussions were peppered with her outlandish comments.
A plodding row of married guys sat in the back row, one with a combover and leather jacket, another, tall, with the ever-present Red Sox hat on, another redheaded and flushed who always laughed uneasily. They were nice and helped me study for midterms that I probably would have bombed otherwise. This was our cozy right half of the classroom, which I never ventured out of--the left side was all the weirdos who would never comment or do their reading.

The last installment on this familiar side of the classroom was two people: one boy, and one girl. They both sat against the far right wall, she just behind him. Both brunettes, she was tan, he was pale. She had a face like mine, with big features, and he looked a bit like an intellectual Beaker, long-faced. They didn't know each other just as well as the rest of us didn't. I knew the girl from somewhere, wondered who she was for a few class periods, and then figured out she'd dated the older brother of my bleach-blond high school student body VP boyfriend. I'd seen her on their lawn with the Brother once, watching a movie on a laptop. I thought she was so pretty and nice.

The boy who would sit in front of her in British Lit always did his reading. I'd presume to say he was probably the smartest person in the class. He was thin and wore sweaters and round glasses. He always had something intelligent to say, always, and read out loud in the best read-out-loud voice. I was completely enthralled, and so was Westover, presumably, with this voice, because he always asked the boy to read aloud.

I'm a nosy person.

But so are most English majors. Actually, the entire English department. Actually, I'd venture to guess it's a requirement for anyone in the college of Humanities, along with Love of Pretty, Deep-Looking Cover Art and Hatred of Anything Math Related (speaking of, my Shakespeare teacher brought a graph up on the screen yesterday and my entire class went into loud moans and about pooped their pants and screamed and covered their faces) and Serious Emotional Overbearance Problems.

This Boy and Girl began a friendship in the class. We figured that by about the fifth week of class, they'd at least been on a date. Tupperware and Pepper Girl and Snyder and I would watch these two delightedly throughout class, as she'd turn to say something to him and he'd smile back into her eyes. There was something going on over there. We loved staring unabashedly from three feet away as the two of them became Something or Other right there in front of us. He was just the coolest, the smartest, and she was just the prettiest and obviously the nicest. They were just the est together.

After a while, we forgot about their relationship, it seemed to become stagnant, no showing of affection, no changes. No in-class declarations of love. Their mediocrely interesting in-class flirtations became as habitual for us (the watchers) as Pepper Girl's loud comments or Westover's humming or Harry Potter inevitably showing up in the conversation at least once a class period or the perpetual, stony (but friendly) silence of the married man English majors (a rare breed) on the back row. The little scrabble of people I sat in figured Boy and Girl had been on a date or two and left it at that, because nothing seemed to change.

On the last day of class, we met in the campus library to geek over some Special Collections, first editions of Dickens, a first edition of something or other owned by Jerome Kern, stuff like that. It was a nice end to the class. I wouldn't say any of us in the group had become snuggily close, but we got along fine. We assembled in the plush basement room of the library, surrounded by steep shelves of books, comforted, and I noticed that Boy and Girl weren't there. Neither of them. Hmmm.

Then they walked in holding hands.

And then we all wet our pants with happiness at least in our minds. We spent a half hour after class standing by the metal detectors discussing the happiness, after we watched them walk away, hands entwined, shaking our heads happily with big fat grins on our faces.

And now they're getting married.

And whenever I see either of them in the hallways at school, I smile and add an extra bounce to my step afterwards, because it's fun to know them and know that they met in a class that I was in and know that they fell madly in love. It's kind of awesome.

Up next: Oh, you know. Something. Any suggestions? What are you guys thankful for? Gimme your thankful food, your thankful book, and your thankful clothing item. Or something.

I'm thankful for Regina

2009-11-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-06T10:37:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-05T11:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T07:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-10-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Happy Friday

2009-10-15T23:39:00.000-07:00

As much as things change, they don't.
Except that my hair gets shorter.
As much as I thought I knew then, I didn't.
And as much as I thought this song applied when I was silly and a senior in high school, it just keeps applying more.
Please enjoy the pouring out of my eighteen-year-old and twenty-year-old souls, with Eric on the piano.

This is me singing one of my favorite songs. It's called "Stars and the Moon".

Not succinct, but I'm saying it.

2009-10-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

Before I take my turn, may I say that a Bit has already been written here--at least, a variation on the upcoming theme--and whatever I blurt from here on out will probably be exponentially less succinct and much less well-packaged than this sister blog entry. And the sister blog entry has a fun background and a newer picture. But here goes anyway.

Things always work out. Every single time you think they aren't going to, that this, this will be the time that something doesn't turn out, that it's bad, and sad, and undeniably unfixable, and you're going to die--it always works out, even if it takes a while. If you believe it will work out, it will. Things work out. Every time you go through some kind of situation that you think won't turn out well, it does, somehow. I know some of you are shaking your heads already, maybe even clicking dramatically out of this window, off to be bitter, because you think I'm wrong and you're even more dramatic than I am, which is a feat. I congratulate you. But I'm not wrong. And I'm not saying that things work out the way you want them to, either. I'm just saying that they work out. Even if it's in a way you always thought you wouldn't be able to bear, it does work out. You do bear it, though. You have to. And it's often a hundred times better than the way it would have been had it turned out the way you wanted it to at first.

Sometimes it takes years for things to be OK. Sometimes it goes up and down over the time period that it's becoming OK, and is OK sometimes, and then bad again, and back and forth, before it levels out. I've only had a couple of experiences that took more than a year to become OK, because, after all, I'm only twenty, and there haven't been many spans of anything over any large amount of time for me yet, besides School and Church. I'm sure many will come. I haven't had any kind of situation really truly fail yet. Everything bad that happens has had something better to come along and remedy it almost immediately for me, or, the badness has turned good and sweet and better than before after a while. Nothing has happened that has cemented itself into being irreversibly bad. Everything turns out, and while some things haven't turned out yet, I know they will.

Someone I loved very much more than anyone else I ever had at the very young age of seventeen came zillions of miles to visit me this past week.

OK, in reality, they came to visit their family. But I was here too. I haven't seen them since last year for a week's time, and before that, I didn't see them for two years. When they opened the door on the first day they were here, my eyes welled up with tears and I fell into their long sinewy arms and breathed with my lungs again and another one of those little strings fell again from around my heart. Automatically. Effortlessly. One of the last ones, too.

You can go through so much with people, hate them, have them hate you back, say amazingly nasty things about each other. You can be terribly in love and end it in a two-minute phone conversation or other form of unemotionally cruel communication without explanation or understanding or a chance and feel like regretting that for the rest of your life. You can ruin friendships for each other and stop talking for years and be vindictive and awful and childish. You can fight over people and try to get as many on your side as you can, you can make up stories (guilty!) and act like big babies and use other people to get back at each other. You can cling to the badness stubbornly, refusing to see the good, and torture yourselves about it and cry without moving forward. With some people, this happens, and you do end up hating each other forever, or pining, or something pathetic like that, because one or both of you is too damned selfish to stop and try to work on it for a second. You never talk again and it's awkward and miserable, not to mention, extremely childish. But you don't want those relationships anyways. Phooey to those relationships.

BECAUSE if you've made a real, caring, mature-as-you-could-be, loving, unselfish emotional connection with someone in your life, at any point, and you've really given everything you can, both of you, and you really care more for each other than for yourselves, the bond doesn't go away. Ever. At least, not in my experience. Forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world. After five years of friendship, you can meet again and take care of each other and spend precious time together, you can sit in a beanbag and watch a movie and suddenly none of those awful things ever happened. You can wake sleepily up from a nap to find your visiting half, who probably thinks you're still asleep, carefully rearranging your blanket around both of you and spooning up against your back. You can smilingly recognize the other person's soft snoring, their strange mannerisms, you can drive in the car through a tunnel up the canyon and make a ridiculously hopeful wish when you hold your breath in the tunnel, and get lovingly annoyed at this person who STILL knows EVERY WORD to EVERY SONG and points out their SEVEN FAVORITE PARTS in each stanza of the seventeen-track CD they burned for this specific car trip.

They're such brilliance, these relationships you have with people. They're brilliance because they never change. While addresses may be different, zillions of miles apart, while you both may have changed priorities, goals, beliefs, personalities, political views, spiritual understandings, while you may have nothing in common anymore, your friendship continues, eternally precious, because of the love you have for each other.

Junior prom, circa 2006
Thanks to Allie for finding this picture

Some exchanges, lately

2009-10-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

My mom and I are sitting in my kitchen.

VICKI: Who are you texting?
ME: ___ _____. (guy I know)
VICKI: What did you say?
ME: That if he needed cuddling after the (big test/life crisis/nuclear explosion/getting fired/open-heart surgery/roadtrip/major life decision--can't be too specific), I'd be happy to oblige.
VICKI: You just can't play the game, can you? You have no game.
ME: Shut up Mom!!!

On the fourth floor of the JFSB (English department offices), I am waiting for the elevator with my red duckie umbrella tucked under my arm. Some prof in an orange shirt and a tie with books on it walks up with his prof friend, talking about El Azteca. And I think yummmmm. About El Azteca, not the professor.

RANDOM PROFESSOR: Young lady, you have a duck under your arm.
ME: Yes. Yes I do. And I heard you talking about El Azteca...and I wish I could leave school right now and go there.
RANDOM PROFESSOR: You're welcome to join! We're going right now.
ME: Well, (making weighing motions with my hands) art history, El Azteca, art history, El Azteca
RANDOM PROFESSOR: Well, the offer stands until this elevator stops on the first floor. El Azteca is much more important than class.
ME: Uh, really? Can I quote you on that?
RANDOM PROFESSOR: Yup.

Andie Pheysey and I are on Facebook chat.

ANDIE: Yeah, how are things going?
ME: Pretty OK. I had a hard time this summer, but I'm doing much much better now.
ANDIE: Oh good, Love hurts doesn't it?
ME: Yeah. It definitely does. But Heavenly Father has helped me a lot.
ANDIE: Yes it does. Oh good, I'm glad that you're doing okay.
ME: Me too, Andie. Me too.

"I can't sleep anymore. It's too much like death."

2009-10-07T01:18:00.000-07:00

My tweet from 2:05 AM, October 3rd, at windowsill:

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees.

I arrive home Friday night late. My room is a mess, every piece of clothing I have askew on its hanger in the open closet or bundled like a rag somewhere on my floor. It looks somewhat like those scenes in plays where people are huddled as background homeless people, while the lead homeless person sings some homeless person song. So there are little groupings all over my room. There are warm brown towels and shoes and books mixed into the piles on the floor. It’s dark and heavy in my room, my nightlight in one corner casts a low glow onto the floor. The air above my knees is dark, below my knees it glows brown and gold, the piles of clothes everywhere parted to make way for a tunnel-shaped space on the carpet that my body fits snugly into. My computer is at one end of this tunnel.

I arrive home Friday night late. I don’t bother to turn my light on, too tired, and before I lay down in my worm-shaped space to get to my computer, I walk across the heavy, warm air and lumps of clothing to my desk in front of the window. I remove my shoes, my pants, my shirt. I put them on my chair. I rub my slightly aching stomach with my free hand. I place my purse unstable and askance on top of a pile of things on the desk, folding my arms over my belly, and the windowsill catches my eye. My windowsill is covered in laces of finely-worked blue moonlight.

Moonlight, I think to myself. Moonlight. Lately I seem to have been re-realizing infinite amounts of things like this, like I did the beach. Re-realizing that they exist and are alone enough to live by. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen actual moonlight, ever observed a totally darkened space, mid-night, that’s lightened substantially by the glow of the moon. My own piece of it. I flip through my mind, remembering that I did once see moonlight like this, on a long car trip as a child, in the middle of nowhere, lighting my windowsill. It was very late at night and I should have been asleep with my blankie. It was in our maroon van, this same lacy blue light. I remember that I placed my little fingers on the windowsill to see them lightened by the moon. And they were.

It is the full moon weekend, this Friday. I keep one eye on the moonlight to make sure it’s not just a reflection of my neighbors’ house lights, and bend down carefully to flip off my seashell nightlight. Both eyes return to the sill and I look beyond it next, to the roof, to the flicking shiny pieces of shingles that are silver and brilliant from the moon in the quilted configuration of clouds far above. I look at this moon, this chip of ice, and think smilingly of Moonstruck—la bella luna, oh, it is magical, this magical blue moon. My fingers are once again dancing on my windowsill, dancing in the quasi-dimensional tesseractic blue light. My fingers dance, leap, and bound effortlessly. No gravity. I reflect the moon in my fingers, on my windowsill.

It seems so trite, so silly, so cliché to talk about something like moonlight and the magical effect that it has, but to stand there at my windowsill, like I do for so many other things, for my regal Chinese elm, for the purple sunsets, for the kitties on the rain gutter, for the shingles that glow adobe-colored, other times silver, blue, deep black when it’s snowing, for my father working in the back, for my fiberglass yellow slide, for the Scotts who live behind us that sit outside and mow a lot and have a fake owl in their garden whom I always hear laughing—to stand there for these things is something that I live for.

This windowsill is a lot of things, and this early black morning, it is moonlight. The moonlight will linger as I sleep. I sit there in front of the desk for moments wishing I could sleep here somehow so as to keep my fingertips dimensionless and wavering in the icing light. But, I remove my hand back into the thick warmth, I retire to my bed on the other side of my room, nightlight: off, and try to keep my eyes as open as long as possible while I am turned to the magic blue square of light coming from my window in my falling asleep. Even when my eyes close I feel it. The moon.

Sand Dreams

2009-09-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes waking up is gratefully like being fuzzy and blind and a pupa in an extremely comfortable cocoon.

I'll usually drift awake, readied to feel anxious, tensed to feel stressed about something, but on these occasional sweet mornings, I will find myself delighted to be waking up.

Instead of slowly drifting open, through half-dreams, heading into the worried seasickness of morning anxiety, something else happens. Eyes still closed, my mind pops quietly open, awake, unfolding into the morning, and I lie there quietly, folded in the dark blue living room behind my eyeballs, wondering what time it is. I smile and wonder where in the world this opportunity came from to wake up so pleasantly. A dream starts to remember itself, and I work at it in my mind for a moment. I feel the socks on my feet and how toasty they are at the bottom of my bed. I nest in my black-and-white flowered down comforter and smile even more, still with my eyes closed. I wiggle a little and sigh, falling in my mind back into an epic, lawn-sized pillow. I wake up this way, poppingly and sweetly, from a dream about being at a warm beach with my friend Ben. I don't drift uncomfortably out of the dream like I usually do out of most of my dreams, without control--this one is just ended like a nice sentence with a period. I am awake. And I remember my dream.

Ben has blackish hair and used to wear an orange Beaker t-shirt all the time. There's a little cove in my dream, wavy and sunshiney, with dark rocks and a light sky. Ben and I lie there on the sand comfortably, with my cousin Megan, who is two years old and seems to have come along for the adventure. She's wearing a little sand romper and fluted beach cap, walking in small circles around us, pad pad pad, and I'm wearing a ruffly black swimsuit that is somehow echoing the soft comfort of my bedspread--so much that I'm finding myself having a hard time not falling asleep in the warm sand. My skin is pale and warm. Ben is there, my friend, just sitting next to me. We are at the beach.

A dozen or so yards from us, down the stretch of sand, are Wes, Lex, Alex, Eric, Connie, Sarah Russo, Caitlin and Pam. They're just playing at the beach, softly and quietly, a little distance from us--like one of those old Charlie Chaplins, they're fuzzy and quiet, muted and animated, and they take the occasional break from their beach activites to wave and smile. They let me know they're there, they're close. Lex waves again. Eric blows me a kiss. My cousin Abby is there too, I think. They're wearing those beach "costumes" and playing some fairly complicated game with cycling black-and-white beach balls that looks effortless and light. I can faintly hear the tinkling piano rag that goes along with their little movie, just down the beach. I breathe the sand air and lay perfectly still, remembering in my dream that this beach vision probably came from the vat of sand passed around in my biology class yesterday. Remembering that I remembered in wonderment, the beach. Like when you forget that Christmas exists, or something, and remember it after not thinking about it for a couple of days. Christmas. I remember the beach, and the disappointment I felt when the sand vat didn't get to me, and the transporting I did of myself from the stuffy MARB classroom to the beach in Coronado, in the sun, with a tan and a book.

Ben isn't wearing his Beaker t-shirt, in fact, I can't really remember or tell what he's wearing, but he's there with me and we are just being. We aren't talking, we aren't even looking at each other or taking much notice of each other at all, but our presence is a conversation. We hold a conversation in a cove on some temperate golden sand and my friends play commitedly down the way, nearer to the water. The water doesn't really look like water, it's swirling and gray, and sparkling a little. It's not splashing as it flows, it's silent. Nobody is in it. Not even a seagull down there. This is also a seaweed-less beach. I know in my dream that nobody is to go in the water, that being here at the beach is a still place not to get into the water at.

Megan sits next to me and places her tiny hand on my back, smiling and babbling into my face, and she commences pacing. Ben sits on my other side. I am reclining on my elbows in an effortless way. We sit this way, in our spot, and stare out into the whorling gray water. It is beautiful and I think if I got in it, it would be scary. But to sit and watch it is about the nicest thing. The sky is light. I am comfortable in my black ruffles with my friend Ben and my friends down the way in their movie and I remember this dream and I lay in my bed, and I smile some more.
These are the mornings I get my cocoon.

For the beauty! Really.

2009-09-28T22:03:00.001-07:00

I know this isn't actually a post with words in it, but if you don't look at these pictures immediately, your eyes will never have feasted. Don't you want your eyes to feast? Your eyes will explode with feasting.

Calmy Pants, or, Asinine Thinkers and a Warm Water-Calm

2009-09-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

Listen.

After Shakespeare class, I rode the elevator to the top floor of the JFSB and laid on the only full-length couch in the whole building (mine, all mine) to read some Anglo-Saxon poetry and bite my cuticles. Before I laid down I cried for a couple seconds. Later, I will write something about the difference between restorative tears and hopeless tears. It's probably kind of like the difference between contact lens solutions, or between different types of artificial tears. Anyway, I cried for a moment, beautiful tears, big warm ones that slid comfortingly down my face. Drippy ones that took a second to dry when I wiped them with my two index fingers. The hopeless ones dry insensitively, too quickly, before you have the time to really feel them. But these were enveloping ones, enveloping me in love. Somebody (Up There) is really enveloping me in a whole lot of love, even with tears.

So I cried for a couple seconds, sitting up, facing the giant window in front of me. It felt really good. I was really glad I had worn my gray wrappy Gap sweater, because it's warm outside, but I need to snuggle with myself occasionally. Snuggling with oneself is incredibly soothing, especially on the only full-length couch in the building. I laid twisted towards the back of the couch with my gray-paper Anglo-Saxon poetry book and read it, taking breaks occasionally to write nonsense in my orange iridescent journal, and to text some nice people. I bit the end of my right third finger for a while, coaxing the skin off with my four front teeth. I carefully moved my tongue to catch the small shard of skin, then picked it off the end of my tongue with the tips of my fingers. I turned a page.

The way The Couch is set up on that top floor, it is one side of a square. The opposite side of that square is a giant wall-size window. The two other sides of the square each consist of two armchairs. Nobody was sitting in them when I was crying. That would have been weird. There was a girl in the same room, but not in my square. She watched me cry, but unintrusively. I appreciated that.

Two days ago, or Monday or something, at the poster sale on campus, I was flipping through heavy books of posters with my friend Matthew. We were barking back and forth about and at all the asinine pussies who go to our school, both of us particularly crabby at the time. We were making each other laugh, regardless.
As we stood there swip-swip-swipping the posters, and Matthew spouted about how he's graduating in playwriting, how is he going to get a job, and I joined in, I am graduating in English, how am I going to get a job, and we got a few good yelps out, a blond boy peeped up from the swirling delicate crowd behind me to say

"Hey, I'm graduating in English too,"
I, in my on-campus poking manner, like a porcupine, barked at him (so much barking)
"Yeah? What are YOU going to do with it?!"
"I'm going to be a professor," he smiled simply.
"Yeah, you get good grades, because everyone who goes to BYU gets good grades, and then they have no problem getting into graduate school. Me, I go here, but I get normal grades. Normal grades. I get normal grades," I bawled loudly, eyes bugging out of my head. This boy looked completely unruffled, to my dismay. He did look speechless, like people usually do, but not nearly as flustered as one would like.
"Well, yeah," he smiled again. He shrugged.

I sighed dismissed it and turned back around to palm through posters. He gave me another look, irritatingly calm, before he walked left, towards the most pussiest posters in the room. Matthew and I continued our spat, he with his messenger bag strapped what it looked like was uncomfortably across his chest and hands flying everywhere and me silently giggling so fiercely that it probably kind of looked like I was about to crumple up like a piece of one of those yellow mailing envelopes on the floor and burst into tears from it, which I almost was.

Back to the couch. Two days later, or whatever.
I was laying and reading, and biting and twisting around and rubbing my sandaled feet together occasionally to keep them warm. Up walked Mr. Calmy Pants English Major and sat in the chair on the left side of the square, the one closer to my couch (MY COUCH!!!!) and further from the wall-sized window.
This is interesting, I thought. I don't think I've ever seen someone twice on this campus. Not even Lanee. Just kidding, maybe Lanee. But only three times. This is my full-length couch, and my square, I thought.
But for the first time, literally, I can tell you, for the first time in weeks, months, I didn't mind that someone was sitting near me. Why didn't I? This was the most irritating person. Because he was the least consequential. Just some annoyingly pleasant simpering peeping BYU student from the poster sale. But I didn't mind that he was there. I liked that he was sitting so close. I felt as though we were close. And by close, I mean, within ten feet of me. He pulled out his black Macbook (good choice, stylish Calmy Pants) and placed it on his lap. He typed.
I read.

"Hi," he whispered. We were in a very quiet place on campus, one of the quietest, which is why I remember it and slip up there occasionally.

"Hi!" I whispered back.

"From the poster sale," he said. This man spoke all in commas.

"Yeah," I said. "What's your name?"

"Darren," he smiled.

"I'm Julie."

He smiled and looked back down and typed.
I read.
He typed.
I glanced at him not sneakily at all, and puzzled. Slammed my brain from side to side within my head a couple times, like people do when they have water in their ears. Why in the name of all that is holy did I continue to take little glances? Julie is not a glancer! Julie is to be glanced at!
Because his calm was astounding. Just his calm existence. In the poster sale I had turned, completely dumbfounded, to find this glowing calm behind me. What was this glowing calm doing behind me? Who wants glowing calm behind them, in front of them? I do. Sitting there in the quietest part of campus feeling calm was perfectly delicious, more delicious than most things I have done in my life. Darren-calm just fell over me like a sheet of warm water.
Darren typed and I read.
Mostly I texted, and I wrote one more thing in my orange book, but we'll pretend for the story's sake that I'm one of those girls who actually reads more than a half a page at a time without getting completely distracted. Some people I know can read entire chapters at a time on campus--it's really astounding.
So I will now admit that we played the stare and catch the stare and throw it back game. I was kind of really surprised that someone as calm as Darren obviously was would be playing this catch-and-throw with someone as obviously spastic and wiggly and loving as me, also someone who was obviously not on their best wardrobe circulation, but he did. He played that game with me. He played it so hard.
I laid there reading the Battle of Walden for about an hour, and Darren got up to answer his phone. He left his computer, on which I saw an open Word document and an open blogspot New Post. Promising. At BYU (I don't know how it is at other univehsities) if you answer your phone and stay in the quiet places, you get basically spat upon by everyone around you. Goyem. He did the appropriate thing and darted like a deer with his iPhone out onto the roof to talk.
I turned on the couch and looked out onto the roof, where he stood with his back to me, draped calmly over the railing on the edge. His shoulderblades made a clean equals sign under his green t-shirt. Hmmm.
He came back inside, and collapsed like a folding chair with his laptop, and soon after, I got ready to go to the library. I zipped my backpack as slowly as cold molasses has ever come out of the jar it comes out of, or the tree, or whatever. I felt the air, still calm, so I figured it was good to leave. The story up to this point would all have happened anyways, and maybe I'd run into him again. He wasn't going to do anything.

I walked halfway down the hall to the elevator.

As my foot swung up, like in a cartoon strip, to take the next step, it stopped in mid-air as I heard

"Julie," from behind me.

There came Darren, running down the hall to catch up, and very suddenly he was right in front of me. If you were wondering what he looks like, it's less like a Darren and more like a Conrad, or a Nick. Maybe a Joseph.

"Can I have your number," he said.

I smiled. In my glasses and my wrinkled t-shirt, trembling there in my gray sweater, with my Kirkland meal replacement shake-breath, I smiled very largely.

And so it goes.

In which I tell you about Wendola, who I hope you will meet

2009-09-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

Wendy is like a tall fairy from a Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has russety hair like I think they probably do.
Wendy is my friend. My friend Wendy is one of those people you don’t know you’re actually tied to by your heartstrings. She is someone I know I knew way before I knew her. I didn’t meet her until last year, but I can guarantee that I have known her since at least the early eighties, in this life. Probably in the pre-earth life, when we were just light intelligence orbs like ghosts whizzing around, Wendy was whizzing around next to me making sure I wasn’t bothering the other whizzers and protecting me from the bully whizzers. I have lots of these side-along whizzers but I wanted to tell you about Wendy because the other day I saw her for the first time since April and I can’t believe how big of a tautly-knotted string she untied from around my heart. A whole string herself, effortlessly, when most people have been helpful this week at just nipping away at assorted strings. I ran into Lanee’s kitchen to see Wendy, and her big eyes watered anxiously at the sight of me, and mine watered right back, and one of those dozen little cords just fell from around the slowly-fading hurt. And she hugged me loosely and I hugged her tightly.

When you meet Wendy, and I hope you will, don’t be taken aback by the fact that she doesn’t hug as tight as you do, if you’re a tight hugger like me, because inside that skinny ribcage of hers is the biggest, tenderest heart I’ve ever met. I know a lot of them. Tender hearts. Tender hearts attract other tender hearts--actually, I would say tender hearts attract everyone because they are chewy and tender.

Like I was getting to, Wendy has a chewy tender heart. Wendy used to enjoy copious amounts of Sunny D while studying in front of the TV in our cozy basement apartment. I would arrive home at four and five in the morning, often blah and often beside myself, to find Wendy with her blanket over her lap, sweats on, eyes partly closed, Wendy-slippers on the floor, TV on low, studying some manual. Or she would arrive home, at four and five in the morning, to find me dinking around with photobooth, in my nightgown, feet numb on the cold linoleum, eating Heather’s cookie dough ice cream. We would talk. About everything. And we never needed to pick at things, we would just talk naturally, in a straight, progressive line. Wendy would look at me and nod, and I would nod back. If it weren’t for Wendy talking to me in her poignant Wendy-way in the middle of the night, or in the hallway at our church, or in the evenings when we would both get home from school, my sophomore year of college may have been much less than pleasant. I remember many a winter evening, sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop pushed up against the napkin holder; I would type with Wendy plopped down next to me holding a family-sized chicken potpie she had warmed from the freezer and a glass of milk. She ate chicken potpies and talked to me. She was good at school, and I don’t like using the word “was” because it sounds like she’s dead, which she isn’t. She is good at school and she always busts out awesome graceful looks whenever she's dressed up. I was jealous. Wendy never fumbled. She seems to think that she fumbles, sometimes, but I believe that everything Wendy says is exactly what needs to come out of her mouth.

The number one reason I admire Wendola is because I often feel like, myself, I say too much. I am always saying too much. About everything. Extra sentences, five adjectives when all I really need is one. Other people, they say too little. Always making excuses for themselves, they clip their conversation and it’s not awesome. Wendy is one who never fumbles. I feel that she always says what needs to be said, what should be said, what can be said, and she stops there. She says exactly what is needed. I just wouldn't do without her.
When I saw her on Thursday, when she was leaving, she firmly said, "Are you going to be OK?" And I knew, when she said that, what she was saying was, "You're going to be OK."
And very suddenly, just as when I saw her, I was. I was already OK, I was ridiculously happy because of Wendy, because of Wendy's capacity to say whatever needs to be said. I said yes. Because I am awesomely OK. Because Wendy always says exactly what I need.

See? Perfectly placed, my whizzing protector friend.

Pancake Holes, part two

2009-09-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

We went to Denny's on Tuesday.

I decided I'm never going to use the phrase "I went to Denny's", only "We went to Denny's", because it is always a we and never an I. It was the day after Labor Day, and we got there a little early for our Denny's posse style--about nine o'clock. Didn't cramp it though. Nobody there but us. When one of us came late, he texted me to say "Where are you guys sitting?" and someone cleverly said, "Tell him we're the booth with people in it".
Someone else very generous offered up their credit card to buy for everyone, to host a gorging celebration of sorts, a new kind of Denny's experience, probably a one-time, and we took it to town. We've had better times and worser times at Denny's, good times with just the carafe and some seasoned fries, and AJ's vampire contacts, good times too with seven or eight Grand Slams.
This time, we really took it to town. I can't remember a time when anyone ever ordered an appetizer, and this time we got two before everyone had even arrived. We had shakes. Three different shakes? Or two. I think three, yes, one of each flavor. Chocolate for Kyle, strawberry for Ames, vanilla for Jeremy. Seven Diet Cokes, one regular Coke. We had double cheeseburgers, chicken strips; there was a French Toast Slam and a Rascal Flatts quesadilla (there were actually tiny pieces of them in it) and club sandwiches and mozarella sticks and even mini burgers, to go along with the bigger ones, I suppose. Onion rings on the mini burgers, mmmm. Matthew's customary dish of pickles and fizzy fruit drink sat snugly alongside all the regular food, to remind us of our humble beginnings. At least, I think that's what they were there for. If I had remembered, I would have gotten some peanut butter pie.
It was pleasant, and a smaller Denny's gathering, comparatively, we've had at least fifteen people there a few times, at one of the longer tables. Those are always fun, the long table-gatherings, because you have the sense of being on some kind of bus or train with a bunch of people you really like on your way to somewhere exciting. At least, I do. Because I'm seven, and I like trains.

Tuesday was a smaller gathering, a circular one, kind of plush. Like fuzzy plush, like warm and comforting and concentrated, like a stuffed animal. I was nestled in between the wall of the booth, the front of the table, the wall of the Denny's, and a person. I would have preferred a person and a person and the booth and the table, no wall, but I suppose it was nice to have my own little bit of wall, too. From time to time, while everyone was talking and Matthew and Kyle were spouting about some deep-fried pickles, or something, I would bury my head behind the person I was sitting next to. Just to squeeze my head in there and feel nestled. I talked to my shrink on the phone for a while. In the middle of Denny's, with everyone carrying on their conversations unworriedly around me. He told me, "I'm glad you called". I was glad I called. Jeremy threw a lesbian-bride smile across the table every seven minutes to make me smile when I had big fat tears. There was so much absorbing of comfort and greasy onion rings going on. While I absorbed and greased and everyone else absorbed and greased a smiling beautiful girl from high school, a year younger than me, came flittering in with her tall dad, who is my friend, and some young man I did not recognize. She smiled excitedly, happily, warmly at me and had that Look in her eyes! They sat kitty-corner to us, the two younger people across from her dad, and began to talk to him very urgently.
In the parking lot we hugged and talked and they have dated for three weeks. I squeezed her so tight.

I can't say that I have had many Denny's experiences as great as last night's was. There have been worse, and there have been better, there have been knee-cuddles and Shia the Beef dolls karate chopping people, there have been vampire contacts (mentioned above) and Heidi's ex-boyfriends sticking around and Logan Kendells and Tiny Cowboy and forks thrown all kind of distances.
Tuesday night, with Jeremy calmly spreading mayonnaise all over the leftovers of Emily's club sandwich with a toothpick across from me, was one of those perfectly placed visits. Not one of the ones when we've been going every night for a week, not one of the ones where we haven't seen each other for six months. There weren't any newcomers or random people, each person was there. It wasn't the middle of the night, we weren't especially hyper, nothing remarkable had really happened that day. It was just a visit. And sometimes, those visits are exactly what one needs. I mean we. What we needs.

(Click Pancake Holes for part one the original)

Bullets of Notice

2009-08-23T02:26:00.001-07:00

I am alive and very, very well.
Since my last post, I have been doing pretty well at making goals and finishing them and trying new ones. Huzzah. Not perfect, lots of backsliding and forehead slapping, but productiveness is happening.
I have to buy 17 books for fall semester. You heard me. My booklist contains 17 singular books. I'm both feeling incredibly attractive and being nervous.
When some people are sad, they eat too much. Others eat too little. I just eat straight candy. I learned that when I was sad for a few days. Just candy. Even in the morning all I wanted was candy. Sour candy. Sour watermelons and stuff like that. And my digestive system seemed to regulate itself on candy. Next time my dad's on a fast for his diabetes, it's a candy fast for my intestines. Yessir.
Emily and Ames got married yesterday and it was the best day ever and very tiring. Kyle and I picked up the flowers and delivered them to the temple without getting killed in between.
I passed Physical Science. I just high-fived myself again about that. Goodbye atoms and fission and planets forever. I will not miss you. Please die.
I am running with open arms toward fall semester: Shakespeare, specialized British lit to 1500, Art History, books books books. Take me baby.
Mimi's Cafe is really good, but they have a breakfast menu that's basically big piles of fat, and we went there for Jenny's birthday at 7:30 in the morning on Friday, and nothing sounded barfier than bacon/eggs/sausage/potatoes/butter/greasefat. I looked at the back of the breakfast menu and was just happy to find that they had oatmeal. I was even happier when it was delivered to me, perfectly gelatinous and creamy, in a bowl on a plate with a doily, with three tiny blue things of brown sugar, granola, and raisins, and a tiny tiny thing of milk.So if you're ever feeling like not eating a pile of fat for breakfast at Mimi's, try the oatmeal. Mmm mmm mmm.
Everyone will always say what they think the other person wants them to say at hard times. Or they'll just tell them how great you are. People think they have to take sides when that's probably the last thing they need to do. These things can be both very helpful and very detrimental to trying to think your way through something.
Calligraphy is for patient people.
Cafe Rio's pork isn't as good as Costa Vida's, but it's passable. So don't be afraid of Cafe Rio anymore. Except for that going to Cafe Rio has turned so franchised it's kind of like going into Disneyland.
Speaking of Disneyland, I like it there, and I would like to go soon.
I like pandora.com, and I'm pretty sure you all must have known about it for like five years by now, because I just found out about it. Am I right?
Check out the rad blanket (sheet) fort at top. I am in full utilization of my version. You should probably utilize yours too, because soon it will be fall (October) and cozy.

Treats

2009-08-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

Thank you guys so much for all the shiny cheerful feedback. What awesome responses. They made me want to reach for a sno cone and family and babies and you guys and Regina Spektor all at the same time. I even received one very special response through e-mail, from a sweet girl who is a true hoper and a real hero to me. Her remarkable story has helped me so much through the last little while. Thank you.

So everything you guys said got me thinking.

I think it's important to treat yourself.

I was raised by my parents, who treat me as parents are wont to treat their children. At the grocery store, every once in a while, I was allowed to pick a treat. They took me to Disneyland. They took me to movies. My mom still makes my favorite phankuchen for breakfast or a snack when I'm living at home and nothing else sounds good or I've bombed a test.

While my parents are the most wonderful, for some reason, I've grown up trying to keep from doing things for myself. Letting myself do things. Or doing them too much. Both are habits. For example, when nothing sounds better than dipping leisurely into the nutella jar for a half hour or so with my feet up on the counter, I'll immediately scold myself and take one quarter teaspoonful, staying away from that area of the cupboard for the rest of the day. I'll try to eat things that don't really hit the spot that day--leftovers, a glass of milk, a turkey sandwich, etc, because in some area of my mind I believe that I shouldn't be indulging because it's big and bad. Do you ever do that?
Or, when I want to sleep in and miss class (don't judge) I'll end up falling re-asleep out of fatigue after waking up early to hem and haw and feel bad that I'm sleeping in. So the point of sleeping in isn't even put into effect besides the sleeping part. And then in the same day I study for way too long, absorbing nothing, trying to make up for the fact that I didn't make it to class.

Because of things like this, not only do I not get the relaxation I'm looking for and often needing--I also seem to waste a lot of my productive time. If I could take the initiative to say, hey, OK, I'm going to do my homework for three hours with warm socks on and then watch House and paint my nails with my new bon-bon nail polish from Wal Mart for one hour afterwards as my reward, I know that I would feel a glow of triumph at the end of both the three hours and the four. I have done this about two times in my life, set this goal, and it has made me feel wonderful. But, usually, you will find me riding in the boat of under or overindulgence. For some reason, I have always done this. Whether it comes from the common misconception that keeping yourself uncomfortable and unhappy in little things equals suffering equals piousness equals value, or it just has to do with the fact that I'm scatterbrained, I don't know.

Over the last few months, many many people have been chirping in randomly to conversate about one treating oneself. I don't know where all of these people are coming from. Obviously many of them are people frequenting my presence who seem to bring it up all the time. Some of the people I don't see often bring it up too, when I see them. Usually in the form of something like "Oh man, I'm really going to need to get myself some sushi after this" or "I can't WAIT to buy those shoes for myself after finals!" or "do you need a movie and some soda after all of that?" at someone else.
This has puzzled me. I didn't know that grownups did this. Really. I did not. I thought people just suffered through everything and got to a movie or dinner or the Nordstrom shoe department or Discovery Park or whatever every five years or so and didn't really enjoy it too much when they got there because they were worrying about going back to work the next day. But, it seems that people all around me are taking the time to take care of themselves. And it seems to make them pretty happy, too.

Some people have been treating me, as well. Without request. Many people. Some treat me to long conversations, surprise visits (love those), some to my favorite ice cream, a snuggle, some just show up with things or cards or notes or love for me, and it's amazing. Really, it is.
I've been thinking about it a lot. Sometimes I try to make goals and they don't really work out, and I can never figure out why, but I think I'm beginning to see a bit of the problem. I try to make fifty goals at one time. Even three. Three is too many when you're talking about really mastering something.
So I'm going to make one goal, and do it, and then move onto the next one. I just did this for the first effective time in the last couple of weeks, made one goal and tried to do as well as I could with it. I felt very triumphant throughout the process, because while I knew I wasn't doing perfectly, I was at least doing. And working on the goal ended up leaving me with an incredible blessing of cool-headedness when I needed it most.

My new goal is to do better in the world of over and underindulging. To quit eating nothing but ice cream, and quit telling myself how stupid I am and studying Physical Science for eight hours at a time to make up for it. I can take the time to buy myself my first Anthropologie dress for Emily's wedding, and I can work my allotted hours at work this week without skipping out to feel shmuncky just because I can. I can make a goal and accomplish it, and then move on to the next. I feel good about it.

I'm totally getting a sno cone on the way to work today. Grape with vanilla soft-serve in the middle. Nothing better than that.

Eet eet eet

2009-08-02T16:30:00.001-07:00

Did you ever find yourself back at your home ward after almost a month of all kinds of things happening? Today that was me. Today was Fast Sunday. At church as Mormons we have one Sunday a month where we fast and where anyone who wants to can stand up at the pulpit and talk about God and why they think he's real, or nice, or sometimes they thank people in the congregation for being so nice. Usually, they do both. It's very nice and can be comical when people say weird stuff.

It sure goes by a heck of a lot faster than your standard sacrament meeting.

My last Fast Sunday was the last time I was at my ward and I had a very bad sacrament meeting. I wanted to bear my testimony but I felt stupid about it and didn't want to end up squeaking something indistinguishable and truly frightening out of my frightened and puckered mouth into the microphone in front of 200+ people. People might smirk. People get up there and say distinguished things. People also get up there and say unbelievably stupid things, but I don't want to be one of the latter. It's scary! I wore the same shoes last time I was there at church that I did today there at church. They're my favorite shoes. I believe that favorite shoes should be lucky, and these haven't proved themselves outstandingly lucky yet, but I'm still giving them a chance occasionally because when I bought them their navy blue-ness and lavender polka dotted-ness had that favorite potential. Target does that to a pair of shoes.

That Sunday in July I went outside and talked on the phone during the meeting and mushed sticks into the sidewalk cracks while sitting out there and I felt much, much better about myself and my testimony and how awesome it is for me. It was hot. It's hot today too. Since that Sunday a month ago when I stood out under that shade of one of the good-smelling trees on the side of the wardhouse I've been attending and climbing up on top of with boys and playing volleyball in for twenty years, everything has changed dramatically. Again. As it always does. When I say "everything has changed dramatically", I don't mean everything. I still have the same favorite foods and a general dislike for parched grass and Physical Science and stale water. An extra arm hasn't sprouted out of my forehead or anything.

I mean the perspective, my perspective, has changed again. My perspective of the past. The future. What's going on right now. My opinions. My opinion of myself. My opinion of life and relationships and how much your life should interfere with your relationships. I guess it's all part of growing up, your perspective changing. It's a Big Thing. It's hard but I like it. I like feeling different. I don't know if it's part of growing up, the fact that everything changes so dramatically.

I don't know why each blog I write (at least the good ones) is about some big dramatic thing that happened to me, and the blog talks about it forever without actually defining the dramatic thing. I know that I'm dramatic, and sometimes I think that is why change often seems dramatic. Is change dramatic for other people? For the people who don't comment in class or shout loudly in grocery stores? Nothing seems to stay the same. Does it stay the same for you? Does it stop when you're old? It seems to me that everything changes dramatically so often that I am just beginning to grow and learn from the last dramatic change when a new dramatic change comes along, and that each time, they get more dramatic and more changey. I hope I'm remembering enough from each of them.

So I went to my home ward today and my mean little sister didn't let me sit next to my mom, but I got over it after feeling dramatic about it. She flicked her hair in my face about 1000 times and I refrained from smacking her. You could call that mature. I borrowed my dad's hankie (because he carries them) during the sacrament and dabbed at my face because two big fatty tears tumbled down onto my lavender polyester dress. I couldn't figure out where they came from. I smiled at my bishop when he glanced quizzically at me from the stand. Smiling is always better. I bore my testimony. You could call that dramatic. It felt good though. My legs always shake like crazy and I feel awkward because I figure my butt must be vibrating uglily directly in front of the bishopric as a result.

Go figure, I could get up at age eighteen in a ridiculous costume with my boobs hanging half out and sing a song meant for Linda Eder that was half in French to 400+ people without shaking or sweating one drop, but at a pulpit talking about saying my prayers at night, my facial muscles turn to jelly and I kind of gloooooooobssshhhhh all over the podium. It's fun.

I bore my testimony and said all the things I wanted to say (besides refraining from a shout-out to the Zs back in the first row of the cultural hall) and stomped back to my family's bench and felt terrific. Beaming.
Beaming on the inside for not puckering or indistinguishing. Maybe it was indistinguishing to some people in the room, but I felt pretty good about it. As we sang the closing hymn (God Be With You Til We Meet Again--kills me every time. It would kill you every time too. Listen to it.) I heard my piano teacher of thirteen years/good friend Sandra Thorne sitting behind me and was pleased to hear her alto line singing along sweetly belong my soprano. And I figure, there are always those people there. Singing underneath me. And that makes me happy.

Famous blog people write questions at the end of their blogs and ask for responses, and I think, "How fun it must be for them to read all those responses and laugh and murmur and ponder deeply with a mug of tea while watching the sunset all the things people say to them"

So could you tell me one thing that has made you really spectacularly happy over the last few days/weeks/your life?

Just one thing. Even if it's like Twizzlers or something. I see that lots of people read this blog and don't leave comments--I want to know you! Not in a creepy way. So tell me one thing that you like to be happy about. If you want.

Thank you Freddy

2009-07-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

After reading this post, you may be skeptical of the fact that it sounds a little like someone giving a testimony about their hairy cat or a story from the New Era about someone who found that the cashier at a store ten miles back had given them an extra nickel and how they walked ten miles back over brambles and icy snow to return the nickel. If these stories bother you, I'm sorry, because mine might resemble one of them, minus nickels, cats, snow, and a pulpit. And minus a cheesily-laid-out youth magazine.

That being said, something very wonderful and touching and mysterious oogly-boogly-good-feeling happened yesterday and I wanted to tell you about it.

I'm in PS100, Physical Science, right now. This semester. It's very hard to pay attention when there aren't any words--just pictures. Pictures of little bulbs connected to each other with pluses and minuses inside them. If you've seen about two-thirds of my Facebook stati, you will have noticed that I moan and groan about all that a lot. Science is something that I've never found interesting. Luckily, we've got TAs assigned to us. There are 180 people in the class and we're split up into different labs, which we skulk to on Thursdays. In these labs the merciful TAs (at least, mine's merciful) do the homework for us, give us a pat on the back, and hope that someday we will have the basic understanding that they do. I take comfort in the fact that while my TA may be younger than me AND know all the secrets of the universe, I could hopefully crank out a paper on Toni Morrison about ten times as fast as him. I try to take comfort in that. And he has a shnooky little goatee. Not allowed! Why does he get one?

Last Thursday was a jumbled-up day. That morning I swore to myself that I wouldn't miss my lab, because there were three worksheets to do, and on my own, I'd be useless towards completing them besides signing my name and ID number at the top. And then science would frighten me all weekend. I got a nine out of 30 on my last test, so I'm needing all the free homework points I can get. Unfortunately, Thursday, I missed the lab. I had a paper due in another class that was worth way more points comparatively, and I managed my time badly, so, I just missed the lab. And avoided falling into the pit of despair by choosing to congratulate myself for at least finishing the other paper.

Conveniently, and as usual, I completely forgot about the worksheets until about 9:00 yesterday morning. They were due at 5 pm. This weekend has not been an easy one, not a weekend you exactly feel like curling up and doing your homework in the middle of. Yesterday afternoon, after scolding my embarrassed, science-challenged self into it, I skulked into the open lab where you can always ask for help (hyuck hyuck!) and shrank into a corner while one of the TAs I recognized from my class explained the worksheet to ten or fifteen people. Now, folks, let me tell you--this weekend was the weekend to beat all weekends. Everything turned out fine, OK, very nicely, thank heavens, but it was one of those weekends that kind of strips you raw along the edges and rubs those edges along a piece of emotional sandpaper so by the time the weekend is over you're left kind of feeling around numbly with a couple of fingers to make sure you can see where you're going. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, and your nerves sit ceremoniously like tombs. Or whatever it is.
Sooooo by the time I got to my lab yesterday, it was a hundred thousand degrees outside, my face was sweating, I'd been gulping back something all day, and I was just feeling around with those couple of thawing fingers to see if I could snatch a TA for long enough to whisper to them that I didn't understand my homework so that I could quiver off of campus and sit down and sigh and smile and be calm. Sitting there, listening to the girl try and explain everything to everyone, I felt overwhelmed and wanted to go sit in a Humanities building and wrap my arms around myself. I knew that if I just tried harder and didn't miss classes and read the chapters three times each, I would do much better, but at that moment I just decided to give up and go bury myself in the corner of my bed with some Judy Blume. Or something.
About .0000000002 seconds before I was about to get up and leave without turning in my undone homework, a boy sat down next to me and smiled. I sighed. Seriously, not today. Seriously don't hit on me. Seriously don't. He was short and wearing a red plaid short-sleeved button-up shirt and light jeans. He was holding his worksheets and essay question between his two hands very lightly.

"Hello."
[Ssssssssssssigh.] "Hi."
[nods at the blank worsheets sitting on my lap] "Did you finish your worksheets, then?"
"No...yeah...I actually, unfortunately, I missed my lab last week. I was sppssspspppspspspsppsppspspsppspsppspsppsppsps" (I proceed to give him a stuttering summary of how I always miss my labs and how I never, ever remember to do homework, and then a tiny bit about this last weekend and how everything is going to be fine, it was just a long one and I'm embarrassed and red because a monkey can pass PS100)
"Well...[holds out his worksheets to me] you know, the TAs just do these for us anyways, and if you missed the lab, really, there's no way for you to do the experiments, so you can copy mine. They're all done."
I stared at him, unbelieving. He must be an Honor Code police officer. Maybe not? My saver. Who is this person. Halleluljah.
"You want to copy them?"
All done in perfect handwriting. What in the world was someone who's done and doesn't need help doing in the lab?
I gulped and nodded, my eyes swimming in those silly uncontrollable tears that usually only come out when your mom asks you if you're OK or when you see a cute dog or some quail crossing the street. Really, they were swimming. How wonderful of this random person to show up just now. He smiled and held each worksheet in turn in the thin air next to my lap while I copied his answers down with my head bent, and when I was done, he shook my hand, told me good luck, told me his name, I stood up, I turned my homework in, and I left the room.
Whoever you are, Freddy (that was his name), thank you. I feel a lot of gratitude towards you. Thanks for showing up.

Not an Obituary

2009-07-16T02:02:00.001-07:00

I was in Brother Michael Pratt's class on the south side of the Orem High seminary building in the spring of 2007 and Zach Power and I were co-presidents of our fourth period. We had a big important meeting with Brother Pratt the first day this was decided and I couldn't believe someone thought I was boring and smart enough to be a seminary president. It was fascinating. On the first day of class he brought a video camera and had us each say our name into the screen, smiling, and he promised to take it home and watch it with his wife and some popcorn to get to know us by our smiles. He did. When Bro P asked us each to teach a lesson, Liza Clark was so inspired that she wrote an individual letter to each of the thirty people in the class, telling them about how awesome they were for their own reasons. I remember how he told us that he used to have a mullet. I can't remember the boy's name who stood up at the end of the semester and sniffled and wiped his eyes and told everyone that he was painfully shy. He looked straight at Brother Pratt and said he'd never had such a strong push to do the right things for the right reasons, and that he liked Jesus on his own now. I was so proud of myself when Lee that breakdancing guy and I taught our lesson on Brigham Young, and I brought everyone cute little apples, because Brigham Young's favorite food was apple pandowdy or something creepy like that, and Brother Pratt told me how cool of an idea that was when I was putting a little red one carefully on the corner of each brown desk in our little pods.
I remember the special Joseph Smith assembly with Brother Nixon's class where all the special time period decorations were that Brother Pratt had set up so carefully, and all the times when I would go into class early and Brother Pratt and I would laugh and laugh and laugh through my stories about dating the student body VP who highlighted his hair. He would always end these little updates by smiling and clasping his hands together and shaking his head with that big grin and telling me that I only deserved the best.
He bounced with energy when people started to come in for class. And you could tell he wasn't faking it, and that was important.
Brother Pratt wouldn't get mad at me or be an Obnoxious Grownup about it when I would leave class early to be with some boy, and for that, I am so thankful. I never would have come back had he said one thing, and he knew that, somehow, so he didn't, so I kept coming. When Brother Pratt came to assemblies in the school with the rest of the seminary's faculty, he would be swarmed, absolutely swarmed, and everyone had to say hi to him. They had to let him know that they were there, and that he was there, and that they were in the same place. Everyone had to feel like they were a part of where he was and that they were his arm, or his foot, or his spiky hair. People were always lined up outside his office. Even during class, like they just expected him to drop teaching for a second to come out and hear what they needed to talk about. And sometimes, he did. He laughed at jokes that were in no way funny because he liked people and that made them funny enough.
All seminary teachers, no matter how nice, no matter how patient, no matter how many interactive beach ball games they inject into their lessons, no matter how dry or droll or boring or sweaty or prayerful or whatever they are, have at least one student in one class who snips meanly back at them if he tries to involve them at all. There is always someone. In Brother Pratt's class, no one was ever this person. Ever. Cheesy or not, everyone melted through that classroom door and shut up and listened. Nobody felt stupid learning scripture masteries by beating our fists in rhythms on our desks, which most highschoolers feel pretty ridiculous and zitty doing, unless they're in band and/or get As, which isn't everyone, and people weren't nervous when we had thought time and listened to a church song just before starting the lesson. We had a good time. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that, and I'm sure that if I can't, I'll get some snippy comments of my own on this post. Ah, well. We got into the deep Mormon Seminary Feel-Good Religion together and nobody was embarrassed. My mom made the plaque with the scripture and the family name on it that she makes for everybody, she made one for Brother Pratt, and I took it to him and presented it and was happy to picture it hanging up in his house and whenever I saw his wife she commented on how much she loved it. Zach and I went barefoot to Brother Pratt's house once or twice to talk about a class idea or something and when his little boy opened the door, I thought, "What beautiful kids he has" and, "How weird to see Brother Pratt in warmup clothes!" and, "How cute is his wife?!" It was just two years and a couple of months ago that I was doing all of that.

The day before Brother Pratt was arrested last week, I was asking around for his new address to add to the envelope I had already stuffed with the announcement for my wedding that I was so excited to give to him. I was so excited to visit him. This whole thing has been very interesting. All of this. While boating on Saturday, Emily got a text about the arrest and we all sat quietly as we zoomed back to shore and I was angry.I pounded my fist on the side of the boat. Sunday, it kind of hurt my feelings. Today, I walked into the seedy Albertson's in south Provo with the domed ceiling to buy Andy some dental floss, and for some reason my eyes welled up and I got the overwhelming wish that Brother Pratt, who has posted bail, would be in the store so I could give him a big hug. I feel like he needs a big hug right now.

He might have done it, and he probably did, and I feel sorry for him. He made a mistake. It was definitely a very stupid one. She's sixteen. I think sixteen-year-olds know what's happening.
They do.

So, the point I'm trying to get to is this--not an obituary, which I just realized this post sounds like--but the point that Brother Pratt is a person. A human person. Maybe a pretty good human person. Maybe people do really atrocious things and they are still people. All these people on Facebook, these impassioned people with summertime on their hands who like to type big paragraphs, the ones who support him, the ones who don't, the ones who like to type the f-word a lot, the ones who wonder where their hero has gone, the ones who used to like him and now think he's sick and wrong, the ones who talk about his "victim" being a "child", the ones who "just daren't believe it [handkerchief flutter]!", all these people are coming from all sides and fighting so impatiently and obnoxiously for something they have nothing to do with, and it's bothering me.

I think he did it. And I still want to give him a hug. And I think he feels bad. And I don't think I'm wrong.

I just wanted to say that somewhere that's my own private area, not Facebook or the comment section on ksl.com.

Kickoff Weekend

2009-06-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

Today was the patriotic fireside for the Freedom Festival in Provo, a big awesome patriotic hullabaloo that continues over the next week, including said fireside, held at the Marriott Center, the parade, Stadium of Fire, the gala, etc, that you'll remember from last year. Last year it was Glenn Beck that spoke at the patriotic service, tonight, it was the new president of UVU, Matthew Holland. He spoke about Abraham Lincoln, the Osmond2generationz sang, my mom announced the Freedom Award recipients for the gala, the orchestra played beautiful music, it was a good time all around.
I actually have a top list concerning this evening, because thing after cool/fun/just plain remarkable thing kept happening to me and I ended up with my mouth hanging open by the end of the night. Really. It was kind of amazing. Soon I will write a blog that isn't a list, just watch me.
So.

I met nie nie. I went about it kind of like a creepster on accident, because at the pre-reception, as I was eating some delectable key lime cheesecake, I spotted Nie and her husband who had just walked in the door. My mom said I should go say hi to her. I tried to explain how famous and amazing and wow her blog and everything blah but then I decided, wait a second, and just got up and did it. I just about peed my pants and tripped over people to tap her on the back over by the flavored water table and she hugged me and was so nice while her husband peeked over her shoulder. What cool people. Freak.
Let's talk food at the dinner before the fireside: steak with cranberry salsa chutney, grilled chicken, mozarella-tomato-basil salad, key lime cheesecake, asparagus with tangy cheese on it. And much more.
There was an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who initially scared the crap out of me (reminded me of that terrifying Hall of the Presidents at Disneyland) but he gave the Gettysburg address at the dinner, and it was really, really cool. Occasionally I miss doing monologues wearing costumes in Cedar City. Haha.
A SecondGenerationOsmond attempted to get to know me/flirt with me until he realized I wasn't really giving it back. Hmmm. One without a fauxhawk though, so, that was good. I feel famous. They had an entourage with them. Jenny decided they should probably ride in on the golf carts sitting around, waving sparklers in the air.
Jenny and I went a little crazy after being there velcroing up bunting after bunting for a billion hours. We were dancing quietly and fiercely in a corner when a friendly-looking man walked up to us and asked us amusedly how and what we were doing. Turns out it was the mayor of Provo. Oh hey, mayor, just dancing here with my sister. Nice to meet you. Great work you're doing around here.
I met the last survivor of the original Frogmen (Navy Seals) and have adopted him as my third grandfather. What a cool guy. And I get to hang out with him at the gala later this week.
Mount Timpanogas Pipe Band. Fa-reaking awesome having a bagpiper right in your face, try four of them and a drum major to kill all drum majors. I got a lot of chills from these individuals.
My mom spoke over the pulpit in the Marriott Center. That's right. My mother. I whooped for her. Yeah boiiiiii
The Osmonds performed, and, instead of wanting to pull out a pot of pomade and dip myself in it, I actually really enjoyed their songs. They did a great job and were a pleasure to listen to.
******ADDENDUM******: After what seemed like years, I finally got to see Michelle Peterson of STEELE again and get extremely helpful marriage advice from an expert. My favorite thing about the fourth is getting to hang with with Michelle so much. Good thing our moms are so cool and practically own Provo.
After all of these singularly enjoyable things, I got to run further south in Provo to make grilled cheese sandwiches and watch some Arrested Development with someone who fell almost immediately asleep in my lap after inhaling his buttery muenstery sandwich. Three weeks, three days until I don't have to go home at midnight. And counting. Tick tick tick.

I have two questions.
Who knows cool colors to paint the walls in our tiny house? I'm finding myself turning to standard yellows and greens but I'm wondering if there are some cool ideas I'm missing out on.
and
How do I make pictures gigantic on my blog? You creative people, please help me.

Soon to come: Stories of my adventures at Kid to Kid in American Fork, my new place of employment. Think spitty crumbs, onesies so small that it takes me a half hour to enter them into the computer because I just want to hold and snuggle them, smartie suckers, lots of women talking about Twilight, lots of organizing itty bitty shoes, and an all-around good time.

Scottykins

2009-06-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Happy Father's Day to my dad. He's saved me from quite a few flat tires, drove me to school for years and years, read the Little House on the Prairie books out loud to me when I was little, and makes me this really good noodle-tuna-peas stuff sometimes. He has always been there for me when I need anything, anytime, and I know I can talk to him about whatever's on my mind and receive clear, unprejudiced advice. I've never gotten a clearer head from a conversation with anybody else.

I love you Dad!