Stegosaurus, where are you?

"Nothing makes me happier than this cup, and you can't steal my joy!" That's what H told me this morning when I suggested taking the stegosaurus cup back to Provo with me. We each have one, and I thought that maybe this one was mine, until she reminded me that I had used mine for a paint cup forever ago and that this one was hers. I really did love that glass and I have no idea where it is now.

I went downtown on Saturday with H to help her friend out with a project that involved seeing things from another person's perspective. She chose to observe us and see Portland from the point of view of someone who's from Beaverton and is scared of downtown. We rode the bus, which I had sworn I would never do again, but this was in the name of science, or English, or whatever class it was for. Mostly we shopped. We went to Powell's - the best bookstore on the face of the planet, and to think I had never been there before. All I know is that I'm in love- Powell's is 4 stories and a whole city block of new and used books. I picked up Heart of Darkness for $1.95 and considered buying James Galvin's "X", but a sense of frugality stopped me.

I also went to Buffalo Exchange and got a sweet jacket, and at some point when we were walking around on the street I registered to vote - H did too as a matter of fact. It felt good. I'd been meaning to get registered, but had put it off because I was in Utah. I didn't know what to pick, so I checked Not a member of a party. I know nothing about government. I probably should learn what my political views are one of these days.

My youngest sister H2 spends a great deal of her spare time playing a video game called Harvest Moon. It's all about planting crops and chopping wood and gathering eggs -a video game about farming of all things. She was telling me about the game and this is how that conversation went-

H2: I need to get a wife. I'm supposed to go to the firework festival tonight.
me: Why the firework festival?
H2:Because that's where you go to meet people. I'm thinking about asking what's-her-face to marry me.
me:Oh really? Why her?
H2: Well, she works at the bar and she's really fun.
me: She works at a bar? That's not good. Why don't you marry so-and-so? She seems nice.
H2: Oh, no! She's too shy. Maybe I could ask that-one-girl. She works on her dad's ranch, so she could help me on my farm. I don't know - I just don't have time to get a wife.
me:Maybe you should take some time off from work or something.
H2: I can't take time off from work just to find a wife! I'm a farmer - I need to be here to take care of my crops.

It just makes me laugh to wander past the family room and hear my little sister murmuring about how she needs to get a wife.

Kitchen dancing! Now, don't be deceived - I do not like to dance, and I do not believe that people enjoy having to see me dance, but there is an exception to this, and it's kitchen dancing. I used to do this thing where I would dance in the kitchen if no one was watching, except for H, and she would see me kitchen dancing and try to tell others, but no one would ever believe her. Kind of like how Michigan J. Frog dances only for that one guy in the cartoons. I resurrected this tradition Christmas eve with a spectacular display of my kitchen dancing skills. It brings me joy to dance ridiculously when few people can see me, and especially when no one will ever believe those people when they try to attest to my magnificence.

Three more things. (1) Yesterday I finally understood the idea behind gutters after a lifetime of not understanding the concept of runoff. (2) My sister M and her husband A are flying into Portland tonight and I'm excited. They live in South Carolina so we're not going to see much of them over the next 4 years unless something important brings them to the west coast. In this case, A's sister is getting married in Provo, so M figured that since they were going all the way to Provo, why not go a little further to Portland? Anyway, I'm glad they're coming and I hope to get in some quality thrift shopping time with M. (3) M-Lite and I are finally renting a computer from campus so now we'll have some way to put all the music we stole from H onto M-Lite's iPod - apparently she went and picked one up this morning and has it up and running already.

I lied about there only being three. Lastly, and most importantly, I went to WINCO. WINCO is the greatest grocery store in the universe - I bought 7 pounds of gummi worms to ration out over the next 5 months that I'll be in Utah. If I love you, you'll get to sample some. I also bought some Tillamook ice cream for M and myself, because we don't have access to it full time like everyone else in our family. And juice - it's almost 35 cents cheaper here. I love WINCO, which is why I will need to live in Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California, or Oregon for the rest of my life. There's just no other way.

Good Night, Gorilla

My dad has a small office in our house that's crammed full of books. He buys them secondhand, all genres, anything that looks interesting. He added a shelf around the ceiling, and still they are stacked up everywhere imaginable, overflowing - one day his office will explode, its door coming off its hinges, texts pouring from their hidey-holes and his desk will drift away on a sea of books. Once he went to NAPA to buy some car part for my Dodge, and when he got home he told me I owed him $30.

-What?! How do I owe you $30?
-I went to NAPA which is right next to Value Village, and I ended up spending $30 on used books, and it's your fault!

He spends a great deal of time in there, and doesn't like for people to bother him, especially little kids. My mom used to babysit this little boy in our ward, who would always go up to the door of my dad's office and see him in there reading. One day he went to the door, but my dad wasn't in there and the kid was shocked, and asked "Where's the man who lives in there?!" He had never seen my dad out of his office and was surprised to find him missing from his "home".

Whenever we were bored we could go to our dad's office and ask for a book, and he wouldn't respond for a minute or so, because he'd be reading a book, but if you stood there long enough he'd look up and you could ask again, and he'd scan his shelves and say "Ooh. How about this one?" and hand you something he thought was interesting.

I looked at them today and made a list of titles that I found interesting for various reasons, but mostly because I felt they explained a lot about who my dad is.

The Bible as History
Man vs. The Welfare State
The American Short Story
A Simple Plan
The Outline of History - H.G. Wells
A Book About A Thousand Things - George Stimpson
The Dictionary of Cliches
The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
A Field Guide to the Insects
A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis
A G-Man's Journal
Comedy Writing Secrets
Red Square
The Book of Mormon
Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling
Chilton's 1968 Auto Repair Manual
Masterpieces of Mystery and Suspense
Typee - Herman Melville
Deepest Thoughts - Jack Handy
Crime as Work
Home Food Dehydration
It Didn't Start With Watergate
Hollywood vs. America
The Charlotte Armstrong Festival
Functional Human Anatomy
Occidental Mythology
Understanding Broadcasting
The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The Book of Rifles
Torture Through the Ages
The Last of the Mohicans
A Treasury for Word Lovers
Miracles -C.S. Lewis
The Collector's Guide to Antique Radios
The World Encyclopedia of Modern Guns
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

As you can see, his tastes are varied - books on religion, guns, government, conspiracies, classics, comedy, "how-to" type books, and a lot of books about word origins and literature. Missing from this list is a large book of photographs containing all the different breeds of dogs that exist. I couldn't find it, but I remember looking through that one as a kid - also missing were the Gary Larsen books that always occupied the southwest top shelf corner.

Also on the list were the following 5 books that stood out to me, and helped me to realize that I truly am my father's daughter:

Longman Crossword Key
How to be a Stand-up Comic
Under the Black Flag: the Romance and the Reality of Life Among Pirates
Cocaine: Its History, Uses and Effects
Good Night, Gorilla

Most of them have an obvious explanation, except maybe Good Night, Gorilla . It's the book H and I got for our dad last Christmas. It's a children's story that's in the nursery at church, and apparently he's been known to go in and read it to the kids. I think this has nothing to do with being kind to children and everything to do with the fact that he finds it funny and wants to read it himself. It's about a gorilla that goes around with a stolen set of keys unlocking all the cages in the zoo at night. The copy we bought him even came with a little plush gorilla doll. I find this childlike streak of his very funny, but I understand it as well, because I see it in me.

There are so many things about my dad that don't seem to fit, like the fact that he loves both guns and musicals, and knows all the rules of football and basketball but prefers to play tennis because it requires grace. Not that he should have to choose, but I see in him the two extremes and little middle ground. Perhaps he's just incredibly well rounded, and I don't know but that everyone in our family hasn't turned out to be a lot like him in some way or another. We all have:
- weird senses of humor
- good taste in films (an opinion, but still true)
- a love of thrift shopping

We're all very different yet very alike at the same time. M-Lite made a face the other day and I told her she looked just like dad. I like to grab leaves off of bushes, tear them up into small pieces, and then scatter them on the ground - and when I'm done with an orange peel I cut it first into strips and then into tiny pieces. I don't know why this is, but my mom saw me do this once and said I was just like dad. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me, after he's done eating his chocolate covered raisins in the movie theatre he tears the box to bits and leaves it on the floor.

It's incredible how much influence your family has on you, your habits, the way you turn out, the way you think and view the world. It's the fact that you've been hanging out with these people for the last 20 years that shapes you; of course you act the same, find the same things funny, like the same people, and share a dislike of cats and communism.

This was from looking at my dad's shelves (which I have done countless times), seeing the eclectic nature of the things he reads, and wondering at, but not being at all surprised at seeing, The Book of Mormon, Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling, and Cocaine: It's History, Uses and Effects all in one library.

*Editor's note: Not 5 minutes after posting this I told my mom she was sitting in a highly trafficked area. She told me I sounded just like my dad.

Whack-a-Mole

5am Christmas morning, both my brother F and I were awake for some reason and we got to talking about how our arms fall asleep because we sleep on our sides. It happens to me all the time. He said that one time both of his arms fell asleep and when he woke up he thought he was paralyzed or something. Could you even sit up? Yeah, I just had to swing my arms around like this to get the blood flowing again. And he did it and it was ridiculous, or maybe I was sleep deprived or maybe both.

On Christmases past we have always gotten up at 6am because that's the earliest our parents would let us. We all slept in the basement when we were little, and we'd get up at 5:57, gather all together, and then creep up the stairs together. The older siblings have fought getting up at 6 these last few years - I have always been strongly in favor of it - "it's tradition!" I say, but they grumble, and I only prevailed last year because Christmas was on a Sunday and we had to get up and do Christmas and still have time to get ready for church. Then there was the year my mom wanted us to sleep-in and she went around changing all the clocks, but she missed half of them and we woke up confused and arguing about whether it was really 5 or 6 in the morning. She's sneaky like that -I think it comes from living with dad for so long.

This year my mom had to work a 12 hour shift Christmas eve so she wouldn't be home until 8am. We had permission to do our stockings at the regular time still. F and I were going to bed and I noticed him taking a lot of time to set his alarm.
-What are you doing?
-I'm synchronizing our clocks so they go off at the same time.
-Oh. Mine's set for 5:57, not 6:00.
-That means I'll need to set mine for 5:55- your clock's two minutes faster than mine.

I don't know why he bothered to do this.

Clocks set, he proceeded to read, trying to finish 19 self-assigned pages of "The Count of Monte Cristo" before it turned 12:00.

-Why before midnight?
-I don't want to be awake for Christmas

This made perfect sense to me even if it made me laugh at first. You don't want to be awake for the transition between Christmas and the eve of - you want to wake up and have it hit you in the face that it's Christmas morning. Like I said, our mom was at work, but F, H2 and I got up at 6am as per usual and went into the living room where the tree is housed. I actually went downstairs first thing to creep up the stairs, trying to relive that moment when I would catch my first glimpse of the tree over the banister. It's not the same unless you're coming up the stairs Christmas morning.

F checked the family room to see if our stockings were out. They weren't. Mom always does that. They were still in our parents' room and when we went to get them the door was locked and we had to wake up our dad. Stockings in hand we retreated to the family room and dug through first our own stockings, then glanced a bit at our siblings' stuff, then retrieved our individual packages from under the tree. What to do now? I thought about showering, but that seemed sacrilegious - part of Christmas is being in your pajamas with bedhead and having that just-woken-up feeling. We had an hour and a half before anyone else was even thinking of waking up, so we watched Wallace and Gromit and I made toast for the 3 of us, and thought that it could be a nice tradition from now on.

Christmas eve we watch "It's a Wonderful Life"- George Bailey's character is simply hilarious, and so heartfelt - something about his face - I love the part when he comes home and all of his kids are hanging on him as he's trying to come down the stairs. I can't help but love this film; there's something simple and beautiful at its core.

I received some first rate gifts this year, some of my favorites being: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, Green Squall by Jay Hopler, The Office: season two, Harry and Walter Go to New York, and an incredible plastic pith helmet from H that I wore all day today, or at least up until I took a shower-I thought it unwise to attempt to be fashionable while shampooing. I also got a phone - I don't quite know why. It may have been because H and M-Lite got phones and so my parents thought I would need one too. It's nothing fancy (for which I am grateful), just a little pay as you go Motorola type thing. I can't imagine I'll use it much - it's really just for emergencies, of which I usually have few to none. I now have a phone, and it makes me a little sad that I'm of the cell phone owning class. Oh well.

My dad got a whack-a-mole game, and how else can I put it, but his face lit up like a child's on Christmas morning. Going to Chuck E. Cheese's he always played their version that has gators, and when we were in Disney World this summer he beat out a bunch of small kids at it and won a stuffed yellow dinosaur, which he proudly carried around and now has displayed in his room.

Let me take this opportunity also to say that I'm grateful for this time of year - for what it does to people, how it gives us perspective, how it changes us for the better. I have hope that I can be a better person. I have faith that life will work out. We have a fresh year ahead of us, and I want to believe that anything is possible, as trite as that sounds. I love my family. I love my friends. I'm grateful to have the gospel in my life. The lesson on Sunday was about work and our teacher quoted "The Little Prince" to us - the part after the part about the fox about the rose, and I wondered what had I ever labored for? what was my rose? I don't really know, but I hope to find out.

I didn't get to writing about everything that I wanted to and this is already the world's longest post. In my next posts I hope to include more stuff on Portland, kitchen dancing, becoming registered to vote, and some over-the-break happenings. I'll be flying back to Provo on the 5th, and I'm hoping to have an Office marathon sometime soon thereafter. Think like a boyscout and be prepared.

And one thing I forgot - every year our dad hides a pickle ornament on the tree and we hunt for it. Whoever finds it wins five dollars. This year he did three - two small ones in addition to the main pickle. We attacked each other to get to the tree, frantically combing its branches for the briny baubles. I found the big one, and my sister F, the two smaller ones. I love tradition.

P-Town

I'm home I'm home I'm home. The SLC airport was a mess, and I get nervous when I fly because I lack the necessary life skills to know what I'm doing and I'm usually pretty hopped up on cold meds to keep my ears from freaking out.(More on the history of my ears later) Luckily it turned out that M-Lite and I were on the same flight. Thank goodness is all I have to say. We flew in and then rode MAX to the Beaverton transit center to be picked up by our mom.

I've lived in Portland my whole life, but I've only been downtown 5 or 6 times, so riding MAX was a treat - I saw a million awesome old buildings, and a million more people smoking. I hadn't realized that I'd miss that. I saw a janitor-looking man in coveralls eating a banana, then on Morrison there were 6 chefs outside having a smoke, and they were all in their white smocks and hats which made me smile for no reason. There are random sculptures everywhere, one of which looked like the statue of liberty had taken off whatever that pointy thing is on her head and dropped it sideways to the ground. The Coliseum, the Rose Quarter, Pioneer Courthouse, Holladay Park, art galleries, small shops, and some really fat pigeons. I was stoked.

All I could do the whole ride was point and say, "treeeeeees! graaaassssssss!" because they abounded and I re-fell in love with Portland. It's like when you have someone you think you're over, but then you see them again and you know that you're not, and you're not going to be over them any time soon. That is Portland for me. The air tastes ridiculously good here - at one of the MAX stops someone brought on with them the piney scent of the outdoors, and it lingered for a good while. I'm in love with home. I've been drinking "Oregon water" non stop. I hope to eat a great deal of Tillamook ice cream as well. It's times like this that I wonder why I ever left home.

Our dad took us to eat at Shari's, a restaurant that Utah is seriously missing out on by not housing, and we ate dinner and dessert while catching up and our dad told us about a song about a dead skunk in the middle of the road. I think the title may actually be "Dead skunk in the middle of the road". I listened to it when we got home and then H and I went to hang out with her best friend A, who apparently had told everyone I was coming and it was supposed to be a bit of a welcome home party for me. When playing the game true colors, I got the most votes for questions: Who here would be most likely to have a secret tattoo? and Who at this table would get up and leave quietly when they're really mad? We went to Shari's for a second time, making me really full of mozzarella cheese sticks. We went back to A's, met up with another carload of friends, then all hopped to M's where we stayed and talked and hung out - M wrote an awesome song for his health class about why you shouldn't do drugs that I need to get a copy of.

I came home and slept - with finals and cleaning checks I'd slept less than 3 hours in the past two days. My dream last night consisted of the second coming coming, but it was kind of odd, because we knew it had come and we all still went around doing our normal things, a little bit more hurriedly than before, but everything was surprisingly normal - part of it even consisted of Flippin editing my English paper and him telling me that my characterizations sucked.

I woke up and my face was swollen for some reason. I went upstairs to get a second opinion but everyone was either gone or taking a shower, so when my brother F got out I asked him, " does anything look different about my face?!" he said no, and was probably confused and thinking to himself that this was one of those trick questions that girls ask, like does this make me look fat? I asked H and she said "kinda" until she saw it in the light and then changed her answer to "oh. yeah, you're really swollen." I called my mom and told her I probably shouldn't sleep in the basement then anymore because it tends to make whoever stays down there sick, so I moved into F's room.

F and I are the only ones home. We played duck hunt and he moved my mattress upstairs for me.He asked me if I wanted to make match rockets. I heard rat match rockets. I asked him if he was kidding. He responded with, "how would I be kidding?" and went off to get the matches and stuff and his book on backyard ballistics. We shot them off the front porch while we blared music from the computer downstairs and I ate an orange for the first time in 4 months. Next we're going to get a dry cleaning bag, some jellied alcohol, and make some sort of hot air balloon thing you can fly on a string. I'm excited for this.

When I'm home I listen to all of H's new music, and I heard the Decemberists for the first time that I know of. I'm in love with O Valencia! and need more. This song was just so sweet -

You belong to the gang
And you say you can't break away
But I'm here with my hands on my heart

Our families can't agree
I'm your brother's sworn enemy
But I'll shout out my love to the stars

So wait for the stone on your window, your window
Wait by the car and we'll go, we'll go

I'm also happy with bands "The Format" and "Cartel" and am looking forward to all upcoming musical exposure.

New fake hit song title from last night: Hungry for your lobster
Question F asked me: Do you need to be 21 to buy jellied alcohol?
Things they have here that I can't get in Utah: Tillamook ice cream, America's Northwest three berry blend jam, good tasting tap water, and my family

I'm cold and my face is swollen and I'm utterly happy to be home.

Free Box

Some things about me that aren't important or interesting in any way:

-My feet tend to turn purple when I clean the upstairs bathroom at home

-I'm a total pack rat

-I can't shop for clothes for more than an hour without becoming tired, because I think shopping for clothes is the most boring thing ever

-I've always secretly wanted to dress really punk

-I've purchased 2 bowling balls in my life, one named Annette and one named Barbara. Barbara is home in Portland, resting until the day I decide to toss her pink ten-pond self down a lane

-I weighed ten pounds when I was born. My poor mother.

-I'm scared of having people hear me when I sing or play the clarinet

-I want to host a talk show

-I always feared that I would die before I was 19. Needless to say, I was kind of on edge during the week leading up to my birthday

-I don't like any kind of soup

-I own a place mat with all the presidents of the United States on it

-If I could only eat 3 foods for the rest of my life they would be (1) watermelon (2) White rice with butter and salt (3) breaded chicken

-When I was little my cousin told me that I was adopted, or rather, that my parents had found me in the free box at a garage sale. I ran into the house crying. It's a fact that my dad loves shopping at garage sales.

-I own less than 15 CD's

-I want my wedding cake to be that rainbow chunk stuff, you know, the kind that has colored blobs in it that taste like wax? It's 99 cents a box and delicious; it doesn't get better than that.

-I can't swim

-I can make anything out of cardboard

The End

Past and Present

* * *
When the pavement is wet, people leave behind fleeting footprints, which I like to follow. I catch up to someone and walk behind them a ways, getting a feel for the spacing of their steps, their pace and stride, trying to step exactly where they stepped on the sidewalk. Sort of like walking in their shoes. I don't know why I do it, and I never am able to do it for very long; I always catch up to the person due to my inability to slow down my pace to match up with their's. I wonder now if I've ever followed someone and someone followed me and so on and so on- I picture a long parade of puddle-jumping people forming something akin to a really strange conga line, or the lines at DisneyWorld, or if you've ever been to the DMV. It'd be like that, only with slick pavement involved.
* * *
It's weird to consider the paths that your life might have taken but haven't. It's not really worth considering, just weird and a bit interesting at times. I asked people at work if they could go back and change something in history what would it be? Would they change a huge historical event, or something that only applied to them personally, from their own history? Now, there are a lot of consequences when it comes to altering the past. Stopping a world war or an assassination could have really horrible consequences, even if you only meant for good things to happen as a result of your decision. I asked three people, and this is what they said:

S: I would go back and start rumors, foretelling my birth, so when I was born people would worship me.And I'd be given birth to by a chinese lady, but still have myself be like I am now, so I'd be some sort of anomaly.

D: I would have studied and learned more in high school. It would have helped me a lot when it came to getting into college.

N: I wouldn't change anything. If you change one thing it affects everything else.

I couldn't quite decide what I would change (if anything), but these things are fun to think about. What if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated, and Andrew Johnson had never become president, thus altering the economic status of the United States forever? What if I had become best friends with the girl who was in three of my classes last year but I never spoke to because I'm anti-social? What if the Beatles had never existed?
* * *

After seeing Memento on Wednesday I wondered about getting tattoos done in white so they only showed up when you were sunburned, kind of like invisible ink.
* * *
I decided today that I am an emotional glacier - big and white and cold, but slightly melting. I do not come from a hugging family - it's just not something we do, except for when people leave on a trip or go away to college, etc. When my sister A left home we all gathered in the front yard before she drove off and she cried and hugged everyone in turn, and when it was my turn I put a really big piece of ice down her back, which for some reason she did not appreciate.

When I moved to Provo I had very huggy roommates, all touchy-feely which scared me to no end. I couldn't get to my food shelf without being embraced. All very foreign to me; there didn't seem to be any reasoning behind it, hugging people that I didn't really know. However, I've started hugging people of my own free will lately, and I rather like it, because it's on my own terms - these are people I've actually gotten to know over the past year. My glacier is melting- so all hail global warming I say.
* * *

Temple Square (take two)

It was gloriously fun. I fell asleep on the way to Sandy while listening to the soundtrack from Nightmare before Christmas. Oh, somewhere deep inside of these bones, an emptiness began to grow. There's something out there, far from my home; a longing that I've never known. While I was out we got lost and when I woke up our driver was taking a picture of Chewbacca on the street corner. We got to TRAX and rode to see the lights. We wandered and told stories -I got to see the visitor's center-we watched a movie about the nativity. Outside again, I jumped up into a Japanese nativity set to have my picture taken with something that was supposed to be a donkey but looked more like an anteater in my opinion. I took one more with a camel. We threw chunks of ice at each other in a frenzied snowball fight that knocked the leaves off of the nearby trees. I ran around. I offered M $100,000 to swim in the fountain. That would be too cold she said. I'll let you hold the button I have in my pocket if you spit on that huge chunk of ice. She did, and held my button until her hands were too cold. There was a statue of Joseph and Emma where he's putting a quarter or something in her hand, so we put my button in her hand instead and took a picture.
Four people in our group ran into people that they knew. B and I felt left out, so we staged a reunion. B? Is that you? It's been forever! Fancy meeting you here of all places! It felt good to run into a long lost friend even if it was a lie. I skipped along as high as I could. I ran. I yelled at the people crossing the street - "Jay-walking punk anarchists!"-as I crossed the street with them. I was spastic. M and I played chicken while we waited for the train. There's a cop now. We did it at the crosswalk and raced while the red flashing hand counted down. I made it across and back 3 and a half times. I won. The fence around one of the trees looked like an umbrella stand. The streetlamps had Indians on them. Native Americans. Red men. I saw a gargoyle and thought how terrible it would be if something fell out of its nose on me.

A boy on the platform had a red balloon and I talked about that old movie that has a boy with a red balloon. There were no seats. When the train went uphill I clung sideways to the handrail and pretended I was being sucked out of an airplane. Your mom's face looks like Jordan! I sang "On My Way" in a high falcetto voice for a bit. I talked loudly about the train being derailed. The movie Unbreakable. What would your super hero power be? Back at the Sandy station we walked on the train tracks. Went back to M2's house. We ate chili and cornbread and drank mint hot chocolate. What do you mean, who's One Eyed Willy? I can't talk to you anymore. On the way home I told stories about our old Ford Econoline van and its mismatched seats and it not having any seatbelts and how whoever sat closest to the sliding door was in charge of holding a short wooden baseball bat. In case of carjackers our dad said. We talked about people we knew who had died driving over Christmas break. The Pacific ocean is too cold. I asked if they had seen Pete and Pete, because of the episode where Pete and Artie (the strongest man in the world) beat up the ocean.

I'm glad I had a chance to do temple square the right way, with friends and naps and snowballs and a lot of spastic-ness. Life is good.

Faberge Eggs

Sunshine gave me stickers of Faberge eggs. In short, I am happy. Other things that have made me happy recently:

(1) Spending time with some happy pirates at PHE
(2) Talking to sister H on the phone en francais
(3)The Faberge egg stickers again - they count double for being innately awesome and because Sunshine thought to give them to me

Things that have made me unhappy/stressed recently:

(1) Trying to finish my short story for my writing class. It's a very short short story and I don't think my teacher is going to like it very much - it's titled "This is not about the Polkersteins". The whole story is preposterous, but that's what I wanted.
(2) Having to go to a conference for said writing class to talk about my work. I really just want to tell this teacher that I am not a writer and that he shouldn't waste his time.

Things I am looking forward to:

(1) After all these conferences the teacher is going to feed our class pizza. Free food for hungry me=always acceptable
(2)Movie night at Optimistic.'s
(3) The day I can go home for Christmas, or to be more exact, the time when I will arrive home. (I am not looking forward to the flying part of this trip because I am usually partially deaf for two or three days afterward while my ears make weird squirting noises inside my head in an attempt to become fully popped)

This is all. I should study - I should write a ward newsletter for this month - I should do a lot of things, but I won't until it comes time. Here's hoping the end of the world comes before I have to take my finals.

The Eternal Question: Where are we going to park?

So I went on a horribly awkward date yesterday - I got asked by some guy in my ward to go to the Christmas devotional in Salt lake. I had never been to Salt Lake - never seen the conference center, the temple, the lights, none of it. I knew it would be terrible, but I said yes anyway.

Mistake #1: He said that T.V. was a time drainer - I then had to tell this guy that I wanted to go into Media Arts and become a screenwriter or television director. He said something about me being able to make quality family programming, to which I responded," yeah, something like that..." and then he enacted a scene about someone named "Joanie" and how she held true to the standards she had been taught in her youth. Fact I did not mention: quality family programming about people named Joanie is not quality - it is dull and predictable.

Mistake#3: His personality and the fact that we have nothing in common (except for the fact that we have both read the Oz series by Lyman Frank Baum, and really there's only so far that you can stretch that subject).

Mistake#8: As we were looking for our seats in the conference center (we were late, and I had been forced to run a bit) I saw a button on the floor and I didn't pick it up even though I wanted to. All I thought about on the ride home was how much I regretted not picking up that button, and I had another button I had found already in my pocket, so it was a constant reminder that I hadn't picked up that button when I wanted to. Dangit.

Mistake#17: We left church early to get to Salt Lake in time, and yesterday was fast Sunday. Normally on fast Sundays I get home at 4:37 and I'm able to eat, but this date didn't end until 9:08. Is he insane? I was starving. And it didn't help that on the car ride home, because we had absolutely nothing to talk about, I was peppered with questions about what's your favorite this or that - the last question being "what's your favorite thing to cook?" Talk of food and empty stomach= not good. Assuming I can cook, also not good, and I gladly told him that I don't cook a whole lot because there's only about 17 foods I actually like to eat, which he had me list.

In-between 8 and 17 I watched the devotional while he snoozed a bit. We saw the lights and I froze a little. I met 3 of his sisters and his mother, who also happened to be seeing the lights. I missed out on eating, going to ward prayer, and my weekly phone call to H, whose 18th birthday it was. I meant to make cookies for a friend and work on my short story for my writing class. I don't know if it was worth it.