Book Worm

For about the billionth time in my life I went into a bookstore, naively thinking that I could simply grab what I needed and then leave soon afterwards. Oh, how mistaken I always am. Two and a half hours later, I have my scratch pad out, jotting down intriguing titles (which is just about everything on the shelf). I just love books!--picking it up, feeling its weight in my hands, becoming curious at the title and illustration, reading the summaries and quotes, flipping the pages to smell that wonderful book smell. Aaaahhhhhhhh . . .

And I really love to read. I am still SO giddy that I have a job that basically pays me to sit and read all day. But even with all that, it's not near enuf time to come close to reading everything that sounds interesting to me. Since I got hired slightly over three months ago I've already read the following:
Four Souls by Louise Erdrich
Sam's Letters to Jennifer by James Patterson
The Queen Of The South by Arturo Perez-Reverte
All I Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum
Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen
Our Heritage (Church)
The PeaceGiver by James L. Ferrell
Great Short Stories By American Women
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
Better Than You Think You Are by Ardeth G. Kapp
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Return To Sender by Sandy Hutson
Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas and Micah Sparks
To Draw Closer To God by Henry B. Eyring
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
A Night Without Stars by James Howe
Christmas Jars by Jason F. Wright
Technopoly by Neil Postman
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
A Chimp In The Family by Vince Smith
The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Lectures On Faith by Joseph Smith
The Book Of Mormon
and I'm currently working on Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler, If Life Were Easy Then It Wouldn't Be Hard by Sheri Dew, and How Tough Could It Be? by Austin Murphy. This is why I've never been able to fill in my favorite books on my profile, cuz I've just read too much, and loved most of it. I like to try and get a good mixture in of church books, fiction, non-fiction, and juvy.

And I love that I'm finally old enuf (I think so, anyway, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, no doubt) to talk about how much I love to read without being thought a complete dweeb (except by the funny kids I work with. Silly kids). Cheers!

Solitaire as X Box

As I've been trying to wean myself off naps this week, I found that the only thing that was interesting enough (at the time) to keep me awake was playing solitaire. So, I commenced to play it for over an hour. I didn't win once. No matter how much I wanted to pull myself away, I just couldn't seem to. And after that marathon, I was so exhausted I needed a nap.
Today, I just decided to go straight to the sheets rather than even try. When I woke up, I felt so energized that I decided to play a little solitaire. I finally won.

Kiss of Death

I heard yesterday about this girl that was allergic to peanuts. Her boyfriend ate a peanut butter sandwich and then gave her a kiss. She died that evening from her allergic reaction. Oh man.

Bi-polarism

on a manic depressive scale of 1-10, right now I am an 11. I just got done crying to my mom on the phone (aren't mommies great?) and now have a sudden case of the giggles. Tell me something stupid, anything at all, and I'll prolly think it's funny.
This could be a serious personality flaw. The DSM IV would think so. But since it's not a long-standing characteristic, I don't think I could be diagnosed with it. And since I'm not qualified (and too mentally inept) to diagnose myself as mentally inept, I'll continue pretending to lead the normal life.
But really, because crying is such a cathartic experience, I think it must release an endorphin of some type in my brain and so then laughing just becomes so easy. It's pretty refreshing, really. I think it was an old Jewish proverb, or maybe a Chinese one, that said, "What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul." Ah, those Chinese Jews. What will they think of next?

Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year

(or comeback of his life, as I'd like to hope)

I don't blame you for being you, but you can't blame me for hating it (hanging in?)

And how

Support your local poet.

a hole to stick my head in now, please

I slobbered on myself yesterdae. Dan thought I should have been embarrassed about that, and so I proceeded to explain to him how I don't really embarrass that easily.

Fast forward about 3 hours and I found myself having one of the most embarrassing experiences that I've had in a while. There's this rope swing in Mona (some of you are familiar with it) that people have been hyping up for a bit now, and last evening I finally had the opportunity to go. I was pretty hyped up myself. It wasn't very warm outside, and the sun had already gone down when we got there. Lon starts hypothesizing about the worst case scenario. "If you dropped right there close to the shore, you'd break something," etc. Linwood and he weren't even going to swing. But I didn't drive 30 miles down there for nothing. Everybody went before I did (except Linwood), giving me ample time to completely psych myself out. So I finally climb up in the tree and stand on the little wooden platform for about ten minutes straight (much to the annoyance of everyone there), continuing to psych myself out. My arms are like little twigs, and so I was very doubtful of their ability to hold the dropping of my whole weight when I stepped off that platform. Everybody else had done it and been fine, so I finally just went for it, and basically fell straight into the water. I couldn't, or didn't anyway, hold myself on that rope past the low point of the swing, and that's where I fell in. Yeah, it was about three feet from the shore. The water was only about five feet deep there, but I guess I went barreling in at enough of an angle that I didn't hurt myself. Maybe nobody saw the mortifying plunge . . . But my head emerged to the sound of everyone cheering for me, that wholesome thing that people do when they don't want one of their peers to feel too overly stupid, which of course just ensures the feeling of stupidity. I crawled to the shore and slinked over to where my towel was. People continued swinging, and the nite attained normalcy, again. Well, for everyone else, I spose. I remain quite disconcerted. I refused to pose for the picture because it was not a moment that I wanted immortalized in any way. (I know that posting this on my blog is counterbalancing that. Overly, probably. Oh well. You see how much I trust you people, to read this and still be my friends?)

I think it really is something I could probably do, but I had just completely wigged myself out, and everyone was watching. People were talking about going back on a hot, sunny day sometime. I feel a need to go again and redeem myself. But then there's always the chance that I'll flop again. And I'm sure that nobody else could give a rat's behind if I "redeem" msyelf or not. Ah, the things we do to try and save face.

I recognize that there's really no need to be embarrassed, cuz I was there with a group of really great people, and they won't think any the less of me. But, I unintentionally exposed a vulnerable side of myself that I wouldn't have necessarily chosen to show those people. And, unfortunately, that can't be undone now, and there's really no telling how much this small and singular event will effect certain people's perceptions of me, irreversibly for the rest of time as we know it. And that is really what I regret.

All Around

"I think the world's keenest desire is for beauty, and that our knowledge of how to achieve that is the various forms of behavior and expression that we apply a single word to, which is love."

--Barry Lopez

Hairdon't

Well, I've always kinda turned my nose up at the girls with the stripey hair. You want highlights, why did you do stripes instead? Well, due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control, I have now become one of those girls. Naturally, I'm not very happy about being a stripe-head. Perhaps I'll come to terms with it someday. But until then, I would have preferred polka dots, or at least zig-zags.

Plummeting

I went sky diving this last weekend! Can you even believe it?! I still kinda can't. I had emotionally removed myself from the reality of it (in order to prevent an extreme amount of excitement and nervousness that could have potentially interfered with my functionality), and then it happened. Before I could even think twice, I was out the door of that plane, and speeding to the ground below, even though it didn't seem to be getting any closer. We jumped at about 12,000 feet of altitude. I screamed. Maybe that's a little too girly, but I really just couldn't help it. Jay (my tandem experienced jumper) wrote "NICE SCREAMS!!!" in my skydive log afterwards. I got to pull the rip cord at about 5,000 feet. The parachuting was cool cuz it was slower and we twirled around and checked out the beautiful earth below us. The landing was smooth and easy. The only problem I encountered was my dang sensitive ears feeling like they were going to explode from all the altitude change.
Love is the next great adventure now, Ryan said.

one of those things

Have any of you ever been on a heterosexual date with someone who's homosexual, but is trying not to be, but you can tell that being with you isn't helping their situation at all?
Oh man, talk about awkward.

to all of those who think life can be broken down into nothing but a mathematical equation

"The clock is a piece of machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes. In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created. [the use of the masculine pronouns here I find significant.] In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. The inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser."

Perhaps those last few sentences are a little extreme, but it brings up an interesting point: isn't human nature and all the convoluted ins and outs that make up people and their personalites and idiosyncrasies and relationships a bit more complex than "mathematically measurable sequences"? A person is far too complex and uniqe to ever be described by some equation or graph.

Thus, maybe some of you should stop wearing watches.

what IS it that you want to hear?

"Am I more than you bargained for yet? I've been dying to tell you anything you wanna hear, cuz that's just who I am this week."

LavFest

Here I am at the largest lavendar fields in our nation. I know, I know, you can all get my autograph later.

B Names

I guess maybe I just needed to prove to myself that I could create the uprising that I did. I have a tendency to manufacture drama when my life starts borderlining on boredom, I guess. But, as Bryant pointed out, it wasn't really an uprising to anyone but my roommates, who really needn't worry too much, cuz the name code I used was really only that crack-able to the people who are already familiar with the situations. So no major beans were spilt, right?

p.s. who knows what Byron's blog is?

The Bane of My Existence

I think someone called this the barstool phenomenon once: Affection is directed at the person next to another person all the way down the line, aka. Person A is interested in Person B, who is interested in Person C, who is interested in Person D, and so on and so forth.

Case in point:

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Let's just get it together, people! (Probably this didn't make much sense to anyone. I guess I just wanted to get it all out of my head for my own benefit.)

*All examples given are based on actual individuals and their situations, but names have been changed to protect identities (and the secrets that go along with them).

Thursday Evening

Well, I could get chastised for being a fast mover. Or I could get chastised for being a slow mover. Am currently experiencing frustration at not being in a position in which I could be rebuked for either.
Everyone seems to be ignoring me. I guess their world keeps going round without me.

Plus, why is the Jordan River and the Provo temples both closed for cleaning right now? That's two weeks in a row of the guilts for me, and it's simply not healthy, I can tell ya that much. Shall make an attempt at Mt. Timpanogas tomorrow morning, perhaps.

Sometimes I guess when I'm the subject of the sentence I'm writing I cut myself out. Am currently doing such. Use style when feeling annoyed at and insignificant in my own life.

Choosey

"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
--Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Now there's a lady who knows what I go through. Remember in Bandits how Cate Blanchett's character says she can't choose between her two love interests because together they make the perfect man?

Indeed.

Something I Do

Do you ever say that you've run out of things to say, just so you won't have to talk anymore because you know if you do something will come out wrong and you'll dig your hole deeper than it already is?

Cuz I do.

Isn't she beautiful, though?