Dodgeball Delight

I should be going to bed now as orientation starts tomorrow and I need to be awake and alert. Also I should be punished and sent straight to bed after the pathetic title I gave. Still, I need to toot my own horn a little bit before I forget.

Tonight for FHE the ward played dodge ball. I, of course, am dismal. I played virtually no role whatsoever in any of the first four games but still enjoyed myself and met some kind people. Anyway, so I was horrible. Perhaps my completely nonthreatening and timid playing style was the reason that the last game--the tiebreaker-- found me as the last member of my team still able to play against two stocky boys on the other team. Naturally, as I'm female, smallish, and new they didn't want to release everything they had but things still weren't looking good. Most of the balls were on our side of the gym and they only had 3 between them. They threw two at me at once and somehow I was able to dodge both (a miracle, I'm sure). In an effort to stop one from crossing back over I slid and grabbed it from just over the line. I barely got it but was kneeling at their mercy when they threw the last ball at me. Again some miracle helped me block it with the one I had just got. Everyone (including me) was duly surprised and impressed. Then--my true moment of triumph--one of they boys threw the ball back at me (it had bounced back into their side) and I caught it! It was amazing! That boy was out, it brought in one of our own boys and we won the tiebreaker!

As it was church dodge ball there really wasn't that much competition or anything, but it was a satisfying surprise that I didn't totally embarrass myself. Weird.

Sadness is usually always selfish but that doesn't make the rusty acrid aftertaste any easier to spit out. The knowledge that your life is not what you dreamed it would be, that no matter how happy you are you have failed in some big way from becoming the person and doing the things you always wanted to do is a secret you cannot always keep even from yourself. A life does not have to be bad to be a disappointment when under the microscope. The key of course is to keep the microscope far away from the examination table and giggles and fulfillment are bound to result. I am, after all, happy. Really truly genuinely deep in my bones I laugh all the time life is wonderful brand of happy. I am excited about school, about becoming a physical therapist, about my housing accommodations, about my new hair highlights and about the delicious pasta I made a few days ago. I seek out and take all the opportunities to laugh each day that I can but still... if I am honest with myself my life is still void of the things I want (and have always wanted) more than anything. Being a sister is amazing but I have always always wanted to be a mother. The affection of a parent is both essential and beloved but sometimes I wonder if I will ever know the other kind of love also...

Sometimes I wonder when I will become the main character of my own life. When will my dreams come true? When will it be my turn if not for the spotlight at least for the happily ever after? I mean, don't the Flounders and Charlotte Lucases and Gimlees and Neville Longbottoms eventually get rewarded for their hard work and friendship and determination? Where is their happy ending? Is it their destiny to help others reach theirs without ever finding their own? Where is the justice in that? Surly their stories are real even if they are unsung, right? I mean, being an extra doesn't mean you are a nobody. Being a supporting role surly doesn't mean that is all you are god for, does it? And if the happily ever after never comes along, if Prince Charming gets lost or finds someone else or fate never cooperates and you never catch that big brake or you give it all you have and still somehow fail in your quest then what? Do you make up an almost happily ever after and improvise for life without the fairy tale ending? Can you consider your life a success if you reached all your dreams except for the ones absolutely most important to you? How does one mourn the death of their deepest desire?

Tears taste funny when you are too proud to let them fall. Especially when you hold them in against yourself cause no one else cares. They are more snotty that way, somehow. More salty. Almost like the liquid evaporates a little bit and leaves the remaining goopy dregs just a little bit more minerally than they would be if they just came out right. Instead when they do come they burn a little like acid and shame because they've been stewing for too long. They look funny too--too round, too real somehow. If a tear falls and no one is there to wipe it what is its purpose? What are tears even for--they don't make anything better. Surely if it was just for washing eyes than a good sweat or dust storm would bring them about, not a sudden bout of lost purpose and hopelessness. Why is it that a good cry feels so miserable? What is good about it anyway? What an insipid phrase.

I heard once that God blessed the Brother of Jared with air immediately but made him work for the light. The speaker observed that when there is a true life-depending need, that God will not make us wait to receive it. However, when the need is really just a convenience that seems indispensable to us that it may cost us quite a bit more in sweat, blood, work, effort, and even tears. As a single girl it seems like everything is air, but I suppose much of it is really just light. And the encouraging thing is that after the Brother of Jared brought Jehovah rocks, his faith was strong enough that even his odd and probably insufficient offering was enough to allow God to take care of the rest. It's not really air, I can work and wait.

Also, I know of course I am not going to die tomorrow. I know I am plenty young and should not be speaking so morbidly of burying my deepest desires or balling my eyes out. (Which I do not, by the way). Still, sometimes even the strongest feel a little down, don't they? Sometimes people lose hope in each other. Sometimes... maybe often... we lose hope in ourselves. Hope can be a fickle friend when we aren't' careful. Very fickle indeed. Still, as long as there is hope there is happiness and dreams can be kept alive on a very scanty portion when that is all available. Tonight, therefor, I feed my dreams on leftovers and hope that later I have a more befitting feast for them. If not, though, somehow I think it will all be alright. Dreams, unlike sorrow, are rarely completely selfish and therefor quite a bit harder to kill.

The Overstimulating Sensations of a 28 Hour Car Ride

Yup, you read that right. Twenty Eight Hours. It sounds even longer when you read it in longhand. Somehow I always romanticize it in my head before we actually go. Eating out for every meal, the being together and talking and playing, listening to my favorite songs or a book on tape, and enjoying the general spledor of the great outdoors always seems so exciting and inviting somehow before the trip actually begins. Unfortunately, by the end, those ideals have usually discintegrated somewhat. The hamburger for every meal turns into a constipation concoction in my stomach gurgling with gas and oozing with extremely awkward sensations. I am reminded of the stinkpots in Yellowstone we drove to see one year. Being together becomes more of a sentence than a treat, especially as the conversation leads closer and closer to bickering over which side of the seat line one's hand is lying or whose unmentionable (caused of course by the diet of grease and salt) is filling the car with stink. I always end up hating what once was my favorite song by the end of the trip and the endless drone of the reader proves more hypnotic than stimmulationg as I strive to stay awake and not leave us all as souveniers splattered accross the road. Even the general outdoor majesty turns tired and endless. Especially in Texas with no mountains, rivers, or anything at all to break up the monotomy of sky and prarie, the landscape can seem absolutely eternal. This of course makes me even more proud to be a Texan, but does not change the fact that driving through my beloved state is very nearly unbearable.

And that's just the contrastof what I expect to what I get. THat doesn't even begin on th smells of the thing. Six to eight human bodies cramped in the same twelve by six feet (or whatever it is) for that amount of time doesn't exactly smell good, especially when you add in the grease and salt. You know you smell bad when you smell yourself. You know you are grimy when the scum on your teeth and oil on your face are about the same thckness. When you taste your own breath... well, you get the idea.

But now it's over. An absolutely fabulous week in Idaho on Grandpa's ranch with hourses, ATVs, the rodeo, and all the fishing I could want (which, between you and me is a lot). We got home safely after the ride refered to above at around 9 this morning then I slept grumpily till noon then went to church. Today was actually quite an adventure with broken toes, near death experiences, and worship service as well. Sounds a bit like a movie, doesn't it. All in all a good Sunday.

Cucucucu cucucucu I say, cucuconversation cuconfusion

How I hate the awkwardness of flirtation. Well, not so much flirtation as the uncomfortable mix up of emotion and fear and discombobulation (a real word--I looked it up) of seeing someone and feeling the pheromones rush through the bloodstream and switching intermittently between the hope that he will talk to you and the hope that he won't because you have no earthly idea of what you would say if he did. Then he does begin conversation and my tongue suddenly swells up in my face and dribbles words all over where they don't belong punctuating them with awkward phrases and expressions. What a mess! Okay, so the actual tongue dripping thing was just an analogy but still... a mess.

If I am brutally honest with myself I will admit that while I am certrainly not ugly I could never be called a great beauty and while I absolutely love learning and study I am certainly no genius. Still, calculated objectively I can also say that I am not altogether hopeless as a female. Still, it seems that whenever I stand up in front of a boy...any boy... I end up looking more like Elmer Fudd than anything attractive at all. Well, maybe I don't look bald and baloon nosed but I certainly sound and feel that way. Blah. In an effort to help me out my sister (age 16) gave me a list of chit-chaty topics for my own use. Examples:
-"Darn it's hot..."
-"Do you have any pets?" Then she counseled me to bring up the tragic drowing incident of the family dog in the family pool thinking it would be a good subject. A bit morbid for my taste, but definately opposes the Elmer Fudd model so perhaps I shouldn't complain.
-"How about that meeting, huh?"
-"Are you concerned about global warming?"
-"What did you have for dinner? Do you cook?"
-Anything about herself she suggested.
*Most important-- Avoid politics with old people and liberals and cadaver lab stories with everyone and limit discussions about bodily processes such as digestion, respiration, and the lymph node systems,

Unfortunately the off-limits list contains all the conversation topics that I find truly exhilerating, but what can I do? I guess the best I can do is practice until I can be as good a conversationalist as my little sister, or at least as good as my boy Elmer. Meantime I'm working to keep my pheromones under control (even though I'm not allowed to talk about them.)

Song Lyrics

So I've been thinking lately about song lyrics. What if someone were to find the remnants of our civilization after it were destroyed Pompey style in a freak accident that leaves nothing but a mushroom cloud the size of the Atlantic Ocean and all the song lyrics ever written? What would people say about my society? What would they discern about our way of life? For example: "Just like the white winged dove sings the song sounds like she's singing oo baby oo say oo" or "shot through the heart and you're too late you give love a bad name" or "I'm too sexy for my cat" or even "Listen to the sounds of silence".

If that was all some goupy alien who breathed out of his ears knew about our world, what would he (or she, or it) think about me? Perhaps he would envision some frightening bird/cat cross that bleeds sensually and sings and spends most of my time trying to hear silence through what it considers its lungs. Stuff from nightmeres for sure.

I love laughing at lyrics.

Collection of random thought pieces

So I have a job now. I work around 35 hours each week in a physical therapy clinic out in Denton. It is admitably a bit of a commute but I like it there, so no complaints. The therapist is very patient and friendly and the other tech is also super helpful and I love working with them. Best of all I love worknig in a physical therapy capacity. The patients are the absolute best part. The other day I was helping a sweet Mexican man in his mid forties. He has a bad ankle we are helping him with. Anyway, he asked me how I liked the job and I told him I liked it a lot. He asked about my hours and I told him. He said that it must be an especially good job if I wasn't forced to work on Saturday and Sunday as well. I felt so guilty for all the times I had felt to complain for being at work with nothing to do. How lucky I am to live in such a capacity that I can have my weekends to myself. Indeed how lucky to have a job at all, let alone one that I enjoy so very much. There are funny moments as well. Friday I was helping an older slightly grumpy woman remove an electrode pad from her arm. She was mumbling so I couldn't understand her words very well at first so I just smiled at her but then she said again (only a tiny bit cantankerously) "you're pulling my skin off. Just let me do it." then she took the pads out of my hands and she pulled them of. Uncomforatable at the time but alright later.

On a completely unrelated tangent, I have decided that the popularity of "reality" shows is depressing on several levels. First of all, it shows very clearly that rather than live the reality of our own lives we opt to watch others live their heavily comercialized producer-created "realities" on television and then we laugh at their follies and mistakes. Perhaps because we are afraid to live our own lives we are gratified somehow when others make horribly publicized blunders. It makes me sad, somehow that these shows are so very popular, especially when their popularity spikes by some unexpected tragedy. Sad, somehow.

There was a tornado in this area last week. It was actually kind of fun, somehow. The power died around seven, just as we were planning to tak the girls to mutual. The sky turned staticy, almost like there were black lights shining everywhere. Then we looked up and everything seemed dead for a few breaths. There was no rain and no wind, but in the sky the dark clouds were literally churning in like the lazy bubling of thick soup right before the true boil begins. It was exciting but frightening. Eventually we were all sitting in the far end of the front room as close to the closet under the stairs as we could get without climbing behind the dirty laundry. Daddy had taken the lanterns, lighters, and most of the flashlights for a campout so we used whatever we could including Toria's little "light bright" dude. Paigers and Sarah made a hilariously morbid picture of lightning hitting the house and it all errupting in flame. While I laughted outright, I don't think Toria appreciated it much. We lost two sections of fence but other than that we did alright. Lots others did lots worse. There were trees down all over, roofs torn off, and store signs all over the road. We didn't get power back till about three in the morning so all us girls camped out in the living room with the windows opened since the air didn't work. To my dismay I found that sleeping on the ground was actually super difficult. I thought it wouldn't be so bad as I use to sleep on the floor all the time. Maybe I really am getting old. When the rain came back (and it did with a vengence--huge lightening and thunder a few miles from the house) we were still sleeping and more than a little water poured inside. Still, it was fun. I enjoyed it. Is that sick? I guess I can say it safely because no one got hurt. So yes. I enjoyed the rain and the destruction and the edge of fear and hysteria that kept me laughing all night. Oh dear, maybe I really am crazy.

In a final bit of news, I have found somewhere to live! I am so very grateful. I will room with a girl who is Christian but not Mormon, but with a very reasonable rent, right next to the busstop and close to the school, and sweet roommates to all go with it I am very excited and expecting a great year. We'll see, but I'm excited. : )

The Other Side of the Mirror

Before I begin, here are some discoveries I have made since last writing:

> Barbie dolls have a patheticly small range of motion that is impossible to repeat

> Gas prices went down but have steadily increased since then

> A house in Texas without power for more than 6 hours gets hot fast (this comes from the frighteningish experience of a tornado hitting down a few miles from my house. Wild.)

> You can only watch so many chick flicks before you begin losing brain cells

> Exercise doesn't always work (I have, in fact, gained three pounds since I started going to the gym daily three and a half weeks ago. Time to lay off the treadmill it would seem.)

> Contrary to what you may think blackberries, celery, tuna, pasta, and chipotle sauce do not make a delicious mix. It is, however, eccentrically interesting.

> Wishing something doesn't necesarily make it so and unforutnately doing all you can doesn't even always work. Still, that way at least you have no regrets.

> Blackberry jam is stinking hard to get out of clothes

> Prayer really does work

> laughter is not just for children--we should all try it.

So, my brother left to go on his mission recently. Well, technically he went with Dad and Grandpa to hunt and hang out for a week in Idaho with a before he reports to the MTC but who wants to get technical. The point is, it is so strange to see missionary work from the opposite perspective now that I have had my own experience. To read his e-mails and pray for him instead of relying on his prayers is different. As I read his e-mails I find myself second guessing myself a lot. Is that odd? I find myself wondering, was I this way? Did I have that much faith? Did people actually read my letters? Did I offend people? How was my grammer? Then as my tiny mind begins to whirl like a rusty turbine cliking and complaing as it goes I begin all types of wild worries. Why can't I remember? Why do I care? Am I really dissolving into a materialistic shallow ditz who spends all her free time worrying about what people thought of me years and years ago? What about what people think of me now? Why don't I ever date? Am I going to be an old maid? Will I be grumpy? How will I make my own way? I so want a baby... maybe I'll be able to adopt?

Anyway, you get the picture. Not a good path. The point is it is interesting to watch from the other side. I remember taking off for my own mission. I was so nervous! I spent the night before in a hotel with my parents. I cried myself to sleep with my fist in my mouth to silence my sobs so that my parents wouldn't worry. I just felt so underqualified and weak to the cause that was put up to me. I was scared that I would mess it up and ruin those I was called to serve for all eternity. Rubbish of course. God would never let little old me thwart His work. Still though, at the begining that was what I felt. I guess even now I worry a little though... what if I really did do such a poor job that those who could have been helped were in fact at a disadvantage because they were with me? Still, before I begin on my barrage of questions again I'd better stop now. I did do my best. That I can hold my head up and say. I really did give God all that I could and I know that He more than made up for my weaknesses. Just like the Brother of Jared I gave God rocks and he made light. My brother can and will do the same thing. What a marvelous work missionary work is. It is so big! So amazing when you sit back and think about it. No matter how weak and insignificant we may feel God carries on this great work because it is His. Be it Korea or Seattle, it matters not. What an amazing privlidge it is to be involved in it.