Wednesday Giggles

On Thursday - sorry.

I've gotten sucked into book series recently and everything aside of job hunting and interviews has kind of faded into the background.

I've been thinking of what video clip made me laugh the most this week, but it wasn't a clip, it was a website the timeless LaurenW sent out.

Yay for New Math

It was that an an insane email from the cousin types about sucky bands. But I think the hilarity of this is a lot more subjective. Needless to say though 51 replies later I'm still laughing.

New Faces

So for FHE on Monday we all trekked out to Pasadena to see this screening of this awesome movie called Forever Strong. Its a "Remember the Titans" type feel good sports movie about the Highland Rugby team from Salt Lake City and this delinquent kid that gets changed by the coach and philosophies of the team.

It made me want to marry a rugby player and raise rugby players. The world is too small for men who aren't Men and to quote the movie "girls play soccer, wussies play football, men play Rugby". The star of this lovely film was a gentleman that I took great pleasure in watching. Its kind of rare that I'm actually attracted to an actor. Its usually more of an "Oh. Look at that random beautiful person. Good for them" kind of gig.

This guy was gorgy and taps the groupie in me. His name is Sean Feras. He's 26, a former model and just such a pleasure to look at.



I'm not a fan of the short hair but his smile could knock me out at 20 paces.



I'm typically not one for dark eyes either but there is something about this guy that I love.



And hes a notable actor. Forever Strong was really moving. I cried like 4 times.



That's him in all his moodiness as a punk kid getting sculpted by a rugby team and an amazing coach. My friend who lives in Utah says thy call him The Mission President because he turns out so many missionaries from his team. I highly recommend the movie. I plan to buy it as soon as it's available on DVD.

I'm Going to Explode

So I've been simmering for about 4 months on a particular issue and I've spoken about it candidly to a choice few but I am so fed up tonight I just have to write about it. I can't take it any more and I don't know how I'm supposed to survive the next few weeks.

Gossip travels so fast in a single's ward I wanted to cap it as much as possible but I'm emotional tonight and irrational and I realized that this is all a temporary situation but it is also VERY HARD for me and I need to vent and this is my blog so I get to talk. And the 5 people actually read it probably already know what I am talking about.

Sometime in the middle of last year I started casually seeing a boy. Let's Call him Lurpy. I wrote about a few realizations I had around Nov when things completely melted down here (read that first if any of this is going to make sense).

My heart still isn't bleeding. I'm just angry. Things have gone from bad to worse to worser to nearly a nightmare.

What happened when I "casually disclosed my feelings" was a night from a bad After School Special that somehow managed to harrow up every insecurity possible.

Halloween.

We're on our way to an outing with some friends. The night before (in front of another group, mind you) Lurpy owns the fact that he embarrassingly read a very stupid series of girly books to impress a girl, namely me. I'm thinking we might get out of second gear and possibly into third and this makes me happy all day. The night comes and he shows up with a very pretty, very unknowing, very non-member girl from school dressed in heals and practically in his pocket. I'm shocked. He gives no explanation, just comfortably looking couply with this lovely girl.

I'm weirded out and hurt the whole night. It was truly a terrifying Halloween. I'm hurting so much it totally numbed me in the moment and I can't fully wrap my mind around it for a few days.

I call him on it, ask whats up, hes all indefintion and excuses and gives me nothing concrete. Nothing at all. In fact he claims to be "confused". This boy is *never* confused. I finally say I'm unhappy because I like him and thought he had the taste and good sense to like me back and he shows up with his friend??! If anyone has a reason to be confused it's me. Once again. He has nothing to say.

Lurpy is supposed to go away. His schooling is supposed to take him far away and for a long time so I'm thinking "no biggie. It's all good."

He goes away for a few months, proceeds to do more passive aggressive damage from afar and offending my friends as well as me so that is the start of my hurt turning into seething anger.

We see each other after the holidays. He has nothing to say. So I think "OK - this guy is a waste of oxygen and testosterone and I need to just let it go." Which I still do - I know that.

But he started popping up at church with his friend from Halloween. She bravely came with out him a lot too. Turns out she was investigating and decided to get baptized. I'm sure she's the sweetest girl in the world but I haven't been able to bring myself to talk to her because every time I see her all I feel is the horror of that night and the bile of betrayal I felt, and still feel. Every time. Every Sunday. It's so horrible and I just get hurt and angry all over again. By the end of the week I've got it stuffed back in a box on the shelf but the second I see his profile my stomach knots up and all I want to do is hit something. Specifically him.

Everything was left so unsaid and so undone. He has this Fagin way of getting a girl to think ahead. To make promises without making them, to give the illusion of stability. Now this? Out of no where and for no reason? And then he left for months with nothing but cowardly silence in the meantime. I swore to myself that I would never be that girl and I would never give him the satisfaction of knowing that he got to me. And if he reads this blog and knows what the heck I'm talking about well then whatever.

I don't hate him because I never loved him. I just loathe him and am so angry that he figured out everything that could possibly hurt and unseat me and every insecurity I thought no one could see and he created a scenario that chimes and heralds every single one. It's like a custom emotional medieval torture gauntlet.

I thought time would make it better but its just making it worse.

I just got back from Institute and he was smugly there and all I wanted to do was beat him from the room.

I hate it. I hate this feeling and I loathe his diabolical talent for drawing out the worst in people and making it a reality. He is a dating Dementor. But I'm not afraid of him. All I want to do is smack him so hard he spits out a tooth and watch him drive away forever.

Is that too much to ask?

Wednesday Giggles

I'm feeling nostalgic today -

Emotional Bulimia

So my spuah-star friend S, her husband, and I went to the Post Secret lecture at the University of Redlands last night.

It was very cool and Frank Warren was a very poised, simple speaker that seemed to be the most amazed at the Post Secret phenomenon than anybody else in the room. There were about 300-400 people there and I'm guessing the average age was about 21. It was kind of funny being in line and having this involved conversation about economic imperatives and globalization while the kids around us supplied a good amount of "whattha? whotha?" looks.

Post Secret is a fascinating concept. Frank started passing out post cards at night to random people in Washington DC and put his home address on it and asked people to write down their secrets and to his amazement a lot of people did. He stopped passing out post cards but they continued to come and not by 3s and 4s but by 50s and 60s and soon the 100s. He said now its a regular thing for him to receive 200 postcards a DAY.

There have been books published and art exhibits and people have been changed by being able to read the deep workings of other people.

He recounted the story about an exhibit that they had at Georgetown where they were displaying the secrets and there was a girl there that was holding one of the postcards and came up to Frank in total amazement. It had been written on a picture frame insert and had said that "I wish my life were as simple as a picture frame insert" and she said that she had recently broken up with her boyfriend because she realized she was in an abusive relationship when she read another postcard that said "my boyfriend is so abusive I have ceased to have any opinions of my own" and she sent in the picture frame insert postcard as a reaction and they happened to be displayed right next to each other at this event.

That, I think, is the ethos of Post Secret and why it's so remarkable. It's this private, respectful, shared catharsis and it's beautiful.

Frank's mantra is that "we don't keep secrets, secrets keep us". They keep us from being ourselves. Also that there are two kinds of secrets, the kind we keep from others, and the kind we keep from ourselves. As an example he shared a moment he had with a secret similar to the picture frame insert girl. When he was reading a secret about someone else's humiliating childhood experience and it surfaced one from his own past he hadn't realized he was hiding. So he wrote it down on a postcard and sent it away. It came right back to him but that process was very freeing. In turn, he tries to treat people's secrets with great respect. There isn't any advertising on the site, it's totally funded by the book sales etc.

However, that kind of sincerity was not there last night. Frank and his presentation were lovely and beautifully sincere, but for the last portion of the night there was a mic set up for people to come forward and tell a secret if they wanted to. It was the last part of the lecture and, after a night's worth of reflection I'm not sure a single secret was really shared.

People got up and said "I sent you this secret and it looked like this and I wrote it this way and I want you to know that blah blah blah". That seemed to defeat the entire set up of Post Secret to me.

Another stand out one was a woman who got up to say "I'm 33 and wonderful and have a plethora of friends both online and off and they think I'm amazing and wise and spiritual and perfect and I'm afraid to tell them that I drink it all away and I can't stop and if they knew that that they won't think that I'm super or wise or smart or spiritual anymore". She spent a good 5 minutes "telling her secret" with a line of 20 or so people and only 20 min allotted for the mic. It didn't feel or sound like a confession at all. It felt more of a display. I think her real secret is "I'm an alcoholic" and as S's hubby smartly pointed out, "I'm an alcoholic who doesn't want to change". She didn't want to say that or she doesn't realize it yet. Either way - it left me wondering.

Wondering if she really thought that that was her secret, like, if she had diluted herself enough to fear being thought of less by her friends than alcoholism, and why she had to take so much time to paint that picture that she did, and how I felt that kind of pomp and circumstance diluted the gravity of her secret whatever it was.

I brought this up to S and her husband on the way home along with the concept of "emotional bulimia" and S was open to exploring the idea with me. Emotional bulimia is a Patrick Phrase. It's kind of a family joke. We all talk to each other so much about the tiniest tedium of things and there are a few of us who almost manically grind up bothersome things over and over and talk about them to us over and over that by the end of the issue we're all exhausted with it and numb to the reality that it really has for that person.

Like, I think that airing out secrets in such a manner of robs them of their reality to a degree. What I love about Post Secret is that it's a private way of letting go of your secrets. The mic portion of the evening taught me that element of the project hasn't permeated the majority of the people who subscribe.

It also left me wondering why people (going back to the alcoholic girl) would emotionally flail around like that, especially publicly, and among their peers.

Were they not given enough attention as a child? Were they not hugged enough? Were they not taught respect for their feelings or the feelings of others? Are they not even literate about what they feel? Are their problems not real unless 1000s of people know about them? Do they not feel alive or human or worth something unless someone is listening? Do they not know themselves at all? Am I one of them but in an opposite manner? Do I just not talk about anything remotely close to any nerve centers? Because that has to be just as unhealthy.

Frank encouraged us to share our secrets with the people we were with on our way back to our cars etc and we didn't really. We talked about what brats we were essentially. I shared something I never shared before though that had to do with why my friend and I were brats. So that's a secret I guess -

We were sitting by an open doorway close to the ladies room and when the presentation started we kept hearing strange sounds coming from the hallway. They were vocalizations but not utterances. S and I both looked over at the doorway the third time one erupted and she finally got up to investigate and it turned out that there was a deaf woman in the hallway communicating with an interpreter. S wanted to see what was going on so she could know what she was getting annoyed at but I just stayed in my seat and painted a picture in my mind of what could possibly be going on.

I was hesitant to investigate because when I 21 and in the MTC I was brushing my teeth in the community bathroom and I heard someone in the stalls heaving and throwing up behind me. Now emotions run pretty high in the MTC, especially in the sister's dorm and the food there isn't so easy on people's systems so I wasn't too surprised. What concerned me is that it continued for about 5 minutes. And later that night I was walking by the bathroom door and heard the same thing and I realized that whoever was in the stall wasn't ill, she was making herself throw up. However, I did nothing. I said nothing. I just realized how sick this girl was and kept walking. Two days later the other 5 sisters in my district were talking about it and how the girl went home. The whole floor knew about it apparently but I still feel bad for doing nothing. Not approaching the girl, not approaching my coordinating sisters, nothing. I suppose every time I've tried to approach someone that's struggling in their disease I've been snapped at or worse so I've learned to keep my distance. But it's not out of respect like I tell myself it is, its out of fear. She needed help and I did nothing.

So I suppose that's a secret. I'm a wimp.

I better go tell a 1000 people.

Just Like Him

I know that I get a bit carried away sometimes. Superlatives seem to pepper my thoughts more than accuracy might allot. I realize that this may diminish the veracity or viscosity of those thoughts but there are a few things I feel and love so deeply that there aren't superlatives enough.

A few being 1) how strongly I feel about The Gospel of Jesus Christ 2) how amazing I think my family is 3) how well my mother cooks (when she's not running after marbles) 4) the virtues of a good nights sleep and 5) How much I admire the Founding Fathers, namely The General and John Adams.

I'm currently in the middle of Netflixing the HBO John Adams series and have found myself hand-over-heart weeping or throat-clutching involved at this account of Independence (Like tonight. Like 20 min ago) namely the parts with The General. John Adams and The General had a fascinating relationship. Adams, who was made of some of the staunchest moral fiber, constantly found himself chagrined and amazed by The General. It was Adams who nominated The General to be The General as a matter of fact. File that little factoid away for the next cocktail party...

Every time I see any likeness of The General all I want to do is go give him a huge hug. That may be ridiculously irreverent but its the truth. The loving daughter to a trusted father cling around the rib cage hug. I feel a special connection to him. I know my mission ridiculously contributed to it. I spent half of it in Alexandria and the entire town is essentially a shrine to George Washington. I started my mission there in the Mt. Vernon Stake. My church building was on George Washington parkway right on the Potomac, a quarter mile down the road from the doorway of Mt. Vernon. The amazing picture of The General kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge was in the entrance and I saw it nearly every day and was moved by it, him, the story and the parallel to my own call every time. It was the first building I went in as a missionary and the last one I went out of. I swore I would have that exact same picture in my home and I would teach my children all about him. He was my unofficial mission president because he was just as much of a North Star and example as I had in my mission president of excellence, perseverance, duty, love, humility and godly strength.

The General was an extraordinary man because he was a simple man and I love him most for that. He maintained it despite the maelstrom of times that he lived in. He loved his wife. He loved Nature, he loved God and loved his Country and fellow man. He loved all of them so much he did everything he could to serve them. Now The General wasn't perfect. He was a solider and slave owner and a number of other things that led the way wide open for folly and foibles but I think his angles shouted his demons down more often that most men can boast.

He knowingly set down power not once, but twice and both times returned to his fields and pastures at Mt. Vernon. He was a quiet man, a still man, a soft spoken man, a great man. I love him very much and owe more than I can say.

I know I'm not alone with these feelings. In fact I probably run the risk of cliche saying so but its the truth and it's how I feel.

God bless The General and God bless America.

Standards people! Standards!

Dear Barns & Noble and Customer Service Girl,

We have to talk.

There are certain levels of ridiculous that I love and welcome, my latest experience in your store was not the welcomed kind.

I, like any responsible English Major Alum, have been improving my exposure to The Classics post degree so I've been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin online. It just wasn't a pleasurable process so I decided to go get a copy of the actual book. I'm broke and unemployed but I'll still spend $6 on a book.

After looking around for a clearly labeled "Classics" section and finding none (strike 1), I approached the very nice girl at the Customer Service desk to ask for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

You know, just one of the most influential books written in it's century? That short work of fiction that was HIDEOUSLY popular for it's day and accelerated the already eminent Civil War in the name of "freedom" (IE: Slavery)? I couldn't help but notice that this particular individual shared African heritage as well so I thought I'd get a smile at least or a awesome-book nod. But no, do you know what her response was?

"And who's that by?"

You're female, you're Black, you work in a book store and you're asking me who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin??!

Disappointed, disgusted, and resignedly rubbing my eyes,
~Mz. Liz