More gym issues...

I think I just have to accept that, rather than a steady pull that builds like a literal snowball from the really annoying awkward shuffling around just sort of patting a tiny ball in the snow to a giant cartoon pinwheel of snow thundering down the side of a mountain, my efforts at self-improvement will happen in broken fits and starts sort of like a manual car being driven by someone who doesn't know how to drive stick.  Momentum is not something I will ever have on my side.

In the end, I think, the best I can hope for is to cut the time between each new effort down more and more until it might seem, to an outside observer, that they are, in fact, all one consolidated effort.

Tonight was yet another of those renewed efforts.

A month or two ago Kara put me on a two week challenge to eat better and to work out regularly.  The requirements were: breakfast every day, followed by at least one other real meal a reasonable number of hours later, including one serving of fruit and one of vegetables every day; cardio three times a week; and some sort of strength building twice a week.  I think I came up short some cardio both weeks, and the eating fell apart on the weekends, but overall it was a good experience.  Then the two weeks were over and I entered into the two weeks of insanity at work.  My tender little habit seedlings didn't stand a chance and were crushed mercilessly under the boot-heels of 10-12 hour work days.  As is my custom, after the crazy work subsided I made no attempt to reinstate Kara's regimen.  I think since then I've been to the gym 2-3 times.

But what is life but a daily opportunity to improve today what you failed to do yesterday?

So tonight I went to the gym.  I did not want to.  But I went and was blessed in the form of Ever After playing in the cardio cinema.  With credits, I arrived an almost perfect 30 minutes before the end of the movie.  It was like Fate or Jesus metaphorically patting my head and rewarding me with a biscuit.

I ran my customary 15 seconds to crank my heart rate up to near-heart-attack rates as quickly as possible.  The great irony of my life these days is the fact that I actually could theoretically run longer--perhaps 30-45 seconds even.  And the struggle is not, as you might be thinking, the bosom issue.  I have acquired an impressive torture device sports bra that manages to lift and compress my chest into a sort of clavicle-level squshd boob battering ram that minimizes the bouncing from a full on coordinated beating and smothering to simply a muted pounding on my chest.  The side effects of this impressive piece of engineering have been winnowed down to a feeling that my lungs are slightly collapsed and basic arrhythmia as the pounding on my chest confuses my heart as to which rhythm it should actually be following.  Both of which are completely manageable.

No, in the end, it is a different jiggle problem that stops me running.  As it turns out, I am fat.  And my particular fat likes to hang out in two major places: boobs and waist.  The boob situation may be under control, but alas, the waist remains free to jiggle all it wants.  And jiggle it does, to the point that after only a few steps I am in danger of my shorts shimmying right off.  And while it may be dark in the cardio cinema room, I am confident that it is not yet dark enough that no one would notice the shining white legs of the girl whose pants fell off whilst she was running on the treadmill.  Thus, every few steps I have to jump off the belt and hitch my shorts up, then jump back on and run for a few more steps.  Why there are not people working on solving this problem I do not know, because I do know I'm not the only one suffering.  In the end, it is my frustration with this ritual which puts an end to my running, not my lungs, heart, or even legs.  Oh irony, truly thou art a bitch...

Sadly, tonight was not the night I conquered the bros and the machines.

Instead I came home and improvised some very technical body-weight and strength exercises.  One of the bonuses of being fat is that you come with weights built in and ready to go.  If, however, I feel that I need to augment my own natural heft I have managed to find a successful free weight alternative.  Because who wants to buy fancy rubber-gripped weights if you don't have to?  Owning  a 12" cast iron gnome means you don't have to.  Miles actually makes a really good free weight.  And somehow, lifting a gnome is just more fun than lifting a boring dumbell.

And so tonight I began again the endless battle.  Attempting to take control of my life and my body.  Fat jiggles and free weight gnomes and all.  Tomorrow I am hoping to make it to the grocery store after my hair appointment to restock on yogurt so I can make another attempt at being a person who eats breakfast.  Somehow telling the interwebs about the struggle helps, so I shall try to continue to update on my repeated attempts.  Wish me luck!

Thoughts on a night out...

Did you listen to that song?  If not, please stop reading for a second, scroll back up, and click play.  Then you may continue reading.

Tonight I attended the Punch Brother's show in Park City.  The song you should now be listening to was the song with which they opened their set and it was, if you can believe it, even better in person than that recording.

I was able to attend because of the truly magnificent generosity of my dear Matt, who decided that I needed to experience Punch Brothers live and so bought me a ticket as a birthday gift (somewhat prematurely, as my birthday is not till September).

Technically he bought me two tickets, though I intend to repay him for the second.  The goal was for me to bring someone to the show with me.  Unfortunately, it turns out that none of my friends love me enough to come see a band in Park City that most of them have never heard of, which hurt to discover, btw you guys (or, in the case of a few, they HAD heard of the band, they just had lame excuses like poverty or hanging out with their wife's sister who was in town for a short while).

As such, I ended up attending alone.  Which was fine except for the part where all of my witty conversation and observations were wasted with no one to hear and inevitably appreciate them. Which is why I'm sharing them with you all now.

So, without further ado, here is a small selection of the conversations I WOULD have had tonight, had I had anyone to have them with....

....wow...it turns out I did not need to leave nearly so early to get up here.  How shall I pass the hour and 45 minutes until the show starts?  Staring at nothing?  Sounds good....

....these people in front of me literally just pulled out 5 bottles of wine...

....This opening act is so boring that I'm daydreaming about getting a blood clot in my leg from this chair so I can leave to go take care of it...

....HOLY COW I LITERALLY CANNOT HANDLE WHAT AMAZING MUSICIANS THESE MEN ARE!!!....

mostly a picture of the drunk people in front of me, but also of the band all tiny at the front

....dude seriously, this song is so great....

....Chris Thile!  So nerdy!  So adorable!  Might very possibly be the most awkward dancer in the entire world.  Half the time he dances like Scott Pilgrim, the other half like he just needs to pee reeeeeally bad.  He is an even more awkward dancer than Chris Martin....

....Dear Utah, please stop being so tacky and leaving 10-40 minutes early so you can "beat the traffic"....

....And THAT is how you play a bass solo!....

....My mind is still being blown by these guys.  Totes 100% worth it!....

....WHAAAA????  Is he seriously busting out his Bach right now?!  From memory of course.  And this huge crowd of drunk people is actually digging it?  Aw yissssss....


....they drank all five bottles of wine, one bottle per person.  How are they getting home?....

....SHIRT!....

....Oh crap.  I may never get home.  I am 1000% lost on this mountain.  I will die here.  I wonder if anyone besides my mom will miss me.  Oh, this is the road I'm supposed to be on.  Ok, we're good....

....Dear Heber McDonald's:  You might have very fancy bathrooms and a confusing layout, but you gave me diet Dr. Pepper (so nasty) and onions on my hamburger.  We are not friends.....

....Who knew driving Heber canyon at night would be so fun!  I should maybe slow down?  I'll probably definitely get a ticket if a cop sees me.  And animals?  But...Gypsy Kings are singing "I Did It My Way" in Spanish and my speeds remain marginally safe and if I do crash at least there's no one else in the car to die with me! WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Prompt 19: Another Picture of Myself

Dude, seriously?  You had such a hard time coming up with prompts that you included "a picture of yourself" three times? (it's also the prompt for the last day)  Come up with better prompts.

seems pretty accurate.

What's that?  You want a different one?  Ok...

This is possibly my favorite picture of me ever.  Possibly.




Can you tell I'm blasting through these trying to get caught up?

Prompt 5: A Photo Of Myself Two Years Ago

This is, quite possibly, the best picture of me to exist in the entire world.  It was inspired by this blog post from The Bloggess.  If you don't know who the Bloggess is then I really have to question our friendship.  Well, I say inspired by, but who are we kidding.  The minute I saw this gigantic metal chicken just hanging out on the side of the road I knew I was going to have a picture with it.  It was whole minutes after that that I remembered The Bloggess and Beyonce.  There was actually a whole series of photos taken that day, featuring, in addition to myself, the wonderful Callie and Summer.  We literally drove out to Home Depot with no other goal in life but to take pictures with this vast menagerie of cast iron/aluminum (the chicken was aluminum) creatures that this man had put out for purchase.  It was the best possible use of a day.  And for good measure, here are pictures of Callie and Summer posing with some of the other, slightly more reasonably sized animals

This was Summer and the Bear's engagement shoot

Callie cradling a baby t-rex...presh!

Come back tomorrow to find out what kind of animal I wish I had for a pet.  Feel free to post guesses in the comments...

Graduation: A Summary

I am a college graduate.

In a matter of two days I crossed the threshold from student to…bachelor? Plain old label-less human? At any rate, not a student. Thursday, out-going university president Cecil Samuelson “bestowed” upon me and one or two thousand others a degree, the physical manifestation of which will arrive in a couple of weeks via the thoroughly unceremonious United States Postal Service. Friday I was handed an empty vinyl cover in which that magical piece of paper will eventually reside.  I shook the hands of men I'd never before laid eyes on and walked from one side of a stage to the other. Thusly was my education declared complete and my life, as a student, pronounced over. 

If all of this sounds like I am terribly prosaic and unsentimental, I am. If you recall, I have previously declared a complete apathy for engaging in the ceremonial hoop-jumping known as walking for graduation. To me a nine year bachelor’s degree feels less like something to celebrate than something to just get over with as soon as possible…    

The problem is that, though probably less so than it was in high school, a student’s graduation is by no means an achievement which belongs solely or even mostly to them. Even a relatively self-sufficient person like me is still indebted to her parents to some extent, albeit perhaps more in intangibles than otherwise*. Hence I feel that all this pomp and circumstance surrounding graduation is not so much for the graduate’s sake as for the family’s. Which is why I decided not to let my graduation pass silently in the night like my brother. Well, that and I was hoping for congratulatory cash donations. Because I’m classy like that. And poor. Mostly poor. 

Unfortunately, letting your family celebrate your achievements isn’t exactly fun for them when you yourself couldn’t care less about them. In fact, I can tell you from my own experience that it’s actually incredibly irritating and insulting. So it behooved me to strive after some level of engagement in the hoopla which, after all, was specifically for me (and also Dan). 

Alas, behoovement does not engagement make. 

It doesn’t help that there are apparently only two questions anyone can think to ask you post-graduation.  “Do you feel any different?” and “So what’s next?” These are especially trying when you have weaned yourself out of school as gradually as I have. I had exactly zero changes pending the ceremony and, in fact, slightly resented it for awkwardly interrupting my regular schedule. If nothing else, this makes for dull conversation—though I discovered on Sunday that it is still preferable to the guy who uses his congratulations to humblebrag about his own self-funded education, graduation, and consequent disposal of student debt 25 years ago (after his fourth or fifth assertion of hatred at the idea of dragging that debt around with him I was forced to reply “Oh really?  Because I just love it!” because I can only handle so much humblebragging)

In the end, I guess I can be grateful to the fifteen year campaign my brother and I have inadvertently waged upon my mother to strip her of any vestige of hope for a nice family moment. Sadly, we not only lack sentimentality for educational milestones, but for pretty much every other thing my mom cares about. Because my mom is practically nothing but sentiment. Poor woman was somehow cursed with two pragmatically stoic children who could never satisfy her need for heartfelt and teary-eyed moments. But despite my mom’s enduring optimism on this front, Dan’s and my war of attrition has, at least, conditioned her to accept an incredibly low level of participation as satisfactory. She’s like an emotional migrant worker living through the Dust Bowl years of her children’s lives—she can make do with practically nothing. 

This is not to say that I didn’t try. I sincerely tried to glean wisdom from [stay awake through] the speeches, even the incredibly pompous student speaker on Friday. I rebuked myself when snarky commentary about all the arbitrary traditions rose, unbidden, to my lips. I even pulled out Rory’s graduation from Yale to strive after inspiration.

Alas, it was all in vain.  I am as I am; incredibly unimpressed with the ceremony of graduating college.

Luckily, as anyone who has ever talked to me about my birthday can attest, I do love any occasion where my friends and family get together, especially if it involves presents and/or food (as we all know, food is kind of like a very frequent gift to your mouth, so they’re basically the same thing).  Therefore, on that front—that is, the front where tradition dictates the giving of some sort of graduation gift—I found the weekend to be quite nice.

Of course, I admit this with some embarrassment, though my feelings on being an enthusiastic receiver of gifts should probably wait for another post.  Suffice it to say, I have a feeling that it is generally deemed tacky to openly admit that you look forward to events for the presents.  But in this case my natural tackiness came to my assistance, buoying me up to find some enjoyment in an otherwise boring and rather inconvenient weekend.  If I couldn’t muster a tear for the ending of an era, at least I could easily smile for the bouquet of lovely flowers I received to commemorate it!

Thus my favorite part of my graduation weekend had nothing to do with actually graduating, save that it was the occasion that brought us together. And that was our big dinners Thursday and Friday nights. All four of my parents were there (a first-time experience that I very much enjoyed) as well as some of my closest friends. There was delicious food and even a couple really fantastic gifts. 

I am left wishing that it didn’t require some arbitrary ceremony or “milestone” for people who love each other to get together and eat and even give each other presents. If I had the money, I would make weekends like this happen far more often…only without the polyester robes, ridiculous hats, and time wasted in uncomfortable chairs. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be left with a vague feeling of failure at the end. Regardless, I am glad that I got to see my family this weekend, and even that I graduated, though that’s more in an abstract, reasoned sense than any sort of emotional response. That’s how I feel. 

And before you ask, I don’t know what’s next…

*Let us pause a moment for the obligatory disclaimer about how I’m making some assumptions here and that I acknowledge that actually there are plenty of kids who may not have anything at all to thank their parents for and I’m sorry if they’re feeling marginalized right now and they have my sincere apologies

Twilight: slasher fiction for the emotionally starved...

So my friend Danielle and I have this thing where we go and watch whatever Twilight movie happens to be out and we laugh hysterically.  It worked well for Twilight and New Moon.  She was out of the country for Eclipse so I missed that one, but I hear she went and saw it down in Brazil and laughed enough for both of us.  She has recently moved out to New York to be fabulous, but she's back in town for a few days visiting for Christmas so we figured we'd better get us to a late showing of Breaking Dawn 1.0

if your goal is mocking this seems promising, right?

What. The. Hell.

What the hell is that movie?  I'm sorry to be vulgar, but that is really all I can say, over and over.

So, for people like me who had no idea what was going on, here's a rundown.  I actually was just going through doing a play by play but it was taking way too long.  Especially when I realized that this movie is really just four things: wedding, honeymoon, express pregnancy, and delivery.  That's all you need to know.  They get married, they go on a honeymoon, she gets pregnant with the demon baby of death, and then she gives birth to said baby.  And somehow they stretch that into a movie just 3 minutes shy of 2 hours.

But that makes it sound sort of normal.  Oh no.  My first serious "this is wacked out!" alarm went off when she wakes up from her wedding night.  She's all gooey eyed remembering how beautiful it all was and then Edward walks in and asks her how bad she's hurt.  Then he pulls up her sleeves and you see his little fingerprints all over her arms and shoulders.   Suddenly you get a whole new perspective on abusive relationships as you listen to him abjectly apologize for hurting her, swear he never meant to and he'll never do it again, and listen to her get angry with him for...not for hurting her, but for refusing to hurt her even more.  What the what?  He sticks to it for a couple days and all the booty shorts and little negligees in the world won't sway him...until she wakes up from a dream crying cause he just doesn't want her...BLECH!

But that was nothing compared to Gollum!Bella of creeptastic pregnancy emaciation.  The emotional manipulation that happened between her and Jacob.  The bizarre militancy of Rosalee standing guard over PregnantGollum!Bella.  The sippy cup'o'blood to keep sweet li'l baby happy.  The abrupt change in Edward from baby loathing to baby worship.  All of it leading up to a scene that I don't think I'll ever be able to erase from my memory...the Vampire C-Section of Horror.  This is what happens, absolutely no exaggeration.  Bella, Edward, Alice, Rose, and Jacob are having tender bonding times when Bella drops her Cup'o'Blood as Edward hands it to her.  She dives after it and breaks her own back.  She falls, breaking her knees, and is about to splat her little head on the tiles till Edward dashes forward to catch her.  This sends her into labor, but Carlisle is out catching a bite, so it's up to Rose, Alice, Edward, and Jacob to deliver the little one.  Bella is lying there on the delivery table, back still broken, and the rest stand around at a loss till Edward says the baby is suffocating and Bella screams to get him out.  Jacob stands in as the husband, holding her hand and shouting at her to hang in there as Edward snatches up a scalpel and slices open her stomach.  Unfortunately, her uterus has become vampirized and scalpels are useless against it...so Edward rips it open with his teeth!  He comes up with his face covered in in his wife's blood and starts cooing over his new little girl!  Everyone just stands there!  No one thinks "Oh hey!  This woman has just had her stomach and uterus ripped open and may be hemorrhaging out, plus her back is broken.  This may be a good time to vampirize her completely...you know...while she's still alive."  Oh no.  No one even thinks "Oh hey, daddy might want to wipe some of the blood off his face."  They just stare at the baby, watch it take a bit out of it's mother, and coo over how cute it is.  Until Bella stops breathing that is.  Edward finally realizes his wife is in bad shape and hands the baby off to Rose.  He takes out a syringe of "vampire venom" and jams it into her heart.  When that doesn't appear to work he just starts sinking his teeth into her at random, a visual accompanied by a truly cringe-inducing squelching sound.  Nothing seems to be working, and he cries and Jacob cries and Bella looks like dead Gollum.  Oh.  But inside she's becoming a vampire and screaming her head off.  But you can't tell.  She just looks dead and sad.

I would post a picture...but you can't find any

 pictures of a scene that horrifying!  What does

that tell you?

You know what?  Forget the fact that Jacob then imprints on a baby girl.  Forget everything else about this movie--the bad acting, the horrible special effects, even the other questionable plot points.  What the HELL was that scene?  How do people go and watch that and still think that this is a great, beautiful, powerful love story?  What was that!?  I can't ask enough because I can't get an answer.  I walked out of the theatre so disturbed and so confused and so completely creeped out that all I could say was "why did we see that movie again?" over and over and over.

More Pad Thai and Dog Hair...

...but not together.

Not that it is particularly helpful, but in my ongoing quest for the best Thai food in Provo, I decided to try a Thai restaurant down here in Phoenix.  I'm down visiting my dad, and my step-mom is out of town, so it's been dinner out every night.  I figured, why waste a great opportunity for Thai food, right?  So I looked up the best Thai restaurants in Chandler (the suburb where my dad actually lives) and found The Mint Thai Cafe (be warned, the site plays a little blurb of music when you click on it).  It was not the number one rated Thai restaurant, that one was too far away.  But it was a pretty well rated one.  Plus, my dad said he'd been there before and thought it was good.  So away we went.

It was...fine.  I mean, the food was good.  I got my traditional Pad Thai and dad got something called "Siamese Twins" (I find the hyper Asian stereotyped names these places come up with to be vaguely insulting...to pretty much everyone involved) that involved bamboo shoots and coconut and green beans.  I advised him to get this dish  based on the existence of green beans which, as everyone knows, are the world's greatest vegetable.  I couldn't try much of his because it was spicy and I'm a complete pansy when it comes to hot food.  But what I tasted in my one bite before my tongue started writhing was very good.  Mark up another win for green beans.

My Pad Thai was also pretty good.  The flavor of the sauce was quite nice, though I find I prefer my Pad Thai a little juicier than most people make it.  These guys went quite dry, even more than usual.  But there was plenty of chicken and even egg, which I do appreciate since it adds a bit of variety to a dish that can get a little monotonous.  When I asked for my side of lime the woman brought me a dish of lemon slices.  Apparently the only lime they had wasn't looking too fresh and she didn't want to give it to me.  I appreciate that I guess.  The waitress herself was a little eccentric, but pretty good I think.  All in all, I found The Mint Thai Cafe to be satisfactory.  Decent food, decent service, decent prices.  Probably, if I ever get Thai food down here again I'll try a different place.  But if you ever need a place to have dinner and you're craving Thai, you could do much worse than eat there.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

this is what I found when I did an image search for dog hair...
not really want I wanted, but too dang cute to pass up

Visiting my dad is quite an endeavor.  You see, my dad and my step-mom own five dogs (plus my cat, which he's now trying to tell me belongs to my step-brother...pshaw...).  Cristy has a thing for Corgis, so they have four of them, plus an older, giant German Shepherd.  All of the dogs are pretty good tempered and since they're corgis it's not as if they can really jump up on your nice clean shirt.  However, all five of them are indoor dogs, all with permission to exist on the furniture.  This all means that at any given moment, pretty much every surface in the house has dog hair on it.  I find the ubiquity of dog hair in this place to be...somewhat trying.  I don't want to go to church and spend the first 20 minutes trying to pick all the hair off my skirt.  

I have found my intense dislike of doghair generally translates into a dislike of the dogs which produce it.  Any time my dad's dogs try to insinuate themselves into my affections I push them callously away.  See, that's one thing I don't like about dogs.  They try too hard to get you to love them.  Everyone knows you shouldn't be desperate for friends...  Cats, on the other hand, do a very good job of exuding the "Yes, I know you're responsible for my daily food and water, but don't let that fool you into thinking I wouldn't eat you if you died..." (this is a fact.  house cats will eat the body of their deceased owner if they run out of food...).  The point is that dogs, unlike cats, are just desperate for you to love them.  Hence, the moment I sit down on the couch at least one of the dogs will jump up next to me and lay his head in my lap and look up at me appealingly as if to ask me "Now really...how can you say no to real, legitimate puppy eyes???"  

I have managed to rebuff these efforts now for several years, but this year I find myself faltering a little.  One of the dogs is quite old and goes by the name of Jax.  He doesn't force himself on me, he just comes and quietly sits nearby just in case I should decided to pat his head.  He has taken, on this visit, to sleeping in my bedroom, not on the bed, just in a corner.  To be honest, I feel like I'm being courted by someone who is keenly aware of the sort of courtship I would not be able to resist.  I feel weak that I'm succumbing to his charms.  But at the same time...it's just a dog.  Everyone loves dogs (or at least cats or birds...whatever you have as a pet).  It does not reflect poorly on me because I happen to also like dogs.  After all, I love my kitty unabashedly.  So I guess I'll grudgingly accept Jax as my friend...

Reminiscing

So, as I was walking home the other day I happened to look down upon the ground at exactly the right moment to see a little pink tube of chapstick laying under a shrub.  Instantly a memory popped into my head from way back in my freshman year of college.

*cue rippley flashback screen*

So, my freshman year of college was spent in the dorms, specifically DT, U Hall, 2nd floor.  I came to a school that actually practices curfew, which in practical terms means that precisely at midnight all the doors into the buildings lock up tight and the only way to get in is if you have your ID card and you're supposed to be in that building.  Swipe the card and you're in...forget your card and you're basically SOL.

Pathetic as my life was my freshman year, I did manage to find a couple of friends who were willing to overlook my extreme social eccentricity and hang out with me.  We established my freshman year tradition of walking to the Dollar Theatre for the midnight movie (we walked because none of us owned a car).  These were good times.  Let's face it, a girl straight out of high school...the freedom of staying out till 3 in the morning with no parents to object was a heady thing.  I cherished those Friday nights.

I cherished them, that is, after I got the hang of my new dorm.  Our first expedition went well until I got home.  It was at this point that I realized that I didn't have my ID card.  And it was 3 am.  And both my friends were gone, to their own respective homes.  Ahhh.......

Lucky for me, I discovered that I had a fellow nocturnal creature on my floor--recall I was lucky enough to live on the second floor.  There was one light on.  But how to get her attention?  Being the intelligent, problem solving, straight A student that I am, I came up with a great solution!  Throw something at her window!  Now I just needed to find something to throw.

If you care to know, there was a shocking dearth of small rocks in the general vicinity of Deseret Towers.  All I could find on the ground was wood chips and they lacked the necessary mass to create any sort of sound on impact.  On to things on my person.  There was not much.  There were my keys and my chapstick.  The keys I thought perhaps too heavy, but the chapstick...

You have to understand something about this chapstick.  You see, while I was giddy with the freedom of college life, I still missed home.  Quite a lot.  To assuage my melancholy my mother sent me the first and only care package I was ever to receive from her (no point in coddling me, after all).  Within said package were useful things like chicken soup, lime green plastic cups, and a potato peeler.  My mother is a pragmatic soul.  Also included was a tube of strawberry chapstick--I'm not quite sure why it was there considering the fact that I had never used chapstick my whole life, but she thought it prudent to include.  Perhaps because I was so unfamiliar with the product, I was deeply struck by the flavor...strawberry!  Who'd ever heard of strawberry chapstick?!  You couldn't find that anywhere!  My mother must really love me to find strawberry chapstick to put in my package.  I will carry it with me everywhere as a talisman of her love!

Remember how I said I was a touch eccentric back then?

The point is, I had a sentimental attachment to this chapstick.  Ridiculous, yes; real, very.  So here I am at 3 in the morning, stranded outside of my dorm, with this tube of chaptsick in my hand, preparing to throw it at one of my dorm-mates' windows.  I haul back and throw and...it hits the brick next to the window and falls back to the ground.  No problem, I'll just go grab it and throw it again.........I'll just grab it........hmm.......I know its here somewhere.............Let me just look a little bit harder................perhaps if I get down on my knees I will see it more easily..................

It was at this moment that some nice couple, out enjoying each other's company perhaps a little later than necessary, walked around the corner to discover me rooting about in the shrubbery that surrounded the building.  Judging by their expressions, they had several ideas of what I was doing, none of which were remotely close to the truth.  However, bless their hearts, they stopped and asked me if I was ok and when I pathetically related to them the fate of my beloved chapstick--because this was IMPORTANT--they both came and squatted down and helped me look.  And yet, even with all three pairs of eyes looking, the chapstick remained lost.  Finally, in despair, I sent them away.

Of course, as soon as they were out of sight it occurred to me that not only had I lost my chapstick, but I was also still locked out of my dorm and now I was again without a projectile.  Aw crap.  But, putting my keene problem solving mind again to the problem, I quickly found a solution.  The beauty of living in the dorms your freshman year is that your RA gives you magnificently useful things to "keep you safe".  Like the Rape Whistle.  This clever little device is given you to prevent your imminent rape.  Because, on the off chance that your rapist approaches you from a distance and alerts you in advance "I'm going to rape you, so if you have any means of defending yourself or summoning aide, you should probably get that out now," you can pull out your trusty whistle from the depths of your pocket and blow gustily till he punches you in the face.  Yes, its a handy tool that no freshman girl should be without.

Being the good, rule following girl that I was raised to be, however, I had dutifully attached my rape whistle to my key chain.  It was not without some satisfaction, then, that I pulled it off that night thinking "you know, I thought this would come in handy some time,".  After several tries (I've never had particularly good aim) I finally managed to hit the window with the whistle...and after a few more, I managed it with enough force that I actually produced a sound.  An ID card changed hands, and I quickly let myself into my dorm.

The story doesn't end there, however.  You see, I could not abandon my chapstick so easily.  Yes, I really was still stuck on that.  Having gained access to my room, I procured a flashlight (and my own ID card) and returned to the shrubs to hunt.  15 minutes later I was still doomed to dry lips forever.  It was no good.  My chapstick had vanished from the face of the earth.  I was, needless to say, quite heartbroken.

But never let it be said that I gave up on something without giving it my full effort (ok, so I've done that several times...but this wasn't one of them).  The next day I sprang forth out of my bed with a mission.  I was going to go back down there in the daylight and reign vengeance down on those shrubs until they yielded up my strawberry chapstick.  I was determined.  I was energized.  I was powerful and nothing could stop me.  I marched forth out of my dorm and over to those shrubs with what I imagine was much the same sort of resolve a firefighter might feel as he returns to the burning building the third time to find the last stranded victim he knows is in there.  And there, lying innocently on the ground, with what I imagine to be the nearest thing to a smug grin an inanimate tube of plastic can manage, was my stupid chapstick.  It wasn't even hidden.  Nor was it in some alternate location to where we'd been searching.  No.  It was right there.  Right in front of my face.  It had caused me so much anxiety and now it thought it could just waltz back into my pocket as though nothing had happened.  Geez.  Some people's kids...

*Rippley flash-back effect brings us back to the present*

I didn't pick up that chapstick I saw under the shrub yesterday.  After all, someone might miss it.

A kiwi