Dairy. But not really.

I love cheese crackers (or cheese flavored, anyway). I do. Cheez-its, Better Cheddars, Goldfish, those organic-wheat-flour-bunny crackers from Costco, Quaker Baked Cheddar Snack Mix. I'll even eat Cheese Nips if times are hard. What is this hold that enriched flour and synthetic cheese powder has over me?

This American Life

"When you've thought about your life as some slightly depressing, slightly boring novel lying on the bargain bookshelf, it's weird to have it end up on the bestseller rack, in the self-help section."

Swan Lake

Today I was walking through the RB and some kid (twelve or thirteen or fourteen--tops--years old) called out to me, "Hey, are you one of the dance professors?" I said no, I wasn't. Was he looking for one? He said he wasn't. I told him the dance department was on the second floor.

As I walked down the long hallway, heading back to the Fieldhouse, I analyzed why the kid might've asked me that. At first I thought, "ooo, maybe I LOOK like a dancer." You know, Balanchine body, hair pulled back (my hair is in a ponytail today, after all), graceful movements, all that sort of thing. But then I realized a few things, mainly that a) I do NOT have a Balanchine body and b) my hair doesn't look like the tight bun of a ballerina, but what it really is, which is a messy, wacked-curl mess, and c) I do not move gracefully; I'm always kicking things over and walking into door frames.

All of this musing happened over the space of several yards. The thing is, to that kid sitting on one of the couches, it probably looked like I had just walked out of one of the dance rooms. If I had walked out from, say, the vending machine alcove, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have asked. Maybe he would've said something more like, "Hey, is the vending machine out of Pop Tarts? or "Hey, do you have a quarter?"

Despite what I KNOW, it was still kind of nice to be asked, "Are you one of the dance professors?" I did dance once, of course. My mom stuck me in ballet at like age four or five (I fuzzily remember refusing to dance and hold some wand thing we were supposed to prance around with. Still had that pink tutu and leotard for years after). Then in middle school my parents decided I was sitting around too much and I took lessons at a dance studio in town for a couple of years. In high school I took a few classes and I even took a class in college. Stunning resume, I know. More than anything, dance just taught me to be more coordinated. Except that I still walk into the occasional door frame/ tree branch/ other person.

Options

Jobs I could not have:

1. Sports announcer

2. Butcher

3. Podiatrist

4. Sales clerk in, owner/manager of-- a party supplies store

5. Forklift driver (well, maybe for a little while)

6. Calculus teacher

7. Writer of trashy romance novels (Dear Danielle Steele, I am not strong enough to do what you do. That's kind of a backhanded compliment, but really a veiled insult. Sincerely, Amanda)

8. Manicurist

9. Pig farmer

10. Mary Kay consultant (no disrespect. Lots of people do it. I would be terrible at it.)

11. Professional golfer

12. Clothing designer for Lady GaGa

13. Owner of a rug store

14. Cookie factory worker

15. Conwoman

16. Librarian

17. Any occupation involving the harpsichord.

Resignation

I have come to accept that there are some things that I will never have, no matter how much I want them. Like freckles.

You Lucky Thing

This morning I was thinking about luck. There's this movie preview where this woman is sitting with a friend and they are watching her husband, who is a ways away, talking on his phone and the friend says, "you got really lucky" (referring to the husband) and the woman says, "yeah, I did."

What is luck anyway? I know Oprah or somebody says it's when "preparation meets opportunity." I used to really like that, but I'm not sure that I do anymore. Because I think we are sometimes "lucky" when we do nothing at all to deserve it: showing up at the grocery store when it's free soft serve day, finding a quarter on the street, getting to the stop just before the bus pulls away. People have good luck who aren't prepared at all, who don't do anything good. Sometimes really good, prepared people have bad luck: a bird poops on you, you step in gum, you forget to turn on your alarm and wake up late.

I've been thinking about grace lately too. I do not understand grace, but I know that I want it. To me, it seems like maybe what we call luck is really a form of grace. We don't deserve it, we don't see it coming, sometimes it shows up when we don't even know we need it--but it saves our patooshes and makes things more bearable. Maybe I'm mistaking grace for "tender mercies," but right now I'll keep calling it grace.

You know in the spring when blossoms are flying everywhere? Or that white cottony fluff is floating around and it gets on your car and stuck in your hair and it just seems to kind of levitate? I think grace is kind of like the cotton fluff, but it's not around just at one time of the year. It's always there, flying around and hitting you right in the face sometimes. And it hits everybody in the face, the elbow, behind the ear. Everybody gets some cotton fluff.

Brian Doyle has an essay called, "Grace Notes." I recommend it.

Candidates

What's not to love?

You KNOW you want to wrap one of these up. For me.



Give in.

I need some puppy in my life.

Deprivation

My family had a dog before I was born. His name was Marble. I have a few pictures, no memories. My brother, Greg has been known to tell me, "we had to get rid of the dog because of you" and "I'd rather have a dog than a little sister" and things like that. Or maybe it was Kyle or Dan. That sounds like something Kyle would have said when we were younger... Who knows. The good news is that my self-esteem has completely recovered.

I had a hamster named Lucy. We had three floppy-eared bunnies (Misty, Oliver and George). Kyle had a parakeet named Gilbert. Greg once had two mice--both named Andy. A little romance, and suddenly there were like ten other mice, all named Andy.

My mom once said that she felt that we kids were deprived because we never had a big trampoline. She felt kind of bad about that. We had one of those mini tramps used for jazzercise or something. The experience is not the same as a large trampoline--believe me. I was indeed deprived.

Which brings me to the main point: I want a puppy. You should give me a puppy. I always wanted a dog while growing up (minus the slobbering) and it is now the time to make my dreams a reality. I would feed it, walk it and it could sleep with me in my bed. This is completely logical. This is a good idea. You want to give me a puppy. You really, really want to. Do it.

The Year of Magical Thinking

When I was thirteen I read a lot of books by Lois Duncan. Killing Mr. Griffin, Summer of Fear, Daughters of Eve, Locked in Time, Crooked Window, Stranger with My Face, A Gift of Magic, The Third Eye, I Know What You Did Last Summer--to name a few. These books vary from being scary to suspenseful to kind of creepy. Thinking about it now, those seem like unusual choices for me. Those aren't the kind of books I generally gravitate towards (at that same time I was also reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and things like that). Anyway. I remember being in 7th or 8th grade and browsing the oh-so-impressive Wood Middle School library--home of great literature that it was--and finding Who Killed My Daughter, also by Lois Duncan. It is about five times thicker than her other books and it is further different in that it is a book about her own life: the murder of her daughter and her search to find the killer. A paragraph break seems necessary, so...

It is a long and dry book. Filled with cryptic transcripts from meetings she had with psychics and an instance in a run-down barn where she feels the presence of her daughter's murderer, but never actually sees him. A spoiler is coming up, so if you want to read the book, stop here. She never finds out who killed her daughter. It was a drive-by-shooting, I believe. At that time, it was a disappointment to me. I didn't understand a book written as a way for the author to figure things out for herself. The concept of writing as journey wasn't something I was familiar with--especially not from Duncan who, up to that point, had given me suspenseful, two-hundred-pages-or-less books that were entertaining, but hardly thought provoking and even less apt to draw my attention to the experience or metacognitive process of the author.

Today I finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In some ways it reminds me of Duncan's book. It is Joan Didion's attempt to deal with the death of her husband, John. Maybe "deal with" isn't even the right phraseology for what I'm trying to express. In some ways it is really just a record. There are times and dates and medical information and how-she-felt-at-this-moment, etc. By the end of it I wasn't taking away some message or statement on death--Didion herself didn't seem to the point of having a philosophy or understanding of death or life or fate or whatever. It is interwoven with memories and scenes in which you get the flavor and weight of their marriage--yet it is always, always enshrouded in a retrospective feeling. She is always looking back. And I felt that I, like she herself, wasn't sure what she was really seeing anyway.

Her husband died December 30th, 2003. She started writing the book less than a year later, in October of 2004. At that time I was in my second month as BYU. Eighteen. Freaked out. Losing control. I wish I had known that Joan Didion was writing this book at that same time. I think it would have been comforting, but I really don't know why.

She dedicates the book to her husband and her daughter. She was writing for them, sure--but really, it seems like she was writing for herself. It's not an exciting book. It's not a suspenseful book. It's not even really intense. It is steady and honest. As I was reading it I felt like I was doing so for Joan. Sounds stupid and sappy, I know, but the whole books feels like a sounding board in a way. As though by reading it I became someone to listen to her--so she could bounce ideas off of me, try to make sense of it. It's insightful. But not heavily so. There are phrases she repeats over an over--not so much like motifs as much as a kind of string or chain that leads you around and around, in a gently shifting cycle.

It is, essentially, a book about grief. Not mourning, but grief. There is a difference. Didion defines it. Read and find out.

Overall, I liked it. There were, of course, a ton of references to events, people, etc from the sixties and seventies that I was completely ignorant of.

"Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself." -The Year of Magical Thinking, pg 189

Free Stuff

So, Kegan and I signed up for the Teenage and Adult Summer Reading Program at the library today. I am excited. Before I tell you all about it I would like to give a shout out to Katie and Bryan, two great people who feed us lasagna, let us borrow folding chairs, told us about the SRP, and never read/see this blog (or in fact know that it exists). So, ahem: SHOUT OUT (just imagine me holding up my pointer and middle finger, kissing the tips of them and then holding them out towards you. Think LL Cool J).

So, we just have to read three books (is there a catch? Yes: they must be at least 100 pages long. If this sounds daunting, I suggest you do not register. It gets worse. I'll get to that later). After each book, you have to write a review (okay, now it's later, and that was the "worse" part), which you may submit online . Each time you submit a review, you are entered for a drawing to win that week's prize. This could be anything from stuff like restaurant gift cards to a Wii. Seriously. I wouldn't lie about this kind of thing. Katie and Bryan told me and they don't lie either. When you've read all three, you get a free t-shirt (that really got me. I love a good free t-shirt).

I'm sure you're wondering what books I'm going to read. And I will tell you: I don't know. I just started reading the Narnia books, but I'm not sure that those are going to be THE books. Honestly, I started reading them because I had to go to work and I needed to take something and (being on the verge of lateness, as always), I didn't have time to deliberate and choose something. I wasn't ready to make that kind of a commitment to a book I DON'T EVEN KNOW. So, I snatched up some C.S. Lewis.

I lost a book for about three months last year (it was in my car) and I know I have a massive fine on my card. They wouldn't disqualify me for something like that... would they?

Night Light

If you go to sleep earlier, it's easier to get up earlier the next morning. You may even have time to do your hair.