Her royal majesty, asleep

When you get a biographical fortune

It's basically a line out of my Meyers Briggs

Shoes

Just a friendly reminder that my dog moves my shoes to wherever she is while I'm at work. Because she needs something to cuddle with. 

A week or so of photos

Gracie facing down the neighborhood emu. 

Forest fire on the left. Clear skies on the right. 

Yoga skeleton 

Wearing the primary colors: black, white, and mustard yellow. 

Staring down the barrel of existential dread

Cate had a hard thing happen one time because people made bad choices. I offered to go with her on a trip to do all the hard things but only in spirit because MONEY DOESN'T GROW ON TREES and what not. But in the course of the conversation, Cate and I decided that we would *theoretically* cope with the terrible things on our fake trip by journaling, talking about life and staring down the barrel of existential doom. 

And sometimes for basically no reason. And sometimes for a reason, life feels like that. You just wake up staring down the barrel and it's all you can do to shove it aside and like, get out of bed. 

And that was today for me. 

Stretchy Lizard Sunning on a Rock

Seen on my walk with the puppy today. 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Years ago, before the boy who recommended my favorite books married someone else, he told me to read this one over Christmas break. The main character was everything I view myself to be. And there are women of power, grace and pain. A beautiful scene where someone learns to love a child. 

And tonight I watched the movie and I cried three times. It wouldn't have been as good without the book, but it was beautiful and moving and I wanted to text the boy. The one i always counted on my back burner. But I couldn't. And I didn't. And I thought. 

Well isn't that the point? 

Learning to love someone else when you realize the one before wasn't enough? 

Choosing a Book

Which do I read first? The one that will keep me up tonight or the one that will make me laugh? 

Get Yourself a Friend Like Kyle

I was having some technical difficulties, so obviously the next question was how am I supposed to get married? Because melodrama!

Adoptaversary

Happy third adoptaversary to my main girl. 

Took her out to Sandy Beach to celebrate. She has been my very favorite thing about life these last few years. Here's to many more years to come. 

View from an Evening Stroll

Birthday Bike Ride

Wouldn't be a birthday ride without this lady and her muddy muddy paws. 

Dating apps are sometimes awkward

Android

When you give your phone number to someone on mutual and see the dreaded green arrow. Texting android users is the worst. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHEN YOU ARE RESPONDING?!

Literary train of thought

How Democracies Die lead to The Plot Against America which lead to Brave New World which lead to The Feminine Mystique which lead to The Handmaid's Tale which lead to my current book The Bell Jar. Read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Maggie Gyllenhaal!

Were you aware that the protagonist in The Bell Jar is five ten? 

I killed my demons at Ulta today

Get yourself a friend like Kristin. 

And also some nail polish like mine. $4.97

MC Escher, finding what you didn't come for, and my recent literary luck

Today was Alta's last day at the job we both moved to two years ago. We went to dinner and the BYU Museum of Art to celebrate her new job. In classic fashion, I ordered sweet potato fries and dessert because sometimes you just have to order exactly what you want to eat. We ate on the patio because it was the perfect spring evening. We talked about life and change and times of transition. We talked about feeling peace in the face of the unknown. I'm about to make a big life change and I feel so collected about it, just as Alta does about this life change. I have no idea exactly why I'm going to make this change other than that I have this overwhelming sense of peace and purpose that it's what I'm meant to do. 

The MC Escher exhibit was fantastic. But on the way out we stopped at this exhibit about refugees. It ended up being the real reason we were there. Dana Gluckstein's exhibit Dignity: Tribes in Transition was powerful and fragile and so personal. Alta began to cry. Touched by the humanity and the way we all work and struggle and find meaning. What else could she do? 

For information about the exhibit: click here

http://photokunst.com/photographer_detail.php?artist_id=21&collection_id=49&display=50

It's free and you will love it. 

I saw a painting I knew I needed for my bedroom, recently painted serenely gray. 

As we walked into the parking lot, the Carillon bells played Come Thou Fount and Alta began to cry again. Because it was all so assured and unassuming.I made her let me take a picture of the moment because a year from now things will be wonderful and at peace and she needs to remember today when that happens. 

Hair

Going lighter with the hair so wish me luck with that. 

Siri Fail

No Siri, I just want to listen to Janis Joplin

When in Rome

When you get a ridiculous pickup line, it's best to respond in kind. 

But seriously. With wit like that, HOW am I still single? 

Charming

Last night I went on a first date. It had been a rough day. Grandma in the ICU and grandpa at my house in excruciating pain. The nice young man asked me if I would need to reschedule and I told him no, I could use a little break and was looking forward to being charmed. 

I showed up 30 minutes late to dinner. Not that being late bothers me, but 30 minutes is a little much. He didn’t mind. It turned out that when I said I want to be charmed, he went and bought me flowers. But he said, “But not normal flowers because you can plant these, and then if I turn out to be a jerk you can smash them.”

So that's like perfect. 

1971

This is my favorite of my recent resolutions. There are a few great things about it. 

1- Hearing a song from a TV show or movie and realizing that they carefully curated music from the right year.

2 - Seeing a song that you love but have totally forgotten about. Today it was Maggie May by Rod Stewart.

3 - When someone asks about what year a song was released, knowing the answer. 

As I was talking to one of the emergency medicine doctors, he said he thought it would’ve been better if I chose to listen to the top rock songs from every year, because I’ve just been doing the top 20 songs in general. I think he has a good point because when I hit 1973, I don’t think I’m even going to hear Dream On by Aerosmith and somehow that just seems wrong to me. 

True Friendship

Universal truth

Today I acknowledged fully that sometimes when you feel like you are a sad fatty you just have to go back home, ditch the scrubs and Nikes and change into a dress and some put some pink lipstick on. 

And in the ultimate extra move, my shoes match my lipstic. 

BAM. 

Pep Talk

This is when you know you have the best friends. They tell you to drink water to avoid getting headaches and then when you realize you have a headache because you've had nothing to drink but soda all day they give you a pep talk.

And they don't care about run on sentences or sentence fragments. 

Also, my phone tried to correct pep talk to Pepsi. It's probably a sign or whatever. 

Algorithms

Hi Steve, 

You might want to adjust your algorithm. 

Lent, reloaded.

You guys. Instead of failing at Lent, I just chose to start it over! Most nights I've been sleeping with my phone in the living room. Last night I didn't even have to take anything to help me sleep! Granted tonight I can't sleep and I'm in the living room typing this from my phone, so small victories okay? Some is better than none is my new life motto and I'll stand by it. 

Additionally, I took my bike in for a tune up and it turned into a complete overhaul. New toys, New chain, New hardware, pretty new bar tape. She looks great. 

I also added that stem extender to see if maybe having it more upright will make my hips happier. We shall see. But man, I do love my bike. 

Also, daylight saving time happened and it's a game changer.  Getting home from work or what not and having light outside has made my mood like 50,000% better. Thank goodness. November-February can be a little rough on the old "get out of bed and do something with my life" part of my life. 

Springtime also means swimming with the puppy. Here she is today after the park where she could barely stand up because she was so tired. Love that dog. 

Lent

Lent was a big fat fail this year. Might I make a new goal and start again? I wouldn't rule it out. I wouldn't rule it in either. 

Make up box

Well this is my new makeup box which obviously I love. 

Nail Files

When you are an obsessive nail biter, there's a fun thing that happens called a nail file emergency. Monday on the way to the gym, I had one. I stopped at Walgreens then found myself sitting on a stationary bike with blood red nails filing like mad. Obviously this fits my very stylish and extremely  extra persona. 

But the best part is that once I was done filing my nails down to nonexistence, a sixty some odd year old guy came up to me and said "Can I borrow your nail file?" And I thought he was kidding (Obviously) but he said that he had a nail that kept catching on his gym shorts and he was serious. So basically my obsessive compulsiveness saved this guy's workout. You could probably say that I'm a hero. 

Pretty Girl

In 2002 when things were really stressful with dating (for example, I had to talk to a guy), I would listen to this song on repeat :

http://youtu.be/P0neh4spY8g

The song actually had nothing to do with anything related to my life, but it was early in the Millennium and everything was very EMO. 

Little did I know that 16 years later I would be listening to this song on repeat again when distressed about dating. Again it has nothing to do with what's happening in my life, but if there's one thing I have learned over the years it is that if I need to process some EMOTIONS, music from high school is one of the most effective ways to do it. Please remember that the height of Dashboard Confessional awesomeness was in my high school years, so the emotionally raw material is multitudinous. 

Needless to say as I got really for yoga, drove from yoga to guitar lessons, got ready for my massage etc, I have been listening to Pretty Girl on repeat. The song has been at the back of my mind because that's often what I call Gracie, pretty girl. "Hey pretty girl," soon turned into "Hey...pretty girl is suffer while he confesses everything." And then I remembered that listening to songs on repeat is top five ways to cope with difficult emotions. I had already done yoga guitar and diet coke, so it was the only thing left to do before a nap. A nap that I'll have you know I am about to take. As in, I'm typing this in bed. Which is a big fat Lent failure as my goal was not to use my phone in bed until Easter. So now that I've failed at that and begun to emotionally processed my distress, I will be headed for a nap. Like resetting a computer and feeling much better upon awakening. 

Guitar Lessons

I'm taking guitar lessons again. It's a thing that I do on and off sometimes. My guitar teacher Larry is in his 60's and is a super cool rocker who is also a clean shaven BYU professor. He's fantastic. The thing that has been really great about him is the way that he teaches by starting with the basics. That might seems like an obvious thing to do, but let me explain. Previous teachers have had me show them what I know and taught me from there. Larry did that. Then he had me start and the beginning and go through each lesson from there. Last lesson I went in telling him how I really srtruggled with tablature. I can read it but it doesn't really make sense to me-I can't process it in a way my brain understands. And he flipped to the tab page in my book. Then he went back about 20 pages to the part where you learn to play notes from the musical staff (is that what it's called? like treble and bass clef piano notes). I can play basic piano and he is teaching me literally all of the musical staff (scale?) on the guitar. 1-2 strings at a time and only in 1st position. He told me to play it for 10-12 minutes a day and that's it. Then I can work on whatever songs I'm working on for fun. 

There's something about that. Start with the basics. Go through them again. Then learn new things a little bit at a time. Practice them enough that they stick with you. Then play something fun. This is exactly the way I want to live my life. 

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born today. Feminist writer and all around Genius. If you don't know about her, start with the movie The Hours. There is a scene with Julianne Moore that is perhaps one of the most powerful scenes I've seen dealing with suicide. 

Thanks to Google for reminding me of her big day, I've done a lot of thinking about the Shakespeare's Sister section of A Room of One's Own. It makes me so grateful  to be alive now and to be a woman now. It is because of women like Virginia that we are where we are. That we are able to do what we want. That I can sit writing this in my own room. In my own house. Is this the future she imagined for women? And if not, what can I do about it? How can I be Virginia for a future woman? 

If you've never read A Room of One's Own, here's the crux: 

"Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle."

New Years Resolutions

My goal is to listen to the top 20 songs from every year 1960-1979. I have to be honest, 60-63 were a bit rough but 1964!!! The year the Beatles come onto the scene and The Kinks. I never really realized how much the Beatles changed the game. Rock and roll started, and man I love it so much.