Hoping

I should really make clear that I don’t think that my life was bad, even back then. Obviously I had issues, but not really worse than anyone else did, and with a few perks.

For one thing, I am really good at enjoying myself. It’s a gift. My coping strategies did work for the most part. Yes, about twice a year it would all hit, and I would be angry and depressed and defensive, and then in a few days everything would be stuffed back in the box and buried, and I would get along okay until the next round.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have been happier if I had dealt with things sooner. I’m sure I would have. I’m just not sure that it would have been possible. Even though when everything turned around it seemed to happen suddenly, there were a lot of things that built up to it in terms of knowledge gained and experiences that put chinks in my armor. Even so, with everything that led me to where I was and who I became, I know that ultimately I was healed by the Atonement, and by Christ.

It then becomes a sensitive thing to talk about, but that has ultimately been the biggest factor in my life. Even then when I would not let myself think about things, I sensed that a big part of why I was generally happy, even with my problems, was through the influence of the Holy Ghost. I still believe that, but I also give credit now to righteous living, which kept me from a lot of unhappiness, and my faith with the things I believed and the comfort they gave. Heavenly Father told me over and over that He loved me until I finally started believing it.

I know religion gets a bad rap. There is a lot of falsehood out there, and then you throw people in there and with their vanity and stupidity they muck things up, even when they have every opportunity to know better. I get that completely, but you should never let that cause you to underestimate the power of true faith.

When we think of miracles so often we think of physical healings, but medicine has made a lot more progress with that than psychology has made with spiritual healing, so maybe we need it more, and when it happens it feels miraculous.

In my French Novel class, we read Nausea by Sartre, where the protagonist is sometimes taken over by sick feeling. This is considered to be existential angst, which he eventually learns to accept and live with.

I would sometimes get this sudden sickening feeling of wrongness, that there was something really bad, about me or around me, and it was as disturbing as it was undefined. Only after it had stopped happening did I relate it to those deep dark shames which I had tried so hard not to think about. I did not have to learn to live with the sickness—I was allowed to learn how to live without it.

I guess the point that I am trying to make is to not be afraid of what is inside. I am always telling people to own their emotions, even if they are bad. Then you can analyze them, figure out if they are based on accurate information or not, and choose to do good things even if you have bad impulses. If instead you feel ashamed and try to squelch your rebellious feelings, they probably end up doing more damage in the long wrong. I mean, there’s no point in being ashamed of being human. Just be a good one.

The most valuable thing that I have ever learned is that there is nothing really that horrible inside you once you will let yourself look at it. First of all, doing that is half the battle, but also there is always the hope of being healed, and whatever you might need to give up for that is worth the loss. That is why there can always be hope. That is why I can always know that things can be okay, even when I have no idea how.


21 minutes walking outside
Wall sits
1st Nephi 14 – 1st Nephi 9

Coping

Now, you might suspect that a teenage girl in denial about her deepest fears who overcompensated by taking on a bunch of extracurricular activities could at times be hampered by her insecurity, and you would be right. I was always worried that people would be getting sick of me, and not want me around. Fortunately, I found another shield to use besides humor. It was busyness. Sure, I was always doing something, but also I always had something I needed to do.

This was my real armor. I had mentioned in writing about the reunion that I am not very ADD. Actually, I probably swing more towards OCD. I mean, if I mean drumming my fingers on a particular spot of wall, I don’t have to go back and do it, but I notice that I missed it.

This may be another reason that the sports management is what really stuck over the other activities. I had responsibilities. I was serving. As a people pleaser (psychological wound: shame), it was natural for me to feel a strong need to do things for other people anyway. Then, I could focus on the task at hand instead of focusing on whether I was an intrusion or not.

At one point during my junior year, the basketball team decided to start changing in the gym instead of the locker room. After all, the locker room was in the basement, so getting there required going downstairs and then coming back upstairs, which is a lot of physical effort to require of young athletes.

Part of my job was going over the practice area with a dust mop before practice, and one day when I was doing this, suddenly boys were undressing. Well, I just kept my head down and kept at it. Yes, they did try and encourage me to check out other people’s shorts, and I remember at least one person calling my name and then saying, “Look at me when I’m talking to you”, but I can’t remember who was saying it, because I never looked up.

(That’s not to say it wasn’t awkward, but the problem was resolved when Coach noticed the increasingly longer line of girls looking in the gym windows during this period, and suddenly they were heading back down to the locker room.)

This deep focus has some advantages, but it has some disadvantages too. For one thing, if you catch me when I am doing something else, I may have a hard time talking to you, because I wasn’t in talk mode, I was in reading mode or eating mode or pruning mode.

In addition, the lack of self-awareness was an issue again. I guess I sort of thought that if I was not looking at anyone, they were not looking at me, when actually I was quite visible. I think this is why I am sometimes surprised to realize people knew who I was or noticing what I was doing. Actually, you kind of stick out when you are doing needlepoint in the student center, and I have seen people do things like that as a way of getting noticed, but I swear I just wanted to finish the project. (Actually, I think the needlepoint is why I was able to hear some conversations that I did, because I looked intent, and I was, but only with my eyes.)

Anyway, it was natural for me to volunteer to be a greeter at the reunion, but in that case my focus was on socializing, so it worked well. And you have to admit, I get a lot done.


22 minutes walking outside
Pushups
1st Nephi 18 – 1st Nephi 15

Task: Blogging

I’ll get back to my high school narrative, but I had to get out that newsletter tonight, and that is one of my blogs. And yes, one of the things I had on my to-do list was blogging.

Regular readers know how sporadic I am, for which I am sorry, but it is nothing new. This main blog I primarily use for self-discovery and getting things off my chest. I also have the travel blog, and then the preparedness blog is pretty much just a way of archiving the preparedness newsletters that I do for my ward.

That is the most regular one, because I am good about getting the newsletters sent, and once it is written updating the blog is easy, but there are occasional delays. Sometimes the writing doesn’t flow, and I have to consider whether I am being wrong-headed in some way. Like this one is on using whole grains. I thought I would have information on storing them, and maybe even on cooking, but that didn’t seem right and it ended up being more about how to easily introduce them into your diet.

I did one once on personal safety, and I was all gung ho to include this tip I had read back when Chandra Levy disappeared, that young people living alone should leave notes or messages every time they leave regarding where they are going. It just didn’t feel right, and then I realized that the main point of that is to make it easier for the people who are investigating your disappearance. I was trying to keep people from disappearing at all, and reminders of possible death would only make the message less well received. It’s not a bad idea—it was just the wrong place.

For the travel blog, I was going to just post on Saturdays, but last Saturday was the busiest day I have had in a long time, and it was just not going to happen.


Jamaica Me S’wet (20/45)
Crunches
2nd Nephi 1 – 1st Nephi 19

Girl on the run

Well, now that I have sullied the good name of the drama club, I should make it clear that I wasn't specifically avoiding them. I wasn't enjoying acting in junior high. A lot of it was vanity--I had not yet learned that there are no small parts--but maybe there was also too much waiting around for someone with a frantic need to keep busy. My friends were all still nice to me, and we still frequently ate lunch together and had classes together, but I most of our social time happened during the school day.


If that wasn't the problem, what was I avoiding? Well, there were the internal conflicts which I covered already. That was two years ago, actually, but I don't feel a strong need to revisit. In summary, I had seen myself as fat since I was 6, and as unworthy of being loved romantically since I was 14, and I could not bear to even think about those things, which was unfortunate because there were some fallacies that became self-fulfilling prophecies. There was also an external issue.

I have also written about getting into a fight with my father over driving, where he stopped speaking to me for two and a half years. What I probably haven't mentioned is how sometimes I get confused over which birthday that happened on, because I get confused about other times when we fought and he was not speaking to me.


So technically, I was already a year and a half into my relentless pace when the big rejection happened, but even before that being home was no fun.


When my father first got caught cheating on my mother, and attended his one counseling class, he wrote a list of things she did wrong, and ways she could change. One thing was wanting her to get a job, which resulted in her taking a night janitorial position and then adding house cleaning during the day. There were good and bad results to this. She did learn more independence, which would come in handy, and it's the only reason she has any social security income now, but it is also probably a factor in her severe arthritis and other aches and pains.


When this first started, Julie and Maria were only four, and had a hard time with her being gone at night. By the time they were thirteen, they joined her at the night job, earning some pocket money, bonding with her, and making their own escape from the house.


I can't blame them. Dad had a talent for casting a pall over the place, and we reacted by giving him a wide berth. Perhaps it was not the best reaction, but it felt like the only possible one.


With my activities schedule, I hardly ever had to be home. If that was helpful before my seventeenth birthday, it was an absolute life saver afterwards. In soccer and basketball season I had two games a week, and then I started helping at practices. The track season only had one meet weekly, but then I worked any nights that I did not have games, so it was all good. Sometimes I only had time to change between getting home from afternoon stuff and heading to work. Of course, I neglected homework a lot, but I had a history of doing that.


Sometimes it was too much. I think McDonald's was a good learning experience, and kids were coming in from school all the time, so it was fun in that way, but I was always closing, getting home at 12:30 three nights a week, and then at 2 am on Saturday nights. I knew it was too much when I fell asleep at my desk after finishing my Spanish mid-term. (At least I finished.) I gave notice, and then after resting a few months I got on at K-mart. They were only open until 9 on any night, so that helped a lot.


I didn't have any of this self-awareness at the time, but considering how much I loved curling up at home with a book, it was amazing how rarely I did it during that time period.

Beginning Belly Dance (30/30)
Wall sits
2nd Nephi 8 - 2nd Nephi 2

Nasty

I’ve had some doubts about even posting this one, but I keep referencing the drama group being corrupt, and I may do it again, and I feel like I need to give some background so it is not like I am just maliciously slandering everyone who participated in a play.

When “Cruel Intentions” came out, I remember the reviewer saying the way in which it didn’t really work is that the kind of casual sadism where you wreck people’s lives just because you can doesn’t really happen with teenagers—it takes the kind of cynicism that you don’t acquire until middle age. I’m not sure that’s true.

These are the things that I think about when I think of high school drama. I remember A being obsessed with S, but knowing he couldn’t have her, so using C, not caring that she adored him, and how excited she was to be getting the attention, and how unfair it was.

I remember the same S putting a different A’s hand on J’s butt, comparatively innocent, but mortifying for both of them.

I think of N watching her friend’s first time from the stairway, like she was stoned. (Well, she could have been, but alcohol seems to have been the drug of choice.)

Those are just the things that should not have resulted in assault charges (which I can’t talk about, even using initials, but that’s a long list). Those are just the cases where I know specifics, as opposed to just knowing that one person really messed up another.

When the athletes would talk about sex (mainly the soccer team, and no, I don’t think they knew I could hear them), it was about things like what to do if you have gas when you’re having sex (make a lot of noise, let her think you’re doing a good job).

I believe in chastity. I believe fornication is a sin, and that’s why it tends to end up in heartbreak so often, even when no one has any bad intentions with it, and I guess my point is that you can have a good heart, and feel love, and still do it.

So yes, there were wrong things happening in other places, but I associate drama with mean-spiritedness and debauchery—not always at the same time, but often enough.

I know there has to have been people who did not participate in it, maybe lots, but I don’t remember anyone telling me about how they built great friendships, and how everyone was so supportive either. I hear people say that at the ten year that everyone was still competing and trying to one-up each other, and that they don’t really want to see those people again. Probably a lot of those people are fine now. I know S is. I hope N is. But yeah, I can see how they don’t have the fondest memories.


22 minutes walking outside
Pushups
2nd Nephi 17 – 2nd Nephi 9

Club sandwich

So maybe I did not want to do drama, but I ended up doing a lot of things. Actually, too many things to do any of them well. Without even including the things that were single events (like Model UN and Girls State), here is what I can remember trying.

Science club: This is the only one where I ended up in the yearbook photo, which is odd because I did the least with them. They had meets and prepared for meets, and I did not do any of that.

French Club: You know, we went downtown once, but I don’t remember doing anything particularly French on that trip, and I’m not sure what the point was. My main club participation was reading palms in French at Le Village, an annual fundraiser and expo. Also, I delivered roses on Valentine’s Day. I wonder what we used the funds for.

Spanish Club: I read palms in Spanish for El Pueblo, which had some strong similarities to Le Village.

Literary Magazine: I helped out some during the first year, but the staff was a little pretentious, and I gave up on it. Of course those people graduated, and I would have liked their successors better, but I just never went back.

Student government: I would sometimes just observe their meetings when I had a free period. This would probably have actually been very annoying for them, except then I ended up helping decorating for dances, or recruiting chaperones for the prom, so that may have mitigated things a little.

Amnesty International: I participated in at least one letter-writing session.

Earth Club: I remember they were going to plant seedlings, and I couldn’t go, and they had an awesome fundraising booth based on maneuvering a boat around an obstacle course in a wading pool without spilling oil. (This was not long after Exxon Valdez.) I was not a part of it at that point.

I also tried some different volunteer work, but what ended up being the issue with a lot of these things is that I was also working a lot, and there was just finite time. The things I participated in the most were speech team and sports management, and those were things I set my work schedule around.

Well, I set my work schedule around speech tournaments anyway. I did not end up at practices often. That was why I did not end up in the pictures, which is not a big deal, but perhaps if I had gone to more practices, I would have performed better. I have to admit, our coaches were not high pressure, and I appreciated that. I tried almost every event, and they let me bounce around like that. Eventually, I found out that my real strength was After Dinner Speaking, and I did make state one year, but I was not great at it. Also, I wish I had found Student Congress sooner, because I liked my experience with it, and I think I could have done well.

I think there were different factors contributing to my scattered accomplishments here. One is just that I want it all. I want to do everything, learn everything, read everything, travel everywhere, meet everyone, and not miss a thing. Impossible, but I still try and reach out pretty far. I haven’t changed that much there.

The other thing is that with both speech and sports, it took me away, and it got me there. With a lot of the activities, to participate fully you needed rides, but the speech team usually had a bus, and if not they worked out carpools. The sports teams always had a bus. The speech team went better places (college campuses), but the sports teams went more often.

If I wanted to avoid thinking about whatever was wrong, well I definitely had no time for doing so anyway, and I had tasks to focus on, which was my big coping method. More on that later.

22 minutes walking outside
Rest
2nd Nephi 25 – 2nd Nephi 18

My life was not a John Hughes film

I did some edits to the last three titles, because I realized that it is probably helpful if the blogs that are based on different items from my to-do list (even if the original item is just a launching point for whatever I blog about) are clearly labeled. So, from now on, they will be.

Today is not from the task list, but is more post-reunion analysis. In addition to what people wrote about me back then, I also did get some responses to the Nostalgia week posts, and some things from conversations, and that caused me to think and reflect also. It’s just what I do.

One person remembered me helping her with English homework, and explaining what the teacher was going for, and then getting an A. I don’t actually remember that, but I do remember helping people a lot. I think in high school it was mainly in English, as I was on a downward trend in Math and Science. Oddly, in college it was always helping people with Spanish, though maybe that was because I only took one English class, and college students are less likely to ask someone who is not in the class for help.

Another memory was my doing so many activities, and one person gave me undeserved credit for being the glue that held the different cliques together. I’ll go over the activities later, probably in two separate posts, but on the clique thing, I guess I can’t take credit because I didn’t even think that there were cliques. Now, I can be pretty oblivious, and there will be more on that later, but other people thought there were cliques, and maybe I was missing something.

It was something I thought about. I had social groupings explained to me in junior high, and my mentor’s definitions were influenced largely by “The Outsiders”. There were pops and socs (popular, social), who dressed trendily and went to parties with chocolate cake (maybe because they were rich and poor people could not afford cake?); and stoners and rockers who dressed the same, but rockers did not take drugs; and then there were nerds. There was probably some other term for a person who had nerd popularity but was not smart, but I can’t remember. Obviously, I would have been a nerd.

In high school, I think I originally thought you were either popular or unpopular, and I probably would have put it all to being attractive or not, but I saw that it wasn’t that simple. There were people that I could not have placed with one group or another, and some who seemed to have really good crossover appeal.

The thing is, and I know many people who see The Breakfast Club and feel like that was totally their life, I never saw any open hostility between groups. I saw open hostility between people in the same groups, but in my view (and maybe it was naïve) it seemed like anyone could talk to anyone, popularity was more about whether you dated and what parties you went to.

I really only thought one group was terribly exclusive, and that was Masque, the revamped drama club. I would tell you that those were the worst snobs in the school, and the most corrupt, but maybe it was only because I had more information on it.

I went all six years to Chehalem, which fed into Mountain View. When I was in fifth grade they changed the boundaries, and my neighborhood changed to Aloha Park. That’s where Julie and Maria ended up going. Aloha Park fed into Five Oaks, the other junior high that fed into Aloha. Of the students my age who were affected, we could choose to go to sixth grade at either Chehalem or Aloha Park, but would then go on to Five Oaks. Four of us finished at Chehalem.

Initially I was very depressed about this, and was sure that I would be a lonely outcast for three years, but then I ended up making some friends, and adjusting, and by the time I got to Aloha I knew about 75% of the student body because of the boundary change. There were other changes though.

The group I hung out with at Five Oaks had primarily been interested in drama. Several of the people I had been closest to at Chehalem were interested in drama. I had been once too, but then I rebelled against it in 9th grade, and quit both the club and the class (switching to yearbook staff and guitar class—I was pretty good at yearbook, but horrible at guitar). I did try an Intro to Drama class at Aloha, and it was fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I did many other things while my friends did plays. This is why I knew things about what was happening in drama, without being a part of it myself.

I guess it could have been alienating, but it wasn’t really. As friends started experimenting with hazardous things, I didn’t really feel estranged from them. I worried about them, and whether they would be okay, but I was always busy, and I didn’t hear the worst things until later anyway.

So I talked to drama people (who were my old friends), and athletes (whom I managed), and nerds (who were really just smart people, and whom I had classes with), and people who did not really fit in any of those categories but I had known for years, and I wasn’t really thinking about any of it anyway, because conversations seemed completely open. It was just dating that seemed closed off, not because of my social standing, but because of my lack of attractiveness, and I did not let myself think about that. And now sometimes when I look back and realize that it was possible that someone was attracted to me, well, there’s nothing to do about it. I can only try and be better now.

But I wonder if there were boundaries that I missed –because I can be quite oblivious, or class lines that people perceived, but it was their own issues holding them back—which I can relate to a lot.


24 minutes walking outside (not counting the trails in the forest or any of our fun stuff)
Crunches
2nd Nephi 33 – 2nd Nephi 26

Task: Yearbook and scanning photos

One thing I really wanted to accomplish before the reunion was going through the various yearbooks and seeing if there was anyone I was missing among my Facebook friends, and see if they were on there. Just by keeping in touch with multiple people from school, you tend to see posts by other people, or that multiple people have become friends with someone who has just joined Facebook, but there is always the possibility of missing someone. Also, shortly after the last time I scanned photos in, I found more, and I was not up for another scanning session, but I promised myself that I would get back to it.

I was moderately successful. I could not find the other photo stash, and then I did find more photos, but I am not sure they were the same ones. Still, I scanned those in, and the brilliant thing about this batch was that I had actually written the names of people on the photo backs. That was really helpful.

For going through the yearbooks, I just could not be as thorough as I had originally envisioned. I thought I would be really meticulous, and there is just too much data. I did submit some new friend requests, and saw that some old friends remain stubbornly off Facebook, but I probably missed some people, and I will have to accept that.

I could not find my yearbook from 8th grade, or my class pictures from 3rd and 5th grade, which is a little weird, but I took some nice trips down memory lane. There were the pictures, but also seeing what people signed in the 7th and 9th grade yearbooks, and then in the literary journals for 10th – 12th grade. (At our high school, the yearbook did not come out until the school year had ended, so everybody signed the literary journal, Day by Day. Also, at the time it was a 3-year school, but it is 9th – 12th now.)

Of what people wrote to me, I would say about 10% is random and individualized, and another 30% is “I didn’t really get to know you that well” (is that code for “Why are you having me sign this?”). Anyway, where it really gets interesting is the other 60%: half are about how sweet I am and the other half is how I need to quit ripping on people.

Well, it’s not as contradictory as it seems. I am very much a people pleaser, and I love helping people and doing things for them, and I remember coming up with some very thoughtful gifts and doing nice things.

At the same time, I have a very mean sense of humor. Looking back, I think it goes back to my 9th grade humor. I may have taken it to heart that I was a joke, but I didn’t accept it enough to not be angry about it. I did use humor as a shield, and it worked, but there was probably some bitterness there, and that was always the conflict for me. I was happy in a lot of ways, but I had a secret pain that I was not going to deal with, and it made me a little mean.

Also, there was just the issue of boundaries. A big part of growing up is learning where the lines are. Saying this will be funny, but saying that would just be hurtful. Some of my more excruciating memories are when I got the balance wrong and hurt someone, or came off as immature, or just did not get it right.

Even as I have gotten more mature, and dealt with my baggage, and grown in all these ways, my sense of humor is still pretty cynical. For my last year of college I worked at the Science Library, and I remember my supervisor saying he could never tell if I was joking, and the reason was is that what I was saying was absolutely true, and it was a pain, but I was just treating it as funny. That’s still pretty much the case.

The thing is, except when I am doing my stand-up (which is not all that often), I am not usually trying to be really funny, I just throw in humor and maybe it is more than I realize because I am often surprised at how hard people will be laughing. I remember when I first started writing screenplays a lot of people assumed I would be writing comedies, and, no, the sixth (Coulrophobia) was the first one that could be considered a comedy, and even at that it is not a straight comedy—more of a comic thriller.

They do all have humor in them, but it is something that is lightening the drama. Whether the issue is dealing with espionage and paralysis, or choosing between comfort and passion, or vampires, or abuse and manipulation, or a devastating injury, there is humor to lighten it.

That’s pretty much how I handle life. And it certainly isn’t always right. Generally on the way home from church, my sisters and I make fun of people, and then we go back to work praying for them, and thinking about how to help them. It’s our stress relief. Someday we may have a better one, but yeah, for now it looks like the way I can be sweet is through recharging by ripping people. It’s fun if you don’t have any real malice.

(Well, it might still be fun if you have real malice, but I don’t recommend it. We’re sketchy enough as it is.)


28 minutes walking outside
Wall-sits
Jacob 6 - Jacob 1

Task: Flu shot

I don’t remember whether this was on the original task list or was added in (I am always coming up with new stuff to do), but one very real concern was getting a flu shot.

As a diabetic I have a compromised immune system, so I am generally supposed to get one. I had been pretty good about it, but then in 2008 I did not get one. Mom got one, and when flu swept through the household she was the only one who did not get it.

It had been so long since I had gotten the flu that I forgot exactly how terrible it could be. At its peak it felt like someone had beaten me over my entire body with a baseball bat. Then, it started feeling like the beating had still happened, but they had missed some spots. It was so miserable.

The irony was that I had just finished reading “The Monster at our Door”, which focused on Avian flu but was a good primer in general on what could happen and how flu strains work, so I don’t know what I was thinking, except that we caught it fairly early in the season and maybe I would have gotten a shot in a few more weeks if it had left me alone.

Anyway, for the 2009 flu season there was also the threat of H1N1, and I really intended to get both. I never did get the H1N1 vaccine, as it took so long to become available, but I know that somehow that fear motivated people more than usual to get the regular flu shots, and that line my mother and I waited in took three hours. Still, I did not get sick, and that was a good thing.

I had been thinking of it lately, because the H1N1 threat was recently declared to have been past, and I hope people realize that the government did a reasonable job with it. I know people were initially afraid, and then thought it was for nothing, but there was a real threat, and even with a vaccine shortage, what was there was generally deployed appropriately, and the precautions that people took about washing hands and such were helpful. Having read the book helped me appreciate that more, but also someone was recently on the Daily Show who pointed to that as a success, and I realized that they probably weren’t getting much credit. Actually, a new edition of “Monster” with an added chapter could be good.

I must say, I get really mad at how much credence people give the anti-vaccination campaigns. They do a lot of harm. Good intentions combined with ignorance are, well, a really widespread problem.

Get your flu shots.

40 minutes walking outside
Pushups
Words of Mormon – Jacob 7

Task: Prune and repot plants

At one point I made a long task list of all of these things that I needed to get done, and I had blogged that I was doing that, and at some point I intended to write about all of the little things—maybe why they were important and what progress I had made. Anyway, one way I am going to be able to blog daily during a period of great business is that I will do some quick task updates interspersed with the more verbose postings.

Once upon a time I had three plants. One was a gift from two friends at a time when I was feeling down. It is a gold-dust kroton, but I did not know that originally so I just called it Spot.

They other two were rescues from someone who was away from work for an extended period (I think it was maternity leave). I noticed them dying and started watering them, and when she got back and I mentioned that, she said I could have them. (Whenever I go on vacation I put someone in charge of watering the plants, so clearly we just had different viewpoints on the importance of plant care.) The African violet I recognized, and called Violet, but it took me a while before I knew that Stripe was a dieffenbachia.

Anyway, they all did pretty well. Violet eventually started blooming again, and even though Stripe lost a limb when Stephen sat on my desk against it, the rest was doing fine. Well, Violet has since died, but I feel like it was okay, and just the natural course of events rather than anything I did. The real problem was Spot.

Krotons are amazingly resilient. They can go for a long time without water, and eventually the leaves will start to get a little droopy, and then a quick drink perks them right up. You can also overwater, apparently, and they survive that too. The problem is that Spot keeps getting taller without getting thicker. Judicious pruning early on probably could have fixed that, but I didn’t see the need until too late. Anyway, Spot periodically gets a little top-heavy, and needs to have the top snipped off.

I hate doing this. There is this lush, green growth, stretching upward, and looking all happy, and I just come along like a barbarian and cut it down. Still, I think if I didn’t, there would be an issue with the distribution of nourishment, and the roots would grow weak and it would die.

I have taken care of pruning, although it will come up again. I don’t really like the pots for either, and so I frequently come back to this idea of getting something new for them. Of course, it was not an absolute necessity, and I have been so broke, that it was not really an option. Now that I will have income again, perhaps I can think about it. Could they go in together, and share a pot? I don’t know. I know some people who have tended indoor plants professionally though, so maybe I can ask.

Disco Sweat (28/70)
Crunches
Mosiah 6 – Mosiah 1

20/20

More reflection on being twenty years out of high school will follow, but I am kicking something off, and I wanted to write about that.

I decided to treat my last doctor’s visit as a wake-up call. My blood sugar levels are being a bit stubborn about going back down after my little ER visit. They’re not horrible, but they should be lower, or I will need to start looking at more drastic remedies, and I don’t want to do that. The doctor focused on the importance of exercise, saying that simply walking just fifteen minutes a day could be really helpful.

Well, that was doable. I started on July 28th and have been doing pretty well, missing only two days. Part of that was insufficient planning. If I go on a walk with my sisters, we go in the evening, and sometimes we are good about that and sometimes we miss, but if I had been planning on a walk, and then it doesn’t happen, I have to work something in. This happened three nights.

The first night, I just wandered around the family room for twenty minutes. Sometimes it was walking back and forth, then running in place, then throwing in sequences I could remember from old aerobics tapes, but it was all very odd, and the only saving grace was that I did keep moving for twenty minutes. Yes, it was twenty instead of fifteen. There’s a reason for that.

During the first day, during the first fifteen minutes actually, I started remembering this recommendation made by a President Richardson at a stake conference. Looking at things to improve the lives of the members, he recommended what he called the 20/20 program, where everyone should exercise for twenty minutes a day and read the scriptures for twenty minutes a day. I decided to do that, so along with improving my health I would also be keeping on track spiritually.

Scripture study, like exercise, is another area where I tend to be off an on. I go strong for a while, and I know it has blessed my life, strengthening me at times and certainly increasing my knowledge of the scriptures. However, having been through them so many times by now, maybe I wane in my enthusiasm. Still, I want to be strong, and have mastery over my thoughts and behavior, so that is good.

Actually, at the time I had already started a new thing where I was reading the Book of Mormon backwards. No, I am not looking for evil messages. I can’t tell you how many times I have read it, but a conservative estimate is fifty, and I worry that the familiarity will make me miss things, and thought that perhaps going out of sequence would help me weigh each verse individually, and help them stand out. It’s going okay. I’m sure I am still missing things, which of course is one reason that I could read it fifty times more, but actually with the frequent use of chiasmus, there are passages where it kind of reads the same.

Anyway, the second time it happened, it was late and I hadn’t read either, and though it seemed unbelievably lame, what I decided to do was to read while doing various isometric exercises—I would just flex or stretch something and hold it while I read. Sometimes it ended up being more yoga-like, but I had done something for another night.
Still, both of those sessions were so lame that the next time it was late and I had not exercised yet I just blew it off. (I think that was when I spent two hours more than I had planned helping at the blood drive, and that had left me irritated, which did not help.)

The other time I did not get in my twenty minutes was quite recent, and it was a bad decision brought on by negative emotions. Julie had been showing some discomfort with my use of the treadmill. She didn’t say I couldn’t use it, but it was still there, so finally it came out that when she was researching them she kept finding a weight limit of three hundred pounds. I decided we needed to check for this one, and it is actually 275. Ouch.

I had already been worried about keeping the exercise going after starting work. Now I was losing one more tool (and I was still worried about the VCR at that point), and losing it in a way that reminded me how far away I am from normal people. So obviously, when you are depressed about being fat, the best thing to do is to skip exercising, and maybe eat a batch of cookies while you’re at it. (Okay, I did not eat a batch of cookies, but I should have exercised and I didn’t.)

I’ve covered my weight issues in depth a few times, and if anyone needs to go back to that, I’m putting links, but there is so much new material to cover that I don’t want to recap here:

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/12/trending-downward-316.html
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/01/sporky-pig.html

The last time I posted my weight (June 2009), what happened was that the scale broke, which I mentioned, but I don’t think I ever mentioned why I didn’t start again. We replaced the scale, and the new scale weighed me about ten pounds higher than the old scale. That was a little discouraging, but the one at the doctor’s office always weighed more than the one at home, so I figured it was probably more accurate, and I could live with that.

The problem was that it varied so much from day to day that I was concerned. One day I weighed before and after my shower, and I was six pounds heavier after. Now, I know I have a tendency towards water retention, but I did not absorb six pounds of water in the shower! So I couldn’t trust the digital one. We do have an old-fashioned scale also, but as you move the weights back and forth, it can be hard getting the right balance, and if you shift position it throws everything off again.

As important as it is to monitor yourself, I think right now it is something that I can’t do closely. I did check today, and I was 316.8 on the digital and 315 on the old one (analog?), and that is probably about right. My heaviest on the old digital was 346, which was probably more like 356-360. I was thinking that I would probably not weigh again until Halloween, but I will probably do it at the end of the forty days.

You see, thinking about what I had accomplished, and what I need to accomplish, and what obstacles I have and will have, I decided I wanted to give myself, well, a Lent. The exercise and the scripture study will go well beyond forty days, but I am abstaining from video games. I had taken a break from them while I was finishing the one screenplay, and then I started again, and it is amazing how much time I will spend on them when I have other things to do, so really the only thing that works is abstinence, and with a specific time period, it is easier.

(Really, I get addicted so easily that the most fortunate break of my entire life may be having been born in the Church so that I never even tried alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. I don’t think I would have done well.)

Part of this (the non-game playing part) will be being more effective, and getting all these things done that I want to do, but another important thing is getting the exercise down and scripture study down, during the first few weeks of work, that it is just non-negotiable.

One thing that has always handicapped me for weight loss is that I will have specific targets in mind, and I want to fix—well, fix myself, really—and I can’t look at it that way anymore. Wrapping my personal worth (and worthiness of love) with my body size has just not been effective in the past. Also, I just need a more realistic scope.

I will not be thin in time for a reunion, or vacation, or wedding or holiday. This is a marathon. It could easily take me five years to reach my correct BMI, if it is even reachable, so I am not about that. (For my height and age, the range appears to be 110 to 145, which does not sound plausible, but that will not be my only gauge of my fitness.) I am just trying to make my body healthier, and I am starting slowly.

I remember once thinking that for me to really get healthy I would probably need to be completely regimented, with every meal and snack measured and planned ahead and multiple exercise periods worked in, and it didn’t seem possible. Well, maybe that needs to be reached incrementally. I have already modified this twice. On the first day I lengthened it, and shortly afterwards I felt like I needed to do something weight-related (maybe because the lame isometric workout had me feeling so loose.) So, now I am alternating push-ups, wall-sits, and crunches. And they are the weakest, wimpiest push-ups, wall-sits, and crunches you have ever seen, but they do cover different body areas. They will get better, and other evolutions will occur, long-range.

I don’t know where I am going to end up, but perhaps the biggest change in me personally has been my growing comfort with uncertainty, and acceptance of things beyond my control. Took me long enough.

Anyway, I intend to blog daily during these forty days, and there will be a little report at the end of what I did. We’ll see what happens after September 25th. (Oh, and the reason I did both push-ups and wall sits today is because I didn’t do push-ups yesterday, but I did walk.)

Beginning belly dance (30/30 minutes)
Push-ups and wall sits
Mosiah 15 – Mosiah 7

Thriving at your Reunion

I had not originally intended to blog about the reunion, but then Cheryl said, “I hope you do”, and I’d do anything for Cheryl. Also, I have been analyzing it to death, so there’s that. It may turn into a three-part series!

Anyway, this is actually the kind of event that I do really well at, so there might not have been much to write about, but I know some people who did not go because they did not enjoy the last one; I had one friend who was really nervous before, so I was trying to help her with that; and in my function as a greeter I found some people who had other concerns. Somehow, everyone seemed to end up having a good time, so perhaps there are lessons to be learned.

For my friend who was nervous, this is partly because another person was harassing her at the last one, and he has a minion, so even if one was not there, there other could have been. In a situation like this, it is important to plan ahead. First of all, this particular scumbag will only attach when the victim is isolated—whether from sheer cowardice or due to some conscious knowledge of wrongdoing does not matter—so the first part of the plan was to use the buddy system.

It was important to emphasize the positive, so the plan needed to be constantly looking for additional people, taking time to enjoy each of them, rather than looking over the shoulder for the big bad one. Part of this included going over RSVPs and yearbooks to remember all the cool people one could possibly spend time with.

That strategy is probably good for various kinds of pre-reunion anxiety. Jogging the memory and remembering good times helps build excitement.

So, what if your memories of high school were bad? Well, the good news is that people who were immature at various times, maybe even nasty, will have often grown up, and if you get to know them now you might like them.

This is where Facebook has been great. First of all, we don’t have to go all the way back to square one with each new person—we may already know how many kids we have or what they’re doing for a living. Also, you can get to know people you did not know the first time around. I knew a lot of people at school, but I didn’t know everyone, so that’s been nice.

Yes, there are invariably people who don’t grow up, or maybe even get worse, but the really beautiful part is there’s a good chance they won’t even come! On one level that should not be celebrated, because it’s really kind of tragic, but I must say it was kind of nice. I only even remember seeing one person who was likely to bring drama, and as far as I know she behaved herself.

It’s sad that some of the people who worried about possible drama and stayed away missed out, but the cost was very expensive, which was another deterrent, and I have no helpful advice for that. Actually, well, Facebook helped a little bit there too, because there were various unofficial get-togethers, but you don’t want people to skip the official one for that. I went to a multi-class gathering at the park the next day, which was great, and there were two separate opportunities for barhopping the following evening. Next week I am having dinner with friends, and then the week after that I am going to karaoke. You don’t have to fit it all into one night.

Now, one thing that never occurred to me as an issue, but other people did, was simply being overwhelmed. I have to admit that the venue did not help here. Things got pretty loud, which does not calm anyone down, but also the bar was right in front of the entrance with the nostalgia table on the other side, so right as you came in the first thing you hit was a traffic jam. Even if that had not been the case, there are stimuli on all sides. Just trying to cross the room to one person could lead to five different diversions as you keep finding other people to hug and question and snap photos of.

I like that kind of chaos, but if you are at all ADD, or PTSD, or introverted, it can be an issue. I think you use the usual coping methods. Take deep breaths. If you need to take breaks, do it. To some extent, you also need to just embrace the experience. Focus on one person at a time, and take them outside if needed, but also, you need to know your own capabilities. I can see where claustrophobics and agoraphobics, opposites though they are, could each have problems with the setup, and okay, maybe you need to visit with people one on one, and avoid the big gatherings. If this is a chance to stretch yourself a little though, and it works, it can be good.

Speaking of knowing your own capabilities, remember that alcohol is not your friend. Sure, it makes you feel a little looser, but it does that by eroding your judgment. Not drinking at all, ever, I don’t really have any helpful hints for deciding the right limit, but I suspect most people should stop at two drinks. It’s legally imperative to have a plan for not driving drunk, but it’s also tremendously helpful to have a plan for not humiliating yourself, or getting into actual danger, or getting into a bad hookup. I’m just saying.

For some of the people who did not come due to having a bad time at the ten-year, it was because they found people being competitive, and they didn’t want deal with that. Again, most people who are still attending seem to be above that now, but I do think it’s natural to want to be able to present yourself well, and feel like you are doing okay with your life. Personally, I would have really liked to have been married, physically fit, and financially secure. As it was, I’m just lucky Regence called the day before, so at least I had an upcoming job instead of being completely unemployed. Still, I had a few things working in my favor, and there might be some last tips here.

First of all, whenever people see me, they commonly tell me that I look great and that I haven’t aged a bit. In large part, I believe the reason for this is that I set the bar so low. If you remember someone as slender, and she puffs up after giving birth, then she’s gone downhill. I have gained a lot of weight since high school (I’m actually down a bit since the 10 year), but ultimately I have always been fat and had crazy hair, and so I’m primarily the same. (Certainly, not drinking or smoking helps.)

That being said, I think the big anti-ager is happiness, and I am generally pretty good at being happy. I have my moments, like anyone, but even with decades of weight problems and romantic disappointment, and two years of unemployment and underemployment, ultimately I still like myself, and life, and the world, and that’s your best strategy for thriving in any situation, including reunions, is to be okay with who you are.

Of course, if someone who you have always kind of liked is there, and feels so good to hug, and you can’t stop thinking about him but he’s in a relationship, and there are plenty of other obstacles, so it’s pointless, yes, there can be some wrinkles there, but ultimately you keep doing what you need to do and it works out. Hypothetically.

I got some other nice compliments that weekend, and they have caused me to think a lot about then and now, and I think there may be some postings on that. Otherwise, if you are wondering about the happiness thing, I do have some tips:

http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/03/october-2008-three-keys-to-happiness.html

The Resistance of Memory

I have already mentioned my irritation with Facebook status updates that order you to do the same (especially when they are accompanied by the accusation that you just don’t care), but there was one specific idea that had intrigued me. You were supposed to set your status asking people to share how you met, or your first memory of them (there were variations), and then they should make that their status so you could post on their wall.

Well, I did try that one, and that was okay, but there were some people whom I would have liked to have seen posts from that I didn’t, and some that posted, and I didn’t really have anything good to share in return, and sometimes my earliest memory was not the cool one. I kind of toyed with the idea of just picking one week and posting whatever memories I felt like on whatever walls I felt like, and maybe other people would do it. I could call it “Nostalgia week”.

Well the week before my twenty-year reunion seemed like a reasonable time to go for it, so that’s what I have done. I also looked through old yearbooks and literary journals, and there are some interesting things.

First of all, where did my 3rd and 5th grade pictures and 8th grade yearbook go? It’s weird that they are not with the rest of the stuff. It’s not a tragedy, but it’s a little annoying.

Mainly though, I have pondered the “stickiness” of memories. Some things are so clear, and some are faded, and some are just gone. For example, I was at a wedding reception lately, and I ran into someone who was my girls’ camp leader for, I think, four of the five years I went. She knew she knew me, but couldn’t quite place me, so I reminded her and she said, “That’s right! You’re the one who made all the wonderful crafts!”

I did not remember that, but then thinking about it, I did remember that it was true. I could even picture one craft, but it was very dim. I could get at faint traces with a reminder. Sometimes, there is not even that.

In my seventh grade yearbook, there is a complex coding system consisting of stars, hearts, mustaches, nose zits, and mouseketeer hats. Clearly it came out of a mixture of immaturity and boredom, and it is embarrassing now. Some of the people I remember quite well, and why they have that rating. There are some boys with hearts that I don’t remember, but I liked a lot of boys, and it was usually passive, so that’s not a big deal. However, there are mustaches (showing an active dislike or resentment) that I don’t remember at all. In addition, there are girls who are double-starred. This means that either we were good friends or that maybe I did not hang out with them because they were older, but that they were really nice to me and I respected them a lot. Still, the mind draws a blank.

Another issue is concern about putting the wrong memory. Oddly, there were several people who looked alike. When I look at class or family pictures from the seventies, it always kind of looks like mine, I guess because of the clothes. In the eighties, it’s probably the hair. So, I might have thought it was one person, but it was really another, and how awkward would that be! Actually, one issue with a lot of the athletes that I managed is that everything was kind of done as a unit. It’s not any more of a memory with Jason than it is with Mark.

Actually, thinking about the athletes leads to another issue, in that a lot of the things I do remember are not really good for Facebook posts—maybe they are just a little too crude, or not flattering to one of us, or maybe it is best forgotten, like “Hey, remember when you told everyone that I liked Casey and he went from being like my best friend to never speaking to me again?” or “I remember always being afraid you were going to kill yourself because you knew way too much about suicide for how alienated you were.”

It’s not that there can’t be good conversations about some of these things, and in a lot of the cases where I remember someone being a jerk, we’re cool now, and there’s no anger left, but they don’t necessarily work for nostalgic wall posts.

So, I don’t have stories for some people. Some of them I have always remembered their names and faces immediately, but I have no good stories. Others I don’t remember, but I really like now. And seriously, some of my Facebook friends I specifically remember that we never spoke or came into contact, but hey, why is that a reason not to be friends now?

I did have this idea that then other people would start posting memories to other people too, and it would be this kind of love-fest, and I don’t think it is happening to the extent that I wanted. Maybe I was unrealistic in my hopes, but I could also be missing things, because I am posting so much, I’ll see Gina posted on so-and-so’s wall and 29 similar stories. Still, some people have posted memories to me, and some conversations have gotten started on posts I have made, as we remember classes and teachers and things we have in our shared experience.

I wish I had a story for everyone—a good one, but we can always make new ones. In the immortal words of Simple Minds, Don’t You Forget About Me.

What's been going on

We’re having some downtime at work, so I’m taking advantage of it to do an update. I know it’s been a long time.

Well, as usual, things have been crazy. The last time I wrote was May 23rd, and there was a ton of stuff going on that I didn't even cover. First of all, there was a series of rough patches.

The first one happened in April, where I got behind on my medication, and I was just hoping to ride it out until some money came in, because I have skipped a few days here and there before and managed. I think the problem was that I ran out of multiple, instead of just one, or that it was a longer stretch. Anyway, one Sunday I started getting sick, and it came on much faster than it usually does, and I found myself in the ER getting pumped full of IV antibiotics. While I was on the second bag, my mother came in and told me that our cousin's wife, Shirley, had died. It was just kind of a low point.

Expensive medical treatment aside and sadness and concern for her family aside, life went on. I worked Monday, got back on my medicine, received several death threats in case I ever tried that again, and did manage it so that I could make it to the graveside service on Friday, and later that night Maria came home and had cracked a tooth. Always on the weekend. She did have an uncomfortable weekend, and we were expecting a really expensive bill, but it turned out that she just needed a filling replaced, making things somewhat better. That got fixed Tuesday.

Once again, life goes on, and the next Friday Julie came home sick. Well, it was a downer, but at least our issues were getting milder, with quicker recovery times. (I still had a week of antibiotics left.)

So life goes on, Julie was well enough to travel for her trip with Maria to visit a friend in New Mexico, and while they were gone I found out that my job was coming to an end. Granted, it was a temp position, and so that was something that was going to happen all along, but suddenly it was a reality, just when we were having weekly crises. I thought I might actually be done the following week, but I got a slight reprieve. That’s when things really got interesting.

My last day at Intel was to be May 21st. About a week before that, I got a call from a writer friend, who had another friend with a book that had gotten some interest from a movie producer. She felt it was important to come up with a screenplay, but neither had any experience with screenwriting. Enter me.

We agreed to meet on the 22nd. I started reading the book, but did not have time to do more than that. My last day at Intel, I concentrated on creating a few more documents to help my successor, and would be running around like a chicken with my head cut off for the last hour or so as I turned in my laptop and badge and tied up all the loose ends. Before that, though, the person I was training recommended me for another job. I said that was fine, and suddenly received a phone call, and had an appointment to go in Monday. So, I had my crazy hour, went straight to Vancouver, talked to Christine and spent the night, headed up to outside Tacoma the following morning and met with Liz, parsed out the scenes, headed back and filled out paperwork for the new job Monday. It was a whirlwind, but that's two great opportunities just dropped in my lap, right? Well, it's never that simple.

The new job was another contractor/temp job, which was fine. It paid quite a bit less, but since it was only for six weeks, I figured that would be okay. Getting to the contracting company was easy—it was right on the MAX line. The actual job site, well, let’s just say it takes an hour and a half and three buses to get there. Going from telecommuting three days a week to that was a little bit of a shock to the system. Never a morning person in the best of times, it was rough going, but I kept telling myself it was just for six weeks. I think I am in my eighth week now.

In addition, I was just not getting anywhere on the adaptation. I had written all of 24 pages, and I kept wanting to write and thinking that I needed to write, and not getting to it. Liz and Christine kept finding more potential buyers, and sure nothing is guaranteed but having those kind of options is still huge, so I felt like I was just blowing it all, and that was a lot of stress too.

Is it lame that a combination of bad hay fever and exhaustion got me sick? I think it was July 1st where my tonsils started feeling swollen, and then it was just worse on the 2nd. That was a miserable day on multiple levels. Everything was starting to wear me down anyway, and then I found out that another job I had been hoping for would not be coming through. Then the bus never came, and this particular bus only comes once an hour, so you need to make sure not to miss it, but I had time to spare but that was not it. Maybe one broke down. While I was at the bus stop, it started to pour and I was out of cough drops and it was feeling like a really bad day.

I had felt like the tonsils were just irritated by all the allergy symptoms, rather than actual illness requiring medical attention, but having just been in the ER makes you a little jumpy, so I went to the doctor on Saturday. The throat was definitely inflamed, with white and red patches, but the strep test came back negative, so all she did was prescribe me some cough medicine. Since that was what I was planning on taking on my own, I did not feel great about the out-of-pocket office call, but I had been having trouble sleeping, and the prescription Robitussin had codeine in it, so I thought at least it will put me out. Didn’t work. I mean, the syrup helped with the coughing, but there was no accompanying drowsiness--just the same old tiredness.

(This led to me cancelling my volunteer shift at the Blues Festival, actually, which was disappointing.)

One thing I had been a little concerned about was that maybe part of the irritation was that I have been taking fake Zyrtec (Walzyr) to keep the symptoms under control, but I have been taking it for a longer period than most years, and I wondered if the partial suppression of the symptoms increased the irritation. I skipped a few days, and Tuesday when I went in I had only cough syrup in my system, and no Walzyr. I was coughing and sneezing all day.

Wednesday I got up, and I showered and was all ready to go, and I just could not do it. I called in sick, went back to bed, and slept for another four hours. I was thinking, well, if I have to have a sick day, I can catch up on sleep and then catch up on writing, but I never wrote. Even after the extra sleep I was so tired. I slept more, and I spent a lot of time lying down but awake. At night I had a mini-breakdown because I had missed a day of work and accomplished nothing. I should have been done being tired, but I wasn't.

After talking with my sisters, I decided to take off the rest of the week, so I called in again, and went to bed without setting my alarm. That gave me basically four days of just sleeping and writing (and church on Sunday). I did slowly start feeling better, where Sunday I was feeling pretty good. There was physical relief from the rest and mental relief from accomplishing some writing, even if I had to force myself to do it. I mean, every writer encounters times like that, regardless of health, and at first I was getting into this weird mental space where I worrying about things like what if I couldn't do it at all, or was going to end up in the ER again, or what if I had chronic-fatigue syndrome? (No, it was just regular fatigue.)

It was a relief to make progress and feel better. It left me with a dilemma, though. This job is bad for me. I can't make myself fall asleep early enough to get enough sleep when waking at 5. The long travel time means that I am losing twelve hours out of the day, even if I am only getting paid for eight. That's normal, but those eight hours were also being paid at the wage I was making back in 1998, which made me want to cry a little. The job was literally getting me sick, but there were no health benefits. And it looked like it could go on for at least another two months. I couldn't put myself through that.

One thing that I had noticed in the previous months is that I just keep plodding along. It doesn’t matter how tired or discouraged or frustrated I am, I keep going. There are good things about that, but it needs to be combined with some judgment. It wasn’t making sense here, No matter how terrifying quitting was.

I ended up delivering an ultimatum, explaining that I either need to make X amount of money or that Friday would be my last day. I sent it before I came into work. Once there I found out that the rumor mill said I had pneumonia. Well, not quite that bad. Anyway, I will either be unemployed again or better-paid in a few days.

I do still have a lot to do on the screenplay, and I better get it done before I start getting sick again. I feel bad not posting though, so I was thinking of posting some short fiction and things I have already written. We'll see.

Pentecost

Well, it is fifty days past Easter. I had planned to bear testimony (in some way) daily from Easter through today. I did not make it for every single day, but I made it for most of them, and it was a pretty good experience. I wanted to write up a bit about that.

First of all, and I certainly did not have this in mind, I was entering a really rough period of my life. I didn’t know it, and I will write more about that later, but at first my little plan seemed ironic, because I was supposed to be making expressions of belief but I was struggling so much to feel any belief.

It seemed ironic, but it was actually very helpful. Having to be able to find something to say, and when to say it, and to whom, kept me from wallowing in self-pity. I had to remember over and over that things have worked out before, and that ultimately I believe they will continue to do so. I’m still not the kind of person who is grateful for trials while they happen, but I can concede that they often end up being helpful, and that things do work out. The timing was good from that perspective.

It also led to some good experiences that would not necessarily be expected. One night I remembered at eleven o’ clock that I had not done it yet, and so I went to where Mom was getting ready for bed, and I told her that I knew the church was true. Instead of looking at me and wondering if I was on drugs, she reaffirmed that and shared her own testimony, and it was a very touching, bonding moment in the bathroom, that would not have happened otherwise. That was good.

It can also be good to tell people what you are doing. My friend Jill will bring up religion fairly often, and she will sometimes disparage Mormons a little, not too bad, but I tend to shrug it off, answering questions and sharing things as appropriate, but not really paying attention to that, because she is kind of smart-mouthed in general and I tend not to take the bait. Well, because of my goal, I was taking all of those smart remarks and refuting them and testifying and just not letting her comfortably ignore the truth of it. In other conversations that followed, she kept telling me I was a control freak, and I think that’s way. If I had told her, by the way, I have this goal, maybe she wouldn’t have said that—but then maybe she also would not have taken what I was saying so seriously.

(Incidentally, I didn’t think I was, and that seemed ironic because I had just been talking to Julie about her being a control freak, but not the way Becky is, and Jill admitted she was a control freak too, so maybe everyone just has different things that they freakishly need to control. It really only bothers me if they try to control other people.)

There was another incident that was especially important to me. On Mother’s Day, I suddenly remembered that this would be the first Mother’s Day for a friend since his mother had died, and all of those milestones in the first year hurt. I mean, they hurt on subsequent years too, but I believe it starts to sting less. Anyway, I wrote to him, and among other things I told him that I knew that he would see his mother again.

It was his response that made the difference. He didn’t really say that much, but there was emotion conveyed where it was like he had not been thinking in those terms. That’s the one thing with bearing your testimony at church or with other members—yes, we do feel something and we are strengthening each other, but it’s usually just reinforcing what we already know. That the soul continues and that we will see each other again is just such a given for us, but it’s not that way for everyone. That realization humbled me. It’s an amazing thing to know, and I felt more grateful for it at that moment than I have before. And believe me, I have been grateful before, but remembering that not everyone has that, and being able to comfort someone, I felt it more.

I know it was not as effective as it could have been, at least in terms of reaching other people. I kept getting stuck inside my own head with worry and fear, and I just was not organized at all. I’m not planning on continuing the daily part, but it did remind me how powerful sharing faith can be, and that there are actually a lot of opportunities. Two of the nights that I missed, I had conversations that just skirted the area, and if I had been thinking I could have easily gone there.

More to the point though, as I was looking for people to share with, it reminded me to think about other people, and what they might need and what might help them, and that’s something I try to do anyway, but there is always room for improvement. If you don’t want my religious beliefs, but there is something else I can do for you, I really will try. That kind of things is great, and I love it.

Just let me reiterate, though, that it is an amazing thing to know, and it is a beautiful thing to share it.

My opinions on everything!

Seriously, I filled out my ballot tonight, and I thought I might do an election blog, but it’s pretty boring. Granted, it’s only the primaries, but so many of the races are either uncontested or foregone conclusions, it’s like there is not even a point. So, I thought I would just write about everything else going on.

Wearing the American flag on Cinco de Mayo: I do suspect that the kids in question were doing it somewhat defiantly, as is not completely unheard of with teenagers. That being said, threatening suspension is ridiculous, as is asking them to turn the clothing inside out. If they were trying to be intimidating by anything other than their clothing, but all means punish that. If they were wearing clothing that had a negative message even, maybe, though you don’t want to be overly draconian about the whole thing, but if all they are really doing is wearing flags, it’s not an issue.

Actually, this one does appear to be a non-issue. Most of the student body seems to feel it was an overreaction, the school board feels it was an overreaction, so basically you have one principal in trouble, plus Roger Ebert. People overreacting to (and via) tweets, though, is a whole other topic, and one I don’t care about very much.

BP versus the Gulf Coast: The damage that is happening there literally makes me feel sick. The rush of lawyers heading there to try and get lawsuits started is not as visceral, but still kind of sickening.

Arizona’s new law: There are a lot of things wrong with this. The part that makes it really ugly is that it is essentially turning Arizona into a police state for brown people, many of whom are citizens. I don’t imagine that many Caucasians are going to be asked for their birth certificates when they are out walking, and it’s just wrong. I think all the citizens who are against this law should start walking around with their birth certificates around their necks as a protest. Maybe it’s a lame protest, but it’s a nasty law.

The bigotry factor is what makes it ugly, but I’ll give you two things that make it stupid. Firstly, if the real purpose is to cut down on crime, I think it will turn into a pretty ineffective way of fighting crime, including the crime of illegal immigration. More to the point, you have to fix immigration from the employer end. As long as people can come here, get hired, and make money that even at horrible wages looks good to them by comparison with what they can make at home, they will keep coming. If they aren’t getting hired, it will take a while to filter through, but it will change things around, and I bet you will find it easier to crack down on employers than seal the borders.

Things that are appalling: The skinny jeans defense and Elizabeth Hasselbeck.

Kind of disturbing: In the picture of Kagan that AOL is using, she kind of looks like Brendan Fraser (which has absolutely nothing to do with her qualifications).

Okay, so what about that election? Well, the two ballot measures are both basically procedural, and the voters pamphlet did not have a single argument against either of them, most of the judges and representatives are running unopposed, and the gubernatorial races seem to be a lock for Kitzhaber and Dudley.

I’m actually not down with that, for what it’s worth. On the Democrat side, I favor Bradbury, and voted for him. I am one of those people having a hard time getting over Kitzhaber calling Oregon ungovernable back in the day. He needs to demonstrate that either he has changed or the state has changed to build confidence. The two things he has indicated don’t even come close. Yes, Oregon is not currently GOP-led, but that could easily swing back the other way in the near future. The margin is not really that wide, and partisanship has gotten much worse, so there are still going to be real issues there.

The other thing he has said is that he would focus more on dealing with the voters, and getting them behind ideas, rather than focusing on trying to work with the legislature to get his policies passed. Once again, partisanship has gotten much worse, and I just don’t see him pulling it off.

That’s not that I don’t think he’s a good man, and if I needed someone to head a special committee for working out medical reform, where we could reduce costs and improve care and get it offered to more people, I would totally put him in charge.

Bradbury I think has a more realistic view of the situation, and he really won my heart by pointing out that a lot of the issues we have stem back from Ballot Measure 5, which I say all the time but in general it gets ignored, and yet it damaged schooling then and it has never really been repaired. I’m not crazy about his Bank of Oregon plan, because what I really want is for people to leave big banks behind and go to credit unions, but his principles are sound. So it’s Bradbury for me, but if he loses I am sure I will be voting for Kitzhaber in November.

Honestly, I kind of like David Lim, and if I were registered Republican I would vote for him, but he really is a long shot. In fact, I recommended to my family members that they vote for Alley, because I think he is the only one who even has a remote chance of beating Dudley, and we all hate Dudley.

It is interesting to see how many people Sizemore has lost over time. He doesn’t seem to realize that he’s a joke. On the plus side, he saves Dudley from being the biggest ego in the race, so that’s nice.

The 26th district only has the one Republican candidate for representative. I did think about advising the voters to come up with a good write-in candidate, lest they have to choose between a lying child-abuser who manipulated his way into the office and a Democrat, but it’s hard getting a good write-in campaign going, so we’ll just worry about that in November.

There is one other race that is pretty interesting. There are three excellent candidates for Metro President, but one keeps raking in the endorsements, and he has mine as well—not just for the sentiment. Tom Hughes will be a great leader for Metro:

http://www.votetomhughes.com/home.php

Where was I?

No one who is a regular reader will be surprised that I have gotten busy and gotten behind on the blogging, because that’s sort of how I roll. There was an additional issue, though, in that I found I kept getting sidetracked on the subject matter.

Remember that I was starting on the issue of the lack of civility in politics—what I have noticed and why it was a concern for me, and how pride is a factor—and then I wanted to have one post on why this was bad for society and another post on why it was bad for individuals. Well I managed the first part of that way back in March, but every time that I started thinking over what I wanted to say regarding why pride and anger and all of that was bad for an individual, I kept getting back to why it was bad for society.

I always have been prone to tangents, but maybe I am just increasingly aware of the difference an individual makes for others—that you can’t really isolate yourself from your impact on society. What happens with the individual is still important for the individual’s sake.

Where I had kind of thought I would be going was that if you are full of anger, and your world is full of enemies instead of brothers, and if you are so confident that you are right in your ways that you would not be able to hear a still small voice suggesting that you are wrong, that you need to consider the fact that maybe you are a goat instead of a sheep, and that goats go to Hell. Granted, under my belief system that doesn’t mean that you are left there, but that still if Christianity is important to you, than loving your neighbor and having charity needs to be important to you, and it’s not enough to only be kind and respectful with the people who think the same way you do. Even publicans do that.

There are signs that are hopeful. I will frequently see stories of generous donations and volunteer work where clearly there are still good hearts out there. I also still see really ugly comments and arguing and wrong-headedness that will lead to bad decisions more to prove a point than anything else.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

If this is what you are feeling, perfect! But if you (for politics or other reasons) get caught up in wrath, scorn, contempt, hatred, etc., that is a problem, even if you political philosophy is sound. And because religion so frequently seems to flavor these political arguments, it can affect your salvation.

That seems like important information, and yet I keep getting distracted. That is partly getting distracted by how bad it is to have a bunch of angry, hateful people walking around and posting anonymously on message boards, but there is more.

Maybe it’s that trying to modify your behavior by fear doesn’t really work. If I only try to be good because I am scared of the results of being bad, chances are I am not going to be able to sustain it. Otherwise, people would probably have more success at dieting and quitting smoking.
However, as I try to do what is right, and I feel God’s love for me, and I act on that and love other people more, which also feels good, motivation becomes a totally different thing. I am acting out of love and gratitude and I am not doing it because of an eternal reward, but because I want to in the here and now. And then I find out that even small actions can make a huge difference with people, and I learn more what is important, and ultimately when I am worried about eternal salvation it is for other people, and all I feel is peace.

I don’t know if that sounds over the top Christian or ridiculous flower child, and really, I am a very practical, grounded person. Also, I do worry about my soul at times when there are weaknesses that I can’t seem to shake, and even when I am doing well at being kind, I often feel like I am totally awkward, or I realize later that there was an opportunity that I completely missed, so don’t get the wrong idea about me that way either.

What I’m trying to get at is that love changes things. Specifically, charity changes things. It elevates and uplifts, and beautifies. It increases your enjoyment, and it can bring some increased pain too, I suppose, because you do care more, but it has rich rewards, and it is a shame what some people will choose over charity.

You know, I could give different examples of that, but then I think it would become kind of scolding, and I don’t want to do that. Plus, then maybe I would feel pride for not being like these people, and that would just be wrong.

So I guess I am leaving it at “Love is good.” Aren’t you glad you read this?

I testify

My mother is really close to her oldest sister in Italy, and they talk about once a week. They do talk about us quite a bit. Elda does not have any children of her own, so she just adores her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and grandnieces and nephews, and always wants to know about them. Anyway, Mom said that Elda had mentioned something about how I am always going.

This seems funny because I do not consider myself energetic—in fact I feel tired a lot. However, I am always coming up with some new project. Elda remembers me as always being up for any excursion, no matter how minor, and studying when there was nothing else to do, or asking questions or looking through books—always being “on”.

Well, my aunt is eighty-eight, so by comparison I should look energetic, but also, I do very much always feel a need to be doing something. I am always getting ideas for things that I want to accomplish or ways to challenge myself, and I do tend to get overly ambitious, but every now and then I complete something cool.

The lead-in to this is that even though I am working, and doing a web site, and reading some thick books that are due soon, and have a lot of blogs and family history and preparedness stuff to do, I have given myself another project.

There were a few things that led to it. One is that a friend asked me if we observed Lent. My church does not officially do that, no. I have done it at times, given up or taking up something, because I do think it is nice to do something special while looking forward to Easter, but not on a regular basis. She called us slackers, of course, but actually what we do is fast one day every month instead of for a month, and sometimes we may do additional fasting if there is a special need.

For some reason the Lenten forty-day fast, symbolic of Christ’s forty-day fast, put me in mind of the forty-day fast our ward has been doing this pretty much annually. They have people sign up for a one day in a forty-day period, so that at any given time there is someone fasting for missionary work.

Somehow with those two things in mind, and sitting in fast and testimony meeting, I started thinking about how people say that when you bear your testimony your sins are forgiven. I believe the scripture they are referring to is Doctrine and Covenants section 62, verse 3: “Nevertheless, ye are blessed, for the testimony which ye have borne is recorded in Heaven for the angels to look upon; and they rejoice over you, and your sins are forgiven you.”

While this scripture is given to specific people as a greeting to them, a lot of people take it as a general rule. Even if there is not an exact correlation, bearing witness invites the Holy Ghost, which sanctifies us, and that is how we become clean and forgiven, and if we are bearing witness on a regular basis we are probably trying to do what’s right on a regular basis, so it all works.
And I was thinking that I would like the extra help. I feel like I just keep making the same mistakes over and over again, without really progressing, and I am tired of it. That busy-little-beaver aspect of my personality is that compulsion to improve myself and really be better and wiser and achieve my full potential. The point of all this being that I have decided that I will bear my testimony every day between Easter and the Feast of the Pentecost, which we also do not celebrate.

After all, the Resurrection is the turning point that changed everything. Yes, there were people who had already accepted him as the Messiah, but many still saw him as a prophet and many misunderstood his mission. His miracles were impressive, but not unprecedented. Yes, Lazarus had been dead longer than anyone else raised from the dead, but still, other prophets had raised the dead. No one had ever raised himself. Suddenly His power is certain, His mission is understood, and everything is brought together. I’m not doing it justice, but it is a watershed. Not only does it happen, but suddenly the Savior is everywhere, appearing to multiple people, and there are many witnesses, for fifty days, after which He goes and visits North America and gets even more witnesses.

So I will be bearing witness in one way or another from yesterday through May 23rd. I don’t know how all it will go. Yesterday after family scripture study I expressed my belief in and gratitude for the Resurrection to my family. Tonight, I am blogging it.

In other cases I may talk to people, or send e-mail, or write out cards, and maybe even pray it. Bearing your testimony to God can be really special. Yes, He already knows, but that does not detract from it. I assume I will get us on the fast Sunday in May—it seems like kind of an obvious one.

I don’t know how all it will go. I have some impressions of people with whom I will share my testimony, and some of them are a little intimidating, and I certainly don’t have fifty in mind yet, which is a lot—this is longer than Lent. But it will be okay, and I expect to be better at the end of it.

So, in case it was not clear enough a few paragraphs ago, I know that God lives, yesterday, today, and forever. Christ died, but He did not stay dead, and neither will we, and I don’t know how I would bear the separations of life if I did not know that. I know that Heavenly Father knows me and loves me, and that is true for all of His children. And through the Holy Ghost, I know that it is possible for anyone to know.

April Foolishness

I came across the paradox of me today. I knew April Fools Day was coming up, and wanted to acknowledge it in some way. I am a little mischievous, and I am certainly good at working out plans.

A good prank is not so over-the-top that it is not believable, and I don’t have time for anything really elaborate, and I certainly would not want anything malicious, so I kind of thought that changing my Facebook relationship status from “single” to “engaged” would be good—simple and non-labor intensive and harmless.

I didn’t want anyone to be going on too long, and feel really fooled, so I thought I would make a status update referring to April 1st as a clue. At the same time, I didn’t want the new status and the new relationship status to appear to close together and be too obvious, so I set the status update about April 1st at midnight, right before I went to bed, and then set the new relationship status first thing in the morning.

The way I believed this would work was that people would see I was engaged, think, “Really?” and then see the status update and realize it was a prank, so this was a one-minute thing. I was so wrong.

There were a few things I didn’t think through. With people you see on a regular basis, they know to be suspicious if you are suddenly engaged when you haven’t been seeing anyone. With Facebook people can see the status who may be sincerely interested in you, but not see you enough to be automatically suspicious. Therefore, I received a flood of well wishes, and begin to feel really guilty.

I was surprised at how bad I felt. I thought I was being a little bit bratty, which is not really so unusual for me, and there is the paradox: I am a brat, but I am also very susceptible to guilt about it.

I guess I felt bad that I had squandered all that good will. Suddenly I was feeling like I was letting people down by not being engaged, because they would all really like that for me. Bad Gina. And also I fooled them, which is not nice.

This is sometimes an issue in my daily life as well. My sisters and I rip on each other (and Mom) quite a bit too. We’re not really mean, but our humor kind of is. Anyway, I’m not sure of the best way to express this, but usually I score the most points. Generally that is fun, and no one seems to feel bad about it (unless they are in a bad mood and I notice too late), but what if it is having a harmful effect on their self-esteem that even they do not realize? I guess I will just have to stick to making fun of other people—only ones who are not around.

Maybe next April Fools I should go with something more elaborate and less believable, like a series of pictures of me with the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot and things like that. We’ll see.

Quick update because I am lame

Well, maybe not that lame, but I was really on a roll there, and getting pretty close to the conclusion of that particular series, and then life happened again, as it does.

There was some stress about the burning smell coming from our dryer, sure, but after a week that is resolved. Certainly, I am always fairly busy anyway, but I was busy when I actually was doing the daily updates too.

No the real issue now is helping my friend with her mother's web site. I learned HTML ages ago, and have had different web-based responsibilities on and off, but my current assignment has beefed up my skills considerably. I have been repairing broken links, and have done some resizing and little things like that. I am still no expert, not by a long shot, and also, every interface is different.

Well, I have a friend whose mother is setting up a beach rental, and she wants a site set up. She asked if I would help. She has done a lot of stuff for me before, including helping with the dryer and she is currently troubleshooting my desktop. Of course I want to help her.

I am glad to be helping her, not just for friendship but also for the ability to stretch my skills. I could be unemployed again in a few weeks (I am definitely employed through April 9th, and it could go all the way to August 6th, but it is being decided one month at a time), and increased abilities can only be a good thing.

Still, it is a little consuming. This time I am working with Wordpress, which I had only had a passing familiarity with, and I am doing a lot more. It is really cool, but there is not much time for blogging. That will probably only be for another week or so, then I will get back to the other 36 planned regular blog posts, and finally finish that animal-centric travel blog post, and oh, I'll do all sorts of good stuff.

And if somehow I am ever able to afford another trip, I have a place in the Cook Islands where I can stay for free!

Taxes and Terrorists

I took the weekend off, but now I am back at it.

Before leaving off, I was writing about the financial decisions we make as a society—what we will fund, and how it will be paid for. Those decisions affect us on two levels. Perhaps you could call it external and internal. We get the society we pay for certainly, so that is the external, and whether we were in the majority or not, that affects us and has its own perils. There are also some internal perils though, in the person that we become as we make those decisions. We’ll start with the external.

Back on the topic of infrastructure, there are some things that we need to be able to rely on if society is going to function smoothly and support positive growth. Sadly a lot of the watchdog agencies are not doing their jobs, so you may have waste dumped into your water, or find that your electricity rates go up and it is generating profit for shareholders rather than improving service, but that’s a topic for another day.

The topic for today is whether we really want a system that widens the gulf between the rich and the poor? Money can buy you bottled water if the water supply becomes untrustworthy, and can move you into the country if the air becomes polluted, and if you have enough money maybe you can even have your own helicopter so that the state of the roads never matters. Most of us will not be able to take our private helicopter into the country, but we will be living in neighborhoods and traveling through civilization to a job, and humanity will be around all of the time. We shouldn’t want to avoid humanity, but we can’t anyway, so we need to think about how they are turning out.

Say schools struggle with funding. Wealthy people can send their children to private schools, and less financially secure but still dedicated people could try home schooling or maybe setting up a charter school, but the majority of children will be relying on public school. If the public school does not have adequate resources to prepare their students for a future of employment and social responsibility, enough of that can bleed over into the lives of the private school kids also.

First of all, you need an educated workforce. This goes beyond being able to attract economic investment to simply being able to support it, as well as having a population that will come up with its own innovations. If you have your own company and can put Junior in charge of running it one day, that is great, but it is a more meaningful gift if he can find good employees who know how to think and develop. Even if you have no children, it makes sense that as you age you will want there to be good doctors and city planners and safety inspectors, not to mention people continuing to pay into Social Security and Medicare once you are collecting. For that to work smoothly, you need success in the schools.

You could argue that you also need healthcare, living wages, and other things like that, and could argue about how much is really necessary, but there shouldn’t be an argument that you productive citizens for a smoothly-functioning society where pretty much any citizen can feel safe and accomplish what they need.

Yes, it was Afghanistan that sheltered Al-Quaeda, and there have been attacks against our troops in Lebanon and Yemen, but the great majority of terrorists come from Saudi Arabia, which is considered a close ally. Well, our government is allied with their government, and we like buying their oil, and they find perks in the relationship, so why the terrorists? There are a couple of things that make Saudi Arabia a fertile breeding ground.

First, you have an economy where there is great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and great poverty in other places. You also have fairly high unemployment. This is getting better, and I could not find statistics for before September 11th, but two years later, in 2003, it was 25%. In addition, they practice polygamy, and assuming they have a fairly even birthrate, with the same number of men and women, and polygamy is common, there are not enough women to go around. Finally, although the government is friendly to us, and they do not have the same interest in freedom of the press and freedom of religion as us, they don’t interfere with a strongly anti-American press and clerics, because they would rather have the hate being spewed at America than them.

So, imagine a young man born poor, with limited opportunities. He can’t find a job. He is interested in girls, but with no money or job, or prospects of that changing, he will never have a girl either. With no job or girl, he has a lot of time on his hands, and the people who are really interested in him are the mullahs, who will preach to him for hours, and may even feed him, and they will teach him how corrupt and evil Western civilization is, and how glorious martyrdom is, and then you do get the women.

It may sound overly simplistic, but why don’t we get more terrorists from Jordan or Lebanon or Indonesia for that matter? You get a lot of Palestinians, even if they are not directed at us, but again, they are coming from horrible living conditions, with a lot of time to listen to the preaching of hate.

I first came across this theory in Psychology Today, and one point they made is that we just don’t get a lot of American suicide bombers, even in our lunatic fringe, and it’s a combination of those differences. There are people who will listen to a lot of hate speech, but they can still have families. There are people who are unemployed, but they have gotten a balanced education. Generally speaking, our conditions do not create the complete lack of hope for the future that is then coached into anger and hatred. Not yet.

This is a big reason why I worry so much about the lack of civil discourse. We have been moving into uglier times. I believe I expressed some anger towards Aaron Campbell for the choices he made, despite feeling compassion for him. I will also give him this credit in that I don’t believe he was trying to cause any destruction other than his own.

I cannot say that about Jeffrey Grahn. It wasn’t enough to shoot himself, and it wasn’t enough to shoot himself—he also needed to shoot two of her friends. I can’t say that about Joe Stack, who loaded his plane with an extra fuel tank before flying it into a building. I’m sure he was very disappointed to find out he had only taken one additional life. People call him a hero because it was the IRS—no way. And if you won’t get over your anti-government feelings to see the wrongness of that, how about him burning down the house where his wife and step-daughter still lived first? Okay, I guess it was nice of him not to shoot them, but leaving them homeless is still a pretty big “Screw you.” He just wanted to destroy.

Not everyone will turn hopelessness into hatred, but it does happen, and with prolonged hopelessness it’s a fairly easy step.

Life is difficult enough—we should not be setting things up to make it harder for anyone to progress a little and get somewhere. They say a rising tide raises all boats. Well, a little scuttling might end up sinking the whole fleet. We are connected. At best we have a society that gradually becomes less efficient and poorer; at worst life imitates Grand Theft Auto, We can do better than that, and we should want to. That will be the next piece.

On a side note, I can only imagine what kind of keyword flags this one is going to throw out. I guess its a good thing I don't have any trips planned.