Celebration of Love #2: Be Brave

Loved this commercial during the Superbowl. 

The Onion

I love February.  It's Valentine's Time.

Celebration of Love #1: a great love poem.  I found this while teaching language arts in Philly.

Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

--Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy is a contemporary British poet.  She's said, "I like to use simple words but in a complicated way.”  Good example.  The first poet I loved is Edgar Allen Poe, and so my taste developed early with a tinge of eeriness. 

Because of this poem, I intended to give my boyfriend an onion for Valentine's Day once.  My roommate interceded, telling me it miiiight be too soon to unleash all my quirkiness on the day of love.  I gave him some Ed Hardy temp tattoos instead and we put them on each other.  And, coincidentally, he gave me an Edgar Allen Poe love poem attached to some dark chocolate. 

He probably could have handled the onion.

Believe It

The Half Marathon I Didn't Die In

A girl makes plans to run a half marathon in January in St. George because she is enticed by the possibility of a warm weather weekend.  She forgets that the months of Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays required to prepare for said weekend all must take place where she lives--which tends to be quite cold in winter.

So I didn't run a ton.  Toward the end I was only faithful to twice a week but have toughened up considerably since my first race two years ago that I trained for entirely on a treadmill.  I can handle running outdoors in the cold for the most part.  I also did a lot of Crossfit, so the non-running days were still getting work done. But still, I was aware of bad things coming.

I hear the most important time for sleep and quality food to fuel you for a race is the week prior.  Despite my best intentions, both eating and sleeping were quite sub-par, thus further shooting my race preparations to hell.

The day before the race I had cold chicken fingers for lunch and the night before the race I slept about three hours.*  I was unconcerned by then, however, because it was too late to care.  The race started and Summer said to me, "Wanna just do the 5K?" as we giggled about what a crap race this was going to  and took off.  I usually time/pace myself with a GPS watch but it's acting up; Summer brought hers instead but forgot to wear it, so we decided to not stress about it and just run for our lives.

I was amazed at how fun a race it turned out to be.  My dad and Fay were our cheering section and met us at random places around the route with snacks, along with some poster holders with a sign that said, "Go Amy, Heather, Summer and Emily!"  They didn't know it, but we counted their cheer for us as well.  We cruised up hills with zero problem, and even had some time to stop and take pictures along the way. 

The last two miles were grueling, just as the last two miles of any run are bad.  During the time my brain entered delirium it brought up the story of Bilbo Baggins, and I imagined myself trudging through a freezing dark forrest fighting for life. This mental adventure worked, and I ended up significantly beating my last half marathon time.  Book nerd that I am, it doesn't surprise me that I transcended into a story.  I just wonder why I made myself a Hobbit.

After race pictures: everything looks all sweet and happy here.

Here I am with my biggest fan.

 

This is how I really felt. I had charly horses in my hips.  Dumb Hobbit hips! 

Footnote:
*This sentence speaks Hemmingway, in case you didn't notice.

Abe Lincoln is the new It Man

Abraham Lincoln is lately trendy. He is overtaking popular culture all over the place. Have you noticed?

Evidence:

These are the new USPS stamps released January 1, 2013 in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln signed January 1, 1863.

This is the first stamp of a civil rights set being issued this year.

 'Mixing his trend with another hot item.

I read the book over Christmas break. Pretty entertaining--LAME ending. It's also a movie, I hear it bites. The cover artwork is fabulous.

He's Hollywood's Latest Hearthrob-- even up for an Academy Award.

You know you are something when you make SNL (not for tender ears).

And, no one can truly transcend unless they are somehow attached to George Clooney.

 Clooney is Lincoln's half-first cousin five times removed

 Another box checked.

 Can't get enough of him via all of the above?

 Check out Lincoln's handwritten documents, address book, and taxes

 (That last one is for you, Emily Alley.)

I have always had a thing for tall & slender, dark, mysterious, driven men that are related to George Clooney.  So I'm actually way ahead of the trend here.

Wash Your Hands

I am a business manager for a charter school, but because I missed the classroom and a classroom here needed a teacher, I picked up teaching a 7th grade CTE (Careers and Technical Education) class. It's pretty awesome. I basically do fun activities with them. Well, I try to. They don't always turn out.

Today did, though.  Lately I'm teaching a Healthcare Careers unit. Today my mom Tam talked about being a CNA and my sis Kaylee talked about being a medical receptionist.  Tammie had the kids put glow lotion on, half of them then washed their hands and the other half de-germed with hand santizer. Then they put their hands under a black light to see what they missed. 

The moral of the story is: a 7th Grader's hands are gross.

This kid is obsessed with Jeeps.

 

 

It was great.

Post Break-up #2 To Do

Transition.

Here are the steps commonly involved in such a task:

Forced Calm.  It's not personal; it's business.
Incredulousness.  It's impossible that that really happened.
Peace.  This is where your love for the other person only lets you want the best for them. "If you love something, set it free..."
Perturbedness. This is where your memory kicks in.  "What the hell?!"
Melacholy.  Shoulda Woulda Coulda.
Jealousy.  It's best to let this one starve.  We always have a choice.
Acceptance.  Fine then!  Fine, ok, ok.  Fine.  I'm fine.  It's fine.  It's good.
Apathy.  "Weird that a while ago I had a serious boyfriend."

These steps may look orderly, but they're not.  Instead of consecutive keys on a piano; they're a song.  This is why you can't make a To Do list to get over someone, you have to just let yourself wake up to a melody in your head for a while. 
The steps aren't patient either.  They push and shove until they've each had enough of the spotlight.  Right when you feel like you're over it, you see an online post about a certain someone not sleeping because he's being kept up by a new girl.  Gag. 

My transition was a little awkward, because the break-up was sudden and unexpected for everyone else around me.  I had quite a few conversations similar to,

"Heather, Happy Holidays!  How are you and the boy?" 
"Holidays are going well!  Oh, we broke up!"
"Congratu...What??"
"We're not together anymore.  It's OK."
Silence.
"Oh."
I know the other probably wanted to end the conversation with "Merry Christmas!", but wasn't sure whether it's socially appropriate to wish a newly single person such a sentiment.

It is, so you know for the future.  Some break-ups might even bring merrier Christmases.

I am relieved to now be on the side of acceptance.  You know you're at this point when your mind is occupied with things other than all that stuff above, when you don't feel strongly in any direction about the person, and when you finally have a tinge of excitement for your new Friday night date. 

Sometimes I miss him when I am standing at my kitchen counter cutting up vegetables.  I would often get the daily message or call from him while right there doing just that.  I miss how I felt when I was with him and good he was at solving problems.  But, I no longer have burning questions to ask him or poignant observations to declare. As the Parable of the Cute Shirt (previous post) teaches, just because we like something doesn't mean we need it.  And, experience tells all of us, there is always something new around the corner. 

I must admit, I love the anticipation of what's around the corner. 

Parable of the Cute Shirt

**I originally wrote this post two years ago and discovered the concept eight years ago.  When searching for the post to link it to the one above, I realized I'd never published it.  Here it is, saved from abortion:


a really great shirt often takes precendence over the best-intended money goals.

one day a girl goes window shopping with her friends, determined to stick to her budget and just "look". then, she finds on a back rack the shirt that cannnot be passed over. i mean, true that buying it would blow the budget, but when would she find it again? besides, when making the budget she really wasn't planning on finding such a shirt. so the excuse slides in and the money goal is pushed to next month. then again, if one is really tricky, she can squeeze and twist her budget to meet her wants. she can sort of make this count, even though her re-vamped budget looks nothing like its original shape. sort of like trying to pour into a pair of too-tight jeans. admit it.

after this the girl feels a bit disappointed in her lack of discipline and knows she should have been better. but, she has the shirt now and knows it'll make up for it.

a couple of years ago i moonlighted evenings at Ann Taylor Loft to pay for my braces. my love for clothes and the tempting 60% employee discount often ate up my meager $9 an hour, thus messing up my budget. one day while working i was tossing numbers around in my head to figure out how i could buy a particular could-not-be-passed-up shirt and still stay on budget.

a mind-blowing thought entered my head right in the knick of time: I Don't Need That.  the simple concept was profound.  i could appreciate the shirt was beautiful, and that could be enough.  admiring and acknowleging its lovliness displaced the "gotta have it" mentality.  it dissuaged my desire for the shirt entirely, and i was once again a girl in charge of my own wallet.

overtime, i've found this concept to be likewise applicable to men.  break-ups or lack of reciprocation can be hard, because we let our wants overrule our needs.  we sometimes feed our hopes and desires for a certain guy that we lose a level of sanity.  not to mention dignity.

a much healthier perspective is: "that guy is great.  amazing even.  i see that he is sort of Zeus, but I Don't Need Him."  thus, a girl maintains control of her own sanity. 

this is like a miracle drug.  try it, it works.

Post-Break-Up #1 To Do

Since having a break up with a guy who is extremely healthy and never eats processed foods, the best thing for me to do is eat macaroni and cheese.
The prob is that every time I do I feel a little gross because I have also learned the benefits of fresh foods and don't even like macaroni and cheese really.
But I don't care! I am eating it anyway! It isn't going to make a difference in my body!
He did always say I was defiant.

Flying Away

I'm finally on a plane to London, in considerably better spirits due to a Scottish man sitting next to me with curly eyelashes who said, "Do you think they could make these damn seats any closer together? Sheeeeeet." At least I think that is what he said, I can't understand him very well. And then I'm pretty sure he went on to tell me he just got engaged in Edinburgh Castle and to describe some refurbished bridges in London.
I'm excited.

I Believe in Packing Light

Which is why is just went through my backpack a second time, mercilessly throwing out 2 shirts, a dress, some vaseline, and chapstick. 
Unfortunately, I am also a bit lighter on this trip because I am missing a very important piece of it: my paper ticket for a train ride from Paris to Florence.  Two of my friends and I scoured my belongings, to no avail.  I have to leave in the morning without it.  I didn't think it was that big a deal, until I just finished watching the season finale of How I Met Your Mother, and at the end burst into tears. 
Good vacations do not start with crying.  I need to buck up. 
Actually I need to go to bed. 
Day 1.

Conference As Usual

when i log in to my blog, it tells me it wants a new look. i agree. i was just thinking myself that i need a haircut. i suppose my blog feels the similar need to switch things up or thin things out when they're getting out of control.

but before my little blog can get a new look, it needs to be more disciplined in updating itself. ahem. it's not my fault, it's the blog's.

every 6 months my church holds a General Conference where our leaders give counsel and encouragement. if you live in Utah, you know about this even if you're not Mormon, because the bullet points are reported on the news. when i came back to Utah after living away for a few years, i thought this was weird.

i love conference. i love the messages shared, i love the updates on numbers and people. i can't help it, i'm a numbers person. i especially love Temple Square. it gets very dressed up for conference and smiles at everyone.

if i were still an English teacher, i would expect my students to ask me why i keep using so much personification in this post. well, it's just my mood. "Who needs an excuse for literary elements?", i would retort.

i have a couple of friends that love conference at Temple Square as much as i.

(speaking of English teaching, the previous is a good sentence to explain when to use "I" or "me" at the end of a sentence. if i said my friends love TS as much as me, it would mean they love it as much as they love me. when i say they love it as much as I, i mean they love it as much as i love it. excuse the mood, dear readers.)

i have the confidence to say that these friends likely love conference at Temple Square also as much as they love me, so in this case it really doesn't matter how i said it. so there, Miss Bankhead.

i digress.

one of my fellow TS lovers is Camilla. when we were in college, we would drive down to SLC from Logan and sleep on the sidewalk outside Temple Square to make sure we could get a good seat. most teenagers/young adults do this for concerts and parades. we did it to see the Prophet and the flowers. i think we liked that it made us feel like pioneers. now, every conference Cam and i have some sort of communication during it. this time it was a text from her telling me one of songs reminded her of me (not I) because it's my favorite, and to see if i liked President Monson's "Hello." i had to confess that i had been cleaning the bathroom while listening, so i heard the song but missed the facial expression that came with hello. it's all bueno, she assured me. neither of us had slept on the sidewalk the night before, but we still love it.

Christy is another of my conference friends. we committed after we got back from our missions to always meet up for fall conference somehow. we are usually successful at this, even though both of us have lived in states outside of Utah for a large portion of our adult lives. this past weekend we met up Sunday afternoon. Christy picked me up and we drove down to our typical parking place. the open space that day happened to be on a hill. Christy parked and then as a second-thought asked me which direction the wheels are supposed to be turned on a hill. i told her, she already knew and did it, and we got out. as we were walking back down the hill, we heard a loud POP! and turned to see the car start rolling. there was not enough time to panic, we just both started running back to it. because the wheels had been turned toward the curb, the car backed itself right into the driveway next to it, and started heading toward the garage of the house belonging to the driveway. by this time, our purses had both been thrown into the flowers and Christy's very-cute high heels were kicked off, and we fumbled to get the door open. we both realized that cars are heavier than we'd ever imagined. my brain was trying to predict how hard the car would have to hit the garage door to seriously damage it, and was relieved that it was heading for a garage and not a bedroom. blessedly, the driveway was on a slight incline and the car lost its momentum going toward the house. it rolled back down toward the street a moment, and then stopped. it was perfect, just as if it were stopping by to pick us up. we grabbed shoes and purses and hopped back in, found a flat spot, and made it to Temple Square.

the adventure of conference never ends.

(the English teacher is back: please name the onomatopoeia in the narrative above. 10 points.)

The Curious Incident of the Dead Bird in the Bathtub

The other day I found a dead bird in my bathtub. Here's what happened:

Monday my friend and I took an accidental hike up a little road in the mountains that we imagined led to a really cool house. It was accidental not because we broke down, but because we couldn't find our FHE group who must have been on a different mountain.

In the middle of the road, the friend noticed an ant-covered bird--a bird with a broken wing that had minyons of ants crawling all over it. The bird was still alive and involved in a horrific scene. We quickly decided to defy nature and save the bird. It's bad karma to let stuff die from ant suffocation. As we grabbed for it, it flapped and squawked to get away, drawing the attention of the dog that was with us. The dog was faster than we were and snatched that poor bird right up. We hesitated a moment, hoping the dog would hurry and put the bird out of its misery, but it turned out the dog just wanted to swing it around a bit. We eventually saved it again, wiped the ants off it and ourselves (but let the dog fend for herself), and took it home.

I put it in a little drawer, complete with a magazine-shredded bed, some bread and water, and a little washrag blanket and then covered the drawer with a towel. Bird tucked its little head into its shoulder and fell peacefully asleep. Relief. The next morning, I awoke to a little chirper a few feet from my bed, which I thought was cute.

The two most important things you can do for a bird with a broken wing are save it from being someone's dinner, and keep it in a place where it won't further injure itself. So I left it in the drawer and put the drawer in the bathtub as double protection. I opened the shower window nice and wide so Bird would have some fresh air and made sure some of her magazine bed could double as reading material in case she got bored in the drawer. I left for work expecting to return to a refreshed, grateful, and current-event-apprised bird (she had Time magazine, after all).

Later that night, I ran up the stairs in the dark with my newly-purchased meal worms, hoping hoping hoping the bird was still alive.

A person ignorant of what a bathroom serving three girls is like would likely think they walked into a corner store in a small country when they stepped into the girls' bathtub. In it are all varieties of shampoos, conditioners, and other things that I don't even really understand. Our unmentionables sit on the window sill. The sill of that same window that I had left wide open.

When I went in to deliver dinner, much to my horror, I found the following things lying spread-eagle in the bathtub: one ginormous bottle of super-smoothing shampoo, pomegranite dream body wash, frizz + death defying conditioner, and a dead bird.

I was sad she was gone, relieved I didn't have to open up the meal worms. I wondered how long I had to dispose of the body, but when someone said the word "carcass", I pulled out my head lamp and camping shovel and buried the bird under the bushes.

How Bird passed will forever be a mystery. It could have been old age. It could have been sustained injury. Maybe despair. It may have been death by the bottle. It could have been a heart attack caused when wind threw everything down. We will never know.

The moral of the story is this: sometimes when you're focused on little things, you forget to look at the big picture.

Determined?

I'm right now reading The Chosen for the second time. It sits on the bookshelf in my living room. Sunday morning it winked at me so I picked it up with the intent to skim a few pages while waiting for church. I got hooked pretty quick and ended up taking it with me to church and had to fight not to read it during the lulls. I am now giving it the good, thorough second-read excellent books deserve.

You might think I am talking about a guy, but I swear it's just a book.

The story is about two Jewish boys and their friendship (to put it lightly). Last night I read a portion about a period of time when one of the boys, Danny, really needed to talk about some weighty things on his mind with the other, Reuven, but Reuven was too busy with school and illness and student government to take time to have more than a fleeting conversation with him. Because I've read the book already, I can anticipate the later-described struggle that Danny was going through at that time, and know how speaking with Reuven could have relieved some of his burden. This morning I was thinking about it again, and feeling very annoyed with Reuven for not taking the time out of his schedule to give his best friend the conversation he needed. I was feeling frustrated and sad about the situation and its consequences. Maybe you could say I was brooding. Eventually it occurred to me that the story is already written and no amount of feeling I have about the situation is going to change the outcome that I know is coming (I'm aware that another reason I shouldn't stress over this while driving to work on an early morning when I have lots of other things to stew upon is that it's a fictional story. I can't help it--I get into stuff).

So then I wondered if this is true about non-fiction life. I wonder if consequences/outcomes/endings already exist, and therefore worrying about them or thinking about them or planning them is pointless.

Over the past bit of time I've been settling upon an understanding of the importance (and freedom) of releasing expectations of others. This means letting people be who they are and where they are when they are. I've found that when I let people be themselves and accept them for who they are I'm able to love them better. To be clear, I feel that accepting a person for who he/she is can be concurrent to believing in their greatest potential.

I'm getting off the subject. I guess I wonder whether I actually influence outcomes in my life, or if I am just a vehicle for fate.

Ragnar Relay

i'm writing about my recent Ragnar Relay experience soon. it's a long story so it's taking me a while. in the meantime, here are some pictures.