Best of the Week

Great things happened this week: night hikes and night walks and incredible full moons and 7-Peaks with the best family a girl could ask for and a baby blessing and I hit my teaching groove (oh I'm loving it) and I got a new phone and friends cleaned up after dinner (tomato jelly!? homemade garlic bread!? homemade mozzarella caprese? carrot-cranberry-pudding-cake?!) but the best of the week was last night, learning how to play bridge (a fantastic game with ridiculous terminology) over apple-bacon-pancakes and laughing laughing laughing.

yeah yeah yeah

Sometimes when you're driving to the temple and you're feeling particularly self-flagellating and KBYU is only playing flutey-flute classical you switch to KRCL hoping for some mellow-y folk and Karen O comes on. Perfectly.

A thing

I've been thinking about lately is entitlement/obligation. A friend of mine posted this quote several months ago:

Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth, "you owe me."
Look what happens with a love like that,
it lights the whole sky.

-Hafiz

And I sort of wish I could tattoo it onto my brain. I'm such a lucky person, and no one owes me anything and I'm not sure why it's so hard for me to remember that (or if figuring out why would even help).

And. I have some things to say about teleology (my vocab lesson of last semester) and the way that it limits contentment. And options. And steals lives.

For now: I worked hard all day today. I found myself planning lessons like a madperson, not able to pull myself away...which is sort of uncharacteristic and entirely awesome. I taught well and studied well (I might have fallen asleep for a minute, but) and rushed rushed into dinner and workshopping and got my phone fixed. Then I walked through nighttime Provo which I love of course.

So.

Girl Crazy

So you could take this the wrong way, but shouldn't: I crush on girls waaay more often than I crush on boys. Like once a month I fall in love with some girl in my class or ward or on the street or whatever. I do crush on boys, and I like them a whole bunch, but girls are easier. And nicer, generally.

Anyway.

Best of the Week

This is another toughy, so I think I'll generalize: my best of the week were the summer nights. I ate dinner with a friend outside in this gorgeous temperate bluster. I went on late late walks by myself when Provo was entirely asleep and the air was just cooler than my skin and then I watched/heard/smelled the sun rise (I have honeysuckle outside my window=winner). I tended a campfire and slept under the stars (how do I alway forget how great they are up the canyon? Wow) with friends and almost watched the sunrise again. I considered a nocturnal schedule (sleep from noon to 8 or something because I'm pretty sure hell is driving up University Parkway at 4:30 in the afternoon) so I could just live summer nights and mornings all summer long.

Love them.

Saying yes (and no) to Summer

Spring was unpleasantly busy. Sometimes pleasant, but mostly not and I promised myself that summer would be different. Yes I'm teaching and working on my thesis, but my hours are much more flexible and, um, salaried. I am saying yes to summer.

Yes to rock climbing (and I cleaned a route--which isn't the right way to say that, but it was sort of scary and I did it). Yes to sleeping out. Yes to rope swinging (pics to come I think), on the high branch. Yes to friends. Yes to family.

And no too: I've given up Facebook and sugar and Diet Coke. Two-and-a-half-days and counting and no coke. This is a big deal. And I feel great.

Because summer is going to be fun, dammit. And awesome. :) And already is.

Girls I would marry if I could: Christine

(This may or may not be the first of a running series. There are soo many great women that I know, I wanted to start up a running tribute. And why aren't these girls married?)

I first met Christine in the basement of a house we were both moving into. She and Liann (sure to be featured here soon) were painting the family room Red! and Orange! and Pirate's Cove Blue! because, they said, it looked like a dead grandmother's basement, which was a true story. I wasn't sure what I'd gotten myself into, moving into this house with near strangers who were probably listening to something poppy and raucous (Mika was a favorite that year I think) and laughing over some ridicutraumatic story.

I'm not going to lie, Christine's shining cheeriness put me off at first. I spent the first week or two circling warily, walking in and out of Liann and Christine's extended discussions, waiting for some chip or crack to show.

And it still hasn't. And she sucked me in entirely and loved my crotchety soul (something like Anne and Katherine Brooke from Anne of Avonlea) and inspires me all the time.

Christine is magical. And her life is magical. And one of her favorite words is magical. This is what I mean: Christine is impervious to worry. She's certain that everything will work out, and everything works out. She finds jobs and finishes papers and plays plays plays with inspiring abandon, not always certain of the next step, but certain that it will be right and great besides. Christine is willing to wait things out: her dream has been interior design school for as long as I've known her, but she took a little detour to get and excel at a real-person job, and the design school thing, eventually worked out. Christine loves people.

And the coolest thing about Ms. C is that she doesn't take any of this for granted. We talked about this once, about how sometimes people sort of wistfully wish for her life and her spunk and her love--and she said "I work hard for this, every day." And that's something I've never forgotten. Christine decided who she wanted to be, and set about becoming that person. She wanted to be social and happy and blessed, and so she works on it. And it's panned out gorgeously.

So. Christine. (Oh, and she skydives.)(Christine. With someone (Joshua?) from So You Think You Can Dance. Because that's how awesome she is.)

Confession: "I love deadlines.

I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by." --Douglas Adams

Instead of writing my paper (still and again for the last, like, 36 hours) I'm going to theorize about why I'm soo bad at deadlines. Because I think it's a thing.

And the obvious bit: I'm not super great at self-discipline. This isn't a thing I'm proud of, and is something I could change with some work, and I haven't or whatever (I've started, actually, and my forees into self discipline have been liberating and empowering: I am in the business of doing, etc.). My friend delivered some Cadbury fresh from London yesterday and I thought for a second "I could keep this as a reward for something later," then dismissed the idea as silly and lit in. It was delicious. I shared with my friends. I finished it after lunch.

Deadlines though? Hate 'em. Hate them like I hated practicing teaching at the MTC with Brother Young glowering through the tinted glass and stopping me every 5 minutes telling me how bored he was or the time the football coach taught driving range and I forgot my right and left and it was awful and growly and queasy? True story.

I live for exceptions to the rule. That, in fact, is what I'm banking on. I'm wagering that my professor won't start grading until tomorrow morning at the earliest, so I can take my sweet (free, self-defined) time tonight knocking ideas around and email my draft to her some time late this evening.

Because deadlines stress me out. I took a job this summer that paid like $3 less an hour because I could set my own-ish hours and I regretted it for like 5 minutes. I'm 15 minutes late and no one's glowering, I go to the dentist without asking permission, I take a long lunch or leave early and I work hard and get the job done with no one breathing down my neck (or telling me that I'm weeding wrong? What?). It's lovely.

And something about exceptions to the rule make me feel like a real person? I go in and talk to a professor (and sometimes tears come, I'm also sort of a stress case) and we bond over the fact that I'm not a mind-blowingly awesome student, though I have them laughing at jokes as I leave, and there's recognition there: you, ke, are more (or at least as) important than (as) the rules.

Rachel wrote about running for the love of it and not for the regimen, and there's some of that in what I'm writing.

The inevitable question is whether this is a thing I want to change or something I'm going to inhabit and work around. Which I guess doesn't really matter now (because the paper is due in an hour and its 30% written) but is something I'll think about. Later. When I feel like it. :)

The thing about theory

is that everything feels like it applies. So I watched Old Spice commercials for a half an hour yesterday (I was going to write on masculinity. It could've been awesome. It was, actually, awesome--I didn't know that Neil Patrick Harris did an ad--just less than entirely applicable). And am blogging right now. For unclear reasons (dear my body: sorry about the sleep deprivation thing. You're a peach). Laters. :)

Are you listening

to Chet Baker? Self-destructive, handsome, troubled, with a voice like velvet or suede or something that has seen better days. How have I missed him?




(Who's ever heard a version of this that isn't schmaltzy and terrible?)





Love.

Best of the week:

My best-of-the-week was all week (well, starting Tuesday afternoon I think. I might have cried over kickball on Monday. Because I'm in 2nd grade.) I might not always cheat (by writing about more than one thing, which is the rule), but today I am. And with good reason: this week was awesome. To wit:

• Tuesday: My prof says "this [explication of gnarled psychoanalytic theory] really comes naturally to you, doesn't it?" It does not, but the compliment felt great.
• Wednesday: Greek food+friend+great convo
• Wednesday#2: the most beautiful evening ever.
  
• Thursday: Help the Verb! A game I made up (think hot lava+grammar book+water gun) to help the kid I tutor get a grip on his helping verbs.
• Thursday#2: A second convo with my prof about the paper I should maybe be writing right this minute goes really well. I'm excited to get into my sources and play around. And I've been really pleased with the types of things I've been coming up with, the fact that the paper is due in 50 hours and is officially unbegun notwithstanding.
• Thursday#3: A conversation with an old friend over Noodles+Co. synthesizes a lot of things I've been chewing on lately. God loves me. And everyone. And thinks I'm doing a great job. And is into the things I'm into. And isn't trying to trick me.
• Thursday#4: I fell into Walking Club and we found a guy baking pizza in his own pizza oven that he built in his back yard and it was incredible. And I made some new friends.
• Friday: I got to play with my nephews and it was soo fun. Cookies and hide-and-seek and swords and I fell asleep at 9:30 which was awesome. They are old enough now (4, 8, 12) that there's no almost-marble-swallowing or tantrums or crying (mostly. I think Max cried a time or two, but then I played Lego Indiana Jones with him and he forgot that anything was bothering him).
• Saturday: More nephews. A sushi date.
• Saturday#2: Dinner+Daria with my favorite people. Green chile and garlic mayo+roasted corn on the cob. The kind of teasing that only siblings and great friends can pull off. And Daria is just as awesome as you remember.
  
• Sunday (! are you tired yet? This is ridiculous!): I had my RS teachers over for a training/lesson preview. We had fruit and muffins and some insightful conversation.

And this all was only the beginning. Changes are afoot. And probably I'll be grumpy again later and things will be hard or whatever. But. Awesome. This week was awesome.

ke