Frenemies?

This video might be funny only to me. There's not a ton of payoff.

I love how Mandu the Dog looks at me like, "Why are you doing nothing to stop this?"

Note to Facebook readers: you have to click through to see it. Duh.

Why yesterday was the best day for birds.

1. It was not rainy or frosty.

2. I saw a whole avocado lying in the street. Picked clean.

Wait a minute.

Here you go.

My dog hates me.

So today Judith and I were perusing Target and I insisted we check out the cheap Halloween candy. I was then immediately sideswiped by the Halloween decor/costume aisle which proclaimed:

90 PERCENT OFF. Hells yeah.

These FOUR dog costumes cost me a grand total of 4.16

Bumblebee. This one is my favorite I think.

White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. A little big, needs some minor alterations.

Headless horseman from the Ichabod Crane stories (you can't really see,

but that's a headless dude with a pumpkin head riding him)

Hot dog. Get it?

He may or may not have spent the rest of the evening hiding from me.

This is How I Prepare for Things.

Look! A baby teacup poodle!!OMG so cute asasdfhsdjkjdff.

I Can't Believe I Haven't Blogged About X, Day 6: My Favorite Color

You will soon understand why this is the best present I have ever gotten.

My favorite color is red. Do some people not know this? That is because I have never blogged about it.

You might think my favorite color is blue, because I wear a lot of blue, but that is incorrect. My favorite color is red.

I like red because it is sexy without being hyperfeminine. It is also powerful and important. I want to be all those things.

Bonus: my favorite animal is the hippo. If I could be any animal, I would definitely want to be a hippo. They don't stress about their looks and just hang out in the water all the time. Everybody likes them. Also, they kill more people every year than lions. They are totally awesome.

Another short picture post

I really love Earth and the environment and all that jazz, so I was disappointed to hear about the oil spill in the Gulf Coast, but I didn't exactly get emotional about it.

Then this photograph damn near broke my heart.

A dragonfly tries to clean itself as it is stuck to marsh grass covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in Garden Island Bay on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana near Venice on Tuesday, May 18, 2010.

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

On Narwals.

Here is a haiku I wrote in a writing workshop with two ten year-old boys.

Narwal queen and king

dancing in the ocean breeze.

They will stab your face.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I am a ten year-old boy in a twenty-five year-old woman's body.

Ugly animals that I for some reason love, continued.

"In experiments, I noticed that earthworms frequently clustered and formed

a compact patch when they were out of the soil," Zirbes told the BBC.

I spent like fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to capitalize the title sentence before giving up.

So I doubt anyone thinks of earthworms as social or intelligent creatures, because they are ugly and drown in puddles more frequently than other creatures, but I still really like them.

So does Lara Zirbes at the University of Liege in Belgium. For her PhD dissertation, she conducted a series of studies to determine whether earthworms demonstrate herd behavior. She rigged up a bunch of mazes and sent earthworms through them, and it turns out that they do! Apparently earthworms communicate through touch and prefer to travel in groups.

When placed in a chamber together, worms will follow the same path. Unlike ants and other social insects, worms communicate using direct physical contact rather than pheromone trails. Which means they try to touch each other with as much of their bodies as possible to mazimize communication.

I'm not sure why exactly but to me that is so beautiful.

I feel pretty good about what I have decided to do with my life.

I really like teaching. The more hours I spend in the classroom I am volunteering with at Room Nine, the more convinced I am that this is the vocation for me. That being said, I am glad I majored in something else for my undergrad, because I think I will fit in better at the UW's teaching program than BYU's. Assuming I get in. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, today I was helping some fourth graders prepare for the writing section of the MSP (which used to be the WASL, which used to be something else ... which is just one symptom of the disease that plagues public schools these days ...but that's not what I'm here to talk about). I took three of them into a tutoring room to help them do a practice worksheet for the narrative writing section, where they give you a prompt, ask you to write a creative narrative piece, and then grade you on it. Super counter intuitive. But again, beside the point.

I thought it would be a helpful example, and also only fair, if I participated in the dreaded exercise with them. The assignment is to take the open-ended prompt they give you, do a pre-writing exercise, write a first draft, and then write a final draft.

Here is the prompt.

"One day you receive a special gift. It is a very old watch. You put it on. In several paragraphs, write a story telling what happens."

Inspiring, yeah?

I talked through my pre-writing process with the three ten year-old boys I was working with. Here is what I came up with at first.

1. Get present (in the future).

2. It's a watch.

3. Watch explodes.

4. I get hit by a truck.

The truth is, I am a ten year-old boy in a twenty-five year-old woman's body.

So anyway, in the first draft stage we talked some more about my story and agreed that it was super awesome. However, it still needed the following additions:

1. An alligator.

2. A dinosaur.

3. A veterinarian.

And now, I present to you the story I wrote for the fourth grade Washington Skills Test. I imagine it would get top marks. Maybe even extra points for being so awesome.

**************************************************************************************

It is the year 3000. The world is a very different place than it was the year I was born. For starters, man now lives to be several thousand years old, which has its good points and bad points. I certainly appreciate the medical miracles that allow for such lengthy and pain-free lives, but the monotony of day-to-day life over so many years can get tedious. Also, I have way too many relatives.

The only thing that really keeps me grounded nowadays is my pet alligator, Robert Palmer. I call her Bertie for short. She has a very genial disposition and always listens to me. Feeding her can get expensive, but when she gazes at me adoringly with her beady yellow eyes, it's all worth it.

Today is my birthday. I am 1016 years old. After so many years I have completely run out of birthday party themes: pirate, cowboy, French food, Salem witch trial reenactment--I've done them all. Plus most of my friends are dead or cryogenically frozen. I decided to just have a quiet birthday dinner, me and Bertie.

Knock, knock. A visitor? Nobody ever visits me. Not even door-to-door missionaries. the "BEWARE FEROCIOUS ALLIGATOR" sign is a bit misleading, but I don't feel too bad about it.

It was the Fed-UPS driver with a package for me. After a retinal scan to confirm my identity, he handed me a small package. It was from my Uncle Eugenio. He and I have never gotten along. What was his angle? Maybe he was trying to make nice. I quickly tore open the package.

It was a calculator watch. The kind I had when I was a pretentious 25 year-old hipster, almost a thousand years ago. I couldn't believe Eugenio would get me a present I actually liked. I put the watch on.

KA-BOOM!! The force of the watch's explosion sent me flying through the air, over my front lawn and into the adjacent road. Stunned and slightly singed, yet unhurt, I staggered to my feet just in time to see the truck barreling towards me.

The next thing I remember, I was on my back in a white room, Bertie at my side, and a dinosaur in a lab coat was shining a flashlight into my eyes.

"Good afternoon," she said somberly. "If scientists hadn't proved the non-existence of luck six hundred years ago, I would say you are the luckiest person who has ever lived."

Dazed, I tried to sit up, but she pushed me back down with one three-fingered hand. "Nope. Rest. It's a good thing Ms. Palmer brought you in immediately. I don't believe in God, being a dinosaur, but somebody deserves to be thanked."

"Thanks, Bertie," I mumbled weakly. She nuzzled me with her snout and nipped affectionately at my silver space pants.

"You can go home now, or whenever you want," Dr. Rex called over her shoulder as she bustled out of the exam room. "I need to attend to a few solar panel burns. Feel better!"

Bertie and I ambled home slowly, her pausing every few seconds for me to catch up. I felt sore all over, like I had been hit by a truck, which made sense. But as we were finally within sight of my house, I saw that familiar sinister van parked in my driveway. A white van with no windows. Uncle Eugenio!

He stepped out of the car slowly as soon as we arrived at the sidewalk. His golden teeth glinted in the sun, as did his greasy mustache.

"So, you survived my birthday present," he snarled out that last word.

"Why, Uncle Eugenio?" I asked, choking on the term that indicated we were of the same blood. "Why would you want to kill me?"

"Why?" He screeched. "WHY? Because our grandmother died and left her massive fortune to all her descendants! Split evenly! Do you know how much I received?"

I racked my brain, trying to recall how much my share had been.

"A dollar?"

"FIFTY CENTS!" He sputtered, flecks of his saliva striking me in the face. "Millions of dollars amounted to nothing for us all! Why? Because there are TOO MANY OF US!"

"So ... "I began, trying to figure out where this left him and me.

"So I am going to destroy every member of our family until I receive a decent inheritance. You rabbits," he said, cocking a pistol at my forehead. "I will now finish what I started with you, you alligator-loving bunny."

Before the shot was fired, however, there was another sound. A sickening crunch, like burning logs. I looked down and saw Bertie, with Uncle Eugenio's leg from mid-femur down, in her mouth.

Robert Palmer continued to work her way methodically through her meal on my front lawn. I watched for a few seconds and then went inside to fix a cup of herb tea, guiltless.

**************************************************************************************

I expect a letter regarding my Hugo Award sometime in the next week or so. If you want to ensure I get the recognition I deserve, go ahead and submit my name for me. I won't be embarrassed.

Being a spider is a tough break.

Longtime followers of my blog will recall that I have an unnatural affinity with bugs. I believe it can be traced at least in part to this song from the film Summer Magic.

I identified with this song as a child. And I really like bugs. I like watching them, though depending on the bug, I don't always like them crawling on me. Caterpillars, potato bugs, stick bugs, yes. Spiders, no. However, I make every effort to capture spiders and take them outside when I find them in the house. It seems like the right thing to do.

So today my employer went up into the attic and brought down one of those jumping activity centers for C, because she is four months old and has long legs and needs to exercise them.

Like this, except with a less creepy baby.

Anyway, so this activity center has been in the attic for a least a year, right? So of course, it has become home to a spider. A very industrious one, I might add.

I have decided his name is probably something like Bernard.

That white and green bulbous thing is his home. So picture this. You're a spider, hanging out in your incredibly comfortable home, when suddenly someone PICKS UP YOUR HOUSE AND MOVES YOU INTO A BRIGHT, LOUD PLACE AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

Suddenly poor Bernard is subject to the following new stimuli:

• Direct sunlight
• The sound of a baby crying
• The sound of the toddler and various adults talking
• Music (today was Beach Boys and Billy Joel)
• Various crashes resulting from aforementioned toddler
• The terrifying electronic "music" emanating from this and other toys

Do you see why today was maybe the worst day of Bernard's life? Apparently most spiders live approximately one year, too. At least this wasn't his only chance to have a good day. At least he wasn't a gnat.

Anyway, so I felt really really sorry for this spider and decided I wanted to give him a leg up. Figuratively speaking. I don my water glass and postcard and attempt to remove Bernard to a better place.

Nothing doing. This is what happens when I come too near.

It was kind of adorable but also really, really sad. Because I wanted to help him, but he made it impossible.

This is not a metaphor.

These sorts of things take a few weeks to set in.

I have moved away from the my first grown up place of residence. Every other city I have lived in, I lived there because that is where my parents lived. Utah is the first place I CHOSE to live in. How ironic.

I am back in Seattle now.

Sego is practically suicidal. Last week we stayed with my mom and the Count's fat and flatulent bulldog, who by all accounts under-performs as everything but a doorstop. Then we drove 800 miles and stayed in a Motel 6. He was just getting used to living with Austin, Brooke and Ashley while I spent a day and a half packing the car, then BAM! Motel 6 part deux. BAM! One thousand miles in the car, again. BAM! New house in Seattle, this time with an agile young cat who by all accounts could Kung Fu Sego's metro little rear back to the days of the Sabertooths (Saberteeth?). All in all, we have driven almost 2500 miles and slept in five different beds. He is currently lying down in my room and refuses to budge, even when I offer him food. Poor dog.

Comparatively, I am doing quite well. I made the drive in two days instead of the three I had planned, partly because of a storm report slated for Friday, but mostly because I was in the zone. The Driving Zone. I felt like I could just keep going until I reached my destination. The drive went without incident. I never even stopped to eat. I ate leftover Christmas candy, apples, and Slim Fast. If you want to know how my insides dealt with that, I'm afraid that's too awkward even for the internet. Sorry.

In other news, although my degree is nearly posted, I am not done with studying. I have to take a standardized test to qualify for the teaching program I am applying for. I also have to take a couple of classes. There is lots to worry about and organize. Being a college graduate is quite similar to NOT being a college graduate. I feel so lied to.

Besides application considerations I have no concrete plans at all, except tomorrow I am going to join a gym and schlep that depressed dog to a dog park. Magnussen, or if I'm really especially ambitious, Marymoor.

For Future Reference:

Here are some pet names I plan to use at some point.

Cats:

Note: Cats names are more fun in a sense, because cats don't answer to their own name anyway, so you don't have to worry about it being too long or complex for them to understand.

Castor and Pollux (twins!)
Cat with No Name , or CNN for short, so that when I introduce her I can say, "This is CNN."

Dogs:

Sparta (see my reasoning with CNN ... also, I would want to own Sparta and CNN at the same time, for obvious reasons)
Robert Palmer
Wingtip
Walrus

Tonight I said to Brooke while walking: "I should never love anything ever."

This post has nothing to do with yesterday's post, for the record.

So I love our neighborhood because it has a really nice mix of families and college students (Being, you know, a whole six blocks from campus). And the families are nice and chill, not the uptight ones you see on Hot Mom Day at Costco. It's also pretty diverse. For Utah. There is a small apartment complex down the street from us that houses mostly Hispanic families. Fairly recent imports from Mexico, with Dads that bike to work (Awesome!) and kids that speak Spanish to each other, English to me. They love our house because we have two dogs.

Some of the kids in the aforementioned complex come by every once in a while and ask if they can take Sego for a walk. They used to come over and just play with him in the front yard, but because I know them and they are ten or eleven and have proved themselves to be responsible, I now let them take him out for a while when they ask. They usually go to the park and then bring him back. Such a nice little slice of real community life.

Anyway, today the little sister of one of the kids came by with one of her friends and asked if she could take Sego for a walk. She was younger than the kids that usually take him, but I figured it would be fine. This is a really safe neighborhood. I remember asking as they left, "Are you two going to be OK on your own?" She said yes. Two hours went by.

It was eight now and starting to get dark, and I got a little worried. The kids never keep Sego out after dark. So I walked down to their apartment complex. They weren't there. So I walked to the park. They weren't there either. I went back to the apartment complex and asked some of the older kids if they knew where they were. They said they had no idea. More walking around the neighborhood. Panic ensued. Luckily at that precise moment I ran into Brooke, who went back with me to the complex to see if we could talk to their parents. Tangent: I really really need to learn Spanish.

We found out which apartment the girls lived in and knocked. No one was home. So there were several possibilities at this point.

1. The girls were out somewhere with Sego at nine at night by themselves. What parent lets a kid that young run around any neighborhood after dark? I don't care if it is Provo.
2. The kids were out with their parents somewhere and had taken Sego with them. What kind of parent lets their kids take a strange dog in the car to another person's house on a Friday night? That also does not make any sense.
3. The girls had lost Sego or something bad had happened and they were afraid to tell me.

Because 1 and 2 seemed so illogical and I was already in a panicky mindset, my mind immediately jumped to number 3. My panic changed to near hysteria, but luckily Brooke was with me for support. A couple of nice boys from next door heard me crying and asked if I needed help. They actually rode their bikes around the neighborhood for about twenty minutes and looked for him to no avail. That was so nice of them and I was too preoccupied to get their names. I salute you, Bicycling Knights.

Anyway, obviously this story has a happy ending, but chronologically, it didn't happen for a while. The truth is we walked around the neighborhood for another hour and a half asking everyone we saw if they had seen two little girls running around with a black dog. Most people assumed we were looking for the kids, and I didn't correct them.

Here are the emotions I was feeling during this ordeal, if you care:

1. Guilt. I felt guilty for letting my dog into the hands of incompetent six year-olds where he had surely met some awful harm. I chided myself for not telling them what time to bring Sego back. I also felt terrible because a few months ago Sego lost his tag with my phone number on it and I hadn't bothered to buy him a new one.
2. Paralyzing fear. Every time we saw a lump on the side of the road (Remember, I don't have the best vision) my stomach lurched with the possibility that it might be Sego's body.
3. Rage. I wanted to kill those girls for letting something happen to my baby.
4. Embarrassment. I felt a little stupid about getting this worked up about a dog. If you've never had pets and/or aren't an animal person, I'm sure my reaction sounds completely irrational. That's cool. I understand. But I say unto you, I was NOT acting upset because I wanted attention. I was truly, genuinely hysterical--the exact same kind of hysterical I was when my little brother went missing for a few hours when he was three. Maybe even a little MORE hysterical, actually (No offense, David) because Sego is my responsibility alone.

To make a long story short, we returned home and Sego was there. The girls had brought him back and, finding no one home, left him inside. I have never been so happy to see a dog in my life.

In conclusion:
1. You know how sometimes people say they don't want to love anything because the possibility of getting hurt is too great? They're right. I seriously considered never loving anything or anyone ever again during this ordeal.
2. However, when Sego and I were reunited, I forgot about all that and remembered why I love that darn dog in the first place. Why I love him more than a lot of things. Possibly you. Just kidding! Maybe.
3. This experience made me remember that someday Sego is going to die and I am going to be completely devastated.
4. However, likely as not he will die old, safe and surrounded by people who love him, including the children I hope to have ten or twelve years from now.
5. Maternal instinct? That shiz is LEGIT.
6. Something about eternity.

Happy birthday tomorrow, Sego. You better know I love you.

Formicidae and First Days

So there are lots and lots of dishes that need to be done, but I am not doing them--and not for the reason you might think, but rather because our dishwasher is infested with ants. I hate ants. I don't mind them outside, I just hate opening up a cupboard or dishwasher and seeing them crawling everywhere. It freaks me out. I would take one thousand spiders outside in a glass before I would co-exist with ants. Blegh.

Anyway, yesterday I was the one unfortunate enough to discover our little ant problem when I opened our dishwasher. I screamed really loud and scared Pamela to death. Anyway, we tried to create an ant trap using honey, but it doesn't work. So I (and I still don't understand why I had to do this) sprayed cleaning fluid on them and drowned the little bugs. I felt bad about killing the ants even though I'm not crazy about them, but as Amalia so logically pointed out, "What else can we do? Sing to them and lure them outside?" Then I (shudder) wiped off the little ant corpses so they wouldn't get on our dishes the next time we ran the machine. I really don't like ants.

Today I opened the dishwasher again today and they were back!!! Perhaps reincarnated. Perhaps the other ants smelled their dead family members. I think ants have a really good sense of smell. Is that right? I know they have superhuman strength (superant strength?). They are pretty cool creatures. I just wish they would stay outside. Anyway, I killed those guys too.

I wasn't planning to write about ants today. I was going to write about my first day of junior high. Taylor, Brooke and I were brainstorming about the latest draft of our pilot, which is about a girl starting her freshman year of high school. Then this memory came back to me, and I am pretty sure I had forgotten about it until today.

So I went to a charter school that was really awesome, and it only had about seventy kids K-6. We had our own salmon hatchery, graded ourselves, and called the teachers by their first names. I don't mean this in a corny way, but it's true: we were more like a family than a school. My graduating class in sixth grade was only eight kids, and we were like siblings. We fought like siblings even, but generally got along really well. Anyway, everyone except me and one other girl lived on the other side of the district divide, so I only knew one girl when I started my first day at this junior high of several hundred kids. As luck would have it, she was enrolled in some special program, so we didn't have any classes together.

The two things I remember about my first day of junior high was that I answered a question correctly in my science class (it was a really easy question) and everyone in the class looked at me askance, because apparently only losers answer questions on the first day of school. Also, I remember that at lunch, I had no idea where to go, because I didn't know anyone. Finally I saw a girl I knew from girls' camp, although she was in a different ward. I was so happy to see someone I knew, so I went and sat with her and her friends. She didn't talk to me or even look at me, which at the time I found really embarrassing, but now I find sort of funny. Anyway, I never tried sitting with her again.

The next day, this other girl who had recently moved to Seattle from Palestine walked up to me and asked if I would be her friend. Just like that. She turned out to be really cool. Her name was Zaynab, and she and I and this other immigrant girl from Vietnam (Thuy Nguyen) sat together every lunch until Zaynab's family ended up moving a few months later. Those girls even got me a present and sang to me on my birthday. They were so nice. Thuy and I were friends (though never super-close friends) throughout high school. She had a baby sophomore year and kept it, but she stayed in school and graduated with all sorts of honors. Her daughter's name was Eden and she was incredibly cute.

The really funny thing about the initial memory of having nowhere to sit at lunch is that I totally forgot about it. I was never good friends with that girl, but it's sort of ironic because I moved up the social ranks pretty successfully in high school, to the point where I knew pretty much everyone and was considered fairly "cool" (this was mostly because of Cori). By high school, this girl had decided that I was someone she wanted to be seen with, and because I had totally forgotten about the incident in seventh grade, I didn't have any reason not to be nice to her. I could have totally gotten revenge by rejecting her, but I forgot I had any reason to.

I wonder if I would have gotten any pleasure out of that. Probably not. She was mildly handicapped, I think, or maybe just not very well socialized, so it would have felt sort of unfair. Like killing ants outside, as opposed to inside, when one has no other choice.

Things on my mind

1. Rock and Roll really did peak in the 1960s. And it's not nostalgia telling me this, because I was not alive in the 1960s. I'm not saying glam rock and punk are not awesome, because they so are. But no one, I repeat, NO ONE, can touch the Who.

2. When I was in high school, I was pretty friendly and tried to be nice to everyone, and I would say I liked pretty much everyone. There were probably only two or three exceptions to this (which I will not disclose...not that it matters six years later). However, I have to say that although I liked almost everyone, there were probably only ten to fifteen people that I truly respected. The past few years or so, I have once again been spending time with lots of people that I like, but do not respect. This bothers me.

If you're freaking out right now because you think I'm talking about you, relax. I most likely am not.

3. Last night C. gave Toby a small piece of chicken and he went insane with pleasure. When we put him in his crate that night, he whined ALL NIGHT LONG. All he could think about was chicken chicken chicken. We are convinced the thought of meat is making him mad. Mad as in insane. Maybe meat makes every living thing insane? It's in the Old Testament, people!

4. I spent about twenty minutes during my 527 exam today thinking about how much I hate taking tests, and composed a most excellent blog post about it. It was so funny. Unfortunately, I can't remember a word of it, a mere three hours later.

5. Tugboats. How do they tug the big boats when the big boats are so much bigger?

Humph.

Throughout my life I have undergone a great deal of preparation to be a mother. I have always looked forward to parenthood, and although I am 24 and as of yet unmarried, I do have faith that all these experiences will be of use to me someday, if they haven't been already. In high school I worked at a daycare during the summer, volunteered st Seattle Children's Hospital, and tutored elementary school kids in reading. It was a blast. I always dreaded leaving my job at the daycare each fall when school started again, because I would really much rather hang out with little kids all day than go to high school. Then again, who wouldn't?

When I got back from my mission a nanny job sort of fell into my lap, and I worked full-time there for about nine months until I started school again, then worked part-time until they let me go in December (this economic downturn affects all, even the very very rich). So basically I feel about as prepared to be a mother as I could be without actually having undergone the birth/raising a baby process itself.

Apparently, God disagrees.

I have a dog, and although I love him dearly, I would say it is a different kind of love than the love I feel for humans. However, having a dog is excellent preparation for parenthood. Because of Sego, I have to get up in the morning at a reasonable hour even if I am so tired I want to die, because he has needs that need to be met. Much of my money goes towards meeting his basic needs, even though I would much rather be spending my money on books or scarves. Also, parenthood is often dirty and disgusting, and so is owning a dog. Dogs bring a certain amount of chaos to your life, and so do children. I use Sego as a litmus test for possible romantic partners, because (this is true) I want lots of kids, and if someone can't handle the chaos supplied by one 24-pound dog, NO WAY are they going to handle living with five or six (or you know, whatever) kids.

Anyway, about the "disgusting" part. Last night Sego seemed a little under the weather, so I let him sleep in my bed. I usually do this only if one of us is feeling down. Generally it's me. Anyway, I had a really hard time sleeping last night, so I didn't work out this morning and slept in for a while. When I woke up, I felt sort of cold and clammy, and though I sometimes sweat when I sleep (if I'm sick or something) it didn't quite feel like that.

I woke up and examined my bed, and Sego had puked ALL OVER MY BED. And by extension, me as well.

GROSS GROSS GROSS GROSS GROSS EWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Thusly, I am skipping class to do laundry this morning, so my roommate (a cat person) won't come home to the MOST DISGUSTING SCENE OF ALL TIME.

OK, God. I get it.