From the archives: November 21, 2004

Tonight I watched Sleeping Beauty all the way through for the first time

After the evil witch Mafeficant (sp?) gets killed.

Me: Man, none of this would have happened if they had just invited her to the party. So the message of this movie is: invite everybody to the party.

From the archives: November 17, 2004

RIP Kierkegaard

Of course, it would be the vegetarian in the apartment who accidentally drops the pet fish down the disposal.
Oh, the paralyzing guilt....

From the archives: October 11, 2004

Actual conversation with my roommates

Important detail: I gave blood today.

Scene: Elisa and Hediyeh, having returned from grocery shopping, are putting said groceries away and talking to Nancy and Alli.

Hediyeh: Hey, Elisa has a crazy story to tell you guys.
Me: I passed out in Brother Bott's class.
Hediyeh: NO! The other crazy story!
Me: (mystified) What?
Hediyeh: About how your friend got engaged after knowing the guy for 13 days.
Me: Oh. Uh, my friend got exchanged after knowing the guy for 13 days.
Alli: Wow.

Dude, I am so in love with Provo it's not even funny.

My best friend

had an elaborate plan when we were in high school on how she was going to meet her future husband. Her plan was to attend art school in Florida, get hired as a Disney animator to work on some sort of cartoon about outer space, and, while sketching at NASA headquarters, meet her husband, who of course would be an astronaut.

Things ended up going slightly differently, but of course she still got her happily ever after.

I, on the other hand, am free to fantasize about these handsome blokes:

These are some NASA astronauts from the 1960s. Seven originals members of the Mercury missions, pictured here during survival training in the Nevada desert. The gentleman front and center is my favorite. Possibly because I have a thing for noses?

Image courtesy of here.

Sometimes I feel sad I wasn't an adult in the 1960s. Then I remember the pilot of Mad Men and I'm like, oh yeah.

On Third Grade.

Things I remember from Third Grade:

1. I turned 9.

2. We moved from the house I had lived in since I was 5, to the same house I am currently living in.

3. At one point I hid in the school library for an entire afternoon and the school almost called the police.

4. It is the first year I can remember being able to write anything longer than a few sentences.

5. We did a unit about the brain/optical illusions. This is when I learned that those damn Magic Eye posters don't work if you only have one eye.

6. My dad worked nights at the post office, so we had to be quiet during the day so he could sleep (this actually might have been fourth grade).

7. I wore a lot of tie dye and vests. My hair was shoulder length.

8. My best friend Molly and I read palms for play money on Market Day.

9. I got teased for months because a group of boys saw me picking my nose.

10. I was so nervous about the first day of school that I got hives all over my body and had to stay home.

I think about teaching a classroom full of kids that are eight-turning-nine and I feel like they are so young and small. But I don't recall feeling small or young in third grade.

My cooperating teacher is in her sixties. She has a dry, wry sense of humor that I'm curious to see if she shares with the kids. I would categorize her as old school, but in a nice way, not an intimidating way. She's very organized and crafty. She made a joke about growing marijuana to supplement her income during our initial interview. That's when I decided I liked her.

The kids in my class are split about even between boys and girls, and approximately into fourths in terms of race: Hispanic, Black, White and Asian. Most of them were at the same school last year. I don't know why I'm thinking abut them this late on a Sunday. I guess I haven't stopped thinking about them since I saw their list of names.

From the archives: September 2, 2004

Humorous quotes from my professors! *cymbal crash*

"English spelling is ... disgusting."
Professor Skousen

"'Whom did you see at the dance?' Now you could say this, maybe to one of your rommates. But you would be branded as some sort of weird ... English Major or something."
Professor Skousen

"I don't know what it is with Mormons and food. Have any of you ever been to a church activity, not including the three-hour block on Sunday, wherein there was no food available? Anybody? [no one in the class of 250 raises their hand]. See? Also, I've noticed that we tend to substitute ice cream for alcohol. You know, normal people, if they want to go out casually with someone of the opposite sex, they go out for drinks. But Mormons, they hit up Baskin and Robbins for a quick ice cream, and if they don't like each other, they just take off."
Professor Campbell

"I am proud to say that I missed my grandfather's funeral to attend class out of fear of missing school. Grandpa was proud too, I suspect, since he taught school in Canada, back when going to school was an honor."
Professor Sorenson

"Welcome to English 325. English grammar. How thrilling."
Professor Skousen

"I did not choose to major in Philosophy, nay, but rather I realized that I had been a philosopher all along and just did not realize it. This is not a career path that one would consciously choose. If I could, I'd be really good at ... business. Or something."
Professor Foster

"The death penalty, you have to admit, caters to this Old Testament sense of justice that we use only when it suits our purposes. Really, I don't see any point in killing more people after the fact, especially since we let them live twenty years before we do it anyway."
Professor Sorenson

"Thank you so much for coming to this department meeting! Please help yourself to the refreshments available out in the open-air atrium ... and by that I mean the sidewalk."
The Department Head (I didn't catch his name, or else I just forgot it)

My Grand Return, Dedicated to Vilja Johnson

Yesterday I was chatting with the abovementioned college friend about the fact that I have not blogged in a while. Yes, there has been the odd post, but I actually wrote those over six months ago and scheduled their release ahead of time. Haha tricked you. Anyway.

I was explaining to her that I feel it’s very important for me to keep blogging while I student teach (starting in a few short weeks WTF), because the memories and experiences of my first “real” year of teaching will be invaluable in the future. On the other hand, I articulated to Vilja, I do so much writing in grad school it’s the last thing I feel like doing for fun. I already express myself so thoroughly in my schoolwork that I don’t feel much of a need for self-expression outside of it.

Then Vilja said, quote, “Nooooo!!! Funny stories!!!!”

Dammit, she’s right. This blog is for the funny stories! So I dedicate any funny stories I write in the next few weeks to you, V. Luckily for her and maybe you as well, my recent "summer vacation" was excellent fodder for the same.

Funny Story Number 1: I am upstaged by a natural disaster

Some/a few of you may know that over the weekend, I went to New York City for a friend’s wedding. It was a beautiful weekend filled with friends, puppets (I saw Avenue Q AND the Jim Henson exhibit at the MOTMI … amazing) and visiting the ancestral island of the Wu Tang Clan. Overall, a wonderful five-day break from school. However, if I could do it all again, I probably would come home two days early instead of midnight the night before. I’m boarding the plane on the plane to Seattle right now, and something tells me that I am going to be very, very tired at my 9AM class tomorrow.

The only two things that you need to know for this story, however, is that I was staying with my cousin in Brooklyn and that the Brooklyn Bridge is currently undergoing some maintenance construction.

Oh! One other thing that is important to know for this story is that I have a thing for being hydrated, and love my water bottle as if it were my own dear child. I left it at a friend’s house last weekend and it was like a part of me was gone.

Okay, exposition over. Here we go.

Scene: Sunday. My cousin and I were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (which is gorgeous, by the way). The construction obstructed certain parts of the view, but it was a lovely walk nonetheless.

While we were walking, I asked my cousin, “So, why are they doing construction on the bridge? Are they earthquake proofing it or something?”

“Oh no,” she said, with ironic foreshadowing. “New York doesn’t have earthquakes.”

Scene: Monday night. Said cousin and I walk to a tortilla factory/restaurant in Brooklyn and get tacos. It is a super authentic, hole-in-the-wall, INCREDIBLY delicious, cash-only taco extravaganza. Every taco I eat in the future will be compared to those. Then we went home, ate ice cream and watched The Daily Show. Crazy New York party time.

Scene: Tuesday afternoon. I am packing and realize with a minor amount of panic that my water bottle is missing. I look in all the usual places, to no avail. Then I remember I had it at the table with me at the taco place the previous evening, and concluded I must have left it there.

Walking around Brooklyn is awesome, by the way. Reminds me of Sesame Street (or maybe Sesame Street reminds me of Brooklyn?). I get to the taco place, stand in line for a minute and ask if anyone found a pink water bottle on the tables last night. Then I remember that one of the charming, authentic aspects of this taco place is: nobody speaks English. We even wrote our orders in Spanish the previous evening.

I really, REALLY need to learn Spanish, you guys.

Anyway, using hand gestures and repeating the word “water” a lot, I ask if anybody turned in a water bottle the previous night. The woman there said something about a little boy, pointed at her eye a couple of times, and we both looked at each other totally confused.

Just then, the East Coast Earthquake hit.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so earthquakes don’t particularly faze me. But for all the proprietors and patrons of this establishment, who had presumably never been in an earthquake before, a 5.8 was legitimate cause for FREAKING THE HELL OUT. Everybody there started yelling, calling friends and relatives on their cell phones, asking if everybody else had felt it, etc. It was then that I realized I had lost the room. I was probably not getting my water bottle back, even if they did have it.

In a very George Costanza-like moment, while all this was going down, I asked if the woman wouldn’t mind, pretty pretty please, checking to see if they had my water bottle. She walked next door and came back a few minutes later, empty-handed, but I am positive it was to talk with the neighbors about the earthquake, and not for any other reason.

So this week I am going to buy a new water bottle. The end.