My Social Demise

Today is Saturday. Thus far I have slept in, showered, gone to a dollar movie, seen ten minutes of said dollar movie, left the dollar movie with a voucher because the theater broke, studied for the GRE, cleaned my bathroom, gone to Target to get a hand towel. Yeah. That is my day, and I expect the rest of my night to go like this, study for the GRE and watch "Clueless." I don't feel like this is what I should be doing on a Saturday night, but its what I'm going to do. I think I have figured out what my social problem is and to validate my thoughts I'm going to break it down, and maybe come up with a solution. But probably not.

1. My first problem is I lack motivation. Sure I could call a friend and we could do something. But then I would have to know who I wanted to play with and what I wanted to do. I hate planning. Multiple years in the young woman's presidency and one year as IWA president at UCLA have basically ruined me. I never want to plan anything ever again. I am done feeling responsible for making sure everyone is having a good time. And if I call people and want to do something I feel like I have to make sure everyone has fun. It's just not worth it. Basically the only way to solve this is for me to get motivated; I don't think that is going to happen this late in life. Hopefully I used that semicolon right; I'm trying to practice semicolon use for the GRE.
2. A majority of my friends live at home in Sandy, or California, or Mapleton, and as such always want to do stuff in Sandy, or Murray or wherever. I'm not saying I'm unwilling to drive down there, but I always go to them, always. They never come up here,and gas is expensive,and I am not made of money. I mean sure I could drive 20 minutes to see a movie in Murray or I could see a movie closer to home and save money. Basically I need to move or find closer friends. Both could help me in the future, but neither of those help me tonight.
3. A lot of my friends have a significant others; it sucks. Because when someone gets an opposite-sex-friend they are no longer interested in spending time with their single friends. Or if they do invite you someplace its with the bf/gf. I get that you're in love but could you separate yourself for one night and just hang out with me? No? Ok well could you get me a boyfriend or something? No? Ok, well then this seems like an impossible problem then.

So as you can see because I am single, living in not Sandy and unwilling to plan something that makes everyone happy I am destined to be alone, with my roommates stack of movies tonight. Maybe one day I'll be social again, until then I have Paul Rudd movies to watch.

I LARP you

Every Wednesday at Sugarhouse Park a group of like minded individuals come together and spend an hour or so LARPing. For those of you who have been living under rocks LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. Basically it means that a bevy of people dress up in actual armor and beat on each other with fake swords. Every week, weather permitting, this happens, and every week I sit and watch. I don't watch them because I want to mock them or belittle there passion like so many passerby's who stop and gawk. I don't watch them because I secretly want to construct and then wear my own chain mail and whack others with a foam spear. I watch because I love watching; I think it's supremely interesting and quite cool. Not cool like Freddie Prince Jr. in any teen movie ever cool. Cool because I feel like if I asked any of them why they were there, in the 90 degree July weather every week their answers would be something like this.

"Well Jessica, we come out here and do this because this is what we love. Because for a few hours every week we get to connect with other people who share our interest. We get to connect with a time in history that is awesome but long since past. We come here because at this place in this time we can forget our worries and our day jobs and truly be ourselves. WE come here to embrace our passion instead of denying it. That is why we come here."

And to me the fact that they are willing to come, risk embarrassment, and bodily harm all to do something they really love doing is extremely cool.

Ben Folds and the Deathly Hallows part 2

Usually Thursdays aren't the highlight of my week. I mean to be honest Thursday is probably one of the most over looked days. Most weeks it's just the day before Friday. But not this week. This week Thursday was the highlight. This week on Thursday so many of my dreams came true. First I went to see Ben Folds live with my dad. It was awesome. Ben Folds is amazing live and he is witty and clever and he made a Ke$ha song classy. He also had a super hot bass player, with the moody hair and the slight awkwardness and musical skills and the yeah. All in all one of the best concerts I've been to. THEN I got to go see HP7.2 with my friends. Actually I wasn't actually with them because we bought our tickets separately and I ditched them to sit in the middle of the theater. Seriously I was in the exact middle of the theater. It was a thrilling experience. I laughed, I cried, I fell in love with Neville Longbottom. Basically my life is complete. And basically that was my Thursday. Feel Jealous that yours wasn't as cool as mine.

Bumps and bruises

Good news folks the upbeat piece promised after my last horribly depressing/long winded/soul searching crap-o-post is here. Thank heavens.

So I just impaled my second toe on a tooth pick. Yeah. I was trying to be all productive and clean my room, and I went to pick something up and BAM! Searing pain rushing through the pointer toe on my right foot. I look down to see half a toothpick looking up at me from said toe. WTF! I mean it's a tooth pick. And it wasn't even sharp end in, it was the splintered end of a broken toothpick. Who would have thought that possible? Yet here I am, a few minutes later bandaging my toe wondering if I still have remnants of tooth pick in my toe. That is when I realized that this is really just the latest in a recent string of bizarre self inflicted injuries. Seriously I don't know how I do it, and how my body has not just quit on me yet. Don't believe you, well here is a detailed list of all my the injuries I have acquired in the last month or two.

1. Burn on the inside of my right leg. I bumped the exhaust pipe on my dad's motorcycle, Stan, whilst trying not to spill milkshakes upon dismount. For the record I didn't spill a drop.
2. Parallel bruises on my left leg. The cause is still a mystery. I think it was from mowing the lawn, but I'm not entirely sure. How does one bruise ones thigh while mowing the lawn? What can I say, I guess I'm an aggressive mower.
3. Bruised shin. I know this doesn't sound that whacky, but I got it from tripping up the stairs. Yes, up them.
4. Scraped knee. I thought there was one more step in my basement and instead of just doing that weird trip thing like most people I ate it. Hard.
5. Scrapped up wrist. I found out my mirror had sharp edges the hard way.
6. Bruised cheek. I was bending into my car to get something and somehow rammed my face into the corner of the door with a large amount of force. People asked me if I was being abused, and if I won the fight. Yes, I am my cars bitch, and no my car won the fight won't let me forget it.
7. Thats all I can think of recently, but I also have scars on my leg from dropping an iron on my leg, on my elbows from tripping while playing fugitive and from trying long boarding. And am pretty much constantly discovering mystery bruises.

So the moral of this story is that I'm pretty sure that I'm either going to develop skin that can withstand bullets or I'm going to die young in a freak accident involving ice cubes, a very sharp spoon and an army of hummingbirds.

California, but sadder

*WARNING this blog goes from mild ridiculousness, to nostalgic wishfulness, to serious life appraisal. All those looking for witty banter about the worlds problems skip this post. If you don't care about my life's problems (which I don't expect you to) skip this post. Also it's all sort of stream of consciousness-y. Which is not the best or most understandable writing style, but the easiest for me to just do. So really don't feel that you have to read this. But you can. You have been warned*

If you're reading this I assume that you read my blog, which is weird to think about because apparently people do read this blog. However I'm going to keep pretending you don't read this blog so that I don't feel self conscious about ranting all the time and having the people who evidently read this blog think I'm an angry person, which I'm not, I just sometimes feel the need to rant about things that bug me and what better place to do it than on a blog that nobody reads. Right? Right. So back to my initial point, if you are reading this, which I'm assuming you're not, I'm assuming you've read my previous posts specifically the one about my spring break in California and its high levels of awesome. If you haven't read it do so now, or don't, I don't care. Anywho the moral of that story was that California is awesome and I had an epic time with no sadness involved.

This past weekish I went back to California for the marriage of Chris and Kristina. It was beautiful, but that's not the point. The point is that there was a lot more sadness this time around. Seriously even when I was happy I was sad. I really didn't understand it. I mean I was IN California, the state of my heart where I am meant to live forever. How could I be sad? I wasn't sad last time. Was Utah starting to brain wash me? There was some panic. Don't worry though I figured it out. Want to hear my conclusions? Well you get to. When I went back for Spring Break it was like a greatest hits reunion tour. Everyday was jam packed with awesomeness. Every waking hour was spent doing all the fun things that California has to offer. It was like a salve on my wounded Cali-sick heart. It showed me that all my friends still loved me, and that the state still loved me. It was perfect because thats what it was planned to be.

This time around it wasn't like that. Every minute wasn't planned. It was like I was living my old life again. Like I had spent the last year on pause and someone had finally gotten around to un-pausing me. I spent everyday just doing things that I did when I lived there. Going to campus, chilling with my old dorm buddies, chilling at an apartment, strolling through Westwood. And I realized that it felt so right doing all those things, but also kind of wrong. Because the thing about being paused for a year is that when the big hand from above hits play you don't feel like you missed anything, but you did. Everyone else has spent the last year living while you've been frozen. Things change, not drastically, but enough. Enough that I had to realize that LA California is not my life anymore. Everyone there who knew me still knows me, and loves me, and welcomes me back with open arms, and its great but not the same. I'm a visitor. To them I'm a temporary distraction and to me they're what I want my life to still be. It's no ones fault. It's just how life goes. I'm sure it's happened with some of my friends from high school. The difference is I don't care about my high school life. That ended, I was glad, I let go and moved on. I haven't moved on from California yet. My life in California is still something I want and crave. It's like that stupid ex you just can't get over because nothing else has measured up yet. You think you've gotten over it but everything is compared to that ideal. And then you realize that you're life has been in a holding pattern, but what can you do?

This weekend was the realization. And hopefully it will help me to get over California. Hopefully I will stop waiting for things to be just as good as they were in California. Things in Utah are always going to be different, but does that mean worse? Does that mean I have to just keep waiting for California style living? NO! No it does not. So from this day forward I start getting involved in my life. Or something like that. At the very least I hope that I can be ok with the fact that Utah is not California, and that California is not waiting for me.

Sorry that got a little heavy into the where my life is going, and all my problems and that. But this is something I had to work through, or some cheesy junk like that, and I promise that my next post will be both light and witty.

Driving Woes

Let me preface this airing of grievances by saying that this blog is not about my feelings toward my newly acquired car Joan Jetta (if you get why this name is incredibly clever let me know because you get an automatic spot on my awesome person list.) I love Joan and I like to think that she loves me. So don't think this is me being mad at my super cute car.

Shall we begin? Yes? Good. So I believe that there is a system for driving on highways in Utah, and by highways I mean I-15, because what else is there. I-15 has either three or four lanes. The right side lane is for the slow people, the left side lane is for people who think they are in the Indy-500. I like sticking to the middle lanes. I feel at home there going 5-10 miles over the 65 speed limit. So something that really gets me mad is when people don't respect this system.

Example number one, when someone decides to ride my tail when there is no traffic on either side of me. I'm cruising along between 70 an 77 miles an hour in my friendly middle lane and some car, usually either a ridiculously large truck or a shiny sports car come speeding up behind me and then slows down and continues cruising like 3 inches away from my bumper despite the fact that the left and right lanes are wide open. Seriously bro? Just change lanes. Your type belong in the left lane anyway. I'm going a respectable speed and if you don't like it move. I mean I try and be courteous, if I'm in the left lane and I see approaching cars I move over. So why can't these D-bags juts merge into the available space?

Next, if you have cruise control use it. I hate it when one minute a car going 85 races pulls in front of me and then 15 seconds later they've slowed down to 60 mph, and then when you start getting close to them they speed off in a huff. My speed ain't changing pal, its you, so there is no reason to get offended. Stay at a constant speed. Please.

If you merge unnecessarily into spaces where you have no business merging. I hate you. Everyone hates you. This isn't a spy movie, and I highly doubt that dangerous merging is going to get you anywhere much faster.On a similar note, use your friggin blinker. It's there for a reason. No one in Utah signals and it makes me want to hit a wall.

Thats about it for now. I guess it boils down to this, if people would stop driving like they have a pregnant woman bleeding out from a gunshot wound in their front seat the highways would be a happier place for everyone.

Righteous Indignation

I am a Mormon. Many a time in recent years, especially since I've moved away from home I have found myself wondering if I'm LDS because I believe its the truest religion or if its because I was raised in Utah County and feel a strong sense of social pressure to be Mormon that I can't escape. For those of you scoffing right now try spending 18 years in Mapleton and the tell me you don't feel a little brain washed. For the most part however I have decided that I do believe in the church, most of the time. Sometimes the general authorities say things and I think, no, nope, no, I don't believe that, and I never will. I'm not a sheep, and if that sends me to hell so be it. I won't get into all the points where the church and I disagree. I don't like discussing religion, or politics. My beliefs is my beliefs and I don't need your approval, and you don't need mine. However, I got some church related news tonight and I feel the need to voice or more actually type my anger, cuz I be pissed.

So apparently the general authorities decided, with no warning by the way, to cancel the morority/fraternity program. In fact they got rid of the whole IWA/IMA program. And I am mad as hell. I know this might seem weird. I've always kind of mocked myself for joining the morority, and in the final months of my first year in I was kind of doubting my commitment to the whole thing. But now that it's gone I'm mad. Because if I'm completely honest with myself without Upsilon my year would have been a fatty mess. It was in the morority that I final found friends. It was after joining that I decided I didn't have to move back to California even if it meant being an exotic dancer to pay the bills. It shrunk the huge number of nameless faceless people at the University of Utah to a small group of girls who were a lot like me. And the connection was quick. It made finding a whole new group of friends far less intimidating. Basically, in the mushiest terms possible, the girls I met in Upsilon were my life preserver. Without them I might have drowned. And now the church has decided, with no clear reason, that this program isn't something they want around. And I am not ok with it.

I don't know why this happened, but I have my suspicions. The church just reorganized all the singles wards in Utah. They are expanding most of the wards and being very strict about everybody going to their ward and ONLY their ward. So basically what I've gathered is that the church wants all young adults to get married as soon as possible. But instead of giving us a lot of options that will allow really sort through all the candidates and find someone who is really right for us as an individual they want us to choose from one of the 150 guys in the one singles ward we are assigned to. Apparently they think if we just date our way through the singles ward we're bound to find someone we can put up with forever. To me it just seems hugely hypocritical. They are telling guys to date and girls to get out there and all this stuff and yet they are tearing apart an institution that helps people find each other in smaller settings. They want us married but only if we do it their way.

Which brings me another problem I have that is connected to this whole dating/sorority/singles ward thang. The general authorities need to get with the times. It's not 1950 anymore. I mean sure, it would be super keen if a guy would take me on a date to the movies in my poodle skirt, and then after three dates he would give me his class ring and we would be "going steady" and then 2 months later we would get married. But that just isn't how it works anymore. First I don't even know anybody with a class ring, or even a letterman's jacket for that matter. More importantly dating is expensive so I understand if a guy wants to get to know a girl and really decide if he is interested before taking her out. Also being friends is a great way to start a relationship, and the sororities/frats give the YSAs a great way to meet one another in a low pressure way. We make friends, some people find lovers, urbody leaves happy. Another thing I don't plan on being a housewife and I also don't plan on marrying a guy after three months of dating. No thanks, not my style, never going to happen. I'm not just going to marry the first dude who seems nice and can provide for me and my 2.5 kids and our dog Rover. Things have changed. The nation wide average age of marriage is 28. So maybe the head honchos should just chill the frak out, and let us single adults figure out our crap instead of trying to force us into an early and unhappy marriage.

In conclusion, I'm pissed, I want my sorority back, I'm writing this exceptionally tired and I want to hit something. Oh and if this doesn't get me sent straight to hell, well then I'm sitting pretty.