Voice-to-Text Tacos

I have no less than three blog posts in development right now, but I haven't been able to complete any of them. It takes time to get things right (or write. Ba-dum-ching!), and time is precisely what I lack.

Because I have been such a busy bee, I have been looking for ways to write more efficiently. Among other things, I downloaded a voice-to-text app for my iPod. The idea was that I could talk through a rough draft of a post and then go back and edit it later.

Tonight I told the app an exciting story about a taco stand. Apparently, the app is not a good listener, because this is what it thought I said:

Tatopoulos and some coworkers I was the only one who had never been to taco stand for

So everyone knew how to taco stand but me

Really awkward because I really speak Spanish

Speak Spanish lesson Roud Ceragon speak Spanish that was silly because Reiwnd 90 Vengay don't

Ways I got a chicken fajita burrito and it was delicious except the chili-n-beans Showcas Vernoe Bienskie heading so that I had to

Yep this is Yearsley Monavie meurtre Poseidas Aggerate NEnd Hunting Kouzes going anywhere so have a nice life and all that in force be with you good night

Voice app = no go. I don't know what route I'll try next. Maybe a stenographer?

The Everythings Again

They're back. The everythings are back.

I've just had the craziest week, culminating in packing up everything I own and putting it in boxes because I'm moving out of the Obnoxious family home.

If breathing were not an involuntary physical function, I'd die from lack of oxygen because I would not even be able to take time out of my schedule to do it.

Now excuse me while I figure out what I'm going to wear tomorrow. Every stitch of clothing I own is currently boxed up. #lackofforesight

In Which I am Gainfully Employed

After much searching and tribulations, I have received the blessing of a real, grown-up job. A writing job, no less. I'm actually getting paid to write stuff. Pinch me; I must be dreaming.

The day I went to turn in real, grown-up paperwork for my real, grown-up, writing job, I adorned myself in a real, grown-up outfit of a cream blouse, navy pants, and a navy blazer. I felt very real and grown-up except for the fact that I had no shoes.

LITTLE SISTER: You look very business-y.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Thank you. I need to borrow some shoes from you. Where are your navy flats?

LITTLE SISTER: You can't wear navy pants and a navy blazer and navy shoes.

So instead of borrowing the navy flats, I tried on some tan flats. And some pewter flats. And some yellow flats.

Little Sister is younger than me, so you'd expect her to be shorter than me. That's what I expected. Never in my life did I ever dream that my scrawny little sister would someday be taller than me. But she is. In fact, she likes to call me Little Sister in public.

And when I say that she calls me Little Sister, I mean that she literally calls me the words, "Little Sister," and not her name. Because that would be bizarre. Even for Little Sister.

Anyways, since Little Sister is sadly taller than me, you would expect that her shoes would fit me with room to spare. But they didn't.

Now I was panicking. I could not show up to turn in real, grown-up paperwork without shoes. I ran to Mom's closet and visually scanned the footwear.

LITTLE SISTER: Look! Mom's leopard-print flats. Wear these.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: You don't think they're too much?

LITTLE SISTER: I think they look good.

So with my personage clad in business navy and my feet shod in leopard print, I hied to Work City to turn in my employment paperwork.

'Twas but the work of a moment to bring in the paperwork I had filled out earlier that day. The actual act of filling out the paperwork had taken more than a moment, mostly because I could not remember my Social Security number.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: (filling out paperwork earlier that day) Mom, what's my Social Security number?

MOM: At some point, you're going to have to have that memorized.

In the literary world, we call this foreshadowing.

I presented my completed paperwork to the company receptionist. Whereupon she gave me more paperwork and told me to go get a drug test.

Now, my mother is also taller than me. So you'd think her leopard-print shoes would be a little loose on me, if anything. You certainly wouldn't expect them to rub away painfully at the heels of my feet, but they did.

And normally I dislike walking around in high heels, but at that moment all I could think about was how my high heels were a million jillion times more comfortable and easier to walk in than those flats.

My life is just full of irony.

I found the drug test office and limped inside.

LAB TECHNICIAN: What's your Social Security number?

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Um.

LAB TECHNICIAN: You're supposed to know your Social Security number!

In the literary world, we call this lampshading.

The drug test was taken. As I was heading out, the technician asked, "So is this your first job?"

"Well, no. But I just graduated from college, so it's my first real job," I said.

"You do not look old enough to be graduated from college," she said. "You look like you're twelve."

Feeling considerably less real and grown-up, I limped home to treat my blisters.

Ready or Not

It's been a busy summer.

Right now I am undergoing some major life changes (which I will expound upon further in future posts), which means that I spend approximately 24.78 hours a day coordinating said life changes and praying that I won't spontaneously combust.

The user picture on my laptop is a photo of me, Best Friend Boy, Etch-a-Sketch, and Shutterbug at our high school graduation. I uploaded that photo right before starting college and have never gotten around to changing it. Mostly I don't even notice it anymore, but as I was logging on just now I randomly rediscovered its existence.

When I randomly rediscovered the photo's existence, I remembered the day it was taken. High school graduation is another time of major life changes. When we graduated from high school, all four of us had an idea of how our lives were going to go.

All four of us were (to varying degrees) wrong.

It's a good thing we didn't know it that day--how wrong we were. Making those major life changes was scary enough when we thought we knew what we were doing. It becomes ultimately more terrifying when you realize that you don't have a clue.

It's so terrifying, in fact, that it can be paralyzing. Whenever another major life change comes along, it's tempting to stand at the precipice and ask yourself, "Am I ready for this? Am I ready for this?"

Which is fine--until the act of asking the question becomes so all-consuming that you find yourself unable to make the leap.

In the words of Lemony Snicket: "If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives."

I don't know if I'm ready.

But here I come.

This Actually Happened

I wanted to show Baby Sister some stuff I had bought from Target, so I sought her out and found her in her and Little Sister's room.

Baby Sister was lying on the bottom bunk, staring up at the underside of the top bunk. Suddenly she flinched quite dramatically.

I asked, "What was that?"

Baby Sister said, "You're gonna think this is weird."

I doubted that. When something seems weird, I just compare it to Little Sister and it suddenly is as normal as doorknobs and other people's lives.

Baby Sister pointed to the underside of the top bun. "I was picturing a claw coming down from here. It reached down my throat and yanked out a ball of metal. Like in The Incredibles? Yeah. Like that."

That was weird.

I changed the subject by beckoning to Baby Sister. "Come downstairs with me."

Baby Sister's response? "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-"

I stared at Baby Sister as she rolled around on her bed, in hysterics.

"-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-"

Mom came in.

"-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-"

Mom stood there for about thirty seconds, blinking in confusion.

"-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-"

Mom left.

"-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. HA." Baby Sister proceeded to stand up and follow me downstairs as if nothing had happened.

"You know," she said a few minutes later, "I don't know why I was laughing like that."

That made two of us.

The Miracle Vitamin C Binge

There are a few times in my life where I've gotten sick at extremely inconvenient times.

I got sick the day before the seventh Harry Potter book came out. Like, this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, and Viola was facilitating a costumed get-together to go to the midnight release, and it was going to be really awesome, and I had a cold. In July. Who gets a cold in July?!

It was a real humdinger, too. I was feverish, tired, and slightly delusional. My nose was alternately stuffy and runny, and I had no motivation to do anything but lie in bed.

At first, I tried to ignore this cold. Surprisingly, this approach did not make the ailment disappear, so I decided I was going to flush it out with Vitamin C!

Now, some people like citrus tastes. I'm not one of those people. I don't like oranges and especially I don't like orange juice. But that didn't stop me from drinking two pitchers of orange juice and one pitcher of grape juice over a period of ten hours.

No joke. I probably had enough Vitamin C coursing through my body to fight off scurvy.

The next day, I was sniffly, but feeling well enough to hang out at Barnes and Noble until after midnight and then stay up reading until 5:00 am.

And thus I was convinced of the effectiveness of the Miracle Vitamin C Binge. I was convinced so much, in fact, that when I came down with a cold in Italy, I decided to replicate the treatment in true European fashion.

The European equivalent of orange juice, I determined, is carrot-orange juice, which is the only kind of orange juice I find appealing. And the European equivalent of grape juice is wine, which I do not drink. So I consumed vast quantities of carrot-orange juice and hoped that would do the trick.

"Does that really work?" one of my trip roommates asked.

"Sure," I said. My roommate offered to obtain some straight Vitamin C to supplement the carrot-orange juice. I dissolved said Vitamin C in water. It tasted like minerals and carbonation.

Within a matter of hours, I went from almost passing out in Milan to walking up and down six flights of stairs several times a day in Rio Maggiore. I did wind up with a sinus infection that accompanied me back to the States, but by and large my health vastly improved.

Yesterday, I woke up and realized I was ill.

"Nope, no can do," I said to myself. "I have too much stuff happening this weekend to be sick!"

I grabbed a can of frozen orange juice and dumped it in a mug with an inch or two of water. An hour or so later, I took my first sip.

News flash: Thawing, almost-pure orange juice concentrate is not a delicacy.

"Well," I said, "this is more disgusting than most things."

I did drink the entire mug. But after that, I decided I wanted to drink egg drop soup instead.

Said egg drop soup had to be bought from a Chinese food establishment. Leaving the house was something I had zero percent desire to do. So I decided to order the egg drop soup in. But I had to order at least $20 worth of food. So I bought three dishes plus egg drop soup and then when the food came instead of just drinking the soup well I ended up drinking the soup plus eating a plateful of rice, shrimp, and chicken.

"Oh," I realized after eating. "This was not a good idea." If anything, I felt quite a bit sicker. I went to bed with the expectation that I'd likely be worse in the morning.

But when I woke up, I was almost completely better.

Miracle Chinese Food Binge? I'm a fan.

Happy Twenty-Fourth of July (Three Weeks Late)

I spent this twenty-fourth of July/Pioneer Day driving back from Nauvoo. It was exactly like the Oregon Trail, which I know because I've played the game Oregon Trail, which is a pretty accurate representation of what the trip home was like. Except nobody died or contracted malaria, not even Little Sister, who has the immune system of a carcass.

My family spent the twenty-fourth honoring our pioneer ancestors by crossing in a matter of days the same stretch of terrain they struggled, starved, and sweated across for months.

To further show our appreciation for those pioneer souls, we not only followed in their footsteps, but we did it in relative comfort.

And with air conditioning.

Yup...they must really hate us right now.

I really did miss the Hometown carnival (particularly the fried bread), which got me thinking that the Twenty-Fourth of July really should be celebrated outside of Utah. All we really need to do is make it the coolest holiday ever by dreaming up even more ways to celebrate it, and it will surely catch on in the other 49 states and also Canada.

I'm thinking that some Pioneer Day cards would really spice things up. They'd be like Valentine's Day cards, but with pioneers.

A sampling: I think you're wheely cool.

And: I just wanna be pioneer you.

And this classic: I like you so much that even if we were starving in the Rocky Mountains with the Donner Party, I wouldn't eat your corpse.

Momish

Today we were driving through the beautiful mountains of Utah when Mom called from the driver's seat to the distant back row of the Mormon Assault Vehicle, "Can you find my red wallet? It's in a Target bag."

I turned to Little Sister. "Mom has a red wallet?"

Not that Little Sister knew of.

In some confusion, we looked around for a Target bag. There was none.

After a few moments, Little Brother asked if the red wallet was blue, to which Mom said yes.

"Where'd you find the Target bag?" I asked. Little Brother replied that he hadn't found it in a Target bag but in a Hometown Marketplace bag.

Little Brother's mad Momish translation skillz: 1

The English language: 0

Pioneer Pastimes

One of the best things about Nauvoo was the 1830s and 1840s culture.

I'm not even being facetious right now. There were a lot of missionaries, volunteers, and a few paid performers all over the city, dressed in authentic garb and teaching us modern folk all about way back when.

My family and I square-danced. We walked on stilts and played a Frisbee-like game with ribboned hoops and sticks. One rainy day, we gathered at this thing called Pioneer Pastimes where all these authentic wooden toys were laid out for kids to play with.

When I say wooden, I mean wooden. Tops. Matching games made out of chips of wood. Blocks hooked together by two ribbons that defied the laws of physics.

We spent more than an hour playing there, and when our parents pulled us away, we were still going strong.

Either my siblings and I are way too easily entertained, or stuff doesn't need to be all newfangly and technological to be fun.

Says the blogger. Fine, the next Awkward Mormon Girl post will be produced on paper airplanes and/or messages in a bottle. I'll only be able to write like five copies before my hand gets cramped, but that's okay because you all learned to share in preschool. And when those five copies are so worn and torn from being passed around that they're illegible, it won't matter because I have terrible handwriting and they would never have been legible in the first place.

As my siblings and I were completely engrossed in playing with these little wooden acrobats on sticks, we had a conversation that went something like this:

OLDER SISTER: So where did we come from? New York?

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: What about Boston? Since Mom's pilgrim ancestors all settled in Massachusetts?

OLDER SISTER: Okay, but what does Dad's job translate into?

LITTLE SISTER: He owns a hotel.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Or runs a hotel for some rich investor guy.

LITTLE BROTHER: And Baby Brother and I are the bellboys.

OLDER SISTER: We all help in the hotel. But I feel like you would also be a schoolteacher, Awkward Mormon Girl. Not at like a city school, but a really small school you run out of the hotel dining room.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: So I have like six students then.

OLDER SISTER: And half of them are Baby Sister, Little Brother, and Baby Brother. Now, Mom would be a midwife, but she probably doesn't really get paid for that. We're probably kind of poor.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Maybe we used to live on family money, but our grandparents disowned us for joining the Church. Or maybe we lost all our money in the Kirtland Bank crash.

OLDER SISTER: But I feel like we would have come after Kirtland-

DAD: (overhears) Are you seriously planning what our life would be like if we were pioneers?

If we knew how to whistle nonchalantly, we would have.

Joined at the Hip

My BFF Viola and I officially met at rehearsal for Anne of Green Gables.

I say officially because I knew who she was before that. We were in the same theatre class, where she was one Viola of many Violas. When the teacher called roll on the first day of class, I thought, "Not another Viola!"

When Anne of Green Gables rehearsal rolled around, I learned that I had the same role as the superfluous Viola. I also had a cough, as I often do when I need to be very, very quiet and very, very still: during a priesthood blessing. As a visitor at Mass. And, in this instance, on the first day of rehearsal.

After meeting each other, all the counterparts sat next to each other in a big circle while the director outlined the details of our production.

I listened as politely as I could whilst hacking up my lungs.

"Are you okay?" Viola whispered. She thought I was going to die.

"I'm fine," I whispered back. I thought I was going to die of embarrassment.

"Okay," Viola said, but I'm pretty sure I saw her sneaking peeks at me like she thought I might kick the bucket at any moment.

I wrote in my journal that I thought Viola was nice and that I liked her. What I didn't write down was how much she bewildered me.

When Viola wasn't onstage, she would make small talk with the kids playing Anne and Gilbert. When I wasn't onstage, I would read.

It didn't occur to me to strike up any conversations. At that age, I rarely talked to anyone, and consequently nobody really ever talked to me. So when Viola not only would talk to me but talked nonstop, I didn't even know what to do with myself.

So I said a lot of, "Yeah"s and "Uh-huh"s and tried to read my book. After a while, the book became nothing but a prop. It hardly ever got read. I was too busy listening (and, eventually, talking) to Viola.

The role we took turns playing was that of Diana Barry, Anne's best friend. As the performances drew closer, we started to get together outside of rehearsal to practice the blocking for our difficult scenes. And then to half-practice, half-mock our lines. And then not to work on the play at all but just to hang out.

And one day, our director looked at us and smiled and said, "Our two little Dianas, joined at the hip."

And we were like, "Dang straight on that metaphor. We are so close that if you wanted to separate us, a surgical procedure would be required."

Anne and Diana were best friends. And so were (are) Viola and I.