Fragments of Unfinished Posts

Sometimes it takes me months or years to write a blog post. More often than that, though, I start and then never finish posts that I don't feel right about for one reason or another.

Last night, I was going through drafts of unfinished posts and thought I'd share.

First, a fragment from a Christmas post that I eventually restarted and finished. It took me a good two years to write up what I was trying to say. Here's how part of the beginning originally went:

"Right this way," said the hostess. She started to take us to the fun part of the restaurant, where little wooden dividers separate everyone from everyone else so it's like being alone in a jungle of neon lights and plastic booth seats. And in that jungle, you can feel free to be yourself because it's just you and the people sitting with you. Also the waiter. Your secrets are safe with the waiter.

I also found a post titled "My Life as a Hobbit." It was a post trying to explain why I love hobbits so much. Also why I prefer the animated version of The Return of the King to the live-action movie. It was scattered, at best. The two memorable lines that I want to preserve are:

On a perilous quest to find my SAT scores in the depths of my bedroom, I stumbled across an unevenly cut piece of paper covered with my pre-teen scrawl.

and

If you like dragons, dwarves, and the white pony wearing sparkly armor, then you should not watch this movie. There are no dragons in this movie. No dwarves. And no sparkly-armor-clad ponies.

I also started a post called "The Road Goes Ever, Ever On." That's more hobbit stuff, for those of you unfamiliar. It was a post explaining why I decided to leave the country a few years ago. I will probably use that title eventually for a travel post, but it will be markedly different from the draft I stumbled across.

There was also a post about why my family loves Disneyland so much. That one just did not come together very well. I may try again at some point. I'd share a bit, but it's not that good.

Penultimately, I found a post called "Adventures in Book-Selling." This post was meant to describe my brief stint of unemployment during my last year of college. I'd felt like I should quit my fast food job but not look for another job for a little while. Strange as that was, I went ahead with it. In the two months where I didn't work, I tried to sell my textbooks on Amazon. Selling textbooks on Amazon would have been a lucrative career...if I hadn't been in college (the textbooks had to be mailed within a certain number of hours after the order was placed, which conflicted mightily with my school schedule) and if I'd had an unlimited supply of packaging (sometimes packaging and shipping cost more than the profits I made from the book).

This post didn't get very far, but here's what I opened with:

It's one thing to be in the grips of The Neediness. It's another thing entirely to be under the shadow of The Nothingness.

If The Neediness is when you care too much and feel extremely insecure, The Nothingness is when you don't care enough and are so self-satisfied you can't imagine changing whatsoever. The Neediness is unsteady, but The Nothingness is stagnation.

It probably would have been a real chipper post.

The last thing I found lost in the annals of Blogger was actually not a post. It was a draft that I filled with text messages copied off my phone. That way, I could delete texts off my phone to make room while still having a copy of the ones I wanted to remember. Such as:

Best Friend Boy: No problem. It was very nice to catch up. :)

And there we have it. All of the unfinished stuff floating around on Blogger. Hope you're gladdened by being able to see it, even if it's not in the originally intended form.

And School Comes Along Just to End It

Well, summer's officially over, everyone.

And by officially, I mean unofficially, because in the manner of the calendar it's still summer. But summer vacation is over. On the first day of school, the temperature in Hometown dropped drastically. I swung by my parents' house after ten o'clock p.m., and the lights were out and everyone was asleep. No matter what the calendar says, to all intents and purposes, summer as we think of it is over.

Not that it makes that big of a difference to me. Now that I work all the time, summer has lost a lot of its meaning. Don't get me wrong—I have a super great job that has been a huge blessing to me. But this was only the second summer of my life that I had to work every weekday like a proper adult. I'm still getting used to it.

Conversely, though, I guess it would be just as accurate to say that I have summer vacation all year long as it would be to say that I have no summer vacation. Once work is over for the day, I can pretty much do what I want. No homework...no grades. Responsibilities, yes, but responsibilities that come with the money and the means to fulfill my semi-wildest dreams.

I don't know, guys. Adulthood is weird.

Discretion

Occasionally, people ask me why I don't write about certain big life events on my blog.

There are a lot of interesting things that I definitely could be writing about. Considering that I've lived in Utah my whole life and followed a fairly standard life track, I've had some atypical experiences. The problem is that most of these experiences involved other people. And, years ago, I learned two important lessons when it comes to writing about other people.

Lesson #1: Don't sell out your friends for a good story.

Lesson #2: Be careful what you say about others on the internet.

In following these two lessons, I have definitely robbed my corner of the internet of some good blog posts. However, I've been able to maintain my integrity (and keep potential angry mobs at bay). And that's what's really important.

Now enjoy this photo of Grover trying to convince you to eat carrots. I know I'm sold.

Sleepy Time

I've been worried that I'm not sleeping very well, so over the past year and a half I have sometimes used an app to track my sleeping.

The app is pretty easy to use. I just turn it on, put my iPod face down on the bed next to me, and go to sleep. The app also offers a "soundscape" to help me sleep, which is really just a recording of ocean breezes and waves. I'm sure it's supposed to be soothing, but really it sounds like a toddler splashing in a tub.

Somehow, the app uses my movements on the mattress to record my sleep throughout the night. 

The orange stuff is when I'm awake, the green stuff is light sleep, and the blue stuff is deep sleep. Obviously I can't verify that all of this is correct, 'cause I'm asleep, but the patterns of me waking up do often match what I remember from the night.

There's one more color that shows up: gray.

Gray means there's not enough data to be recorded. The gray used to show up occasionally, as seen above. But more and more lately, it's shown up with more gray than color:

Why is this? Do I sleepwalk? Am I accidentally rolling onto my iPod and pinning it to the mattress? Or is it that my iPod, which was the newest and greatest model when I got it, is now super old and incompetent?

Then I got these results:

Either I cease to exist when I'm asleep, or my iPod really is just too old. So I loaded the newer version of the app onto my iPhone and used that instead. The soundscapes on the new version are better. Also, it records my existence as a corporeal being. Win/win, in my opinion. The only downside is that it made me press my thumb against the phone scanner when I woke up this morning, and I was too tired to understand why.

Of Irritation and Sheet Music

The day before I started high school, I went to band camp, where I met the other members of my high school band for the first time. That night, I wrote: I think I will actually learn a lot in Band this year.

I was right, but not in the way you might suppose.

There were three other girls and eight boys in the clarinet section with me. They all seemed like decent musicians and fine people. I had no problems with any of them...except for this one boy.

It's hard to explain why I disliked him so much. He was cute, he was well-dressed, he seemed smart and he seemed kind. But there was something about him, something...something...

Irritating. He was irritating.

He talked to everyone, even people he just met, as if they were old acquaintances picking up conversation right where they left off. I didn't like the pretense of this. He raised his hand during Algebra and asked the teacher to explain the problems again. Such interruptions slowed down the lecture portion of the class considerably and cut into the schoolwork portion. During clarinet sectionals, he offered words of advice and encouragement to the other players. I was stymied; nobody asked for his opinion, and I didn't understand why he felt the need to share it.

All of these things irritated me—maybe because I am such a guarded person. I keep myself closed and wrapped up tight, and I am naturally suspicious of people who seem likely to try to pry me open. At fifteen, I was especially adverse to those sort of people. Therefore, I was especially adverse to this boy. If he had talked to me like I was an old acquaintance, I would have spent the conversation thinking, "You don't know me, so stop acting like you do." If he had asked for my help with a math problem, I would have given the briefest explanation possible and quickly bent back over my work. If he had tried to offer me clarinet advice, my only response would have been to shrug.

But I didn't have to do any of those things. The boy and I didn't talk. In fact, although we had multiple classes together and were constantly near each other, I was convinced that he probably had no idea who I was. Fine by me. Relieving to me. It was better to be irritated from a distance than to be irritated up close and personal.

Then Christmas rolled around, and with it, the Hometown High Christmas band concert.

This next part is a little fuzzy. After all, I had better things to do during Christmas at fifteen years old then pay attention to insignificant details that I didn't know I would need later for a blog post. What I do remember, though, is that there was some problem with the sheet music for a few of the songs. Not enough copies, probably. Sometimes we had to share copies, and not all stand partners were great at taking turns bringing the music home for practice.

Whatever the case, I also remember that the boy and I were not stand partners (that would have required us to talk, which I was still avoiding). But we did play the same parts for some of the songs. And for some reason, which I still don't understand, the boy decided that I was the best person to borrow sheet music from.

Trying to pry me open is the number one thing you can do to make me suspicious of you. Asking to borrow something is the second, particularly if that thing is sheet music. I had way too many experiences in junior high with people borrowing my sheet music and never giving it back. Besides, the concert was just days away, and I had to practice.

He said he would make copies and bring it right back. My internal response was, "Yeah, right!" But what was I supposed to say? "Bah Humbug; you can't have it"? It was, after all, Christmas.

Reluctantly, I let him take the sheet music. I supposed I'd never see it again. Goodbye, sheet music.

Imagine my surprise when he returned it promptly. A day later? Maybe two days later? I'm not sure. But I was stunned. I didn't know what to say.

He knew what to say. He always knew what to say. He deposited the sheet music into my hands, chattered on about the best copy machine settings for sheet music, probably thanked me, and left.

It was a small thing. Not a big deal. But it sparked a new thought in me. The thought was: Maybe he's not so bad after all.

And that's how I began to become friends with Best Friend Boy.

How to Use Words

Being the English major that I am, I tend to notice when people are trying to say a thing but they don't, er, say it correctly. I touched upon that briefly in an earlier post. In this post, I'd like to touch upon it less briefly. I'd like to give it a big, long squeeze, so to speak.

Not everybody has mad word skillz. That's fine. Those without may know how to do things the rest of us don't know much about, like playing soccer or kissing. It all evens out. In any case, anyone who wants better word skillz can benefit from my mad word skillz as I explain some commonly misused words and phrases. Ready? Let's go.

Alright. "Alright" is actually not a word. In all instances, the phrase "all right" should be used in place of "alright."

Phase. When someone says "That doesn't phase me," the spelling they're actually looking for is F-A-Z-E, "faze." To be "fazed" is to be disturbed.

Baited breath. "Baited" means to have bait attached to something. If your breath is baited, then you should make good use of it and go fishing. Most of the time, that's not what people mean; they mean that their breath is suspended. In that case, the correct phrase is "bated breath."

Confident. "Confident" is how you feel when you have a cute new haircut or you just said something terribly witty and clever to a group of appreciative people. The person to whom you confess all your secrets is your "confidant" with an a, not an e. Unless, of course, you favor the Frenchified spelling "confidante," which does have an e, but only at the end.

Missus. "Missus" is the phonetic spelling of the abbreviation "Mrs." "Misses" is multiple single women or the singular, third-person present tense of the verb "to miss."

You may be wondering, "Awkward Mormon Girl, what gives you the right to lecture us about correct word usage?" The answer to that question is that I have an English degree. That's why I have an English degree. English majors may say that they're going to use their degree to teach or write a novel, but in reality the only reason a native English speaker studies English in college is so that they have the official right to correct everybody else's grammar.

English majors are jerks like that.

Anyways, I hope this proves useful and/or eye-opening. Now excuse me; I'm going to bed.

Perplexed, But Not in Despair

I'm thinking in a mish-mash.

I'm thinking about a Sunday school lesson where the teacher said, "What if you do everything you're supposed to but things still aren't going right? What then?"

I'm thinking about a scripture I read last week in 2 Corinthians. It describes how we conduct ourselves when we believe in Christ and use the power of the Atonement: "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair..."

I'm thinking about how Sister Wendy Watson Nelson spoke about desperation at a fireside earlier this year. She said that being desperate can be a "powerful motivator" to make necessary changes in our lives or to take decisive action. That makes sense to me, but this scripture also makes sense to me. I'd say the desperation spoken of in the scripture I just mentioned is not the motivating kind of desperation but the kind of desperation that makes people throw up their hands and give up.

I'm thinking about how for the past three years, parts of my life have been confusing at best and hopeless at worst. I've done everything I'm supposed to, everything I can think of, but so many things still aren't going right.

I'm thinking, over and over again, "What now? Do I throw up my hands and give up?"

We get so caught up in telling one another that it's okay to have questions that we rarely tell one another that it's okay to not get answers to those questions. There are so many things that I question about the way my life is going. I really have no idea what's going on. I feel like I don't know much of anything.

What I do know, however, is enough to keep me pushing forward. What I do know makes it okay for me to not know what I don't know. It makes it okay that so many of the circumstances around me are so confusing.

I am perplexed.

But I am not in despair.

Kathryn's Return

Do you remember Kathryn?

I've had the same phone number for eight years. Since day one, I've gotten many phone calls for somebody named Kathryn. Most of these calls indicate that Kathryn is in some kind of financial and/or legal trouble, which maybe is why she changed her phone number without telling anyone.

Two years ago, I got a phone call from someone claiming to be Kathryn's half-brother's aunt, Beverly. Beverly had actually hired a private investigator to track Kathryn down so that Kathryn could in turn help the nephew track down their father. The private investigator dug up my phone number but not, it would seem, anything that would actually lead to Kathryn's whereabouts.

That was the last thing I heard about Kathryn for a while.

"She's probably dead," La Petite said when I told her about how no one in the world seemed to know where Kathryn Ramin-or-Atwater (which were the two last names Beverly said she uses) was.

That was a likely guess, but one I nonetheless hoped wasn't true. I wanted Kathryn to be alive so that I could someday find out more about here. That was a story here, and I wanted to hear it. There was a mystery; I wanted to solve it.

Almost two years have passed since Beverly called me, and I haven't heard much about Kathryn since. But, finally, this week, I got a phone call from a number in Ohio.

"Hi, my name is Barbara. I'm calling from PDS Mediation Services for Kathryn Ramin regarding your direct involvement of an account that will be filed in my office against you. I do need to speak with you regarding this matter. So the number for you to return my call is ___. Have a good day."

Well.

Well well well.

It looks like Kathryn is alive and kickin' (and in Ohio?). And it looks like she's still causing problems. I looked up PDS Mediation Services, and it seems to be some kind of legal firm.

I am astounded at Kathryn's ability to somehow avoid detection just by giving out the wrong phone number. Is it a clever ploy? Or a complete accident? Maybe she has no idea that so many people have somehow ended up with this phone number. Maybe she is unaware of the face that she's in trouble with various groups because the groups are never able to reach her and tell her that she's in trouble. Maybe.

Either way, I think I sounded a little too jubilant when I called Barbara back. I explained the situation, and Barbara said that she wouldn't call me again, but I kept babbling.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: It seems like nobody's been able to find her, so...good luck with that!

Maybe I should have said, "And let me know when you do!" but Barbara seemed to really not want to talk to me anymore.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

I told, I told you three years ago that JULY was still a magical Harry Potter month. I held onto hope, and that hope was rewarded with more fun Harry Potter times.

You know what I'm talking about, right? Last week, at midnight on Harry Potter's birthday (also technically midnight on Neville Longbottom's birthday, Baby Brother pointed out, if you count midnight as the bridge between days), a new play called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was released.

I had mixed feelings about this play. I couldn't decide if I was going to buy it. I knew that I would read it at some point, but I couldn't decide when that would be. See, next-generation stories are so hard to do, and when the original author isn't the one doing most of the work—well. It's dangerous, that's all.

But all of my reasonable reasonings went out the window when I saw that Barnes and Noble was having a midnight release party. I texted the link to Viola.

Awkward Mormon Girl: Would you ever consider...

She considered it. We decided to go.

See, midnight releases for Harry Potter books are sort of our thing. Viola and I went to the Barnes and Noble release parties for Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. The Half-Blood Prince party was the year of the treacle incident. Incident recap: we tried to make treacle. We didn't follow the instructions. The treacle was terrible. Yet we maintained a fascination with the stuff and a desire to try some that had been properly made. You could say that we had unfinished business with treacle. Unfortunately, we were not able to finish up the unfinished business during the Deathly Hallows release party due to going with a large group of people who had no interest in helping us make a dessert of murky British origin. We ended up talking about Twilight with them and quoting Harry Potter Puppet Pals instead.

Finally, on July 30th, 2016, we were able to finish our unfinished treacle business.

For my birthday, La Petite and her husband gave me The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook. It contains a treacle recipe, which Viola and I followed to a T.

The result? A caramel-ish fudge.

We tried it. We were all, "Oh, that's what treacle is. Well, let's go to the party now."

It was pretty anticlimactic, really.

The party was fine and everything. Astoundingly, I won a drawing for a t-shirt. Viola and I talked some good talks and ran amok in the Barnes and Noble. (Running amok in a Barnes and Noble consists of sitting on the floor in whatever aisle you choose and eating gummy worms. And if you decide to get up and move to another aisle for no reason, then you just do that, son. It's wild.)

All of that was good and fine, but it was really all just a way to pass the time until they let me get my copy of the play at midnight.

I was maybe the fourth person to get a copy. I really wanted to read all night, the way I did with the sixth and seventh books, but adulthood got in the way and I didn't.

But I read it all in one sitting the next day. And here are my thoughts:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is no Harry Potter book. But it was also fun. Here are some things that stood out... (Minor, vague spoilers ahead.)

I know a person whose main criticism of the Harry Potter books is that someone should have just used a time-turner to kill Voldemort or save some of his victims. He thinks that's a plot hole. I don't think it's a plot hole, because a) the Ministry of Magic clearly has strict rules and regulations about time-turners, b) using a time-turner to save the life of a hippogriff and help a man escape from jail is much different from using a time-turner to save the life of a person; as lovely as Buckbeak is, he doesn't have the same agency as one of the series' more sentient species, and his death or lack thereof would not affect a timeline the same way a person's death or lack thereof might, and finally c) using a time-turner to go back a few hours to change time is not anywhere near as dangerous as using a time-turner to go back multiple years to change time. More things in a timeline would be affected by changing an event that took place years ago and has had time to compound. For example, if someone went back in time to kill Voldemort before his rise to power, who's to guarantee that his absence wouldn't allow someone even worse to take his place? All of this has always seemed obvious to me, but in any case, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child goes to the trouble of spelling it out: wizards should rarely, if ever, use time travel to fix problems, no matter how good of an idea it may seem.

On the other hand, while the basic premise of the plot made sense, the details were not quite clever enough. At one point, all of the characters were operating under an assumption that I felt would turn out to be false. However, apparently the assumption was true, which threw me for a loop. It just seemed like something that couldn't be true without a lot of explanation.

I have to say that I loved the way Ron and Hermione were portrayed. Now, I don't think this play got the characters quite right. Harry needs to be a little more sassy; Hermione needs to get flustered and start talking in that "shrill" voice that she uses when she's upset; Ron needs to be more clever, more sharply sarcastic, and less vaguely goofy. Yeah, I get that they're adults now, but that doesn't mean they should lose all of their character traits.

That being said, I thought the overall treatment of the characters was way better than the movies. There's a scene in Cursed Child where Ron is the first to volunteer himself for danger to spare Hermione and Harry. It was "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us, too!" all over again. It was a great way to highlight Ron's key character trait: his deep love for and devotion to the people he cares about. The movies pretty much ignored that part of Ron, leaving him as nothing but the comic relief. And the more they took away from Ron, the more they added to Hermione, until movie Hermione became a sort of perfect goddess who can do nothing wrong. In Cursed Child, though, they showed that Hermione is flawed! They reminded us that without Harry and Ron to mellow her out, Hermione is uptight and humorless.

The kids were fun. Some of them (Rose) were just like one of their parents, while others (Scorpius) were delightfully different. I was disappointed that there wasn't really room in the story for Teddy Lupin, for Albus's siblings, or for the many Weasley cousins. I would have liked some Weasley cousin shenanigans. Maybe they should write another play that is just Weasley cousin shenanigans. Maybe I could write another play that is just Weasley cousin shenanigans. All I have to do is become a famous playwright, and soon.

Anyways, if you're wondering whether you should read this play, I give you a hearty, "Yes!" Just take it with a grain of salt. It's far from perfect, but it's still enjoyable.