Little Sister's Wedding

Little Sister's wedding was kind of like a huge game of Boo/Yay.

Boo/Yay is a storytelling improv game where one improviser says something negative, and everyone says "Boo!" Then an improviser on the other team says something positive, and everyone says, "Yay!" It's simple, but effective.

First, the groundwork. I went to my parents' house late the night that Little Sister and Mr. Little Sister got engaged. They were still up. Little Sister showed me the ring.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Do you have a date?

MR. LITTLE SISTER: May 4th. Star Wars Day!

Little Sister is a huge Star Wars fan. Mr. Little Sister likes it, but definitely not as much as Little Sister. In fact, I'd arrived at my parents' house with a Star Wars-themed engagement present for her.

MR LITTLE SISTER: The sealing is at 10:20. We've already booked the temple.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: What are you thinking for colors?

LITTLE SISTER: Lavender and wheat.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: What about my bridesmaid dress? Do you already have that, too?

They didn't, but it was soon obtained. During preparations, the wedding soon turned from lavender and wheat to more of a purple fest, and the bridesmaid dresses were frothy concoctions of a sort of lavender-and-mauve mix color.

Baby Sister was the maid of honor. Older Sister and I were bridesmaids. The brothers were groomsmen. Since Mr. Little Sister has no brothers but three sisters, there was a swarm of bridesmaids, and the groomsmen presence was a bit thin.

Two days before the wedding, Older Sister flew in from New York. One day before the wedding, Mr. Little Sister's family held a wedding dinner in lieu of a luncheon.

And that's when things started to go a bit wrong.

BOO: The night of the dinner, I found that I had a raging cold.

YAY: At least I was sick and not Little Sister or Mr. Little Sister.

BOO: The next morning, our parents went off to the temple with Little Sister. The five Obnoxious siblings were scrambling around, trying to get ready. Baby Sister was trying to do my makeup and her hair. Baby Brother couldn't find his preferred shoes. Amidst all this, Little Sister was frantically texting Baby Sister, asking for various items she'd forgotten.

YAY: Baby Sister, being a good maid of honor, gathered everything that Little Sister needed. We managed to mollify Baby Brother and herd him into the car. Then we set off, Older Sister driving, me in the passenger seat and hopped up on cold medicine, everyone else in the back.

BOO: Suddenly, we hit traffic very uncharacteristic of 9:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning! It was rush traffic, and then some. Evidently, there'd been an accident. Soon we were locked in a complete standstill. We'd been on the road for at least fifteen minutes, and we'd hardly gone anywhere.

YAY: We happened to be near an exit. I was able to help Older Sister navigate safely out of the standstill and off the freeway! We then found an alternate route.

BOO: By this time, we were running rather late.

YAY: Older Sister used her mad driving skillz to get us to the temple in record time. At one point, we were turning right one a green light. There were a couple old ladies about to cross the road, but Older Sister yelped, "NOPE!" and cut them off as she raced toward temple parking! Soon Older Sister and Baby Sister and I (Baby Sister having recently been endowed) were headed into the temple while our brothers waited outside.

BOO: Although we made it to the temple on time, most of Mr. Little Sister's family did not. Presumably, they were stuck in the terrible traffic. The sealing room was ready early, so when they started ushering us in for the ceremony, many family members still weren't there!

YAY: Because the sealing room was fully booked for the day, we were afraid the sealing would have to start without everyone being there. Happily, things worked out, and almost everyone was in the room by the time the sealer started speaking! The ceremony was lovely. Mr. Little Sister is a sensitive soul, and he wept throughout most of the sealing.

BOO: When we went outside to wait for the new couple to emerge from the temple doors, we suddenly realized that none of us had ever seen the photographer! We didn't even know if she existed! We gathered that she did, since someone had to take the engagement and bridal photos, but we didn't know for sure. But, assuming she did exist, no one had any idea what she looked like.

YAY: After a good half hour of my awkwardly side-eyeing every single passing photographer, the photographer finally showed up just minutes before Little Sister and Mr. Little Sister made their appearance.

BOO: I spilled soy sauce on my skirt during lunch.

YAY: I wasn't wearing my bridesmaid dress yet! I'd just worn a normal Sunday dress to the temple and planned to continue wearing it until we were done setting up for the reception. Obviously, I wasn't happy about spilling the soy sauce, but it was more manageable than it would have been had I ruined my bridesmaid dress.

BOO: Literally as soon as we got to the aviary in which Little Sister's preferred reception center was located, a bird messed a big, brown mess on Little Brother's white shirt.

YAY: Older Sister was able to wash out the bird mess in the bathroom of the reception center, and Little Brother wore a women's shirt while we set up for the reception.

BOO: Not long after we started setting up, my parents found out that the moving van with most of the items would not be coming to the reception center as planned. They decided that both of them would go back to Hometown to get it, taking Little Brother with them. That left the four remaining Obnoxious siblings, the best man, and Rosebud (who is Mr. Little Sister's cousin) and Mr. Rosebud to set up everything. The problem was, only our mother really knew how everything was supposed to look, so we were at a bit of a loss.

YAY: Rosebud is an interior designer! She oversaw us as we frantically ironed things, hung them out, set them up, moved them across the floor, and so on and so forth.

BOO: The reception center was overly warm. Something wasn't quite right about the distribution of the air in the dated structure of the reception center. I went to the aviary office to ask them to look at it, but they said there was nothing they could do.

YAY: Since I was the only one running a fever, I was the only one who found the heat unbearable. Everyone else was just a little toasty!

BOO: The wedding party didn't wear their outfits to the temple, so we hadn't gotten any family pictures. We were supposed to do that right before the reception. However, the time was drawing near, and things still weren't set up. Fairy lights were still being strung. The backdrop for the bride and groom was falling apart even as Little Brother and Baby Sister put it up. Not to mention that no one had changed, freshened up, or put on their various flower accessories.

YAY: When Mom got back, she just told us to set things up...it didn't matter where. I put a few small trees lining the walkway, a formation that nobody questioned. In the end, everything got set up, and hey! We all were ready, too. Little Sister and Mr. Little Sister arrived, and all the bridesmaids got dressed at the same time as the bride. Mr. Rosebud dedicated himself to getting the boutonnieres on the groomsmen, and somehow, everyone was ready and lining up for photos.

BOO: Little Sister loves her record player. She'd put together a selection of records for the reception that we were supposed to play on her record player. However, just moments before the reception started, she discovered she hadn't put the record player power cord into the box of reception equipment.

YAY: When the DJ arrived, she offered to have her dad and brother bring her record player when they arrived at the reception. In the meantime, Rosebud's dad had an amplifier, and Mr. Little Sister had an iPod, so we did't have to go musicless.

At that point, things went mostly smoothly. The reception was set up like a fairy picnic in the woods. It was lovely. The refreshments were delicious. Having the reception in an aviary turned out to be rather interesting. At a couple points, my younger siblings ran away into the aviary. I had to hike up my delicate skirt and trot out looking for them in my cream-colored heels and flower crown.

At the end of the reception, we indulged in a bit of geekery. You might have seen photos of couples leaving their receptions to a send-off of sparklers or bubbles. Well, we'd gathered a good 15 or so lightsabers. We went out behind the reception center, turned on the lightsabers, and crossed them to make an archway. We blasted the Star Wars theme, and Little Sister and her new husband ran under the lightsaber path to the music.

I didn't see this myself, but word on the street says that after they were clear of the lightsabers, Little Sister stopped and said, "Wait! I didn't say goodbye to my family!" and started hugging everyone with arm's reach. And then she and Mr. Little Sister were gone.

We cleaned everything up and, exhausted, went home and went to bed!

Blogger and Bliss

My laptop, Bliss, has lived up to her name reasonably well.

She hasn't had any unexpected battery issues. She doesn't take 20 minutes to load up, either. She is rather low on storage space, though, and also she came equipped with this disembodied voice called Cortana who's kind of like Siri except that every time I log onto Bliss, Cortana, like, offers to make me dinner reservations and stuff.

It's a nice gesture, but I've repeatedly told her that I don't need her to make me any reservations. Girlfriend just can't take a hint.

All those issues aside, Bliss and Blogger are apparently in a feud.

Since yesterday, Bliss has refused to load the part of my Blogger dashboard from which I write posts. At first I just thought that Blogger's engineers had finally given up. They seemed to have stopped updating the site long ago. They did come up with the Blogger app, but my iPhone keeps informing me that the Blogger app hasn't been updated in a while and will be incompatible with the next version of iOS. I don't know what, exactly, is keeping the site hobbling along like it is. However, I soon discovered that I could still post to the blog—just not, apparently, from Bliss.

Now, in some instances I have used technical issues as an excuse to not be diligent about posting. But in this instance, I am going to commit myself to getting the following blog posts out over the next two weeks (that is, between now and Saturday the 15th):

-Little Sister's Wedding (already underway)
-Escapé
-In Which I Sleep in the Back Seat of a Car

There will probably also be something about the Fourth of July in there, but I'm not going to commit that much.

Correspondence from My Missionary

Baby Sister had her preparation day (p-day) on Tuesday, so she was able to email us. I got quite a few emails from her. A few years ago, only missionary family members could email missionaries, but in many missions that's now changed. All of Baby Sister's friends and family can email her if they so desire.

My sister's writing style is very zesty and bubbly, as you can see from the excerpts below.

Male missionaries are Elder So-and-So, and female missionaries use the honorific of "Sister". So now Baby Sister is Sister Baby Sister. Or, rather, Sister Obnoxious.

Sounds like she's doing well!

How Do I Love Thee?

Since this post, a lot has happened.

Baby Sister is gone! She's in the MTC. The night before she left, I stayed over at my parents' house. So did Little Sister and Mr. Little Sister. Baby Sister said that she wanted all of us in the house with her so that if she woke up in the middle of the night, she could come round and look at us.

I don't know if she actually did that, but she did "tuck us in" the night before. She stopped by everyone before we went to sleep. I'm not sure what she said to everyone else, but she told me to tell you that she said words so wise and deep that they cannot be repeated.

When we dropped her off, we took our new minivan. (Our Mormon Assault Vehicle aka Moby Dick aka the 14-passenger van perished in the fall. I won't embarrass family members by saying how the van perished, but I will say that my fear of sneezing while driving has been completely justified. Why did we even have a 14-person van when there are only eight of us, you might wonder? Because minivans generally stop at seven seats, and if you have too many people for a minivan you have to buy a humongous monster van instead. Both Shutterbug and Best Friend Boy's families, of eight and nine people respectively, also had 14-person vans.) Unlike our Mormon Assault Vehicle, the minivan had a back window that I could actually see out of. I took advantage of this innovation by watching Baby Sister as long as I could as we drove away.

I miss her, but not as much as one might think. First, she's off doing something we both believe in, and that's good, so how can I be sad about it? Secondly, almost immediately after she left, I ran off to go camping with my ward. I haven't even had much time to miss her.

While on this camping trip, I thought a lot about love. I thought about all the different ways a body can love someone and the meaning of those ways. For example, on this camping trip we were accompanied by the counselor's wife whom I referenced in this post about the ward book club. (Update: she's now the bishop's wife! Because the counselor became the bishop...not because she changed husbands...I just wanted to clarify that.) That book club meeting was pretty frustrating for me. I went running afterward, and then following my run, I went back to her house, late at night and unannounced, and told her why I was frustrated. And she just rolled with it. She was so nice to me even though I'd just broken all 75,847 rules of normal social engagement. And then we became friends, which seems unbelievable, just because I feel like a real actual adult mother who isn't my real actual adult mother should be put off by my quirks and personality, not embrace them!

She was so kind to me this entire campout even though I was in a terrible mood, and I was reminded of the power of friendship love. Which is a very important love! Yet it's very different from the love I feel for Baby Sister and my other younger siblings, which in turn is different from the love I feel for Older Sister, which is again different from the love I feel for my parents. All those loves are different from the kind of affection I feel for my roommates. Those loves are different from the people I often see whom I have a vague sort of fondness for but don't know well enough to love. And all of those are again different from the loves I've felt for the boys I've cared for as friends and beyond. And all of that is again different from the love I feel for God and Christ.

All of these thoughts were so much more eloquent and deep inside my head, but now I'm essentially just vomiting all my thoughts and have lost track of the purpose. I don't know what I mean by this. I don't know. It all made so much more sense when I was camping in the mountains and staring at the stars.

My Harry Potter Journey

It's been 20 years since the first Harry Potter book was published in the UK. Sooo even though I'm sure I'll be talking about Harry for his birthday in July and again for the epilogue day in September, I'm going to take this opportunity as an excuse to talk about him. (Like I needed an excuse.)

My journey with Harry began in July 2000. A few weeks earlier, my parents had picked up their family of four daughters and moved us all from one part of Hometown to another. Everyone adjusted well to the move...except me. I had an extremely difficult time with it. I, uh, might have written all over the walls in the rented house we were leaving...maybe.

So my mom, demonstrating that she understood the needs of her young daughter, bought me a Beanie Baby and a book at a sidewalk sale. I was thrilled. I felt like these gifts almost made up for the fact that my parents had uprooted my life and forced me to move a whole three miles.

Well, okay, I was thrilled with the Beanie Baby. The Beanie Baby was actually a plush Beanie Baby named Franny. She was dressed in a very patriotic red, white, and blue dress. I wasn't sure about the book...Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

I wasn't sure about this book because first of all, the cover was real weird. I did not like the illustration style at all. Also, my mom had tried to talk to me about the book in a parking lot a few weeks before.

MOM: I've heard this Harry Potter book is really good!

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: I've already read that book! It wasn't that good.

MOM: Really?

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Yeah. It's a picture book about a weird old farmer with a balloon farm.

MOM: That doesn't sound like what I'm talking about...

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Didn't you say Harvey Potter?

MOM: No, I said Harry Potter.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Oh. Okay.

(It still didn't sound that good.)

Anyways, a few weeks after that sidewalk sale, I sat down with that book, and I started reading it. It was a rough one, I tell you. The beginning wasn't that interesting. It wasn't that interesting and it wasn't that interesting and then when Hagrid arrived it was kind of interesting and then when Harry met Ron it was very interesting and then by the time they were heading out for the wizarding duel I was hooked. (J. K. Rowling has said many times herself that she's not great at beginnings. The slow beginning was also a problem in Fantastic Beasts, in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there.)

And that was that. In July 2000, I started Hogwarts with Harry.

In July 2007, amid many tears, Harry and I finished our seven (literal and metaphorical) years together.

My attachment to Harry Potter far outweighs nostalgia. For one thing, I've reread the books many times, and I'm always amazed at J. K. Rowling's talent. Some people like to say that J. K. Rowling's writing technique is not good, but I couldn't disagree more. There are many different styles of good writing. We all have our personal preferences, but just because you don't like a particular style doesn't mean it's not good. J. K. Rowling will never be a great prose writer, but she really excels at building worlds and characters with a few well-placed words. She also has quite a talent for dialogue. When I'm working on a novel, I often reread the Harry Potter series to get inspiration from her style.

For another thing, it's a joyous journey. I love this world. I love these characters. I think that Ron is a particularly complicated and interesting character, as is Luna. People have a tendency to reduce both of them to caricatures, but let me tell you, they would be tough to write as well as they are. Hermione is also quite complicated, although not in the way they chose to portray her in the movies. (Harry's not very complicated...bless him.)

Finally, there are loads of philosophical and religious moral lessons to glean from the books. I'm not joking when I say that these books have helped me understand my religion better. My parents (who started reading the books a few years later, once I'd finally convinced Older Sister to push past the first few chapters of the first book and she'd gotten really into the series, too) felt like the books were actually great religious teaching tools. They said that they wanted us to read them because they showed a clear difference between right and wrong. (If anyone's interested, I could write a whole post about the religious aspects of Harry Potter, but I won't bore you right now.)

I'm proud to be a member of the Harry Potter generation. My generation is fractured in our beliefs, but here we have common ground. For instance, I'm pretty we all agree that knowing one's Hogwarts house is very important. Surely we can build off of that shared belief! I look forward to the day when we use principles from Harry Potter to guide our political and ethical discussions.

Long live the Boy Who Lived, and thanks, Harry, for all the magic.

Loss

The past several weeks have been strange.

Little Sister got married. Weddings are happy events, but they also mark a cleaving. Weirdly, "cleave" means both to cut apart and put together. So Little Sister is being cleaved to Mr. Little Sister yet she's also, to a certain extent, being cleaved from the family she was born into. It can be a rough transition.

Then there's Baby Sister, who's off on her mission in just a few days (!?). That is also a happy event that will mark a rough transition.

Apart from those things, I think I might be on the verge of losing a friend. It's a sensation with which I am unfamiliar. I haven't lost many good friends over the last ten or so years. Being my friend is a lifetime commitment. Sometimes, though, things fall apart.

However, the most difficult and terrible thing that is happening is the thing that happened today.

There's a Chinese buffet in Hometown which we affectionately call "the ghetto Chinese buffet". It's in a part of town that's really not conducive to hosting a well-frequented restaurant, thus the name. But I love that buffet. Yes, I love it. They serve a few items I've never eaten in any other Chinese restaurants (and I have eaten in a lot, and I mean a lot of Chinese restaurants). They have a delicious chicken skewer with perfectly browned and slightly crispy skin. They have these eggrolls that, well, honestly, I'm not sure what's actually in them. I think it's meat...and some cheeses...and a veggie or two? Whatever. They're amazing. The restaurant also serves almond cookies. I love almond cookies. When I was a kid and my mom took me to the ghetto Chinese buffet on mommy dates, I would wrap some almond cookies in napkins, sneak them out, and hide them in my underwear drawer for future consumption.

Earlier this week I had a great idea. I would surprise Baby Sister with some takeout from the buffet! Baby Sister is the only person in our family who comes close to loving the place as much as I do. A few years ago, the buffet implemented a takeout system where you could buy food by the pound. Baby Sister and I are big fans of this inexpensive option. Baby Sister likes to load up a bunch of wontons and pot stickers in her takeout box, while I'm more partial to the skewers and eggrolls.

So, today, when I went to the ghetto Chinese buffet after work to get Baby Sister's surprise takeout, I was met with a surprise of my own.

The door wouldn't open.

Now, the doors of the ghetto Chinese buffet are notoriously heavy, so I just thought I wasn't pulling hard enough. Soon, however, it became evident that the doors were locked.

I peered inside. Either the buffet was undergoing extensive remodeling, or...or...or...

It went out of business.

I couldn't believe it. First my sisters, then my friendship, and now this???!!!

Numbly, I got in my car and drove home. I cried on the way home, and I'm not even exaggerating this time. I legit cried.

ME: (to me) What am I supposed to do, huh? What am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to do when I'm sad?

(I frequent the buffet a lot when I'm feeling sad. Like I was, ironically, feeling at the moment.)

ALSO ME: (also to me) Will the trials never end?

This is how I feel right now:

Please Be Nice to My Baby Sister

I just spent an hour going through a Facebook friend's posts.

I won't explain just how far back I went, but suffice it to say that there was some stuff about Mitt Romney in there.

What was my intention? My intention was to find a status that this person posted years ago, when Older Sister was on her mission. To the best of my memory, the status said something along the lines of how Mormon missionaries don't deserve any kind of respect unless they've earned it. I suppose that's a fair statement, though I didn't love it. What upset me was that, if I recall correctly, in the comments of this status this person and some friends were trading stories of ways they liked to troll the missionaries.

I got really close to leaving my own comment: "Hey, my sister is serving a mission right now. If she were serving here, would you do those things to her?" Something like that. Something just to remind them that, hey, missionaries are people too, and just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they deserve to be harassed. Yeah, I get it that no one likes to be approached by people they disagree with, but when I went to Nameless Utah College, I was approached by so many political and religious activists that I didn't agree with. I still managed to engage with them civilly, even when brushing them off. I didn't go out of my way to harass them, because why would I do that? (Okay, well, that's mostly true. There was one time when a girl brought voting registrations to the school. She explained to me that the political party that most people in my college supported needed help in the elections. She asked me to register and offer my support. Since I wasn't registered to vote, I took that opportunity to register...for a party that believed the exact opposite of the party she was promoting. And then she had to mail my registration in. So I guess that was a little harassing. But it was still civil.)

The reason I'm thinking about this long-ago status now is that Baby Sister is due to ship out on her mission any day now. Consider it: she has something she believes in so much that she's willing to give up her family, her job, her schooling, her friends, her right to sleep in, her free time, the many Netflix and YouTube shows that she follows, fry sauce, the premiere of How to Train Your Dragon 3 next summer, the ability to celebrate the epilogue day of Harry Potter (September 1st 2017—so close!), and her beloved makeup palette with approximately 7,000 kinds of eyeshadow. Whether you believe that sharing the gospel helps people, she believes that sharing the gospel helps people. And in the end, it's those people that she must be going on a mission for, because the enormous amount of sacrifice required of her suggests that she's sure not doing it for herself.

I guess the title of this post is misleading, because if you see my cutie baby sister when she's out in the mission field, you sure don't have to be nice to her. But I hope that you will not be actively rude to her...and not just because if you are, super irrational Big Sister! Awkward Mormon Girl will track you down and give you several paper cuts.

Pinterest Is Real Weird

In the five years that I've been on Pinterest, the site has slowly evolved into something I barely recognize.

Five years ago I would "pin" things to my boards. Now I "save" them LIKE ON EVERY OTHER SITE, and it's so boring. Plus it totally ruins the metaphor because you can't "save" things to a pin board in real life, Pinterest.

Five years ago Pinterest would show me pins from the people I followed. Now it shows me pins from people I follow and a bunch of random people and ghosts, apparently, because there are a bunch of disembodied pins that randomly show up on my dash.

I see a lot of pins that are, like, political stuff I don't agree with. Luckily, there's a little button in the lower right hand corner of most pins. You can press it and then let Pinterest know that you don't like that kind of pin.

Unfortunately, near this button is a weird circular hotspot. If you hit the hotspot, Pinterest looks for pins like the one you just hotspotted, and it shows you more pins like that one.

I can't tell you how many pins I've accidentally indicated that Pinterest should show me more of something I actually hated with my entire guts. Last night, I was literally hotspotting a bunch of Kim Possible pins in the hopes that Pinterest would show me more Kim Possible and less of pretty much everything else except delicious recipes, opaque summer shirts, and inspirational thoughts.

Tonight, though, I saw this weird thing that takes the cake (HA HA I'M SO PUNNY OKAY ANYWAY LOOK AT THE PICTURE BELOW).

Pinterest...no.

Pinterest, that is a cactus. It's literally a cactus. A cactus cannot be a "pineapple trend". A cactus is a cactus trend. Because it's a cactus.

In all fairness, I think that what Pinterest is trying to say is that cactus wedding décor is the new pineapple wedding décor. Or the new cake décor. Or something. But guess what, Pinterest? You failed. Failed!

Right now you might be thinking, "You're disproportionately bothered by this."

Right now I'm thinking that you're definitely right but that as a proud American citizen, if I want to complain about Pinterest and cactuses, I'm going to darn well complain about Pinterest and cactuses!

Okay, well, I'm going to bed. Good talk, everyone.