The Telephone and Other Disasters

I blame Older Sister for the whole thing.

Older Sister is currently serving a mission in South America. Older Sister emails the family every week. Older Sister's most recent email informed us that the Mission Department has changed the missionary email rules. Now missionaries can email their friends and new converts as well as their families.

Immediately I thought of Best Friend Boy. Best Friend Boy is, well, my best friend who's a boy. He is serving in the mission just north of Older Sister's mission. Best Friend Boy's entire life is dedicated to God right now, which is a wonderful thing, but it means that we don't get to communicate much and only through letters. Sometimes that can be hard.

So when Older Sister said missionaries can now email their friends, a syllogism sprang into my head:
Premise: I am one of Best Friend Boy's friends.
Premise: Best Friend Boy can email friends.
Conclusion: Best Friend Boy can email me.

First I congratulated myself for thinking in syllogisms. Then I congratulated myself for remembering the word, "syllogism." Then I realized that I did not, in fact, remember the word "syllogism" and that I was actually calling the syllogism "one of those proof things" in my head. Which clearly means that college isn't doing anything for me and that I'm just wasting my time. Which caused me to decide that I should go to the registrar's office right now and demand my money back.

And when I demanded my money back, I would say, "I demand my money back! For the kind of tuition I pay, at the very least I should be learning to remember what those proof things are called."

And the office people would say, "But we can't give you your money back because you don't pay any tuition. You're on scholarship."

And then I would say, "Oh yeah? That's DISCRIMINATION!" And then they would have to give me money. Because discrimination is the magic word.

Once I'd syllogised that Best Friend Boy could email me, I realized the next logical step would be for me to get his address. That, my friends, would be easier said than done, because getting his email would require calling his mother...

...and I'm deathly afraid of the telephone.

It's because I'm overabundantly awkward, you see. When I have extremely awkward interactions in real life, I can sometimes mitigate them by looking attractive. Or by saying funny things. When I'm on the phone, however, people can't see how attractive I look. Funny things tend to not be that funny on the telephone, and even suave people usually sound somewhat awkward. Thus the telephone is basically my nemesis.

(Once I had this friend-crush called the Chess Master. Ah, the Chess Master. I won't delve into the backstory with this boy now, but suffice it to say that long ago, when I really, really liked the Chess Master, I tried to call him. It took me at least ten tries of dialing his number before I found the courage to hit SEND. When the phone actually started ringing, I panicked. I threw that thing across the room like it was a time bomb. Or a red-hot potato. Or a piece of chocolate that actually turned out to be white chocolate. Sadly, this example embodies the majority of my call-making experiences.)

After determining that the only way to get Best Friend Boy's email was by experiencing Doom Itself aka the telephone, I slept on that realization. I went to school. I came home and ate a taco, a strawberry, an ice cream sandwich, and a blueberry muffin. Have you ever eaten a muffin and felt like you were asphyxiating? Because that's the sensation eating this muffin gave me. Asphyxiation. With blueberries.

Eventually, I stopped stalling and prepared myself to face my doom. I thought about putting off the phone call until the next day, or the next week, or maybe the next month--but no. If I put off the phone call, I would use that time to convince myself that getting Best Friend Boy's email wasn't important, which simply wasn't true. Missionaries need to hear from their families and friends and know that they have support. Besides, I wanted to email him.

So after much internal hemming and hawing, I lickety split dialed his mother's number. This time I only had to dial it twice before I could make myself press SEND. I was tempted to throw the phone, but I didn't.

Ring ring ring. "Hello?"

Words cannot describe the terribleness of that moment. I only barely found my voice. I stuttered. I corrected myself in the middle of my own sentences. Surely I sounded like a fool. But Best Friend Boy's mother was kind, even though I had interrupted a family gathering. She was gracious. It seemed she was trying her best to put me at ease. When I hung up after some ten minutes, I had received a promise that she would text the address to me as soon as possible.

I was fairly skipping for the next half-hour. Now I could email Best Friend Boy and hear from him more regularly. World peace was imminent. AIDS would surely cure itself. And I had talked on the telephone, and it had turned out well...

"But wait," I said to myself. I rewound the phone conversation in my head and stuck on one moment in particular.

"Did Best Friend Boy tell you about the new email rules?" I'd said in this moment.

"No," Best Friend Boy's mother had said. "I know there were some..."

Pause. Replay. "No." "No." "No," she'd said. Uneasiness crept into my brain. I rushed to my laptop and began to do some speedy research. Within moments I'd turned up various discussions talking about how not all missions had instituted the new rules yet.

...oh no. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no. I dug a little deeper. With my super internet stalking skillz (they are quite mad, I tell you) I turned up a missionary blog from an elder in Best Friend Boy's mission. Among the emails he'd sent his family, there was one commenting on how their mission president had not yet put the new rules into place.

A terrible, terrible feeling washed over me. Whyyyy had I decided to use the telephone? Had I not called Best Friend Boy's mom, I would have sent her some kind of written communication that she surely would have taken her a while to respond to, and then I wouldn't have rushed into things, and I probably would have thought to do more research, and then I wouldn't have made a fool of myself for nothing and-

My phone buzzed. It was the text giving me the email address. OH NO! Not only had I made a fool of myself, I had given Best Friend Boy's entire family faulty information. For all I knew, they were now contacting every single person Best Friend Boy had ever known, sharing the joyous news that he could now exchange emails with them and giving away his address like it was free nonwhite chocolate. Then Best Friend Boy's inbox would be overflowing with emails he couldn't respond to, and it would be totally distracting, and he might even get in trouble!!! Clearly, I had to do something.

Quickly I whipped up a response text that thanked his mom for the address. Then I gave a spiel about how on second thought I wouldn't email him until I had more information, along with a strong yet discreet hint that no one else outside the family should email him either. Then I thanked her again. It was like a thank-you sandwich with a warning in the middle instead of cold cuts.

Yeah I decided, reading it over. That sounds natural.

I sent it.

Yeah I realized, thinking it over. That didn't sound natural at all.

You know how, when you do something embarrassing, they say that you'll laugh about it later? Well, I laughed inside about this one right away. Only it wasn't a ha-ha-that-was-so-funny-shrug-it-off laugh. It was more of a sobbing, hysterical laugh. I laughed until I was exhausted, physically and emotionally.

Then I said to myself, "I'm gonna go eat another muffin."

Mad Skillz

My mother is redoing our kitchen in a color scheme similar to this:



As we've been getting ready to paint, I've noticed something odd. Every now and again she asks my opinion about the decor. She listens to me very carefully, acts like what I'm saying is extremely important, and then completely ignores every word of it.

It's like she doesn't think I'm good at interior decorating or something. That is just not true! I've made furniture out of snow. At age four, I drew that amazing colored pencil sketch of the Little Mermaid on that wall in our old house. Only a few years ago I redid my entire room in a white-and-blue zodiac theme that I've only ever seen replicated in an occult shop and cafe. Plus there are, like, seventy-five pins on my "Let's Decorate" Pinterest board! If I don't have mad decorating skillz, I don't know who does.

The only real assistance I'm allowed to give is priming. Everybody primes. Even Baby Brother.

Quick! Think of something short. Whatever you thought of, there's approximately a sixty-nine point twenty-four percent chance that Baby Brother is shorter than that thing. He is roughly the size of a hobbit or a medium-sized shrubbery. The priming brush is taller than he is. I'm not even sure how he picks it up without falling over.

Today when we were about halfway done with the priming Mom suddenly exclaimed, "Oh no! We only have primer and paint samples! We don't have the paint! How are we going to paint the walls without it? Awkward Mormon Girl (not my actual name), go tell Little Sister to come get her paint."

She said all of this in one breath, and to the casual listener, it may sound fairly straightforward. But I have lived with my mother for many years, and I knew that while she was talking about paint at first, in the last sentence this was not the case. The last sentence was spoken in a dialect I call Momish, and it was really supposed to say, "Go tell Little Sister to come get her dinner."

"Little Sister (not her actual name either), come get dinner!" I called. Then, because I couldn't resist, "Or there's paint samples, if you prefer."

"Dinner!" Mom said belatedly, sounding annoyed. "I meant dinner."

"We can't have dinner! We don't have any paint to eat," said Baby Brother, and he and I sniggered.

I think it's moments like this when our mother questions her life choice to bring six obnoxious children into the world.

Anyways, Mom, if you see this, don't worry. I've come to terms with the fact that you don't appreciate my skillz. Someday, someone out there will, and when I redecorate their entire family room to look like the inside of a tree and put a disco ball in the bathroom, they will not only appreciate it, they will rejoice.

(News Flash: Disco ball bathrooms are apparently an actual thing.



Who knew? I did. Because I have skillz.)

Being Awkward in Germany

Whenever I write something I operate under the principle of "show, don't tell." I've told you that I'm awkward, but I haven't shown you that I'm awkward. And now I feel this great need to show you and prove that, yes, I am really awkward.

Which is kind of awkward in itself, now that I think about it. However, in case you're not convinced, let me tell you about the time I went to Europe with a huge group of nonLDS people. The first night, we stayed in a little hotel in Munich, Germany.

That night my roommates went to a club.

"I don't think I'll go," I said. "I think I'll write my parents." Our room, which was on the fifth floor right next to the owners' quarters and office, had this big fat heavy key. When you went out you gave it to the owners and then you got it back when you came in. Because I stayed in, my roommates simply left the key in the room with me.

Well, first order of business was to get my converter working. I had to go to the desk to ask for tape because the plugs wouldn't stay. They didn't have any, and the German owner guy looked at me like I was nuts. Finally I figured out how to snap the plugs in place and charged my iPod. Then I stepped out to ask the guy for the Internet password. I felt weird about leaving my room open even though it was right next door, so I shut it and took the key with me.

After I got the password I went to open the door. It wouldn't open.

OH NO. I turned the key every which way, turned it upside down, braced myself and pulled as hard as I could. That got me nowhere.

How could this be? I remembered that I'd changed the lock settings before showering. The door must have locked from the inside!

"No no no," I whimpered. I'd already put some distance between myself and my roommates by declining to go out with them. I could only imagine what they would feel when they came back to find that I'd locked us out of our room. Maybe the owners would break the lock and we'd have to sleep without one. Maybe we'd have to move to a different room--my roommates would be forced to drag their stuff up and down the stairs while inebriated. If there even was another room. Maybe we wouldn't be able to get our stuff at all and would be forced to sleep without it. In the hall. Or the elevator. "No no no!" I refused to be THAT roommate.

I stared at the lock intensely like I could open it through sheer force of will. After five minutes it became clear this wasn't going to work and, for the third time in like ten minutes, I rang the desk bell for the owner guy.

He looked at me like, "Really? You again?" I explained my plight. He walked over to the door and, with a sharp twist of the key, opened it.

"Good night," was all he said. The "you're an idiot," part was implied.

The Beginning

Well, here I am. And here you are. And here's the blog.

Now what?

Not to make you feel unwelcome, but I don't like writing blogs. At least, not blogs about me. Been there, done that, didn't enjoy it. It was too hard to write about things I care about without oversharing, and yet when I tried to only write about things I didn't care about I ended up with a very shallow product indeed.

For a while I thought about writing an anonymous dating blog. Why? I don't know. I don't date much, but for some reason a dating blog struck me as really fun. I could write about stuff I cared about and it wouldn't matter because I was anonymous. However, I decided that would get real old, real fast.

Then I thought about writing an anyonymous political blog, because I figured that would be a good way to share and discuss politics without using Facebook. (I personally view Facebook as a place to keep in touch with people or share pictures and other info, not as a medium to advance my viewpoints). But I didn't do that either. One) I chickened out. Two) I really hate politics. Like, really. Like, I think I may actually be allergic to them.

So, you're probably wondering. Why are you here?

I'm here because a post on an LDS blog said something that really struck me. The post reminded me (in a loose paraphrase) that people are wondering about the LDS Church right now. They want to know what we're all about. If I'm not willing to tell people what I'm all about, then someone else will. And the things that someone else says about me and about my church--well, they might not be true or fair.

That's why I'm here. I'm here to represent.

This isn't an anonymous dating blog or an anonymous political blog. It's not even particularly anonymous, since I plan to link it to my Facebook page. It's not a family bulletin blog, or a cooking blog, or heaven forbid, a craft blog. It's a blog that defies all description, except for this description: This is an awkward, Mormon blog about the awkward, Mormon life of an awkward, Mormon girl.

Welcome aboard.