I Hope That Something Better Comes Along

A word on dating.

Now, remember. I'm no dating expert. I've never had a relationship (except with this blog--twenty months strong) so I don't know a lot about dating. Although I suppose that it's possible to learn more about a thing by failing at it than by succeeding at it.

Either way, you should perhaps take my word with a grain of salt. Add grains of thyme, garlic, and rosemary for a delightful herb marinade.

As a Perpetually Single Person, I am often the recipient of much advice. Much of the advice goes something like this: "With guys, you just have to (fill in the blank)."

Variations on this advice: "When it comes to guys, you should never--" "You should always--" "Try this and it will work like a charm--"

While there may be some truth to each of these pieces of advice, there are several billion men on this planet. I find it hard to believe that they all respond the same to the same conditions.

It took me a few years to realize that, actually. There's this idea that's prevalent in female culture that if you properly do X, Y, and Z any guy you choose will like you back. He has to. He can't resist your feminine wiles and womanly perfection. And if he doesn't like you, then there must be something wrong with him. He's a wimp, he's evil, he's "not worth it."

The truth of the matter is that sometimes a guy doesn't like you. Yes, perhaps he's a bit daft not to realize how great you could be together. Yes, sometimes there is something wrong with him. But sometimes he's just fine and he is worth it but he just doesn't like you that way.

The other thing I'd like to note is that it's not good to compare your story to someone else's. Sometimes things go the way you expect: you meet the guy, he asks you out, you like each other, things naturally progress and then, at long last, you get married.

That's the way some stories go, but not all. I don't believe in moral relativism, but after years of observation I have come to believe in romantic relativism. Different things work for different people. Romance is a crazy thing, and you never know what's going to work.

That's all. Awkward Mormon Girl out.

Black Friday

I never went Black Friday shopping before today.

To be truthful, every time someone mentions Black Friday I think that they're talking about some Catholic feast day. Ash Wednesday. Palm Sunday. Black Friday.

Then context happens. Shopping and Thanksgiving are mentioned, and I remember that Black Friday is not a Catholic feast day but an American retail phenomenon.

I'd never partaken of this retail phenomenon. The closest I'd ever come was when Baby Sister and I went shopping on the Saturday after Thanksgiving two years ago. She begged me to take her and I didn't understand why until I saw the two- and three-dollar shirts and then I asked myself, "Why are they having this incredible sale?" and then I remembered Black Friday and realized I was looking at its remnants. Its carcass, if you will. And Baby Sister and I were the vultures picking over it after the hungry herd had moved on.

Less poetically, we got lots of cheap clothes that day.

Well, since I've moved out on my own, it's been a trial to find winter clothes because I do so hate parting with my money. But clothes cost money. So to avoid parting with my money, I've avoided buying them.

Eventually I thoroughly tired of wearing the same eight shirts to work over and over. I set a budget and headed to my favorite lightly-used clothing store. It was newly closed, and the other lightly-used clothing store only had one shirt I liked.

In frustration, I asked myself how I could get nice clothes inexpensively.

And then I remembered.

Black Friday.

Baby Sister agreed to go with me. I lured her with the promise of lunch. At 12:30 in the afternoon, we arrived at our first store.

Let me tell you. There were a lot of people there. And they were buying a lot of stuff. I wanted to tell them that they were ridiculous except I was there too, so, you know.

Everything was going well. Baby Sister and I were finding stuff to try on and discussing the merits of tank tops when I made a dreadful mistake. I left Baby Sister on her own while I tried on a sweater. When I came back, she was gone.

I walked around the store. She wasn't there.

I called her. It went to voice mail. Baby Sister's phone is never on nor on her person.

I was beginning to realize that I really should not have left her alone. I mean, okay. Baby Sister is now a teenager. She can date and she's almost as tall as me. And I admit, she had me fooled into thinking that she could take care of herself while I stepped away for a moment. But the longer she was missing, the more I remembered that she was as defenseless and vulnerable as a newborn puppy. She couldn't possibly survive in this clothing store without me!

"How can you think about shopping when my baby sister is missing?" I yelled at everyone around me. Loudly. But in my head.

I searched the store a second time. I was beginning to be afraid that maybe there was a Black Friday bandit who walks off with kids while everyone is distracted by bargain prices.

They say you should never get between a mother animal and her baby. I've never been a mom so I don't know about that. But it's my personal opinion that you should never get between the big sister animal and the little sister animal, either. It had been ten minutes and I was ready to tear apart the store and everybody in it to find my sister.

Then I checked my phone.

Due to the amount of junk in my purse, I had not felt it vibrate when Baby Sister had sent me seven chirpy messages from her iPod in three minutes.

Baby Sister: Awkward Mormon Girl

Baby Sister: I'm in line it's super long

Baby Sister: You should probably hurry

Baby Sister: So cool

Baby Sister: Ps turn in your phone

Baby Sister: I'm dead seious

Baby Sister: You need to learn to turn on your phone

And I was like, "EXCUSE ME? Who needs to learn to turn on their phone, exactly?"

By the time I found Baby Sister in line, I wasn't sure if I wanted to hug her or hit her.

Also I'm not sure if I want to hug or hit Black Friday.

Giving Thanks

Upon the event of La Petite's marriage, we got a new roommate, Pepper.

Shortly after moving in, Pepper left a bag of paper leaves in many fall colors on the our kitchen table with a note that said, Write something you are thankful for. It will make you Harry.

That really excited me, because who doesn't want to be an orphaned boy wizard and also have people say to them, "Happy Christmas, Harry," every Christmas?

I became less excited when I looked more closely and saw that the note said, "happy," not "Harry." But since the day of thankfulness was upcoming and also because Americans and happiness go together like America and "Made in China" stickers, I decided to participate.

For the past several weeks, I have frequently written something I'm thankful for on a leaf and taped it to the window frame.

Last Thanksgiving season, I made a list of six things I was grateful for. This season, I helped to fill an entire window frame with a lovely leaf border of thankfulness.

There's a lot to be thankful for. And it does make me happy.

Though I would still appreciate it if people would say, "Happy Christmas, Harry," to me on Christmas.

A Lazy Day

It's just one of those days.

I was planning to leave the house for three things today. One, to clean my church building. Two, to practice a work presentation in front of my family. Three, to pick up a coffee table from my grandmother's house.

Then when my alarm went off this morning I decided to hit snooze twice. Then I just went back to sleep for real and woke up an hour later. Then I lay in bed thinking for another two hours.

By the time I was done thinking, it was far too late to go clean the church. So I exercised, ate late breakfast/early lunch...and decided it was much too depressing weather outside to go pick up the coffee table. So I did some housework and then decided that I didn't really need to practice my presentation in front of my family because I didn't quite yet know what I was saying. So I read a book and laid around and before I knew it, it was late o'clock.

I gathered the trash from the trash cans and then I was like, "You know what? I haven't stepped outside all day and I'm not going to start now." Whereupon I made a public service announcement that I would not be taking the trash to the garbage can outside just then.

My roommates were surprisingly cool with that, for which I was grateful. So grateful that when the Seamstress, who was making fondue, needed two tablespoons of cornstarch and there was none in the apartment, I volunteered to obtain some for her.

I wish I could say that I sacrificed my conviction to not leave the house in order to purchase some cornstarch for the Seamstress. But actually I called my dad and asked him to bring some over.

Hipsterland

Older Sister complained that I call everything hipster, after a shopping trip in which I called a restaurant, a sweatshirt, and two pairs of Sesame Street socks "hipster."

Now the Sesame Street socks were legitimately hipster. Like, they had hipster glasses Cookie Monster and hipster mustache Elmo on them. As for the other items, I stand by my labels.

Hipster is the new thing. Everything constantly proclaims how fresh and different and original it is. The new mainstream is the non-mainstream.

Whilst putting together our Halloween costumes, the brothers and I ran into some roadblocks. Little Brother couldn't find a Johnesque nightshirt, so he found a pair of pajamas instead. Baby Brother had to wear red footie pajamas instead of pink ones. And for a while, it looked like I would not have a proper costume at all.

Out of desperation, Little Brother and I hatched a plan consisting of a skirt, some lady's boots, and a bucket hat. "Sort of a hipster 1920s Peter Pan," we said, which somehow meant nothing yet perfectly described the resulting look.

Little Brother, who constantly thinks in cinematic terms, began scripting a movie out loud in which all the Peter Pan characters were hipsters. "It will be called Hipsterland," he said.

Now, I know that Baby Brother is a genius but I admit that still I sometimes underestimate him. I assumed he did not really know what a hipster was and that he did not fully understand the Peter Pan hipster jokes that Little Brother and I were cracking.

So I was rather taken aback when Baby Brother announced that he had a hipster joke for Michael. "I wore pink footie pajamas before everybody else did. And now that everybody else is wearing them, I wear red ones."

Spoken like a true hipster.

Adventures in Housekeeping

The first week in my apartment, I resolved to vacuum the whole place.

The Seamstress had just bought a new vacuum. Very shiny, with a retractable cord. I was enamored of it because vacuum cords are the bane of my existence. I happily vacuumed the apartment, pulling the entire cord out of the vacuum.

Disaster struck when I tried to retract the cord. For the cord would not retract.

Understandably, I panicked. "I am a horrible person who has just ruined my brand-new roommate's brand-new vacuum and I deserve a terrible fate and why am I that person?" I sobbed over the lifeless vacuum cord. "Oh, WHY?"

In a final act of desperation, I began to feed the cord, centimeter by centimeter, into the cord retractor. It would not go in.

In a final final act of desperation, I hit the cord retractor button one more time. This time it worked, saving my honor, pride, and probably also soul from a terrible fate.

A few days later, I found myself out of clothes. It had come time to do that which I dreaded most: laundry.

This may surprise you, but although I had folded and unloaded many a load of laundry, I had never before sorted, loaded, or chosen washing or drying settings for one.

"Did your mother never teach you?" you may ask, aghast.

The truth of the matter is that my mother tried to teach me, but it never quite worked out the way she was hoping.

MOM: Colors. Whites. Light. Dark. Hot. Cold. Delicate. Sturdy.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: So doing laundry is essentially an episode of Sesame Street?

MOM: ...

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Or since we're Jewish... Shalom Sesame.

When I moved out, my mother was very concerned about my lack of absorption of her lessons in laundry. I wasn't, because helloooo. Age of Information. I could just look it up on the internet.

Coincidentally, the washer and dryer in our apartment were brand spanking new. They had moved to the apartment after I had. La Petite had purchased them just days before and they had washed only a few loads.

I emptied my laundry basket and sorted it according to the internet.

So far so good.

I took my first load to the washing machine and put it inside. After some minor confusion about how laundry soap works, I selected the proper settings, poured in the soap, and turned on the washing machine. It started humming, and.

And...nothing.

I frowned in concern. Little though I knew about the machines of washing, I was pretty sure I remembered immediate cascades of water in our machine at home. There was no waiting, and there was no humming.

"But," I consoled myself, "this is a different brand of washing machine. It probably just needs a minute to warm up."

After five minutes: "It just needs ten minutes to warm up."

After ten minutes: "It just needs fifteen minutes..."

After twenty minutes: "Half an hour..,"

After an hour: "I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON WHO JUST BROKE MY ROOMMATE'S BRAND-NEW WASHER AND DRYER."

In desperation, I poured through the internet, looking for information about humming-no-water washing machines. By all accounts, this was not a good situation to be in.

"The machine was working fine yesterday," I sobbed as I read one dire account of broken washing machines after another. "La Petite did a ton of laundry! Why, oh why, do I ruin everything I touch?"

After appropriate hand-wringing and feelings of wretchedness, it occurred to me to ask La Petite if there might be something I, the laundry novice, was doing wrong.

I sent her a text telling her I could only get the washing machine to hum. Was there some trick to using it?

A few minutes later, La Petite responded.

La Petite: Is the water on?

...

Awkward Mormon Girl: It is now.

Follow-Up Post

There are a few posts that I've been meaning to follow up on but haven't yet. So I thought I'd knock 'em all out with one combo post.

First off, Little Sister brought it to my attention that in Sleeping Beauty, they say "Skumps," not "Scrumps." I'm just gonna say that's not what I remember from when I was three years old, but whatever, Little Sister. If you insist on me being accurate.

Secondly, I mentioned an impending surprise meeting with a professor. Whatever did he want?

As it turns out, he wanted to discuss a group project I'd participated in where not all of the group members had not, shall we say, pulled their own weight. I half-composed a post about how professors should know better than to assign group projects because, apart from being super inconvenient, they have no application in real life. Of course, now I have a job where I essentially do group projects. Go figure.

Finally, over a year ago I mentioned my family's great confusion at Baby Brother's insistence on calling bullies "mayonnaise." This confusion was further compounded by his insistence that the reason he did this was to be British.

Several months after the initial incident, Baby Brother happened to say (this time in an actual English accent) "You're all mayonnaise!"

AND SUDDENLY I REALIZED THAT "MAYONNAISE" IS ENGLISH ACCENT FOR "MEANIES."

The Post That Took Me Three Months to Write

You've probably heard that song, "Human." It's, like, annoyingly popular. It's on the radio all the time.

There are a few lines in the song that I particularly relate to:

I can do it
I can do it
I'll get through it
I said something very much like this to myself at the beginning of my junior year of high school. I was taking two AP classes. I was in drum line as well as in regular band and I did two musicals, one right after another: I had the script for the second one before the run of the first one was even half over. In addition, I had to start thinking about my future, for scholarships and college applications loomed large on the horizon and I'd just come of an age where it was appropriate to date.

Add to that the typical responsibilities of family, friends, and church. Add to that all the little dramas and discouragements of being sixteen years old, and you'll perhaps see why by the end of the first semester of that year, I was in deep clinical depression.

Optimism and perseverance are usually not the cause of depression, but in this case, they were. When I was stressed out, instead of taking time to talk it over or relax I would tell myself, "No worries. Tomorrow will be better." I was so focused on the someday when everything would work out that I didn't take care of myself in the meantime.

I could do it. I could do it. I'd get through it.

Just before Christmas, an emotional disaster completely toppled my house-of-cards-like well-being. I was a wreck. A car wreck, a train wreck, a plane wreck--pick whichever you please. I was just as mangled and tragic as any.

I'd like to describe that time of depression to you in specific detail, but I can't. Most of those days felt the same. Things were gray. I cried a lot. I had little motivation to do anything, and most emotions were beyond my reach. So a lot of my memories of that time have melted over the years into a gray, weepy haze with all the variation of a flatlining heart monitor.

It was awful. I highly don't recommend it to you. However, I am forever grateful that I went through the experience. I was completely torn apart and then stitched back together again--and the new stitching was stronger and of better quality than the stuff that used to be there.

Later I discovered that my experiences with depression gave me the courage and tools that I needed to face other difficult situations and help people with similar experiences.

The Lord. He works in mysterious ways.

P.S. The title of the post is accurate. I've known for a while that I needed to make some posts about this stuff. It's just surprisingly hard to get started.