Sibling Sushi Date

I've been working hard to get my siblings to have a more cultured taste in food.

In December, Older Sister, Little Brother, and Baby Brother accompanied our mother and I to purchase and consume some Indian food. Older Sister and Little Brother were mildly interested in trying some new dishes. Baby Brother, the pickiest eater on this side of anything, mostly just came along for the ride.

Our mother, however, was determined that Baby Brother should try something new. Over the course of the night, he tried lassi, plain naan with a bit of the sweet dipping sauce they brought with our lamb samosas, and garlic naan.

Surprise! Baby Brother enjoyed the naan.

Baby Brother cackled to me, "Now I can be your naan buddy! Your non buddy!" because apparently that joke never get old.

Then a few weeks ago, Little Sister tried a cannoli, and tonight I took Little Brother with me to a Japanese restaurant so that he could try sushi for the first time.

In the almost-two years since I wrote this post, I have gotten a lot better with my chopstick skillz. Over the summer, I bought two pairs of chopsticks at the summer fest and whenever I get Chinese takeout, I whip out said chopsticks and practice. I rarely drop my sushi now, though I still despair of ever being able to use chopsticks to eat rice.

Little Brother, on the other hand, is completely inexperience with chopsticks. I tried to show him how to use them. Then I showed him how to eat ginger to cleanse his pallet and how to mix soy sauce and wasabi together to make a sushi sauce.

I started to mix the sushi sauce for Little Brother, but he decided to try to be useful by helping to add wasabi to his soy sauce. Which meant that his soy sauce had a lot a lot of wasabi in it. Every time Little Brother dipped a piece of sushi in the sauce, he would get a mouthful of wasabi and act like he was going to die.

After about an hour of this fine dining, two things happened. First, our father texted me, asking us to hurry home so we could go for frozen yogurt with our mother. Second, Little Brother, having consumed four or five pieces of sushi and half a plate of calamari, said that he was getting full. On sushi. Who gets full on sushi? The result of this was that he slowed down eating while we really needed him to hurry up.

Having finished my own sushi several minutes before, I begin to outline to Little Brother the game plan for the rest of the sushi.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Just eat those last two rolls and we'll go.

LITTLE BROTHER: (struggles to pick up roll and accidentally breaks it in half)

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Do you-

LITTLE BROTHER: I WILL NOT USE A FORK!

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Then put the pieces in your mouth.

LITTLE BROTHER: (manages to pick up piece of sushi with chopsticks and bring it towards his mouth)

PIECE OF SUSHI: (unwinds and drops onto Little Brother's plate)

LITTLE BROTHER: This is really embarrassing.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Just eat the salmon.

LITTLE BROTHER: (tries to pick up piece of salmon that fell out of roll)

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Stab it with your chopsticks.

LITTLE BROTHER: (stabs salmon like ineffective salmon assassin)

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: A little gentler.

LITTLE BROTHER: (manages to flip salmon off the plate and onto his lap)

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Well, I'm definitely getting my money's worth.

Sofa So Good

We got a new couch today. It was brought to us in the rain. It is the size of a small country, and it is as puffy and beautiful as Baymax. It almost didn't fit through the door.

One of our family friends, Bessie, and I used to be students of benchology. I once described benchology as "the study of benches. Many life lessons can be learned from the nature of a single bench: lessons about support, structure, weathering through all kinds of conditions..."

Well, fahgettabouhd benchology. Let's talk about sofalogy. Or perhaps not sofalogy so much as the study of people through looking at what kinds of couches they are drawn to.

As I said, this new couch is huge. It's bigger than my bed. It's softer than my bed, too. And it came with fat, fringed, matching pillows. It is the Lexus of couches; nay, the Humvee. Not that I really know what either a Lexus or a Humvee is like. Or anything about them, really. These are just words that I hear people say and then I use them in a vain effort to sound like a normal human who knows about human things.

The point being, I think my idea of the best couch ever is a small couch that is slightly fuzzy and which has a matching footrest. I would never have purchased this wonderful but gargantuan thing that wouldn't even fit in the houses of probably 30% of the world's population. I don't think the Seamstress, who obtained the new couch, would have chosen this one if it weren't used at a decent price.

But. The beautiful thing about used couches is that sometimes the owners leave things behind in the cushions. I went through the cushions of the new couch just now and found some lint, a couple of Cheerios, two M&Ms (both orange), an old piece of duct tape, and a gift tag addressed to "Elder Davie."

I've ruled out eating the Cheerios. I'm still deciding about the M&Ms.

Splash Mountain According to Me

There's something about Disneyland.

I know people whose attitude goes thusly: "Disneyland?! What's so great about Disneyland? All amusement parks are the same."

Ah, but no. Every other amusement park I've ever been to leaves me feeling tired, drained, and in serious need of a shower. When I leave Disneyland, I feel uplifted, peaceful, and fulfilled.

Why is that? I'm not sure. There's probably a nostalgia factor from my Disney-studded childhood, of course, but it goes far beyond that. Part of it is probably the exquisite design of the place. Everything, from the bathroom signs to the music playing throughout the park to the packaging of the food, is designed with the utmost care and a particular impression in mind.

Little Brother especially loves Disneyland.

Little Brother has been not-so-secretly annoyed with me for not writing any posts of which he is the star. I have done this not because I have nothing to say about Little Brother but because there's too much to say. He's Prince Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender; Sirius Black in Harry Potter; Loki in The Avengers. If there were an emo penguin in Scamper the Penguin, Little Brother would be that penguin. He's tall, dark, handsome, sensitive, brooding, and conflicted. Additionally, he is a fairly fanatical person; when he loves something, he really loves it. When he hates it, he very much hates it.

It so happens that Little Brother really loves Disneyland. And since he was small, he has specifically targeted an intense portion of that love on Splash Mountain.

Who doesn't love Splash Mountain? People who are scared of falling from heights, and getting wet, and seeing singing animatronic animals. But everybody else loves it. Which is odd when you consider that it was born of Disney's most controversial movie, but becomes less odd when you realize the ride has very little to do with the actual movie and more to do with its Academy Award-winning original songs.

I first went on Splash Mountain at age eight, and I was charmed. Little Brother first went on Splash Mountain in our mother's womb, and he's obsessed. He has literally watched YouTube videos that various people have taken of Splash Mountain while riding Splash Mountain at every Disney park with a version of Splash Mountain. I daresay he knows the ride better than he knows the depths of his own soul.

The last time I went on Splash Mountain was summer of 2013. I enjoyed it very much. Yet there was something...odd about it. It took me a few rides to realize that some of the animatronic animals weren't working. Some singing frogs...a fox or two...dancing chickens on the steamboat during the "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" section.

"I don't understand," I said when we got off the ride. "This is Disneyland, where everything is kept in tip-top condition. What about maintenance? Part replacement? Disney magic?"

"I don't know," scowled the upset Little Brother. He assumed his typical, peculiar mix of outrage and excitement at having something to be outraged about.

And Little Sister yelled, "Please don't throw me in the briar patch!" in a very accurate but somewhat offensive imitation of Brer Rabbit.

And then Little Brother's excitement won out and he began to assail us all with random Disney facts.

And I was all, "What is this family?"

Pinpointing

I can tell you the exact worst moment of my life.

I don't mean a moment like, "That time I ate that weird sandwich." I mean the exact moment. Almost to the millisecond. "It was after Event One but before Event Three. In fact, I would say it was during Event Two, but not in the middle. It was more than halfway through, probably about the same time the fifth syllable fell from her lips. There was about two beats of processing, and then my stomach sank like it was an accused witch who was thrown in a river to prove her innocence by drowning."

I can also pinpoint several more terrible minutes in my life, the runners up to the title of Worst Moment. They're like snapshots in my head, screenshots, motion captures.

On the other hand, if you asked me to tell you the best moment of my life, I would say something like, "Oh...the time I was offered my dream role," "The time I got that great job," "That day when two guys asked me out within an hour of each other." It would be much vaguer. I would not be able to tell you the exact moment I felt that thrill. I would not be able to describe it in such exquisite detail or with such specifically ridiculous metaphors.

Funny how that works.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Whatever

Family Home Evening is, ideally, spent with family. However, in a singles ward, the option of ward family home evening is offered for those who live away from home and don't have family nearby.

I attend family home evening with my ward fairly often. Once we played Telephone. Not telephone, the horrifyingest thing that horrifies me every day, but that game Telephone, where you whisper a phrase in someone's ear and then it gets passed all around the circle until it makes no sense whatsoever. Except in this case, we played it as a sort of hybrid of Pictionary.

Each of us had a stack of ten pieces of paper. On the first piece of paper, we wrote a phrase. We then passed the stack of paper to the person on our left. They read the phrase, then put it at the back of the stack. On a blank piece of paper, they drew a picture of said phrase. They then passed the stack to the person on their left, who looked at the picture, put it on the bottom of the stack, and wrote a phrase describing that picture. And so on and so forth until the paper got back to the person who started.

The phrase I put on my first paper was "half-blood prince."

Mathively Confused

One year, I had the worst math teacher in the history of math teachers. He didn't teach us very much math; instead, we spent most of the year learning how to program spreadsheets.

His personal favorite was a spreadsheet that would help us keep track of our stock. Because, you know, teenagers and stock go together like live and stock. Or stock and ing. Or this wordplay and me.

Anyways, this class was my introduction to the stock market. Our teacher would turn the TV on to the stock channel or whatever and then we'd all watch the numbers running across the bottom of the screen.

One night I was at Viola's home, as I often was. That's what best friends are for, really. You practically live in their homes, eating their food and playing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in French on their Nintendos.

At some point that evening, her parents mentioned that they enjoyed watching Numbers.

Viola and I continued doing whatever teenagerish thing we were doing until I asked Viola, "So...your parents like to watch the stock market?"

The Reporters Are Bad at Reporting

Okay, everybody. Time for Journalism 101.

Suppose you saw the following headline on the news feature of your homepage: "Zookeeper Allegedly Ate Penguins for Breakfast"

What's wrong with this headline? Besides the obvious, I mean. Only a monster would eat penguins for breakfast. (While typing this, I actually misspelled "monster" as "mobster," which come to think of it is another possibility. But I digress.)

What about this one? "Penguin Claims He Ate Zookeeper's Toes in Retaliation"

When I was in college, I actually took Journalism 101. And by Journalism 101, I mean an entry-level editing class with a teacher who assumed we were all taking the class because we wanted to be journalists. Thus, he taught us editing only as it applied to journalism.

Although this teacher and I disagreed about my career aspirations, we both agreed that the news should only tell people what's happening. It should give only the facts; it should not tell people what to think about those facts.

Yet reporters, the teacher pointed our, betray the neutrality of the news all the time...especially through headlines.

If a headline says, "Zookeeper Allegedly Eats Penguin for Breakfast," it's already betraying neutrality by suggesting it's doubtful that the zookeeper actually ate the penguin. If a headline says, "Penguin Claims He Ate Zookeeper's Toes in Retaliation," it implies that the penguin claimed he ate the zookeeper's toes, but is the penguin really trustworthy? The headline is telling is exactly how credible this reporter thinks the penguin is.

Every time I see a headline like this, it makes me cringe.

So, just in case you are a journalist or will someday become one, let's review how to write a factual headline.

Step One: Say what happened.

That's it. There is no Step Two. However, I suspect Step One needs some further elaboration.

If you know for a fact that the zookeeper ate a penguin, just say so in the headline: "Zookeeper Ate Penguin for Breakfast."

If you don't know for a fact that the zookeeper ate the penguin, but the monkeys tell you that he did, don't write this: "Monkeys Claim Zookeeper Ate Penguin for Breakfast." "Claim" is a biased word. It sounds like you don't trust the monkeys. Write this instead: "Monkeys Say Zookeeper Ate Penguin for Breakfast." The reader can read what the monkeys have to say and then decide for his or her self whether to trust their words.

If the monkeys say that they think the zookeeper ate the penguin, you can write this: "Monkeys Say Zookeeper May Have Eaten Penguin for Breakfast." "May have" is a good phrase because it lets the readers know the monkeys don't know for sure without strongly favoring one possibility over the other.

The only time you should use "allegedly" in journalism is if you're directly quoting someone else. Like this headline: "'That Zookeeper Allegedly Ate a Penguin,' says Cheeky Monkey." And even then, I would think thrice before using such a quote.

And there you have it. Headlines as taught by Journalism 101. Now you can join in me in my annoyance with all the news reporters ever.

I feel the need to add a disclaimer that this blog is not a news source. It is not neutral; it is colored my own opinions and experience, and I've never pretended otherwise. Don't be misled by my desire for impartial news to believe that everything I write is impartial. It isn't. That's what sets blog posts apart from news articles.

Roses in January

January is by far the worst month.

I suppose it's not it's fault. It does follow Christmas, and everything is a letdown after Christmas. And it's in winter, which is a time of year hardly anybody likes. And it's named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of choices. Choices are hard. Go away, choices.

When I was in sixth grade, my mom took me to buy new church shoes in January. Over her protests that they did not match my church outfits, I chose red Sunday shoes. I thought the color would counteract the gray of January. As I've gotten older, I've continued to combat January by wearing a red coat, a turquoise coat, brightly colored gloves and scarves.

In spite of my efforts, January remains the worst.

Last week, I'd had it up to here with January. (Please envision me holding my hand high above my head). I just wanted to curl up into a ball and sleep until spring. (Please envision me as a bear, one of God's creatures for whom it is acceptable to hibernate. It is not acceptable for humans to hibernate. I think this is a huge problem with our society.)

Then one day, I came home to find this lovely sight:

The Seamstress had brought home beautiful orange roses and placed them on my teal January tablecloth (the tablecloth is another effort to thwart the worst of all months).

That night, before I went to bed, I spent a considerable amount of time admiring the roses. It didn't take long for me to start thinking of them as a symbol.

When you're an English major, they spend a lot of time trying to get you to think in symbols aka looking at something and seeing something else entirely. This has no application in real life, and, in fact, outside of a classroom is commonly known as over-thinking--something that complicates people's lives endlessly and has never brought any joy to anyone.

Anyways, I looked at the roses, and I saw a lot more than roses. I saw a bit of spring in winter and hope in hopelessness. I saw life in the midst of death and positivity in negativity. I saw a reminder that some of the best moments of my life came in the middle of some of my worst experiences and that good things happen even in a stupid month like January.

Much cheered, I headed off to bed.

Another of the side effects of January is that it's cold, which means we have space heaters in our apartment. These heaters have been known to trip the apartment breakers when used unwisely.

This was one of those moments. As I was finishing up my nightly tasks, the breaker tripped and the lights went out.

ME: It sure is difficult to find what you're looking for in the dark. It's much easier when there's light...wait a minute. Do you think-?

ALSO ME: No. No more symbolism. Just go to bed.

H2O My

The seat where I sit to eat my breakfast is near the refrigerator. Our fridge is one of those fridges that dispenses water from a little cubby on its front.

This cubby is labeled "Water Filtration System." However, upon many an early morning, my bleary eyes have instead read it as "Water Flirtation System."

Water Flirtation System.

"You're a sight for sore ice."

"I don't mean to sound superfishal, but you're cute."

"Water you doing tonight?"

"We could spend a romantic evening together, streaming a movie and drinking root beer floats."

"I'm shore it would be a fun time."

"My only porpoise is to win your love."

"Not interested? Maybe I should quit whale I'm ahead."

2014 in Review

Here are the milestones of 2014 in the life of Awkward Mormon Girl.

-I graduated college.

-I found a very wonderful real-life grown-up job.

-My family and I crossed the plains in reverse. And then turned around and crossed them in verse. Which is what the opposite of "reverse" should be but isn't. The actual verse part is all the singing we did.

-I moved out of my parents' house, thus becoming like 12.63% more adult than I was before.

-I went to the temple to be endowed.

Please also note that I ended the year with precisely 104 blog posts, or a perfect average of two post a week. I'm pretty proud of that, to be honest.

And now, here is some of the wisdom I accumulated in 2014, drawn from various sources including my friends, the scriptures, and an original song from Big Hero 6.

"I think it can be good to let yourself cry if you feel like it."

"When you care about people, they have the power to hurt you. You trust them not to use it, but sometime everyone does. We are human."

"It will all turn out right."

"Trust yourself."

"Friendship is important. So is compassion, and endurance, and giving people the benefit of the doubt. And so is forgiveness."

"Making life-altering decisions whilst sick and low on potassium is a bad idea."

"When I'm feeling sad, the solution is not to stay home and feel more sad."

"Feelings are screwy."

"Sometimes we have to move forward before we can receive further instructions."

"It's a very mysterious thing that humans do. We make a really simple question more complicated than it needs to be."

"Chocolate malts = super good. Zombie apocalypse = super scary."

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."

"Forward I go, though I do not know the way."

"Nevertheless, the Lord seeth fit to chasten his people; yeah, he trieth their patience and their faith."

"Sometimes the only payoff for having any faith is when it's tested again and again every day."

"If you fear rejection, don't; rejection, you'll find, is nothing to be afraid of."

"Sin is like glitter: sparkly, and of the Devil."