Where Are You From?

I always answer,

"I was made in Taiwan."

Literally.

I Miss This Baby...

"Here're Your BOOKS..."

I just wanna talk about books. It's not gonna be a good post. Sorry.

I've been reading a bunch lately. Because I want to (now that I don't have to) and I have time to do it!! It's so nice.

You know how in You've Got Mail Kathleen says that when you read a book as a kid, it becomes a part of you in a way that nothing else does...? I'm here to say that is true. Someone once asked me to name the most influential authors in my life, and every one I listed had written my favorite books when I was a child and a tween.

These were my favorites growing up:

• The Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner
• The Boys Start the War series and the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
• The Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• The Snob Squad series (I remember crying I was laughing so hard) and Define Normal by Julie Anne Peters
• Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books
• A Little Princess and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Ramona and Beezus series by Beverly Cleary
• and the list goes on and on....

I also admit to scaring myself out of my wits reading Mary Higgins Clark. I'd read under the covers with a flashlight, I was so terrified. Looking back, it probably was a bad idea for a twelve-year-old girl with a huge imagination to read those books. No, not probably. It was.

Now that I'm "all grown up," I read three specific books every year. I've done so for the past four years or so. They are... To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. They're my favorites. I never get tired of them. Sometimes, I think I should read something more obscure, you know, just so I'm cool and stuff, and then I think, "Nah. I love what I love." And I do.

Since I graduated about five weeks ago, I've read the first two of my favorites, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm about to embark on a reading journey consisting of McCarthy's The Road and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I renewed my library card, so I anticipate a lot of movie-watching and a lot of book-reading. I figure, if I spend all my time doing that, I won't remember to eat, and if I don't eat, then I won't have to spend money on food.

Unhealthy? Perhaps. But very thrifty.

Mormon Humor à la Chess (Part 2)

Disclaimer: Probably only LDS people like myself will get this story. 

Roomie M's boyfriend does not get my sense of humor. No... it's not that he doesn't. It's that he WON'T. He just always seems so disapproving of my jokes. He will not smile. He will not laugh. I just can't appreciate people who can't appreciate how hilarious I am. He bothers me so much sometimes that I made the previous sentence my Facebook status. I'll have you know seven people "Liked" it. See? Those people appreciate my witty remarks.

I'm serious though. He is the biggest stick-in-the-mud when it comes to interacting with me. I'm trying to be his friend for M's sake, but he's making it impossible for me to want to. I'm a teasing person. I make jokes. I like to tease you and give you a slightly difficult time. It's my love language, y'all. You don't like it, well, go be friends with someone else. Someone more boring and less clever.

So let's talk about Sunday. And how I'm funny. And how Roomie M's boyfriend is a doof. Roomie C and I were accompanying Roomie M and her freshman brother to her hometown, because she was giving a little talk later that afternoon at a fireside. Boyfriend came along too. I almost yelled, "Shotgun, no battle!!" just to be funny, but I knew that wouldn't be received well. So I hunkered down in the middle of the backseat, right over the hump, because that's what short friends do.

Freshman brother told us about this Young Men's camp he went to before graduating high school, and Boyfriend followed up Freshman's story with a camp story of his own. All you need to know is that this camp was called "Sons of Mosiah."

I grinned and asked in a deadpan tone, "Sons of Mosiah pre- or post-angel-appearance?"

Boyfriend just glared at me.

COME ON!!

That's funny!

I Should Have a 'Doodad'

just for posts about my friend Clark.

Voicemail from last night: "Yo Chessie, I was wondering if 'texted' is a real word. Call me back!"

He said it only sounds good if you say "I sent a text" or "I text someone yesterday." I said it's fine if you say "text" or "texted" because I'd heard both. We argued. He was annoyed. I was laughing. We hung up. 

What do you think?

Is "texted" a real word?

Mormon Humor à la Chess (Part 1)

Ah, church. Ah, ward conference. Ah, visiting stake Relief Society presidency.

Our guest teacher holds up a crisp twenty-dollar bill. "How many of you want this?" All hands shoot enthusiastically up in the air. Don't you worry. My hand has joined the masses of stretching arms and waving fingers. She folds and creases it.

"How many of you want it now?" All hands shoot enthusiastically up in the air. She crumples it into a tiny ball.

"How about now?" All hands shoot enthusiastically up in the air. She blinks at us curiously. Do you get it? It's an object lesson on our innate value as sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father. Like, no matter what mistakes we make, or how bruised and beaten we are, while we may seem worthless to our peers, in His sight we are still His children and we are worth everything.

She drops the bill on the floor and digs her heel into it. "Now?" she asks tentatively. All hands shoot enthusiastically up in the air. "Really? After all that?" Silly woman. Obviously, we are really smart and see the object lesson for what it truly is.

Who am I kidding? All we learned is that she purposefully mutilated a perfectly good twenty-dollar bill, and that she clearly doesn't understand how poor we all are.

Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite...

Literally.

How to prepare for bedbug extermination:
Begin at 4:30 pm on Thursday afternoon
1. Empty closets and drawers and strip beds

2. Get everything off the ground

3. Bag all clothing and bedding. Multiply that by five. Then add two more girls' belongings to that number (they live downstairs).

4. Vacuum EVERYTHING

5. Have a cereal break at midnight

6. Have a brownie break at 1:00 am

7. Go to bed at 2:30 am

Begin at 8:00 am Friday morning

8. Wake up, eat breakfast, finish packing everything away and cleaning

9. Get ready for the day and play card games until exterminators arrive at 1:15 pm

10. Pack food and heaps of laundry detergent in order spend the day at the laundromat (in addition to the measly ten bucks apiece for quarters allotted to us by Larry the Landlord)

11. Load bags into cars. Try to find room for humans.

12. Arrive and immediately take over entire laundromat at 1:30 pm

13. Wash. Dry. Fold. Put into brand-new clean bags. 

14. Sit down for twenty minutes to eat a Little Caesar's pizza

15. Wash. Dry. Fold. Put into brand-new clean bags.

16. Find ways to entertain yourself

15. After seven straight hours of standing and doing laundry, go home and take all the bags upstairs to your bedroom. Almost cry because the three of you spent over $110.00 in quarters washing all those clothes and because you know you'll have to do it again in two weeks.

16. Realize that you have A LOT to be grateful for because you have so much stinkin' stuff!!

Collapse on floor at 8:30 pm

(Then pick yourself up and go watch No Country for Old Men with the boys. After watching a video of one of them drinking a stick of butter just before you arrived at their house.)

Listening In...

I was sitting in the student center, reveling in the fact that I wasn't a student, but then mourning the fact that I had to be in the student center even though I wasn't a student, because our internet is so bad that I have to go to campus to watch Biggest Loser.

But Biggest Loser is always worth it.

Always.

That purple team is a hoot.

And then this kid walked by with this huge grin on his face. Huge grin. And he was on the phone, and I heard him loudly say, "The best thing just happened to me. Seriously, nothing can beat what just happened!"

Naturally, I took one earbud out and strained to listen as he continued down the hall. After all it's only polite to listen to strangers' phone conversations. 

"I was going to the cafeteria to eat, and all the tables were full but one...so I went over....and then...." I tell you, I couldn't keep the smile off my face, this kid seemed so happy.

..........

You thought I had a really great story to tell you.

Unfortunately, I never heard the end of it.

He walked really fast.

Sorry.

I'm Going to Attempt...

A little blog makeover. 

As much as I can with my limited skills and apathy.

UPDATE: What do you think?

There's Something Very Wrong With This Picture...

Or is it very, VERY right?

So Friday Night Was Funny...

I went to this big church social gathering slash dance. I sat down for a lot of it, because I have a hard time getting up to bust a move when I go to my family's ward and stake activities because I don't really know anyone. But it turned out that it didn't really matter, because a guy came over to ask me to dance. He seemed fairly young, but I didn't think too much of it. He was Tongan, you see, and they look older than they really are. We were boogieing it up on the dance floor and chatting when he asked me if I was going to school.

I played it safe. "No, I just graduated."

He was all cheerful, "Oh yeah?! Me too!" That's when I knew he had graduated from high school. It was confirmed by his next statement, "Yeah, I'm just getting ready for the mission." In our church, most young men leave for a two-year full-time mission at the age of nineteen.

So I asked him where he graduated. Answer: Timpview High School. He asked me where I graduated. I chuckled and said college. He stopped dancing and did a double-take. Poor kid. You just asked an old lady four and a half years older to dance. I just wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh.

We finished out the song, during which I asked him when he was planning on turning in his mission papers, and he said three months before his birthday. Which turned out to be next November. The boy just barely turned eighteen!! He escorted me back to my seat, where my dad was cracking up. "Honey, when he asked you, I knew he thought you were probably sixteen. Poor kid!"

And then his little brother came over to ask me to dance. Twice.

Useless Project #1

I took a film class over the summer. It was awesome. My professor made some crack about John Cusack and a boombox, and I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out it was about the movie Say Anything, which I had never seen. I was Wiki-ing it the other night, and I decided it was high time I watched it. At the same time, there was a list of pop culture instances where they reference the boombox scene. It led me to this music video. I am now fixated on it.

Now I'm spending hours listening to the band. I really like the guy's voice. It's kinda great. But I am fixated on the video, because now I have made it this week's goal to watch all the 80's movies that I possibly can.

So far, I've watched Say Anything and Sixteen Candles. Next up, The Breakfast Club and Some Kind of Wonderful.

Not just that, there's something else in this week's useless project. See, if one of your goals is to do more service, we can kill two birds with one stone. You help me and cross something off your list, and, at the same time, you help me cross something off mine!! How can you lose? How can I lose? How can we lose? We can't, that's what. We have now have a relationship that is built to last. Bahaha!

So here's what I need help with. I need help figuring out all the different movie allusions in the music video. Here are the ones I know:

0:50 -- Sixteen Candles
1:42 -- Brokeback Mountain
2:07 -- Titanic
2:30 -- I think it's Pretty Woman
2:57 -- Napoleon Dynamite
3:06 -- Say Anything

So what have I missed? Let me know!!

New Year's Goals...

Haven't made 'em yet. I think there's something about needing to be in Logan to make my own plans. When I'm at home, I just mess around. But I will probably add stuff that I've already done, so I feel better about myself. Please. Like you don't do that with your To-Do lists. Add things already completed, just so you can cross them off. Don't pretend you don't. We all do. Don't make a liar out of yourself. Own up to it.

I do have a useless project for this week. See next post for details. 

My Mother Told Me...

That she caught the very tall, muscular, good-looking man at the church dance staring at me last night.

Like, at multiple instances. If she weren't my mom, I wouldn't trust her observations at all. But when she was younger, she and her best friend joined a karate class, just because she'd be one of two girls in a crowd of army men. She's a self-proclaimed Boy Scout, you know. That's a direct quote.

Gettin' ogled by a handsome man...

Not a bad way to start the New Year. 

Thanks, Ma!

Too bad I never noticed.

Too bad he never came over to talk to me.

Happy  2011 , all!

Don't wait for it to be a good year,

MAKE it a good year!!