what would...

this evening i was reminded of a story. and there's nothing i love quite as much as a story to tell. once upon a time, about a year ago, in a land far far away, called arizona, there lived a beautiful princess, me.

anyway... so i had applied to be transferred to virginia and went through a wildly extensive interview process (which is absurd to look back on now, knowing how the last year has played out) and after many months of fretting over whether or not i was going to get the position, i was finally given word that i had indeed passed the tests and would shortly be packing up my belongings and moving across the country. a few days later the panic set in. i remember standing in a hall looking at the flier for the richmond, va location, seeing the pictures that represented this city that had more chosen me than i had it, when the kitchen manager walked up and asked me what i was doing.

this is when i went into girl panic mode and began rattling off the list of things that i was thinking mostly along the lines of how will i get all my stuff in a uhaul? how will i drive it across the country? who will unload it? what will i do when i get there? what if it snows (which of course it doesn't do in virginia... riiiiight)? how will i meet people? what if i'm all alone?

and he turned and looked and me and said, well...

what would mary tyler moore do?

at which point i laughed and said you're right and walked back to my office and created the above image which i kept pinned up next to my monitor until i left. when i got to virginia i put it on the fridge, which is where it is currently. mary, ever vigilante, reminding me that we're gonna make it after all, every day.

today at work my domo and jimtwo were telling secrets. i happened to catch them and was able to snap a picture before yelling: secrets secrets are no fun!

thursday i have a tour of a local school. i'm looking into a massage therapy / associates program. it takes 16 months to complete. i'm pretty excited about it. i've had the idea of going into massage therapy on my mind for years... probably about 7 or 8 years i've been thinking about it. but i just never really thought of it as a real option before. but now i think it might be. and i'm pretty excited. i feel good about the decision to pursue this. it's hard to explain why i feel like this is the right choice for me, but trust me i have reasons for moving in this direction. if you want further clarification let me know, i'd be happy to indulge you.

a lot of big things have happened in life over the last few months. i keep on moving along. some times when i stop and think about the things that have happened i don't believe it. i'm thankful that the lord has blessed me with resiliency... and probably a bad memory.

i'm sure i've said this before but i will tell the story again... it was a few months back that i realized i'm an eternal optimist. i was in one of those periods where everything just seemed to be going immensely well and i found myself thinking 'i don't know how i could ever stop feeling this happy.' it seemed totally inconceivable to me that anything could happen to make me feel sad. and then i realized that this happens all the time. i get to a point where i am just so happy that i don't think it will ever stop... and i know in my head that eventually i will have pain again but in my heart i just don't remember what it was like... even though yesterday was painful and tomorrow holds that possibility, for today it's just not fathomable. today i am happy and way down deep inside me where all the important stuff is (like my social security number, pictures of my family and the memory of the way chocolate tastes) something just screams EVERYDAY WILL BE LIKE THIS! and i believe it. every time.

i think about the story of the brother of jared a lot. the brother of jared is a figure from the book of mormon. the brother of jared builds a barge for his family to travel across the ocean in and it's much like a walnut shell. the brother of jared at one point realizes that they're going to need a way to be able to see while traveling in the barges. so he makes some stones out of molten rock and takes them to a mountain and asks the Lord to touch them with his finger so that they will shine in the darkness and light the barges. at which point the brother of Jared sees the Lord's finger touch each stone. the story continues on but this is the point that i like to think about. one time we were discussing this in class and someone asked if the Lord's finger came from the sky and i thought about that a lot and i realized something... probably the thing that was the most shocking for the brother of jared... the Lord's finger didn't come down from the sky or anything like that because the Lord was there with him the entire time. the Lord has been there standing beside him, speaking to him, watching him. the same as any man sits in a room with you but it wasn't until he saw His finger that he realized just how close the Lord was. What a shock that must have been! often as we pray we feel as though God is some where distant, a millions miles away, but in all actuality, He is standing beside us. kneeling beside our beds, riding in our cars, bowing His head over our dinners.

i'm on a classical music kick. i don't know what it is. it just makes me feel good these days.

for some occasions words just won't do.

ahem

i have many things to talk about but not the time at the moment. i was doing some studying for my sunday school lesson and was particularly touched by beauty of the 13th article of faith. it's something to strive for as a way of life. more updates, maybe tomorrow. for now, enjoy this:

"We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul- We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."

and as for me, ahhh you'll see

i was just looking at the pictures from cici's birthday party over the weekend and suddenly all the things that seemed so hugely wrong with my little universe don't matter so much. i love my family very much and i miss them. i hope to some day have a daughter with as much spunk and sense of humor. she really is a special little girl!

in other news, work was an up and down, up and down day. i promise i go there every day with the intention of being happy. actually i go there praying that things will go well, that i won't be overwhelmed, that i will be calm and understanding. i go with good intentions and the desire to work and take care of the things that need to be done. anywho, today started off pretty good. james gave me a dog that i named jim 2.

he can wag his tail, bark and walk forward and backward. pretty amazing. and his fur is really soft.

i had a series of interesting things happen. booked quite a few events, did a good job with that. got in a fight with a manager b/c he says i'm mean and i told him it's just b/c he is annoying and a baby. had some of the other special events people ask me if i had gotten my prize yet... which is 6 weeks late now and of course i haven't.

anyway, work ended on a frustrating note. it's a really long story that would take ages to explain but the short version is what i do isn't important. i mean, i've always known that what i do isn't important... i plan parties in an arcade... it's nothing great... but today it was clear that what i do isn't even important to the company i work for. ::sigh:: i used to enjoy this job. i might even say i used to love it. and not even that long ago. 6 months ago! a year ago i was putting in 50 hour work weeks, working hard, wanting to be there. now they're lucky if i'm there 30 hours and it becomes more and more difficult to care about anything that goes on there. when i had my review a couple weeks back i told my boss that if my job was to stop being there tomorrow i wouldn't care one bit. i think he was taken aback. but that's life.

the silver lining, i called my boss and confronted him on it within an hour. that's a much quicker turn around for me. that's some serious progress on my communication skills, so at least there's that. he's supposed to get back to me tomorrow with an answer. i don't care if they change their minds b/c at this point it isn't about the thing that happened, it's about the job in general.

the only thing keeping me here at this point is that i'm in a lease until march. march is a long time from now and you never know what can happen in that time but i know i can't keep doing this forever... living my life like this.

tonight we watched spice world. funny story, we were attempting to find a copy of spice world on saturday night and i called best buy and asked if they had it and the lady laughed at me and asked if i was serious. it was pretty much the suck. luckily barnes and noble had it. i will always love the spice girls. always.

i taught sunday school for the first time yesterday. it went well. nothing over the top crazy. i'm teaching next sunday as well... on the gathering of israel. we'll see how that goes! i have a partner that i teach the class with. we rotate weeks of teaching. he seems like he's a pretty cool guy and i'm looking forward to teaching with him. here's to hoping it all goes well. after the class was over i felt grossly inadequate but all you can do is keep learning and growing, right? i feel like in the past i taught on more of softer, subjective information and this class is strictly doctrine. it's a little daunting to know that you're teaching doctrine to people who, for the large part, have never heard it before. it's a lot of responsibility and it has been weighing heavily on my heart the last couple days. i am grateful for the opportunity to teach though... to teach and to learn.

on a final note, i had someone ask me if my blog about needing to have a tough conversation with someone was about them and it wasn't but they had been worried it was. in case anyone is in that same boat, if you're reading this it wasn't about you.

it's like thunder and lightning, the way you love me is frightening

anne and i went to pho so for dinner tonight. i love that place. and i will show you why:


these are pork and shrimp rolls. and they are fabulous. i get these every time we go. i also get some chicken pho. and i feel so fancy when i eat it... even though it's not fancy at all. so we're sitting there enjoying our pho and some lovely conversation when who should walk in, but two dudes from church. we wound up sitting at the table with them while they ate. hopefully they didn't mind the fact that we decided to join them. though really, they knew we were going to be there since i had posted on my facebook that we were on our way to pho so. so really, i think that makes us even. they crashed our restaurant, we crashed their dinner.

after dinner i really wanted some ice cream (it was probably daniel's detailed description of a sundae he got at baskin robbins that put the idea in my head). so we made our way to coldstone creamery, where i got french vanilla ice cream with pound cake in a waffle bowl. we then went back to the house where i put a blanket on the front lawn and brought out a lantern and ate my ice cream while reading some stuff for church. after a bit i noticed some flashes of light in the sky and i was worried that lightning was coming... and then i realized it was coming from the same place in a regular pattern. i started to pay a bit more attention and realized it was the fireworks display from the baseball stadium. i stretched out on my back and enjoyed the free fireworks show. if you've known me very long you know how i dearly love fireworks and it was just a wonderful treat to get to watch some from my lawn. after the fireworks were over i stayed outside for a while watching fire flies loop by. until the actual lightning started and i packed it up and headed inside.

now i'm listening to and watching the evening's thunderstorm roll through. i don't know that i will ever get used to them. the lightning is the worst part. it conjures up images of scary movies in my head. every time the lightning cracks i expect to find a face illuminated in the window. and the idea of that really, really creeps me out. i wish the mental image would go away... but i'm stuck with it.

at any rate it was an extremely enjoyable evening. even though i didn't get the laundry done i still feel like i accomplished a lot. a lot of more important things. laundry will always be around, evenings like tonight won't.

in the past few months i've had a lot of odd experiences where things just seem to work out in odd ways. odd odd odd. like i will just not be expecting something to happen and then it will either happen in an unexpected way or something else will happen or i will get some sort of message that makes everything ok. here is the latest story:

a few months back i was having a really rough time dealing with a confrontation and my buddy nate suggested that i read the book critical conversations. i tried to find it at a couple bookstores without any luck and gave up and forgot about the book. so last night i was talking to my sister about a situation i'm currently working on. my sister was saying that i needed to confront the person and i sort it out but i really was like meh i don't want to have that conversation. anyway, i get to work this morning and i have an email from a random company saying would you like a free copy of the book critical conversations? if so please send a message to such and such email address. so i shoot over an email asking for details on what i need to do thinking there will be all sorts of conditions. a couple hours later i get an email back saying your copy of the book is in the mail.

so random. i'm the kind of person that has always looked at that kind of thing as a call to action. a confirmation that yes indeed action is required. who knows.

today my work buddy was attempting to cheer me up as he is often wont to do. he said don't worry one day when we don't work here we'll get married and there will be kids and a white picket fence. and i said do you know what i want to do? i want to go to school to be a massage therapist! and he said that would be great, you could do awesome things like go on cruises for months and work giving massages. and i said i don't want to do that! and he said well, why not? and i said i couldn't abandon our children! at which point he looked at me like i was the crazy one. so it's only funny when he talks about our future children but not me?! so not fair.

speaking of jokes that aren't funny, we had this lady coming in today and her last name with knotts. and the boys proceeded to make lots of jokes about how she can help boy scouts and sailors with tying knots. and i said yeah why don't you ask her if she owns the berry farm! at which point i got blank expressions. and i was just like dang it you guys, if this was california you would know what i was talking about! and they were just like uhmm whatever. it's sad when jokes are geographical... and you're in the wrong place!

i wish there was some place doing a haunted house right now. i would totally be down with that!

location, location, location

so today i was thinking about how i wish i knew of a nice place to go sit and think. a place that is calm and safe and just feels still. i have this mental image of what it should feel like. i suppose a feeling isn't a mental image. it's a mental feeling, which is better than feeling mental. at any rate i spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out where this place was this morning. slowly the details were coming to me.

it's dark there.
it's cool.
it's on a hill.
you can see all the city lights sparkling like a million diamonds.

and then i remembered! i've been trying to find the hill behind the house i grew up in. sadly, that hill is some 3000 miles away and it's not a place i will be sitting tonight. or tomorrow. none the less, i would still like to find a place to think here in richmond. i could use a good think. there is much going on in life right now.

the other night i sat on the front steps, watching the fireflies flicker by in the middle of the night. there's nothing i love in this world as much as watching the fireflies. and i will tell you why. i think fireflies are like getting to know someone. generally when you get to know someone you're just going along and then suddenly you will have these moments when you see that person for who they really are, in all their wonderful glory. you thought they were just some regular bug flying around and then suddenly in an instant you can see what this person really is, and it's magnificent, beautiful, uniquely them. and that's not something you forget.

this leads me to my theories on relationships. which i will happily share with you, my lovely bloggies. i think as you get to know someone you will have these firefly moments, if you will. and each time you do a golden, silk thread is tied from your heart to the other person's. sometimes you will be tied to a person by 5 strands, sometimes 5,000. the more strands you have, the greater a bond there is with that person. and by the time you're getting ready to be married to a person you have so many strands that you're connected by a thick rope. when a couple is married in the temple for all eternity that rope is turned into something like a thick steel cable, unbreakable. and this is why it's so important to share of yourself.

i feel like this explanation doesn't do the mental image that i have justice, but that's the only way i know to describe the feeling i have.

i hate folding laundry. i'd just like to throw that out there. i'm only one person and yet there seems to be a never ending supply of clothing to wash and fold. do i really need to wear clothes every day?!? yes, i suppose i do.

i've been sitting, waiting, wishing.