"I believe I would eat this book rather than read it."

Just finished another book in Sue Grafton's alphabet series. I've read most of them, but in rather cattywampus fashion. I like these books-they're reliably interesting, quite often funny and usually a surprise at the end. Eventually I will get them all, but while my books are in storage I can't remember what I have for sure.

In addition to discussing books I've read, I have decided to add movies I've seen recently. Last night I went to Country Strong, and boy howdy, is that movie bad. The music was fun, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw handled their parts ably, and Garrett Hedlund is ridiculously good-looking (in addition to singing well) but the movie is just AWFUL. Poorly written, confusingly edited and badly thought out-wait for the dollar theater if you see it at all. (I'm trying to avoid ruining the story, so if you want to hear a more detailed review, come talk to me. Believe me, I have my reasons.)

Finally, two titles that amused me today:
I Am Not A Serial Killer (which I find comforting)
Darker Shades of Dead (which is what I assume happens after you've been buried. Yes? No?)

"You prefer the lyrics. I don't trust you."

(Post title for my other sister, just because.)

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but my everyday life keeps intruding, as it so often does. I have recently become aware of some things in my life that I take for granted, and I wanted to get them listed so I would (perhaps) be more aware of my extraordinary blessings.

• The ability to stand, sit, lay down, walk and change position without pain in my back (after I somehow injured it, doing any of these things caused an amazing amount of pain for about a month-hurrah for that being over!)
• Having a job
• Getting more hours at my job
• Receiving a calling that I love and have always wanted
• The realization that sometimes Heavenly Father does give us exactly what we want and it is exactly what we hoped it would be

Also, today's installment of "What I've Read Recently":

The Teashop Girls by Laura Schaefer. I don't drink tea and I still found the various tea facts interesting. The story is amusing, the characters are nice enough (if a bit two-dimensional) and it is occasionally very funny. First book by this author, so maybe she just needs some more...any word I think of here sounds condescending. She just needs MORE. Of something.

Xenocide; Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. Okay, I love Ender's Game. I love Ender's Shadow and all its sequels. I love Card's Women of Genesis series. And reading the Ender series in its entirety was absolutely a good idea, because I had a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas, and I didn't come away HATING them the way I did the first time. However. I still don't love these books, and it is, of course, partly because I am not a huge sci-fi fan. Partly it is because these books generally feel overwritten and overwrought: the foreign languages, the philosophical references, the huge cast of characters making it virtually impossible for their voices to remain consistent, etc. But mostly I feel Orson Scott Card is at his best when he isn't trying to show off how smart he is, and his pomposity makes it hard to focus on his genius. This is never clearer than in the afterword to Children of the Mind, where I wanted to sit him down and say, "Look. You're brilliant. You've written a ton of bestsellers and won a bunch of awards and proved that you know your way around a book, okay? We GET it. Now, would you please, just BE great and stop TALKING about it so much? Thanks."

The Brooklyn Nine by Alan M. Gatz. There is a really terrific book in here somewhere, but this isn't it. A family in nine generations told through the history of baseball, its main problem is that it was written for the wrong audience. As a middle-reader, it simply does not have the space it needs to reach its potential, and each "inning" feels truncated, when it doesn't feel totally superfluous. Rewritten as a real saga, with another couple hundred pages of story, I might really enjoy it.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I do not have the words I need to describe this utterly breathtaking book. Suffice it to say that it is one of the few times in my adult life where a book lived up to the hype. And then I found out that The Help is Kathryn Stockett's first book, and she did it exactly right.

Also a new feature: I have a two-and-a-half-year-old niece, who is so delightfully funny that I thought I should share. When she was smaller I called her "Tanker" because of her ability to eat like you would not believe, so that is how I shall refer to her here. Anyway, she was brought to her mother (my sister) toward the end of Relief Society the other day because she claimed she needed to go potty.

My sister: Do you need to go potty?
Tanker: Nope. I'm just done with nursery.

PS I did finish that Charlaine Harris book, and I still think what I thunk before.

Happy New Year!

("Oh, don't do that.")

I am thoroughly lousy at keeping up at something like this. However, new year, new start, so here we are.

I've decided that I will start talking about the books I am reading. I tried to keep a book journal once, which (like any other kind of journal I try to keep) was unsuccessful. So I thought this might be a good format to list what I've read and what I thought.

I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb. I was drawn to this mostly because of the title, which is one of the best I've seen recently. It's also very funny, very well-written and interestingly thought-provoking.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. This was my second time through and I enjoyed it much more this time around (also true of Great Expectations and Jane Austen's entire oeuvre; NOT true of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, no matter what Naomi thinks.) Still not my favorite book ever, but it didn't remind me nearly so much of Lord of the Flies this time, so that's good.

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't list this since I never finished it, but I never finished it because it's lousy. Apparently there's also a TV show about these books? I say enough with the paranormal stories already!

Also, here are some book titles I saw today that amused me greatly:
How to Be Happy, Dammit!
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Breaking the Death Habit: a Guide to Eternal Life
 

Things to ponder

A few more questions I have before I go to bed (which I should have done hours ago) and while I wait for this stupid video to load (which is taking roughly eight hundred years, so I'll most likely be dead before it's done.)

• Why is it that the light of my cell phone screen illuminates everything EXCEPT what I really need it to illuminate, which is the part where I plug in the charger?
• How come infomercials always have the world's biggest moron performing whatever task they are trying to make easier for you with their latest Whiz-o-Gadget? (Seriously, you watch these people trying to make spaghetti or give themselves a manicure and think, "Well, yeah, obviously this is hard for them, because these people get confused by revolving doors.")
• Why does Facebook think its own name is a spelling error?
• How is it that a childproof cap can come off the bottle of its own accord, as long as the bottle is in my purse?
• Why is a device that only allows you to get ONE NAPKIN AT A TIME called an XPRESSNAP? WHAT IS EXPRESS ABOUT THAT?!

So, you know, just some everyday thoughts. I have no answers, except that I suppose we must allow for the possibility that "xpress" when spelled without the initial "e" is an ancient German word meaning "No soup for you! One year!" I mean, it's only fair.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Fireside

Yesterday the Institute choir had what they called a "friends and family fireside", which I am pretty sure means "one which we want to have early in the year to get our first-performance jitters out of the way so we will invite people we know well because they will still like us if we are a bit rough around the edges". Or something. My sister is in her second year of singing with this group and had to be there early to rehearse, and I came along.

So I'm sitting there in the chapel, trying to make some headway on a (ridiculously ambitious and probably needing some rethinking) scripture-reading program, when the director says my name. He knows me well because I sang in this choir myself for four years, and he wants me to go listen to this duet to make sure it's okay for the program. I say okay sure, and off we go down the hall. (Meanwhile reassuring the girls, whose names I do not know, that I am both a very kind person and a very musical one, so they need not worry about my judgment in either sense.)

The three of us arrive at the Primary room, where we find a boy I do not know, who appears to be girl-I-do-not-know-#1's boyfriend, and a woman I do not know, who (it turns out) is girl-I-do-not-know-#2's mother. I explain what I am doing there and sit down to listen, and MIDNK asks me if by any chance I play the piano. I tell her that as a matter of fact I do, although I have never played this particular song ("For Good" from the musical "Wicked".) She starts playing, they sing, and it's fine, and I tell them so. Then MIDNK asks if perhaps I would like to try playing the song for them, as she is not entirely comfortable with accompanying them in public. I say okay sure again, and we go through it once. It is a trifle awkward, since the song is a little unpredictable and has two key changes. When we get through, they talk about it some and tell me if I am okay with it, they are okay with having me play for them. So GsIDNK take BIDNK and MIDNK and leave me to go through the song a few times.

I join the choir in the Relief Society room about half an hour later, in time to hear their before-performance devotional and prayer. While the prayer is going on, I am thinking to myself, "Please let me play this as well as possible." Playing the piano in public still makes me nervous, and my hands tend to shake, so I added, "Please steady my hands and prevent me from screwing this up." Then we go into the chapel, and the program commences. (And for the record, it was a little rough in places, but boy, when they get past that, they are REALLY something.) The duet is toward the end of the program, and as I am playing, I notice a rather odd phenomenon. I am nervous, and I can't hear GsIDNK very well (by which I mean really at all), so that is making me more nervous, and I can feel myself shaking...but only in my arms, not in my hands. They blithely go about their business without seeming to notice the state the rest of me is in.

Over the past several years, I have spent some time thinking about prayers. I know that we are supposed to ask for what we want, and I know that sometimes we get it and sometimes we don't. I also know that sometimes getting what we want turns out poorly, and not getting it turns out to be a blessing. I have had prayers answered with "Yes", "Yes, but not now", "No", and occasionally with silence, which I interpret as meaning I need to think about what I'm asking for some more. But I don't know that I have ever had a prayer answered quite so...specifically. What I asked for was to play as well as possible, to have my hands steadied and to not screw up the performance. And what I got was EXACTLY that.

This is what I learned anew from last night's experience: God is real. He hears and answers prayers. And (I am pretty sure, anyway) He has a terrific sense of humor.

"What's the matter with these scissors?"

(Today's post title is in honor of my sister, who had a bad day today; it's a favorite of hers.)

The setup for this metaphor is a bit convoluted-bear with me.

I am currently sharing a bedroom with my youngest sister, and she likes to have movies on while she goes to sleep. I can sometimes sleep with the TV on, but not always. So tonight I was awake when the movie got over and I was trying to turn things off with the remotes. And no matter how many times I pressed "stop", the darn thing just kept playing.

Now keep in mind it had been a long day, it was dark and I am (as previously mentioned) horrifically nearsighted. Also be aware that on this particular remote control, the "stop" and "play" buttons are the same shape and size. So it took me perhaps thirty seconds to check my remote orientation and realize I was holding it upside down; the entire time I thought I was pressing "stop", I was in fact pressing "play".

(That's IT for the setup, promise; on to the actual metaphor now. Still with me? Good.) Here is the point: how many things in my life am I trying to do by pressing the wrong button? And how many wrong buttons am I pushing because I am unaware that I am holding the remote upside down?

I don't wish to whine, so I will just say my life hasn't exactly turned out the way I thought it would. I spend a lot of time thinking about this-where did I go wrong, what do I need to change, is this some kind of test, if so is there EVER any end to it so I can just get the blasted grade and have done with it already, etc. The last six months have been especially question-filled, as I 1) went through the Titanic of relationship-endings, 2) lost my job, and 3) at the age of almost-thirty, moved back to my home state and in with my parents.

Not to say that any of this has been bad for me. That guy turned out to be either a complete moron or an unbelievable jerk or some combination of the two (the jury's still out on that); I found a job I love, rather than one I thought I should; and living with my parents has been actually really great, so what could have been unbearably traumatic turned out for the best-as things usually do. But I still can't see, as Anne Shirley would say, past the bend in the road. And so I wonder if maybe there are things that I am doing facing the wrong direction, or if the method I am using is the wrong one.

I am trying, as I said a few days ago, not to dwell on the past. It is what it is and no amount of wishing or regret will make it any different. But what about the future? Is there something I can make different by changing something I am not seeing? And how can I find what I can't see if I don't know where to look?

"Look what I can do!"

Sometimes when you start a new group experience (a class, a committee, a...anything else that could possibly start with C that I can't think of in this moment), the person in charge will have you introduce yourself. And usually it's with just a few pieces of information. For instance, in a college class, you might be asked to say your name, where you're from, and your major. Almost inevitably, you will also be asked to share either A) your most embarrassing moment or 2) something unusual about you.

Frankly, I hate these experiences. I have no problem sharing my name or where I'm from or any information like that, but embarrassing moments and unusual things are hard for me, because I never have any. I don't get embarrassed easily and I'm really quite boring, so I never know what to say. Also, for all my verbal ability, it's the first thing to go under stress, and being the center of attention is always stressful for me.

Ergo, a while back when I seemed to encounter lots of these sorts of situations, I decided I needed to make a mental list of things to say, so I would be prepared. In no particular order, here are some random facts/skills/quirks about my person:

• I am horrifically near-sighted (without correction, my range of vision is about eight inches.)
• I have no feeling on the inside of the big toe on my left foot.
• I dislike talking on the phone, even if I am talking to someone I am fond of.
• I can read almost anything in a Latin-based language-at least enough to get the general idea.
• I don't like wearing shoes, and really don't like wearing socks.
• I am driven to near-homicidal rages by thoroughly stupid things.
• I frequently feel pain, taste food and read in dreams.
• I can put on makeup with either hand and without a mirror. (Recently discovered skill, this one!)
• I give excellent gifts.
• I read about 750 words a minute, depending on the material, and I read every word, but five or six at a time.
• I can put an entire cupcake in my mouth at once. (Also various other foodstuffs: a muffin, a piece of cake, a slice of pie or pizza, an apple fritter, and probably some other things I have yet to attempt.)
• I have never had a cast, been hospitalized, had surgery or worn braces.
• I also have my tonsils, my appendix and all four of my wisdom teeth.
• I like almost all vegetables but not many fruits.
• I tear up easily but I don't cry much.
• I hate (as in positively refuse to eat) black licorice, Canadian bacon, pretty much all fruit-flavored candies and absolutely LOATHE peaches.