Where there's Gold

I have recently come to the conclusion that maybe it isn't always the best to be rich. I'm not talking money, because let's face it, we all need the benjamins, but I'm talking rich... in life. Let me explain.
Today, I am rich in:

• Tomatoes. A certain roommate abandoned 6 whole tomatoes in the refrigerator before leaving for break... SIX large, plump, juicy, delicious tomatoes. The bleeding heart in me is determined to eat them all (so that they won't go to waste) before I leave, that is, to eat 6 tomatoes in the space of 2 days. The rationalist in me will throw them away an hour before I leave. 
• Bobby Pins... how is it that we can never find these little buggers until precisely when we don't need them?! I'm the queen of bobby pins today as I clean our apartment. They are spilling out of their hiding places, greeting me like the pied piper and following me across the floor as I try to vacuum. Its a bobby pin lottery up in here, and I have no hair that needs fastening. 
• Alone time. Ok, I'm probably being melodramatic because, in all honesty, I haven't really been that alone, a few very noble friends have made sure that I'm kept quite entertained. But, I woke up this morning in a house all empty and cold (that was my fault, I turned the heat  down a little... because... I just don't know why, the bed next to me was bare and my heart fell. Can't help it if I still believe in Christmas miracles that involve all the ones I love coming back to spend the night.   

But then I remember that its the little things like these that make life funny. I mean, seriously, what am I going to DO with all these tomatoes!? And so its important to be grateful for the excess too. Not because one day there will be a shortage of bobby pins... but because times like these teach us how to incorporate tomatoes into just about any recipe. 

I'm slowly learning that just about every choice and action can be an opportunity to prove yourself, to decide what is most important to you, what you like and who you are. At least... it feels that way in college. Years from now, I will look back and remember "the day when I learned how to be happy all alone". And I'll know that I could be perfectly fine being alone if I wanted to.

It goes something sort of like this:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace

--Reinhold Niebuhr

Which is a very token way of saying, no matter the oddities in life, I'm going to love and embrace them. Fully and happily. 

I was with a friend last night when he discovered that his very nice, very expensive bike (one that he was hoping to use during an ironman) had been stolen. After the initial "aw, this stinks", he said something that made me laugh.

"Well, now I can fit all my possessions in my car! I'm such a minimalist.... that bike was holding me back!"

I've never had anything substantial stolen. Maybe I could get people to start stealing my stuff so that I can be a minimalist too.

...Door's unlocked!

Bend and Not Break

More often than not, daily life requires that we push forward with reckless determination. We simply don't have time or the foresight to question our action or even our choices, but we just do what we have to do. And for a large majority of our daily existence, that's enough. We have class at 9:30, a friend in need of visiting, goldfish from the vending machine and a paper due tomorrow and that's all we need from life. We dance in a fluid spiral through the motions of life. And life is good.

Then something big happens, like the Tasmanian Devil ripping through our lives, we are knocked off our paths (if even just for a little bit) and we are forced to change, to choose, to live. 

_____________________________________________________________

Suddenly I'm five years old an I don't know how to do things. Suddenly, someone tells me that all my efforts have paid off and I am going to Europe. And it scares me. A lot.

Sometimes life requires that we walk even when we don't know where our foot is going to land.
Its difficult, its frightening and altogether undesireable.

But boy does it feel good when you can say that you walked through the new land and here you are, living and breathing. And everything is ok. 

The Best Deceptions

Forgive me.
I shouldn't be blogging at 3 in the morning, I shouldn't inflict that sort of literary mistake upon the published world.

But I have just finished my 8 millionth romantic comedy and it took me that many billion hours to realize something that my 3AM fuzzied brain considered rather profound. 
With a few divine exceptions (read Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina) girls in romantic comedies are nearly mental. If they are not certifiably insane, then they are categorized as "quirky", which just the polite way of saying "weird". And this phenomenon is escalating to the point where I honestly believe that writers must sit down and say "ok, what sort of mental ailments can we get away with?"
Think about it.

• Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses

• Melissa Joan Hart in Holiday in Handcuffs (tonight's culprit, I'll admit, was a bit weirder than most, she kidnapped a man at gunpoint from the diner she worked at because she had a mental breakdown and needed to take someone home for Christmas to mom and dad)

• Zooey Deschanel in just about any movie

• Maggie Gyllenhal in Stranger than Fiction

• Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner

All of these girls make me want to scream at the screen "Wait! Before you throw yourself upon that poor man, you need to go see a shrink!"

There's two basic classifications:

1.  The girl who is uptight and ridiculously particular/OCD to the point where she can't lead a normal life, but she is able to put up enough a facade so that she won't have to hear "hey... you know they have drugs for your condition, right? Maybe you should see a doctor".
2. The girl who is "an alluring free spirit who won't let anyone - or anything - tie her down." (That is in quotations because I literally just pulled it from cinema's newest romantic comedy Love and Other Drugs. How original. A girl who is a mess.)

And they all end one of three ways:

1. Boy pushes OCD girl to normalcy, usually by making her eat a dirty hot dog or taking her to sing karaoke at a downtown bar full of people who are drunk enough to love her performance. Girl invariably falls in love with boy because, without him she would still be an uptight mess incapable of living. In Romantic Comedies there is no such thing as a therapist (clarification, the heroine doesn't get a therapist. If there is, by any chance, a lead villain female then she and her mother both have therapists. Because they can afford one)
2. Free spirit girl affects normal guy (who was once living a perfectly fine/happy life) to the point where she changes him so much that he cannot live without her.
3. No one changes. Boy usually proposes by saying "you're picky, weird and sometimes insane. But I love you"... How is that romantic?! Imagine this in real life: "You can't communicate your feelings to anyone, you have an incurable obsession with cliff diving and most people have a hard time being in your life. But for some reason, I can tolerate you. So you should probably marry me because you won't find many people who can be around you for longer than 5 minutes". yuck.

 Now this would all be fine and good if we let the crazy girls stay in the movies. But increasingly we find girls who think that their main attraction lies in being electrically eclectic.
In real life.

She saunters into parties in her mustard yellow tights and giant bows in her hair, with crazy eyes that roll back and forth like a dog chasing a car and she announces to the world "hey! I'm crazy! Isn't that exciting/refreshing/great!?"
You stare at the cup of apple cider in your hand and silently think "No, it isn't great, its weird". 
The other party-goers cheer her on as she's singing Don't Stop Believing with emphatic air guitar motions.

This isn't middle school anymore.

Why has it become so popular to be dysfunctional? To be crazy?
There's a quote that I absolutely hate and coincidentally, most girls have it posted on their Facebook walls... in that little box just beneath their picture.
It goes like this:

""I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as heck* don't deserve me at my best." 
— Marilyn Monroe"

*Censored because I'm Mormon and definitely don't see a need for that word to be there. 

And oh how glamorous she is, that girl who's a little different, weird, exciting. She deserves all the attention because she isn't boring and square, like all those other girls. 

Is there nothing to be said for grace, poise, politeness?

Can we stop hiding beneath "quirkiness" and present ourselves as capable human beings? Can we have confidence that we ourselves are interesting enough to attract any and all attention we deserve. Let's be passionate about the things that are truly us, not what we think will garner the most noise from the crowds. That is vain and selfish. Look outside of yourself and care a little more about others than yourself and just how great your new perm is. 

"Women of God can never be like women of the world. The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity."

Margaret D. Nadauld

And, my goodness, take those stupid silly bandz off your wrist.