Weekend in Tucson

It was my uttermost pleasure to spend a couple of days with the Watson clan in Tucson this past weekend. Before I head out on the trail tomorrow morning, I wanted to post a few pictures and give a large global shout-out to Jaren and Charity in thanks for a time well had. (And I've got a black pair of glasses as well, so I'll pick up that red pair in a few weeks. And Charity, I'm still destroyed from Dancer in the Dark. Sharon, I finally saw it. Destroyed. Demolished. Punched in the vocal chord. Stabbed with a tipless ice pick. Forced to drink the sacrificial blood of cocker spaniel puppies. After the credits rolled, Charity stayed up a few extra minutes with me in the 3 a.m. darkness and talked me through the aftermath. But this is a different post.)

Here's some pictures of the night hike the Watsons took me on the night before I left. What isn't included are pictures of the three coyotes Jaren almost ran over in his car, and neither is the snake that he really really really really wanted to see and that we actually never saw. He did find a stick that looked pretty snake-like...Charity and I both agree it probably was a snake before Moses took care of it.

Actually, the first picture is of a Sonoran Hot Dog. Hot damn but I haven't had such a beast of a meal in a bun before. Yea, verily verily, for I have said, a bacon-wrapped dog covered in beans and tomatoes and Mexican dip held gently in a soft sweet bun brings me to tears of delicious gratitude. I had two that day, and I'll have two hundred more before I die. God bless the Sonoran hot dog and God bless the Watsons for introducing it into my culinary culture.

These pictures of the night hike aren't the greatest. I didn't major in photography. So before you know-it-alls snub me for my poor taste in camera option or how much or how little flash I used, I actually like the ghostliness of these scenes and figure it's as good as I can do for now.




The Watson Clan children are pretty adorable. The youngest doesn't warm up easy to strangers and it is with sheer pride and gloating that I can boast how she began calling me "Grandma" by the time I left. Although, for future notice Amelia, I'd rather be referred to as your Aunt. No offense to Grandmas all around, including you Mrs. Norris. I'm just saying. I'm still a virgin. No virgin is ever really ready to be called a Grandma. I'm just saying.

These spiders were everywhere, with great beautiful webs that defy all my strongest grasps on mathematics and geometrical equations. I don't know but that spiders are extremely brilliant perfectionists. They're like Asians and Chinese characters...I'm not racist, I'm serious. You can always tell when an American is writing kanji, I don't care how many times you've seen The Karate Kid. There's a gene being spread about over there that reeks of precision and nimble, accurate fingers. I think in the future, we'll be able to harness this power from the DNA of spiders. Squares will be squares, A's will look like A's. We'll all be able to write a "g" so it looks like the "g" those old typewriters used to spit out. The one that looks like a figure 8 with an apple stem. The kind of "g" I am using in my blog to describe "g". I bet a spider could figure that one out real easy, if it wanted to.

Unfortunately, we gawked for too long and our spider friend decided having his web in broad headlamplight in front of these jokers wasn't going to get him any grub, so he began to swiftly tear his crib down. We felt bad, though at the same time, the process was beautiful. His handle on gravity and balance was impressive.





The kids finally started nodding off, and were all but asleep as we made our way back to the car (let me add here to getting the van into the parking lot was a feat on all itself.....I'll just say it involved two of us stepping down on tire-piercing spikes to get it through the exit side of the parking area. Hmm, I suppose that's actually all there was to that story. It seemed much more exciting at the time. Like Paul Newman sawing the heads off parking meters or something).

And ten minutes after this picture was taken.....

And this last picture is just to prove that I really was also there.

Thanks again Jaren and Charity for a time well spent. I'm excited to come down again soon, in the meantime, I found an apartment of girls to jump into and I hope I'm making the right decision. I feel I'll be more social, though the family I'm staying with claims I won't be able to practice the same sacrifices that would prepare me for family living. You all know I'm not in this place to be occupationally single for the rest of my life, right? I yearn for a family living. Don't I? Am I really subconsciously holding onto a wanderlust nomad selfish free spirit existence? Is this why I don't call Paul from Institute back even though he declared Official Crushdom on me a week ago? No, damn it. I didn't call him back because he freaked me out by confessing a great crush before he knew my name. Where are all the normal people and will I fit in when I find them. Question mark. Things to ponder whilst I be on the trail. Better to live with three single girls than someone else's family at my age, isn't it? Isn't it? Me oh my, the indecisions still fly. Somebody buy me a magic 8 ball for crying out loud.

Return to AZ

This is this.

When my best friend Sharon and I couldn't get into a rodeo in Rigby a couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves instead watching Hairspray from the Edwards Theater in Idaho Falls. We indulged ourselves horribly, giggling at John Travolta in a fat suit and heels with an accent so horrible his career ought to take off again just from how self-deprecating he's become since the cocky days of Vinnie Barbarino and Mista' Kottair. Then, Christopher Walken knocked me gutless with his deadpan slapstic that included x-ray glasses and an ape suit. I remember my first love for Walken transpiring probably about the time I saw him as Max Shreck in the horrible but entertaining Keaton Batman movie II when I was ten. After Hairspray, Sharon turned to me and said, "Now do you want to see a real Christopher Walken movie?"

So we opened an account at Blockbuster and rented Deer Hunter. Darren, you've mentioned that rated R movies are one possible golden ticket to hell, so let me warn you right now that your soul may be at stake for watching this movie. Let me also say that your soul might also be at stake for not watching. Should I suggest Clean Flicks, my Provo man? (I'm not even going to get into that debate.) [AUTHOR'S NOTE: It has come to my attention that friend Darren actually does not disregard films for an R rating and most probably also does not approve of Clean Flicks in general. Or the fact that I called him a Provo man. Even though he is one. My apologies to all for marring this image and associating this my great friend with the large group of people who confine themselves to PG ratings and won't let their children watch Beauty and Beast because Belle's yellow dress is so low cut. If I don't let my children watch Beauty and the Beast it will be because I don't want to foster the deus ex machina approach to solving problems or that death is the great enemy and shedding a tear will conquer it or that pretty girls should always get their way. But that's another can of worms I'm still working out. Bottom line: I retract my statement concerning D.Z. and movie ratings. Apologies, friend, apologies.]



And I'm not going to do the film justice here and now because there is a righteous boiling black cloud thunder/rain/hellfire/damnation/cats-and-dogs storm a-brewing just outside my windows and I must very soon run off to watch lightning crack through the sky from my backyard. It is a royal haunted apocalyptic storm thrashing about.....the kind of day you might catch Tim Curry in a sewer drain. The streets are flooded and I kid you not that I just saw a striking strand of HOT PINK lightning bolt through the air, lighting up my front room windows. I can hardly concentrate on Vietnamese Russian roulette at a time like this.

So let me just say THIS. Rescue Dawn
is an incredible film, especially for Zahn and Bale. But it pales, thins, folds in comparison to Walken, DeNiro, and Streep in Deer Hunter. The pacing, the characters, the music, the language, the pitiful hometown in coal country Pennsylvania are so bitterly human and honest that Sharon and I both stayed wide riveted awake until the film finished at 4:30 a.m. (late even for us). I am changed from this movie, from the poet in Walken, from the diseased, nightmarish evils of warfare and survival. This film deserved all the awards it won in 1978 and it deserves to be remembered and re-viewed. Whatever Rescue Dawn was lacking in spirituality, realism, and heart, The Deer Hunter provides, though the result is necessarily gritty and unbearably disturbing. I just had to back up my last post with this one before going on to a new subject. The sky is still green....I'm going to go heat up a slice of pizza and watch the rain fall now.

Survival Camping

My brother Will and I just got home from seeing Rescue Dawn in a theater peopled with another dozen or so various riff raff....mainly older war vets with their frail, white-haired wives who held hands and both guffawed at certain bitterly humorous places in the film. A few boys my age hung around the back, one with a beard and a thin face who I maybe would have approached if I were a more forward type of girl. A couple of girls in flip flops left the movie about twenty minutes in and came back at the credits to pick up their dates.

It wasn't one of those movies a person goes back to see again and again. Steve Zahn scored hugely in my mind. His sunken eyes and bitter, broken spirit were worlds away from his goofball "presidential flashcard" antics in That Thing You Do. This film ripped me up while at the same time sickeningly enticed me to look forward to survival camping in Arizona again this fall. I have a lot of questions about wilderness therapy and what all the point of "survival camp" really is. I always felt the word "survival" is a bit heavy when you take into consideration the real survival stories like Dieter Dengler's or Chris McCandless's (whose story is also coming out in the theaters soon). Though...if the person doesn't survive, I suppose you can't classify it as a survival story....?

But McCandless or Everett Ruess or even Edward Abbey aren't really the same type of survivor (erm...wannabe survivor?) as someone who didn't just go off and live in the desert of their own accord. Dieter became a hero for not dying, but would Aron Ralston, the guy who cut off his own arm in a Utah canyon, also be considered a hero for not dying? If he had died, wouldn't he have just been considered foolish? Wouldn't he have become just another worst-case scenario to warn hikers and climbers about in order to get them to pay attention in safety seminars? Does it take a war story to make a survival story heroic? Surely, Aron would have racked higher on the scales had he at least saved some babies on the way home.

Today is the day I would have hopped a flight to Japan, had I decided to go. With a sore throat and inflamed lymph nodes, I admit I am happy not to be on such a plane ride at this point in time. Still, I recognize the sacrifice of not going, and, still unsure why I wasn't supposed to take the opportunity, I bide my time trying to make up for it, trying to escape to whatever other adventure will bring me close to something real, something worth doing. Things I can only see and feel while I'm tied down to nobody but myself.

Ed Abbey kept himself in the desert saying, "I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock." With a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes and having just walked out of a movie about Vietnam, I confess, currently, that Abbey's words only make me want to lie down in a bed and eat otter pops while I can. "Gather ye popsicles while ye may...."

The cynic in me also knows that not every young teenager I'll walk with in the desert will see a juniper tree the way Abbey sees it. Wilderness therapy obviously isn't a sure deal for anybody. And in the few months I experienced the desert last year, I had enough scrapes with real danger to know it's folly to trust that Nature won't cream you just because you consider what you're doing as valiant or even God's will. Though at certain points, trust in God's hand is about all you can lean against. Still, even after leading seven teenage girls crabwalking over loose shale five feet from a 30-foot dropoff into dry creekbed in the middle of Bronco Canyon, letting the girls rest in the laughable shade of two-foot mesquite while the other leader, Gina, and I wept in prayer in a crook of rock a few feet away, I still feel "survival" is a heavy word. Yet didn't I change from the moment? Is this what I'm going back to look for? The raw starkness of man vs. wild....as close to a real survival story I'll allow myself, knowing that I have a med kit, radio, GPS, and satellite phones to ensure I'll definitely live through real danger?

As a girl, I'm not supposed to understand this escape as much as a man would. Okay, I'll grant you that. I can feel the urge to nest when it comes out. I find comfort in sweeping myself a place in the sand; I enjoy camping in the same spot for two or three days at a time. I always felt more comfortable when Huckleberry and Jim had made it safely back to their raft--their home base. Even so, there's something about the weight of everything I need on my back, the choice solitary opportunity of appreciating the scenery while squatting behind a tree, of falling asleep to the stars above the cliffs ahead while coyotes howl in the distance. There's something about drinking water out of shallow divets in boulders or chewing the sugary bases of century plants, or of sitting back on your heels next to other dirty people and watching the dance of a hundred fireflies twinkling over watercress in the dusk. Even to be able to distinguish how one person smells from another I find intimate. There are people I walked the trail with whom I loved so much, I have their smell memorized as if they were peppermint or strawberries. Maybe it's that I have to have companionship...maybe that's the girl in me. I think so. It's in my blood to sniff out partnerships, not trails. Maybe? ....Maybe I'm still a bit feverish.

Reasons to Quit Academia

I just got my teaching evaluations back from my last semester of school. Well, hot damn. They were the worst yet. Statistically, I was still above average and given an overall "well done" but the supplemental comments were biting and immature. I'm ready to throw in the hat and take up a secretarial job, one where I can blend into the background and be required of no more creativity than to find different ways to say, "How may I transfer your call?"

Sure, maybe the last semester before graduating is supposed to be tough. Along with teaching two classes of sophomore composition, I was in the middle of revising the final drafts of my thesis and meeting for various defenses (that seemed to only get held between my two classes, requiring me to run across campus). I can blame this on my classes being held in dorm rooms, one room being completely unusable one morning because the door lock had run out of batteries. So we sat in a dim, dingy commons room next to a broken full screen television, underneath movie posters of the most intellectually challenging showcase (Star Trek: Nemesis, Never Been Kissed, Zoolander, Cheaper By the Dozen, I Know What You Did Last Summer). I could blame this on the lack of working dry erase markers, the complete lack of any kind of technology and of broken technology with missing parts I don't realize don't work until after I've wheeled big screen televisions and three foot high speakers across campus to the dorms in a wheelbarrow provided by the media warehouse. I could blame this on one classroom's replacement of erasers with large dirty white rags and a white erase board that actually pressed into the wall as I wrote on it, requiring me to place my other hand on the board to steady my writing area.

But I was optimistic. I knew I wouldn't score as high this semester because my mind really was focused on graduating and filling out all the red tape. But perhaps, after all, I am still too young to be teaching, too immature and too close to the students put in my classes. Yes, it IS difficult to compose myself academically when an old district leader signs up for my class, or his girlfriend signs up the next semester. Ward members who think it will be fun or easy to take my class sign up and label me immoral or disgruntled when I ask them to read essays entitled "Shitty First Drafts" or Tim O'Brien pieces. I do not like finding out I'm dating my students' roommates. I do not like hearing from my roommates that my students want to date me. I do not like having friends tell me they cannot date me because I've been an English teacher to all of their friends.

I get discouraged when one asshole writes in his teaching evaluation, "You drove the point home and were easy on the eyes." I do not like getting other evaluations that end with, "Overall great job, Babe." I am tired and I am finished. Some students plead for an easier workload while others chastise me for making class so mindless and cheap. Some students despise the reading assignments while others remark as an afterthought, "you should have had us read stuff sometimes." Why didn't you give us stricter deadlines? they ask, after I granted them an extension because they begged and begged for an additional weekend. Why all the redundancy about the rhetorical triangle? they ask. It is because your compositions obviously lacked the most simple components and the further I drilled them into your frizzed out, earbudded, selfish minds the better your essays actually became.

The hardest bit of feeling this way towards my classes is that before I know how they truly feel, I really appreciate and enjoy all of them. Yes, these evaluations are the worst I've ever received. But regardless, I really enjoyed my students and tried as well as I could at the time to make class rewarding and interesting. And now I am tired. One idiot a year ago confided in me that when he took my class, he stayed awake by staring at my ass. How the hell am I supposed to engage students in persuasive thesis statements and library research when I am nothing more than a piece of low quality meat to these jerks who ought to know better. I should have taught elementary school. Because at least then I could have avoided these know-it-all 23-year-old boys who just got their trophy wives and learned everything they needed to know on their missions and define their idea of "bringing home the bacon" as undressing their foolish, childish, rambling English instructor in their minds.

And THIS is ALL I will ever say about THAT.

Raising My Glass of Kittens to Both Future, Past

I'm almost done cleaning my room. For those of you who know me, you will understand what a feat this is. It got so bad, I admit, I had to pull the mattress out of my room and into the family room because I could no longer get from the door to my bed. In my defense, I have not allowed myself more than 48 hours at a time in my parents' house since school got out. I dumped everything from my apartment into the middle of my floor and scavenged for pants and books for each next trip/tour/job I subsequently embarked on. I had never been so bad. My mother took pictures behind my back and showed them to my Aunt Lori who didn't believe it until she saw it.

It is now possible to once again frolic in my room. I'm working on the borders now. I bought two bookshelves last night and spent the evening organizing all the books I've collected and boxed and stacked during the past ten years. I cancelled my Planetarium Marathon with Cagefighter Kev to do all this (but mostly because my Planetarium card is still somewhere in the hidden crannies of my border stacks). I did manage to find my USB cord to my camera and I distinctly remember taking it out of my room and setting it "HERE, so I won't lose it." But now I don't remember where HERE was...... So I pulled a picture from my 75 cent copy of Cats Quarterly I found somewhere past the seven consecutive aisles of fireworks at Odd Lots in Bushkill, PA. I sometimes find myself collecting weird and tacky cat mementos because of the ten freakiest men with feline obsessions found on this planet, I know three of them. And you never know when you're going to need to make a birthday card or a mix-cd cover. Plus, the wine glass full of cats appropriately reminds me of the fabled Poconos Palace located approx. five minutes from my Aunt Lori's home, where the "world famous" 7-foot champagne glass whirlpool honeymoon suites await your eager arrival. Along with trailer parks and several thousand white-tailed deer, the Poconos Mountains are known for ridiculously kinky and cheap love getaways. Oh the giggling I did in the Poconos....it was most seriously the finest few days I've had with my aunt and grandmother in years. I'm a bit disappointed that the champagne glass whirlpool is opaque....it is a rare conversation topic to have with your grandmother--that of what a naked body must look like smashed against the strange angles and concave shape of a see-through champagne glass....surely not romantic. I mean, how would one even sit in a manner inoffensive to the one watching from below? I wouldn't be the one to get in first, that's for sure.

So actual current pictures of the friends back east still to come. In the meantime, I've expanded my blog profile with small gems I've unearthed in the mines of my bedroom so I can look as sufficiently self-absorbed as I am at this point of existence. It is a rough patch to clean out one's closets. This, Jen, is why I procrastinate room-cleaning. It's hard on my heart. You never know what hidden memory is lost beneath last semester's papers or within that old backpack kept behind the clothes hamper. But surprisingly, I've done well this time. Maybe this means I'm finally at peace with all the soreness of the past. Maybe I am growing up a bit. I feel good, cathartic. I'm learning to let go, throw things out. Clear my drawers, level the playing field for whatever is coming next.

But I'm still not getting rid of my Grover doll, and I just KNOW I'll figure out what to make with this old salvaged seatbelt if I hang onto it for another five years.....

The Echo of the Void

In the desert
I saw a creature,
naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

--Stephen Crane


I am a bit jet-lagged and I have pictures to post and stories to tell about meeting up with very old and very close friends on the east coast this past week. But I can't find the USB cord to hook up the camera and I don't really even feel much like it anyhow right now.

I've spent a bit of time getting stuck on machines lately. Today it was waiting a few extra hours in Phoenix waiting for a plane to get all fixed up nice to take us back to Salt Lake. I thought a lot. I sat next to a 5-year-old flying alone, a bold and friendly girl named Meghan (she spelled it for me) who had plastic animals to play with. She never let me finish the last five pages of Bryson's epilogue on the Sydney Olympics from In a Sunburned Country.

Basically, I am confused and I am frustrated and I feel like I have let opportunities slip past me. I'm fumbling. I'm grasping for a quarter of a triple-dozen things at once because I want them all. I have nothing to complain about. I am blessed and lucky and fortunate beyond what I deserve. And yet I am frantically, moodily dowsing for SOMETHING, some sure sign, some tickling sensation that keeps me winking at the clouds and sunlight as if to say, "Ah, yes, yes, I get what You're saying....just a little to the left then, eh?" Instead, I'm moping belligerently in a stuffy airport and giving my parents a guilt trip for daring to hint that perhaps I should.....settle down? ....find a career? ....pay my part of the family cell phone bill?

I'm disgusted with my selfishness and for being an ungrateful daughter. I'm hurt and a bit pained that I can't just stick to a dream and grab it since I seem to be all opportunity and availability right now. To my friends back east, I envy you all your quaint but established apartments, your back patios and your babies. It was such an honor to visit and I am thrilled to the crux of my core that we still get along just like kindred spirit bosom buddies ought to. I truly am the luckiest to have knocked elbows long enough with you that passing time no longer affects the heartstrings that bind us, if you will. James Best asked me outside of Tiffanys in Manhattan if I was going to die soon, because I seem to be running around paying last respects all over the country. Trev interrogated me rather charmingly and paternally about what my immediate/long-term plans for the future are. Troy thinks I'm running away from my responsibilities. KP thinks I'll be popping out the first of twelve children by February. Well, I tell you all, I'm as directionless as a hookless compass or a Liahona somebody kicked over mistaking it for voodoo. I recall the image a friend of mine once shared about a boy who caught a bee in a jar and froze it--but didn't kill it--he just waited until it was good and drugged and sufficiently chilled. Then he tied a piece of thread around the bee's body, being careful not to snap him in two. As the bee thawed, he flew again, round and round on the thin thread that kept him bound to the young man who looked pleased as Hawaiian punch that he had a bee on a leash. I've forgotten my point.

But Jen, to you especially I want to thank for the short isolated car rides of conversation and advice. I miss you again already and it was such a pleasure to run around with you and your family for a week. I confess I kept turning my head on the plane whenever I heard a real little kid call out for a cracker. (They were never as cute as yours. Always more hair though, hahaha--don't fire me!)

Top 13 Most Influential Computer Games I Played Before I Turned 13

I'm sick of thinking about decisions and choices and figuring myself out. Instead, here is a list of the top 13 games that changed my life as a child and continue to affect my personality and integrity at 25 years. Please keep in mind this list is organized CHRONOLOGICALLY and not in order of most influential to least or vice/versa. I've also taken the liberty of excluding such games as The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Space Invaders because of course I played those. Everybody did. For most of us it was a school requirement. Also, the number of computer games I played as a kid is ridiculously immeasurable. But these select games rise above the other hundreds of arcade, RPG, text-adventure, combat, strategy, board game, and adventure games I spent my days playing from the old Mac in my dad's office on rainy afternoons. And most evenings. And some mornings.

1. Lode Runner
This is the first computer game I ever played at home. Basically, you are armed with a jackhammer and you go around busting holes in the brick for robbers to fall into so you can grab their gold (making you a robber robber). The brick is creepy because it regenerates after about five seconds. The robbers can usually pull themselves out of the hole the first time, but if you set two holes next to each other and the robber climbs out of one hole just to fall into the next hole, the brick will regenerate onto the fallen robber and smash him dead. Unfortunately, once a robber is killed, he will reincarnate and fall from the sky anywhere on the screen. This can be used to your advantage or not. You can run, climb, fall, and swing across wires. To reach the next level you have to touch the ceiling of the screen, which won't be available to you until all the gold is retrieved. I remember beating my dad's high score on a Sunday afternoon when I was seven. My whole life changed. My dad never played Lode Runner again.

2. Zork
I was a huge fan of the text adventure game genre. I had about thirty-five games, each with their own folders of saved games. I had a stack of printer paper I kept underneath the desk that I charted maps on and wrote magical words from my various weathered, worn, tattered, shiny, and vellum scrolls. I almost put Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as one of my top influential games, but Zork I'm afraid wins over just because I had to play Hitchhiker at my neighbor's house, but I played Zork daily at home and was eaten repeatedly by grues because my lantern ran out of oil. I never finished Zork and sometimes attempt it online in order to procrastinate figuring out my life. Has anyone ever figured out how to beat this game? At least Hitchhiker had a hint system when you got stuck (HELP: 1. drink alcohol 2. pick up tea and no tea 3. place tea and no tea in potted soil with babel fish still in ear 4. take towel from Ford Prefect)

3.Transylvania
Transylvania was the new age in text adventures--screen shots! I could actually see the vampire before it sucked my blood! It somehow wasn't as scary to run into an angry penguin horde on Transylvania as it was to run into a monkey grinder on Zork when I didn't have a cartoony image to ease my nerves. Although, I do remember a bloody dagger and a noose that I would have rather pictured in my head than seen awkwardly pixelated in black and white. I remember the game would beep when an enemy popped up without warning, usually when I was trying to pick up the bread without dropping the cheese because my inventory was too full.

4. Carmen Sandiego
Not only did I watch the television program daily ("Do it, Rockapella"), but I was a pro at European Carmen S.D. As long as I had an atlas and a couple encyclopedias to guide me, I dropped all kinds of anvils on Carmen's henchmen. I was no gumshoe. Actually, this game usually got pretty boring. But I guess I know my European geography somewhat better than I would have otherwise.

5. King's Quest I
Oh King Graham. You dolt. I hated this dude sometimes. I always accidentally walked him off narrow stairways or into lakes and he'd give this horrible tinny "aaaaaaaaah" that sounded like Minnie Mouse being sucked up a vacuum cleaner. Then the fated pop-up box appeared suggesting I save more often and would I like to Restore, Restart, or Quit? I loved this game because it was a text adventure with more adventure and way less text. But the typing commands were still ridiculous: "take the damn troll's money" I AM SORRY. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND "damn", "troll's", "money". YOU DO NOT NEED TO INCLUDE ARTICLE "the". CAN YOU REPEAT YOUR REQUEST, KING GRAHAM? "make love to troll" I AM SORRY. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO TO THE TROLL? "kiss troll" THE TROLL LOOKS CONFUSED. "kick troll" VIOLENCE NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING. "throw rock at troll" *ping!* KING GRAHAM'S SHOT IS DEAD ON. THE TROLL FALLS TRIUMPHANTLY DOWN THE HILL TO A WATERY GRAVE. YOU EARN 15 ADVENTURE POINTS. Sierra Games in general aren't really my cup of tea compared to LucasArts games, but I have to admit that King's Quest was a forerunner of adventure gaming to come and I owe much to my mother who typed in my requests when I was too little to know how to do it on my own. (Footnote: I also played Kings Quest V in me later years. Better graphics made King Graham's red hat look even stupider.)

6. Dark Castle
It doesn't matter what gaming console you're using or what game you are playing on said console--the only way to kill bats is with rocks and it's pretty damned hard. I hate bats. But I loved Dark Castle and spent hours not catching the ropes and running hard into enemies and never actually completing whatever the purpose of the game was. But I always remembered to play the game on Halloween and Christmas because in the opening foyer of the game, a Christmas tree or a Jack-O-Lantern would magically appear. I never knew computer games were real enough to follow calendars and celebrate holidays. That in itself made Dark Castle one of the most influential games of my time.

7. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Finally, LucasArts games came into my life at the young age of....seven? Eight? In any case, I loved not having to worry about what to type because this new game format let me point and click on objects and I only had to decide whether I wanted to look at it, pick it up, talk to it, push or pull it, fight with it, etc. You could still die a lot in this game, mostly from fighting Nazis. I finally saw the movie and figured out how to use the red cordon to smash a hole into the library in Venice and after that I quickly beat the game. Again, pixelation can be a terrifying thing and the only thing worse about seeing the Nazi choose poorly and turn old to dessicated in seconds is seeing it happen in 16-bit color with tinny arcade-style music in the background. *shivers*

8. Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Suedo
I actually don't remember exactly where this one is placed chronologically. I just remember spending hours searching the caves and being introduced to my first Monty Python's Flying Circus allusions. This was a weird game, a bit of a forerunner of Myst I think people might say. A lot of exploring and finding different puzzles that sometimes open new parts of cave. This game was also built in HyperCard if I remember correctly, so HyperCard needed to be installed properly to have it work right. This is one of those games I still dream about sometimes and wonder if I could beat all the puzzles now, with my new adult brain.

9. Loom
And finally! A new LucasArts game! Loom changed the way I lived my life. You are Bobbin Threadbare and you are on a search for your mother. So you go around to all the different elders and creatures of the forest saying, "I am Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?" And his mother ends up being a duck. Or something. I just remember getting freaked out by some of the graphics and thinking for the first time that computer games can really be beautiful, even in 16-bit color.
This game was cool because you learned different spells on your magical flute and could make tornadoes and sing people to sleep and all kinds of things. Link's ocarina is a direct plagiarism of Bobbin Threadbare's flute. There's so much of this game I've forgotten. I would give a finger off my left hand to be able to play this game again. Heck, I would give a finger off my left hand just to meet somebody who also happened to play this game and just talk to them about it for a while. I don't why people grew up playing such sucky games as Dr. Mario and Final Fantasy when games like Loom lurked for us all in the shadows, secretive and seductive and mind-altering.

10. The Secret of Monkey Island
And here it is, folks. The number one most influential game on my life. This game defines who I am today and my little sister and I have had long and serious discussions about how playing and loving this game is requisite for anybody either of us considers marriage-worthy. BOTH of us have actually prolonged rocky relationships just because the guys had had some experience with Guybrush Threepwood and his desire to become a pirate. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have nothing on this game and I swear they even plagiarized the game some when they were writing what good parts of the scripts there are. I spent an entire Primary Program rehearsal at the local stake center writing down ideas from behind a pew on how to get out of the cannibals' hut. I have music tracks from the game on my iPod and I actually listen to them.
I am not ashamed of my obsession with this game. I rejoice that I know the one way to actually kill Guybrush in the game is to drown him and the only way to kill ghosts is to spray them with root beer. I used to fantasize about being Guybrush's love interest, Governor Elaine Marley ("When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice") and I still laugh at all the strange and various uses for a limitless supply of breath mints and the almost ridiculous lack of uses for a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. Actually, I used to have a crush on Otis as well, and my sister and I would laugh and laugh when we found out you could free a rat in the prison cell next to Otis first and Otis would be so upset you went through all the trouble of carrying grog (which eats through metal mugs so you go through three or four by the time you get from the pub to the prison) and then let out a RAT before him. I swear it's funny and totally worth it.
The first Monkey Island is also cool because it has a lot of random close-ups of the characters, little cut scenes that show off just how good LucasArts had come with graphics since Indy and the Last Crusade. The best is the close up of the Navigator's head Guybrush carries around with him to get through the labyrinths of Hell to LeChuck's evil ghost ship (the portal to Hell is a giant monkey head in the middle of the jungle). Seriously. And for the people out there who only played the 3rd and 4th Monkey Island that have come out in the past decade or so, shame on you. Those are equivalent to the new Star Wars compared to the original Star Wars. In other words, they are incomparable. In other words, the new ones suck big time. In other words, I can't let go of this game. This is the meaning in my life. This is my inspiration.

11. Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge
And huzzah! There's a great sequel! This time, Guybrush is officially a pirate and he even got himself some fancy clothes and some facial hair. The Guybrush from the first game was very naive and innocent. People told him he looked like a flooring inspector. This bearded Guybrush is still pretty naive, but he's deluded himself into thinking he's pretty tough and worldly. He's sarcastic and selfish and impossibly gullible. He carries everything from spit-soaked maps to very large dogs in his pockets and is still after Elaine Marley who is impossible to find. The end scene of the game shows the evil arch nemesis LeChuck as Guybrush's bully older brother and the whole game appears to be the figment of a little boy's imagination at a creepy carnival (reminiscent of St. Elsewhere's conclusion that Howie Mandel and the rest of the doctors were merely a figment of an autistic boy's imagination with his snow globe).

12. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Though not quite as fantastic as Monkey Island, Indy and the Fate of Atlantis is another game that changed my life and made me a better person. It's the same format as the Monkey Island games except this one is actually really cool because at one point you can decide one of three paths and actually play three different games, a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure story. There's nothing like an old computer graphic Harrison Ford whipping Nazis and digging up artifacts. In fact, this game could have made a good movie....what with the fancy Atlantis sewer systems and the making of orichallum that would give you the power to become a god (which of course the evil Nazi scientists greedily abuse and thereby reach their predictable demise). There's a sassy redhead that Indy has a delightful love/hate relationship with, too. Very sexy. This game taught me how to siphon gas with a hose, too, so that's also influential.

13. Myst
And then LucasArts stopped making great adventure games (Grim Fandango and The Dig are fun, I admit, but they are a dying breed and can't compare to the old classics), so I think it was Sierra that tried bringing the genre back with Myst and then Riven or Raven or some other game that was really only worth playing if you cheated with the three hundred page manual and hint guide that came with the game. The graphics were great for the day....it didn't even matter if you were lost because the scenery was so pretty. I remember just staring at butterflies flying around for an hour because I had no idea where the hell to get this certain code to get to the top of the redwood tree. Myst doesn't have the tongue-in-cheek humor of the LucasArts games I love, but it was interesting and challenging and I even read all the journals in the library and managed to have a crush on the thinner of the two evil brothers who left video messages all over the island. Did I ever beat Myst? I'm pretty sure I did. Dang. Did I? What happened in the end? Maybe we still have a cd of it downstairs somewhere. But I'd probably need ClassicMac to boot it up. Can't I download that somewhere? And whatever happened to great computer games? And ShareWare? What sort of horrible age are my children going to grow up in without these experiences?

Well, if you weren't sure how nerdy I am before reading this ridiculously long post, now you know. Top 13 games I played before I was 13. The end.

Japan

Okay, I want to write an entry about AP English test-grading sometime soon, as well as my run-in with Stubb and his family and putting up a tent in his living room at 2 a.m. with him and his wife (I'm supposed to keep that on the D.L.). But first I thought I'd churn out this post while it was on the front of my mind.

I'm going to Japan. I know I said I wasn't, but I am. I'm leaving July 28th and will be living in Kyoto for a year. I'm supposedly living in the southernmost part of Kyoto in a place called Kizugawa, named after this river. I've been thinking a lot about this. And I think it's a bit late for me to be pulling the plug on the commitment I sort of made by sending in my health documents. *cough* I still worry about all the things I worried about before. I'm sure I'll have second thoughts when I arrive. But this is life. I know if I stayed here I would only dream about Kyoto from the cubicle of wherever I could find a job. A year isn't forever.

And my justifications about love and marriage come down to this: a roundtrip ticket to Japan costs MUCH much less than any engagement ring. If there's a dude out there that simply cannot live without me and realizes he's been a cad, a bounder, a twit to not say it to me earlier, there's no reason he can't come to Japan and find me. It's not like I'm on another planet.....just the other side of this one. .............hmmm. It will be a good kind of lonely over there, I think. I know I will love the middle school kids. I know I will love late-night summer festivals and karaoke. I will love eating raw eggs again and hyaku yen sushi. I already miss my family and friends. I already know when I come home most of my single friends will be married and most of my married friends will have more kids. My heart aches a little when I think about this. I worry about being left behind....I've always worried about being left behind. But I also feel this is something I should do....I should fill out grad school applications from a red bench in a zen garden. I think I will probably steer clear from most of my former missionary areas, but I definitely will meet up with old companions. In fact, Sisters Morishige, Takahashi, and Nakai all live in Kansai so I'm basically in their territory.

And maybe I'll come visit my family over New Years. I'm sure flights out of Japan are cheaper then because most people are trying to COME for New Years. But it would be excruciatingly hard to not see my family for another full year again. I cain't do it.

I'll post a bit more on this page as developments come. I feel a bit somber talking about it now, thinking of the goodbyes I have to say and feeling the inevitable loneliness that comes from heading into unknown territory where nobody knows your name. But there isn't anything really for me here right now. Or if there is, maybe it'll wait for me. A year is a year is a year, after all.

雨降って地固まる

I hate and love crossroads. I've been told by the people closest to me that I can't let go of anything or anybody. When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about vacant fields and empty parking lots at dusk. Sunsets made me anxious. I had a recurring dream of being in a huge crowd of kids and backpacks in front of my elementary school waiting to be picked up by my mom, and then the people would slowly dissipate and I'd realize I was the only one left, the sun going down, nobody coming after all.

I've been told I don't act my age, but I don't really care. I feel like being belligerent. When I was on the trail last week, I didn't pull my own weight with the staff. One night we made a staff fire and a student fire. I opted to sit with the teenage boys because I was pissed at the staff as much as they were. It's stupid to have two fires anyway. I want to vandalize something. I want to carve my name in bricks and throw them into abandoned house windows except I know I'd regret leaving my imprints in places possibly filled with ghosts who would recognize my handwriting and haunt me the rest of my life.

So I don't know what my problem is. There's still plenty to be grateful for, despite my own disgust at myself and what I do to people. I used to have these nightmares about punching my little sister repeatedly, not being able to stop. I've dreamed of having roommate fights with broken glass bottles as an undergraduate. I dreamed another time that I had to pull porcupine quills from a good friend's stomach to save his life and tore the hell out of his flesh in the process. I've been accused of holding people's heads underwater, of stabbing, abandoning, hiding. A mission companion told me I was hopelessly selfish and impossible to live with.

I'm just writing to say I get it. Consider this my proclamation that I get this about myself. I am aware. Let me have this pity party and give me a moment to gather my inventory and wrap my bread and cheese once more into my red and white handkerchief tied to a stick, and I'll move along as soon as day breaks. But give me this one evening to sit and dwell and be pissed off at the complexities of day-to-day life and my inability to attract and keep any good thing that will last longer than a fortnight. Women are supposed to be these great nest makers and care-givers and despite the common misconceptions people make, I am no different. I am just your run-of-the-mill Aunt Bea, June Cleaver, Mrs. Brady. But I also don't give heed to the sleeping beauty syndrome of lying around with lips puckered until some guy comes around to give me life. I'm outta here.

what Mormons do before marriage

kissing rugby, originally uploaded by emgillz.

Well, I joined the show choir Latter-Day Voices for a boy who I never hooked up with, but Bro. Salmond and the gang renewed, edified, brightened and changed my life all the same. I'm finally home from a ruthless seven days of performances at seminaries and stake centers from 5:45 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. A few of us joked around about wondering what zones and districts we belonged to because we hadn't felt so physically and spiritually tired and cut off from the world since serving missions. Or eaten so much food at church members' houses.

We stayed each night with a different host family with different choir members. I honestly haven't had as much fun in months. Kissing rugby in the Smithfield seminary was Bro. Salmond's idea and my favorite parts of this picture are the facial expressions and LeAnn's open mouth from The Chair. I think I look sort of fat in this picture, but I'm posting it anyway.

I'm trying to get a job in Logan--it's a marketing position.....I'd be writing creative human interest stories about fishermen and field biologists who use these rugged computers you can chuck into rivers and throw against cliff walls and let bears eat and still check your email afterward. I WANT THIS JOB. But I haven't been called for an interview yet, so...............???? I'd love to stay in Logan. My roommates whom I adore from this year are moving into a house which I just found out is the EXACT house I moved into the fall of 2003. What are the odds, really? And they need another roommate.

And I don't think I'm going to Japan anymore. I want to see my little brother turn 16. I don't want to miss that kind of stuff anymore. I'll go to Japan with Nicole, Ali, and Yessica next summer. Before going back to school. And I'm going to restring my banjo. And I'm coming to Pennsylvania in June to see Aunt Lori and Jen Russell Parkins. That's the update. Nothing too literary about this post........I suppose I always feel like making mass contacts before heading out on the trail just because deep down I feel like I might not come back each time. Like getting on a plane, getting on the suburban that takes me into the wilderness is exciting and foreboding--anything can happen. So here's my shout-out to the internet, hey. I'm off to air out the old wool blanket, duct tape up my tarp, sharpen the machete, and head to bed.

Oh, and I won that round of kissing rugby. As if you wondered otherwise.

supplementary video

When I was in jr. high, I spent all my awkward days listening to and obsessing over the Beatles. strawberry fields takes me to those days of Tweety Bird sneakers and puff-paint cat shirts. I must travel backwards in time in order to figure out what I want in four months. I still don't know what to do. But I am newly reminded that I never could decide between John and Paul. I know that George is the most admirable, but I admit I follow the power figures. John or Paul, John or Paul, John or Paul.......John would go to Japan, for sure. Meet Yoko's parents. Or moon Yoko's parents. And Paul.....Paul would just make crappy sap music (except I do love C Moon), looking wistfully into campfires.
This isn't helping.

decision-making time draws near............

I have decided I am no longer mature or capable enough to manage the affairs of my own existence. I am considering outsourcing my life goal planning to people I admire most in life. As I was coming to this conclusion, I stepped out of the celestial room in the Logan temple and ran smack dab into Rexburg's very own Bro. Samuelsauce who I'm still not sure why he was in Logan at the temple at the same time I was. Coincidence? Probably. Even when he was my school schedule guidance counselor/advisor he was never really good at telling me what to do. He did command me to email him, which I shall do directly. Tomorrow.

A positive note: I've been recruited and paid off to try out a different survival camp program this summer, this one in Lehi. I'm going back on the trail, folks, and this time I'll be making fire out of sagebrush instead of yucca which means I won't have to rush to Arizona during the Apocalypse. Huzzah, huzzah.

How 2 Make (and Containerize) PB

Okay, here's a gem. This is in response to my good friend Jacob who posted the Sesame Street how-to-make-orange-crayons clip. I admit, the crayon clip is prime. But so is the peanut butter making. What this particular clip lacks are the little girls in the kitchen spreading peanut butter on bread and licking the knife. I swear she licks the knife. I started licking knives because of this Sesame Street episode. This clip doesn't have that.

But, it does have a sincerely creepy and mind-expanding song-and-dance routine afterward--something that definitely did not show up on Sesame Street the way I remember it--with a tiny Asian girl (the peanut???) who dances on microwaves and kitchen fixtures while all her giant multi-ethnic friends try to eat her. I've never seen this. This is new. This is toe-tappingly bold and sinister. Also, for future final Jeopardy! trivia: the man who wrote the peanut butter song is also apparently the man who wrote the Three's Company theme song. A fine man. "You'll see that life is a frolic and laughter is calling for you....." I love you, John Ritter. John Ritter didn't write the song, that's something different. And this is where I stop.

Angst and Trepidation

Oh, my life! I just want to graduate. But what to do after that? And how will I ever reclaim my dreams of becoming an astronaut and/or animal farmer with a wimpy MA in Literature and Writing from a university with less than reputable ratings? And what of marriage with children? Where does that exist, and does skipping off to Japan equate snubbing my nose at future prospects? OR, if I DO go, maybe there will just happen to be, say, an attractive Mormon Irish lad who gets sent to the same rural neck of the Orient as I do, and things'll just fall into place in an Adam-and-Eve like way. In a post-apocalyptic, we're-the-last-people-on-earth-so-let's-replenish-the-nation kind of way.

Then again, I'll only be 26 when I enter whatever other grad program I'm likely to apply for in 2008. 26-year-old Mormon women getting married is not unheard of, and I have no qualms getting hitched with a kid four or five years younger than me. So really..... And everyone says I look eighteen. I'm still fringing on girlhood. If I wrote an autobiography, it would still be categorized as Bildungsroman.

And what alternatives do I have? I'm not moving to Provo and wearing slinky knee-length skirts made of burgundy pleather. I refuse to stoop to the level of baking brownies for the neighboring apartment of boys and waiting in lip gloss and eye shadow for them to return the plate and suggest dinner and a movie. I'm not desperate yet. I recall that scene from Willow when the lecherous bearded man suggests "WANNA BREED?" to Val Kilmer dressed as a woman. I'm not a lecherous bearded man. It might work for me. But only if I found someone as attractive and exasperatingly charming as Madmartigan to approach. Until then, I just want to graduate.

More men should have long beautiful braided tresses and carry swords.

The Joy of Bob Ross

People never believe me that Bob Ross used to show footage of his pet squirrel sometimes on his show. This isn't the same squirrel...apparently it belongs to a bird lady who also works for public television. But I still consider it proof, so thanks to the great people out there uploading the fragments that make up my life.

In other news, I'd really like to graduate. And the new Zelda game is AWESOME. My little brother and I have played it all through the holidays. He chastised me and threatened to quit watching because I kept picking up this fat puppy and walking around the screen with it because the dog and the way Link held him was so cute. I'm addicted. Go out and get it. All of you.

Goonizu wa Goodo Inafu (Shindi Ro-Pa)

Okay, so I've received a complaint that I haven't updated this in a while. So here we go.

I'm going to Japan. Are any of you going to talk me out of this? I'm graduating in the spring and I'm not tied to anything or anyone and..........and I could do anything! So unless someone has a better idea or wants me to fulfill some secret adventurous wish he or she cannot do for him or herself now, I will be that tool to complete that mission. The only criteria is it needs to get me out of Utah and it needs to help me make money.

In the meantime, I'm applying to teach English in Japan and I feel fine. Jittery, but fine. Does anyone know how I could just go live in Scotland? Couldn't I sell bread somewhere or something? What does one do after graduation? I enjoy where I'm at: I enjoy my punk students who attend class just to raise their hands and reply to my "Don't tell me 'hot', SHOW me 'hot'" with "This class is hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock." I enjoy reading Margaret Atwood. I enjoy sharing crowded offices with computers old enough to run green n' black versions of The Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, and I enjoy riding my bike with the milk-crate-basket across campus with snow-clodded leaves dropping on my head. These things complete my soul. For now.

But the north-westerly winds are a-blowing and I need some type of prophetic call-to-arms or traysure map or archetypal geezer to give me a pouch of vials and a magic amulet to defeat a specific purpose that I do not have to decide for myself. Nobody likes crazy forks in the road where all paths look just as inviting as the rest. I feel like....a lot of bad metaphors: I feel like a choose-your-own-adventure book with just random words in the middle of blank pages; I feel like I'm in the stupid maze of this incredibly nerdy text adventure game called Zork I used to play when I was twelve; I feel like the alto note in one of those weird hymns that have no resolution at the end. They're rare, but they exist. And it's always the alto part that adds the dissonance with somebody...keeps it awkward and pending. Will it resolve up? Down? Ever? This is my state of mind, and this is my lame posting. Take it for what it's worth. I am Clear Moon Full Night and I have spoken.

Let's Silent Librarying

This video is a little ridiculous, but has its moments (Old Man Bites Tenderly). Ridiculous. Maybe I go to Tokyo again in December.......maybe.