Saturday, February 21, 2009

personal prophesying

it shall soon come to pass that it wilst become twenty-five years since the time of my birth, thus leaving such little time before it wilst become thirty years from the time of my birth. and this shall be my list of things i shall accomplish before that wretched and miserable day.

30 things to do before i'm 30

1. dye my hair blonde
2. own all seasons of the cosby show
3. live alone without any other people
4. visit all those people in ha-WA-ii
5. run a mile without dying
6. learn to play chess
7. go on a cruise
8. stop biting my nails
9. invent something
10. see topgun
11. take my picture in times []
12. taste edible gold
13. finish that stupid cross stitch project i started in 7th grade
14. read anna karenina
15. go to a music concert
16. own all brand new socks at some one point
17. learn spanish
18. own a fancy camera and actually take pictures (do this before 11)
19. do a backflip
20. play the cello
21. take a cooking class
22. give more to charity than i can afford
23. get my teeth whitened
24. learn to surf or sail
25. get my portrait painted--and like it
26. build/re-do a piece of furniture
27. buy and learn the ukulele
28. learn to ride
29. MACHU PICCHU
30.

you may have noticed 30 is missing...so it's up to you. what should my #30 thing to do before i turn 30 be? please leave your suggestions and be creative! thanks!

p.s. i'm totally going to finish my list before lisa finishes hers--forcryingloudout.blogspot.com

Friday, February 20, 2009

according to time magazine...

94--number of convicted sex offenders in the czech republic castrated in the past decade despite protests from human-rights groups

feb 23, 2009 issue

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

another nail in the coffin

so tonight i went with my 13-year-old sister, becca, to new beginnings (a young women's thing). please note that becca is THIRTEEN years old. did i mention that becca is 13? so after it was over we were sitting there eating dessert and a member of the young women's presidency (it's a new ward so they don't know everyone) came up and said "so are you rebecca's mom?" i replied, "nope, sister." she quickly tried to recover by saying "oh, you're definitely too young to be becca's mom." TOO LAAAATE.

for crying loud out. becca was born when i was TWELVE years old. i was younger than she is now. do i really look that old? i am turning 25 in a couple weeks. do i really look old enough to have a thirteen year old daughter? depressing.

25 ways you can tell you're turning 25
1. the thing you're most looking forward to is the drop in your car insurance
2. you start lying about your age
3. you think the new music on the radio is garbage
4. you start analyzing every aspect of your life
5. people begin addressing you as sir/ma'am
6. you wonder if you should begin using those anti-aging products you see in commercials
7. you remember meeting someone four years ago who was 25 and thinking they were insanely old and now. . .
8. you want to feel "all put together" like an adult. . . but you don't
9. social pressure really starts to lose its effect
10. you've started a blog
11. you make sure someone knows your funeral instructions
12. they start playing the songs you listened to in high school on the oldie's station
13. you worry about turning 30
14. you worry about turning 40
15. spending the evening home alone watching a dvd sounds pretty appealing
16. you can no longer pull an all-nighter without feeling sick
17. concealer doesn't go as far as it used to
18. you start recognizing symptoms of alzheimer's in yourself
19. making goals and life plans consumes your thoughts
20-24. lists with more than ten points bore you
25. you get mistaken for your TEENAGE SIBLING'S PARENT!

Monday, February 2, 2009

monkeys, bananas, and princesses

when i was in the fifth grade i went to a birthday party for a girl in my class. i didn't arrive early or anything, but we were still waiting for people to arrive before the festivities could begin and a couple girls were playing a video game. i grew up in a house where we didn't have video games and i never really had any interest in them whatsoever, so when one of the girls handed me the game controller i handed it to someone else. she played for awhile but when she finished she asked who wanted to play next and somehow i was nominated for the position. i told them i didn't know how to play but they put the controller in my hands and left, and suddenly i was struggling through a maze that quickly became the only video game i have ever played.

now, i've played the wii and guitar hero in the last few years, but i don't consider those actual video games. a video game by my definition has a controller with a bunch of buttons and a cord leading back to the console. you know, regular old nintendo-playstation type games. so. back to the story.

this game might have been a mario game. i'm not really sure, but i remember a character and i remember something about trying to get to a princess, which for some reason reminds me of a mario game. i might be crazy though. like i said, no video game experience. there were monkeys. that i remember. they were the bad guys. and there were also bananas. i don't actually remember the role of these bananas though. possibly they gave you extra points. possibly they made you slip and fall. who knows. it was along time ago.

what i do remember is that this video game consisted of me moving a character (maybe mario, maybe someone else) from screen to screen in an attempt to get to a place i couldn't see or visualize or even begin to comprehend while simultaneously trying to dodge evil monkeys. this proved too difficult a task for me as no one had explained how the controller worked. i only knew the arrow buttons, as even the evil monkeys probably could have figured that out. i moved my guy forward and when a monkey would appear i would send my guy running in the opposite direction. this worked for a few seconds cause the monkeys paced back and forth a few times before coming after him. but eventually they always walked into my guy, causing him to fall off the screen and lose one of his very limited number of lives. i played a couple times, experimenting with different buttons, and i did learn how to make him jump. up and down. very useful. but in the end i never made it past the second screen. i never got to see where i was going which, as evidenced by the fact that i'm even writing about this, has haunted me to this day. i am a person who needs closure and in my mind my little mario is still hanging out on the first screen running away from the monkeys and getting nowhere.

i do remember this for another reason though. i think, at some level, this game has come to represent how i feel about life. some part of me feels like i'm the one who is running back and forth and jumping up and down, out of breath and not getting anywhere. another part of me feels like i'm still sitting there, pressing random combinations of buttons, and growing frustrated because i have no idea what i'm doing and why the heck didn't someone tell me how to get past the monkeys! there's a princess in there somewhere but i have no idea where she is and finding her is proving to be impossible because i can't even get past the first few steps of the game. big sigh.

if i played the game today, i'd probably be able to figure out, after much jabbing of buttons, how to jump forward and over the monkeys. i'd probably even pass the first few levels. but then i'd get bored and quit and the game would take on a whole new meaning for me. it'd probably haunt me because i'm a quitter and can never stick to my goals. probably video games can be likened to many aspects of life. but i wouldn't really know. i only ever played the one. and i didn't even like it.