This article on getting the truth from an interrogation could be an explanation for why there are different versions of Joseph Smith's first vision.
In contrast to what most people believe, truth tellers are more likely to add details and revise their stories over time, whereas liars tend to keep their stories the same. “Inconsistency is really just a fundamental aspect of the way memory works,” Meissner says.
So we haven't written on this blog in years, and we may never do it again. But we had some thoughts to share, we wanted to send out a New Year's card, and this is an easy way to do both. (We want to be Christmas card senders, but after this many years, let's face it—we're not). Enjoy.
I've never taken heat stroke or homesickness very seriously.
But a week or so ago, Claire was bawling behind me in her bike trailer. And I pedaled away—dizzy, nauseous, the works. One of us was probably going to pass out before we got home, so I found a place to stop: a cafe/bakery where people park their BMW's and pop
in for drinks, professional-looking omelettes, and designer cupcakes.
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| the trail where i often ride my bike with a little girl in tow. |
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| even when hiking, the princess swimsuit is her outfit of choice. sigh. |
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| no sign of heat stroke here. |
Claire had some difficulty adjusting to AZ. Our first week here, she decided to not sleep in her bed.
Shame on me. No pictures? Well, my hard drive croaked.
I feel like a hard-drive crash is something that only happens in theory, not in real life. Turns out, it's real. So go back up your photos. Right now. Then come back for my hearty hello from sunny Arizona.
Back already? Hello!
If you ever move to Phoenix in April, you may notice...
Storyteller genius, Donald Davis, says not to ask old people what they remember about their childhoods.
Instead, he says you should ask about their childhood home. Or their third grade classroom. Or the hard church pew they sat on every Sunday. In other words, if you want to retrieve a memory, access the location where it's stored. Open the door and go inside the space where it happened.
Since we've been married, we've gathered a whole collection of spaces.
And here we go again. Arizona. For a good job. To the place we will be when we make that final student loan payment before the end of the year. I will experience that victory in a sunny spot on the globe.
You wouldn't know it from all our gypsying, but we really hate moving. We had a sweet babysitting swap with some friends in the neighborhood. My sweetie girl has a crush on one of the boys in nursery. When we first boxed up my books last week, I cried.
And maybe I'm making too much of this, but I've been thinking about how we simultaneously live in the spaces by which we access those memories later. By leaving that space, we have to accept that another chapter in our lives has closed—those moments are now memories, and not the present. Time keeps moving and so do we.
I know which memories happened in this familiar space, but I haven't yet seen which ones happen in the new one. We always seem to fall in love where we're living, though, so I'm hopeful and excited. Each move, we're just as reluctant to leave as the last.
So here's to fabulous memories in new spaces. And here are some of my favorite images of the one we've just left—where things have been so happy, sometimes hard, and altogether wonderful. If some young whippersnapper ever asks me about that basement apartment I lived in down the street from the bakery, I'll say it was one of my favorites.
We're moving out of Utah. Utah is not happy with us.
I need to appear on Ghost Hunters, because the vengeful spirit of the pioneers is after me.
As soon as we decided to move, there was a snowstorm. It was as if Utah was a jealous girlfriend who couldn't handle the breakup. But her tantrum only made us more certain that we had made the right decision.
Now, there's brownish yellow water dripping from our bathroom ceiling. We called the lady who manages the place. She said they'd take care of it in the morning. Then she laughed, and said "have fun cleaning that up." Her indulgence in shadenfreude made me think she's one of those people who'd be happy working for the IRS, in telemarketing, or for Hitler.
The brown water is dripping onto our toilet. We have some fans set up, a bucket, and some towels on the floor.
I needed to use the toilet. So I grabbed a towel, and was considering using it as a hood to protect me from the drips as I did my business. But then I decided to fix the problem ghetto MacGuyver style.
With some plastic wrap and some scotch tape, I've redirected the drips so that they all converge onto one spot, into a bucket, instead of on my head.
I can now go do my business without having to get dressed in brown-water beachwear.
Take that, ghosts.
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| The only other plumbing I've done is in Super Mario. |
Last month, we pulled my desk out into our entryway to make me a tiny office amongst the bikes, the shoe rack, and our little wannabe lemon tree. It's actually a huge upgrade from my former office—which used to be the bathroom.
I'm writing in there. Finishing another draft of this novel has become a rollercoaster of panic and delight. Some days, I'm certain it won't turn into anything better than compost. Other days, I'm pretty sure I'm onto something beautiful.
My current deadline has turned me into a bit of a hermit everywhere in my life, including our little blog. (I've actually composed a few blog posts in my mind—how I worried about looking ridiculous playing peek-a-boo through my tinted car window at the gas station until I looked over at the next pump and saw a guy doing the same thing with his kid while his car was filling up—but none of them get written. Just the book. And stuff for work.)
And I realized this: I don't know how you creative people balance dream-chasing endeavors with the reality of motherhood and work and needing to shower. Thoughts? Suggestions?
Nobody's abandoned showering around here (promise), but if you come to my house, you'll see how much I've let other things slide. I like to think it's because I'm always reading books to my little girl, instead of doing chores. And while that's true some mornings, it does not entirely account for the state of my kitchen.
This has become my mantra these days: I have plenty of time to accomplish everything I need and truly want to do.
It's true. I say it if I start feeling overwhelmed, and often, I get a little clarity on what to focus on and what's not worth my time. No surprise that vacuuming often falls off the list. It never makes it into my "truly want" category. But if there's not time for it these days, does that mean I don't technically need to do it either? I'll be a hermit a bit longer, so maybe nobody will notice.
Especially not this girl, whose "truly want" list includes eating cookies on the carpet...
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| (photo by the lovely J. Lanae) |
I copied the internet. I made a 30 before 30 list.
And, boy, did I cross things off that list. I did 30 for-real push-ups in a row, bound a photo book for my baby, wrote a love song for my husband, and was well on my way to planning a scuba-diving trip and learning a nerdy amount of Latin verbs.
But last month—I threw out the list.
I'll tell you why. I read an article that I've thought about probably every day for a month now. I let myself imagine: What would life look like if I nixed my list and went with just ONE goal? What would that goal be?
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| And I'm not saying here what it is until it's finished. But you can guess... |
Starting week three of being unemployed.
I didn't know what to do with myself today. I've applied for dozens of jobs, and I'm sure a fitting position will open for me soon. But it was weird. I couldn't relax, or do things that I wanted to do, because I felt like I needed to get a job. But a job isn't something you can just reach out and grab. You have to wait for it. I have a hard time waiting.
I felt like a waste of space.
Then I read this Thomas Jefferson quote (I keep a Jefferson quote blog):
"I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps a little better."
"The Declaration of Independence."If it's ok for Jefferson to feel like a waste of space, then it's ok for me to have blah days as well
"I proposed the demolition of the church establishment, and the freedom of religion."
"The act prohibiting the importation of slaves."
I found my shoe. In the garbage. Thanks Claire.
Claire loves shoes now. She'll walk around in our shoes. She has learned how to say it and sign it.
She's also been saying and signing "daddy" for a few months now. Kathy thought she heard Claire say "mommy" today.
"You hear that," Kathy said, "I think she she said mommy!"
Claire said it again, gesturing toward a magnet on the fridge. A magnet of Ron Paul.
It kind of sounded like mommy.
This is the only picture from our tiny roadtrip last weekend, and it wasn't technically taken until we got home:
I usually save politics for my other blog. But this one was too good not to share:
It hit home with me, because I voted for Obama in 2008. I thought he would bring the troops home, shut down Guantanamo, and stop wire-tapping us.
When Claire drank from the toilet, it made me wonder: when was the last time I cleaned the toilet? Also, whose kid is that?
I know this girl who just does things.
What things? Like, anything you can think of. And when I hear about her newest project, I look around and think, Can you do that?
You can, apparently. Although I usually don't. Here's what she cooked up recently: The Billboard Poetry Project.
Yesterday was our 4th anniversary. We ate at Pizzeria 712 (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED). The food tasted like exactly what I wanted to eat, and left me feeling like I'd eaten the equivalent of a salad made of rainbows, because I felt so healthy afterwards. And they treated us like guests, honored guests. When we got home, Kathy sang me a corny love song she wrote on the guitar.
Today Kathy woke at 5:30am, got ready, and left. I told her it felt like the middle of the night. She's spending the weekend at a work conference.
We don't spend nights apart often. The last time I recall was a few years ago, when she went to Chicago to write.
Today I stayed home and took care of the baby. When Kathy called in the afternoon, I hadn't yet showered, and I told her that I felt like I hadn't gotten anything done. When she called this evening, I had showered, but still had not gotten anything done. I hadn't wasted my day, but I had spent the majority of it watching baby girl.
Kathy has a wonderful way of telling me I'm not worthless. And the way she says it, I believe it.
Kathy had a boyfriend in high school. I think we've now been married longer than they dated. And Kathy wasn't my first girlfriend.
But she feels like my first love. And I'm sure she'd feel the same. We had feelings when we dated our firsts, and heartache. But it wasn't as real as what we have now. It feels like a corny line from The Princess Bride. But what could this be called if not true love?
Before any of you start swooning and envying the wonderful thing Kathy and I have going, I'll give you a little bit of perspective.
I didn't date anyone until after my mission (mostly because I was awkward, but I told myself I was following the prophet). That's the equivalent of binding someone's feet to their butt for the first two decades of their life, and then untying them just in time to run the Boston marathon.
My college girlfriends could tell you stories that you would think they had made up.
I'll tell you one now.
My first girlfriend left for a study abroad. We had dated for a semester, and she would be gone for a semester. We emailed each other. I tended to notice how often she mentioned other boys. I was insecure enough back then that I let it get to me. So I broke up with her. You know. Over email.
Email is wonderful, but it is inadequate at clearly expressing the whole range of human emotions. And I guess it's a really jerky way to dump someone.
So a few phone calls, and many tears later (mostly mine), I found myself on the phone with my mom. Now, I don't know how she talked me into letting her do what she did.
My mom thinks I'm wonderful. I think I'm pretty wonderful too. She couldn't believe that someone would be so rude to me. Getting email dumped aside, you'd have to be an idiot to let me go. There are many fish in the sea. But I'm a like a magic narwhal, not a stinky fish. So when my mom asked if she could call my ex. I gave her the number.
I can only imagine how that conversation went down. My ex called me about twenty minutes later. By the tone of her voice, I got the impression that she thought I was mentally disturbed.
"You had your mom call me? Your mom?"
"More let than had."
Click.
So that was awkward.
Did you know BYU offers free therapy to students? Yeah. I'm really glad I discovered that before I met Kathy. Turns out I had a few crinkles to smooth out before I was perfect. Regardless of what my mother thinks.
