**sorry for the long break… i’ll explain later. for now, enjoy something i mostly wrote in march with some current stuff thrown in.**
haha, i wish i had this shirt!!
i grew up in a mormon family that attended church every sunday religiously (no pun intended). i have many fond memories from primary and sunday school, but mostly i remember hating my mother for subjecting me to a saturday night bath and sunday morning hair curling session. my sister ash and i had nearly identical haircuts when we were little. sorry, mom, but it was hideous. we both have brown hair that our mother kept to our shoulders with thick bangs straight across our foreheads. i hated when my mom would round me up in my sunday slip, plunk me on the toilet seat, wielding what i came to think of as a medival torture device: a curling iron. my bangs were so wide that it took three sections to curl all the bangs. my mother, i’m sure, had good intentions, but she often burned the tips of my ears with that effing curling iron and it was always uncomfortable knowing that a hot metal rod loomed just inches from my face. to this day i never use a curling iron, mostly because my hair is,as my bf jenn says “is straight as asian girl hair,” won’t hold a curl for longer than an hour.
torturous ritual aside, my mother did dress my sister and me in cute dresses with little pairs of tights. i have two distinct memories involving shoes. i had one pair that i called my “bert and ernie” shoes (a la sesame street) that were black and white… i think the actual name is saddle shoes or something, but i had a silly childish way of saying just about everything. i was very cute. haha. the other memory is more vivid and it resulted in me meeting the girl who would eventually end up one my very best friends, despite the way we met. oh yeah, and there’s one involving puke and a hallway, but i won’t elaborate.
i was very little, probably three or four years old and not old enough for primary yet. kids that age are placed in nursery while their parents attend their own meetings. i was playing on a plastic horsey that sat on springs so you could rock back and forth and up and down, much more exciting than the typical rocking horse. for obvious reasons i didn’t want to relinquish the awesome rocking horsey, but as i bounced along, two little girls my age came up to me. i don’t know why they wanted me to get off the horse or why they had decided to gang up on me, but even at that age i wasn’t about to take that shit. so i stuck out my petite patent leather mary janes and kicked the two girls. i mean they clearly had it coming. well, one of the teachers saw us fighting and the three of us ended up being punished– we had to clean the snack table. cruel and unusual if you ask me since i was obviously the innocent victim in the whole situation. one of those little girls, though, was shelbs.
kids have the memory retention of fruit flies, so i guess we somehow forgot about our fight and eventually became friends. over the years she and i stood out at our middle and high schools as, like, the only cool mormon girls, so we understood each other better than we did the “molly mormons” who we pretty much shunned outside of the walls of the church. we went to girls camp together. we walked together during high school graduation (graduates marched onto the football field in pairs). she eventually went molly on me (just a bit) by moving to provo, ut and meeting a return missionary. but when they married at the oakland temple i waited outside as her maid of honor, and only bridesmaid. someday when i get married she’ll be my matron of honor. now she lives in idaho with the potatoes and white supremists, but i hope she realizes how lame it is there and moves back here eventually. you’re done with college, so what’s the freakin hold up?
so, even though the missionaries came a-knockin’ at our door the other day (i peeked around the corner, immediately spotted the white shirts and black backpacks that scream mormon missionary, and pretended not to be home… sorry jesus.) most likely on order from on high to continue the campaign to get my parents to return to the fold, so to speak. i mean, we all know that we are in the right and the rest of the sheep are in the wrong, so until the church receives revelation from god or from inside a hat or behind a curtain, whatever you want to believe, our family will not return. although i quit going to church years ago, i see my parents coming up on one year of inactivity and feel sorry for them. or at least for my dad, mom was never into relief society or scrapbooking or making jell-o, so she was kind of regarded as a black sheep. my dad, though, had a lot of friends there, friends he had known for some thirty years. so to watch him give up his temple duties and give up a lifetime of friends over politics, important politics, but politics nonetheless, i feel sorry for him. i’ve been happy to see that some of those old friends of his have reached out to him for lunch or whatever and he returns with reports that they weren’t trying to convince him to come back to church. they just wanted to let him know that they still loved him and that they still considered him a friend. when your dad is retired and most days he only has a bratty pug, spoiled daughter, and over-protective wife for company, it’s nice to hear that he is loved by so many others.
yes, my dad is well liked. i love him very much. and when he came home today with forms to keep in the fridge for the evidently inevitable day when the paramedics’ ambulance will make a stop at our house to either zap his chest or… well, the other shit they do… well, i didn’t exactly love that. i have recently lost a little weight, but now that i am afraid to open the fridge the pounds are sure to melt off. best diet ever? not so much. nobody told me that getting older was gonna suck so freakin much. people say being old sucks, but nipping at the ankles of 25 sucks, too. your friends are getting married, having kids, graduating from college, starting carreers. and what am i doing? i’m avoiding the refrigerator.
ahhh, progress.
dans la 408 