In fact, I have almost attacked people who have said those very things. Not believing in the fundamentals of the theory of evolution is like not believing the fundamentals of gravity: if you jump off a building, you're still going to fall.
Go ahead! Jump!
Anyway. I digress.
In my job, I encounter many different people. MANY. And every week, I like to compile a list of people who evolution should remove from the gene pool. And by list I mean I like to think about it. Who has paper anymore anyway?
This week, I've decided that human evolution has failed because there are people who:
1) Don't know their own phone number. WHO the HELL doesn't know their own cell phone number? There are only a few viable excuses for this, which include advanced Alzheimer's and a strange fear of 7 or 10 digit numbers. But even then, just put the 1 in front of it, and it's 11 numbers! PROBLEM SOLVED! What if Matt Damon asked you for your phone number? What then?
Imagine this man...
Asking THIS question.
2) Have their zumba instructor/clandestine lover/5 year old child write letters of reference for them. That is suspicious. There's NO ONE ELSE who would recommend you? The only people who think you're a swell enough person to write something nice about are someone you interact with only when sweating, when cheating, or someone completely dependent on you for life? How about I have my dog write my letter of reference. She thinks I'm awesome.
3) Spend 20 minutes telling me about every detail of their lives in order to come to the conclusion that: "I need to set up an appointment with someone to clean my teeth". I don't need to know about your last bowel movement, when and where you contracted the clap, and that you heard that dog's saliva is more sanitary than human saliva. Just tell me what you want.
I feel like this sometimes.
4) Have no concept of how awful they are. These are the people that always assign blame to someone else, and assume that nothing they do or say is wrong, ever. Usually I want to tell those people that they come from *enter city name, USA*, not Mount Olympus, that they are eating McDonalds, not manna that has been rained upon them from the heavens, and that no, they do not in fact shart unicorns.
Really? Cause I'm pretty sure you're 5. And that makes you better than no one.
If you are guilty of any of these, please - tell me why I'm insensitive in the comments. Also, if you would like to tell me how science is all malarky trying to make us stray from the path of God, post it in the comments. If you think I'm right, feel free to counteract the negative comments from the first two groups of people and redeem my self esteem. In the comments.
Also, today I had to get shots. So while they were stabbing me, I pictured myself riding a pegacorn, eating bacon.
The past 2 weeks or so, I have optimistically set my alarms (there are 3 of them, that go off at a time ending in "3", and then 7 minutes later, and then 3 minutes after that. So I give myself 10 minutes to wake up) to an early enough time to get up, get ready, and ride my bike to work.
So far, I have failed. Either the outside is too cold, or rainy, or my bed is too warm or my house doens't smell NEARLY enough like bacon for me to get out of bed.
See that cereal right there? NOT GOING TO CUT IT.
Well, Monday of this week, I left my house at the usual time, and got to work 10 minutes late. BOO. Traffic.
Yesterday, I left my house 20 minutes early, and got to work 10 minutes late. BOO! TRAFFIC!!!
So as I was sitting in my little carlet yesterday,
Isn't he cute? I need to make mine look as nice as this one. Also, almost every purple 2001 Hyundai Accent I could find was almost unrecognizable because it had been tricked out by someone. Really? On a car with a 4 cylinder engine that sounds more like a sewing machine than a motor vehicle?
So this morning, when I woke up, instead of rolling over and snuggling deeper into my comforter, I rolled out of bed and got to work. I threw some leggings on under my dress and a slip in my purse for when I got to work, and headed off.
Things I noticed on my way to work that I didn't know about that particular route before:
1) There is a house that sells fresh eggs. I want some.
2) There are exactly 11 llamas on the llama farm I pass. And when you make chubacca noises at them, they all look up with the same quizzical expression on their face. I could just imagine them as a greek chorus, speaking in unison: "HARK! What foul mouthed gliding beast is this?"
3) There are cows in one of the fields I pass. Like, cows I never noticed before. Cows are big. How did I overlook cows?
4) The organics food stand is quaint and I want to buy breakfast there. Except they're not open yet. BOO.
5) When you bike past people who drove past you 10 minutes ago, everyone gets agitated. Like that moment in Office Space when an old woman with a walker passes you and you're in your car....
When I was in Armenia, I got sick. Like, SICK. So very, very sick. It was like I had been unknowingly accosted by some acid demon from hell. One that took up spiky residence in my stomach, and simultaneously shoved acid spears up my esophagus and down my intestines. And every time its acid spears would find some untouched bit of flesh, something not charred by its infernal torture, it would jump up, latch on, and slowly rip up the flesh.
This is remotely what I picture:
Anyway, that's what was happening on the inside. And on the outside, I alternated three distinct states of being.
1) Curled in a ball somewhere dark and secret, silently chewing on the inside of my mouth to try and distract my mind from the pain. I figured target confusion would work. I was wrong.
2) Expelling food and drink items from one of my orifices in randomly digested states
3) Traipsing around outside being angry at everyone and everything.
So after a few weeks of this, came The Night. The most DRAMATIC NIGHT OF MY LIFE. Yeah. I said it. And getting that status isn't something easy, let me tell you. I've had some DRAMA FILLED NIGHTS. But this...... this takes the proverbial cake.
Which cake is a whirling mass of bile and hatred.
But anyway, let me tell you how it went.
After a long day spent in state #3, me and my current companion came home for the evening. We had a few things to do before we went to bed. This was my participation, roughly, in the evening's activities:
1) Call the district leader and tell him about our day. The conversation went something like this: "We raged around and taught people crap and Sister Smith didn't let me talk. Cool?" I'm exceptionally pleasant when ill. :)
2) Planned. I contributed little tidbits such as "why don't we change that one tiny detail you let me have control over, while all the really important decisions are made by you. Goody! You even want control over which snack I bring! Joy!"
3) Nightly prayers. I think I said something along the lines of "If you want to kill me tonight, that's cool. But let it be something where Sister Smith feels bad about it." Yeah, we didn't get along.
Then, I went to sleep.
My dreams in Armenia were always haunted with happy things. I say haunted because I was so unhappy and ill, that happy seemed to taunt me. Like food does when you're hungry. Bah. Jerk brain, taunting me with happy memories.
I woke up at around 11:30, and proceeded to state #2. After about an hour of that, I proceeded to state #1. I collapsed like some sort of twitching, gray unicorn on the couch, and began tearing at it with my fingernails. I eventually rolled, as dramatically as possible, onto the floor, trying to make as loud a thump as possible. (I wanted Sister Smith to see me miserable, and to lose some sleep so she would be miserable too). I pulled all the couch cushions on top of me, and twitched in a pile for a while. It felt like a long time, but it could have been like 5 minutes. Who knows, really.
This pain was so intense! It was like I had swallowed a stegosaurus, and as it struggled, its spiny back was tearing me up from the inside out. I was positive I was dying.
Slowly, I became aware of a pathetic, almost frankenstein-ish moan coming from somewhere in the apartment. I remember feeling totally taken aback - how DARE she moan, when I am in so much pain! Then I realized.... I was the one moaning. And I continued to do so. Making my brain focus on making the moaning louder was distracting it from the pain. I've heard people say "searing pain"... but this was like a struggling, wet, acid pain. Something cold and dangerous. Like face planting into a pool of someone else's bile.
Eventually, she woke up. I think she was afraid - the sounds I was making were more like a partially butchered hippo, rather than a human. But when she came out, I think she was frozen by the sight. A mass of olive green, corduroy pillows, at the center of which was a sweaty, half-dressed mass of exhausted pain and fury. I was probably something straight from her nightmares.
We called the doctor assigned to us, who happened to live in Ukraine. Jerk doctor, living thousands of miles away, telling me to get to a hospital. You can't even see me, I thought. You don't know! At this point, I stopped feeling so tragic. My brain had been given a task: locate a medical facility! OF COURSE! Why didn't I think of that?
We started gathering the things we thought were important for an emergency trip to a hospital in the semi-rural, isolated north of a third world country. Sister Smith thought of shoes, the cell phone, extra socks, and carby food items. As she logically filled her bag with the essentials, I decided a can of peas was absolutely necessary. Along with a bucket. And a slip. I'm useless in disaster situations.
We staggered outside and I remember being WAY too loud. Sister Smith kept trying to shush me and I was like "YOU DON'T KNOW ME! LEAVE ME ALONE!" I felt completely indignant towards her trying to help me walk to a taxi. We asked the driver to take us to a hivandanots - a hospital. He looked at me, and I think I was so moany and helpless by this point, he complied.
We drove to a relatively nice part of town, to a building that reminded me of Dick Tracy. I don't know why. We went inside, and a few nurses poked and prodded me and stuck a thermometer into my armpit. They proceeded to tell me that I had "mrselled". Basically, that my feet had gotten too cold, so now I was sick. I immediately saw these nurses as uneducated enemies, and I started flailing and yelling 'Mrsel goiutiun chuni!" Over and over again. "Mrsel doesn't exist!" They decided I needed to go the surgery hospital. I wanted nothing more to do with them, and I think they wanted even less to do with me, so they stuffed me into the back of a white hearse, whose walls were coated with a thick layer of visible infection. Sister Smith tried to talk to the driver about the gospel. I hated her so much in that moment.
We drove up to a crumbling, stinking, cement edifice that seemed scream "COMMUNISM!!! I AM THE SOLUTION TO ALL OF SOCIETY'S PROBLEMS!!! LOOK HOW UNATTRACTIVE AND STURDY I AM!!!!" We went inside, and I was laid on a rough cement slab jutting out from the wall. There was one light in the whole building, it seemed. And it shined directly on the face of an older armenian woman with too much eyeliner and not enough skin. She ran to get the doctor. I saw a few glowing specks coming toward me in the dark. As soon as they stepped into the light, I thought of Beauty and the Beast. The moment where she seems him for the first time. (Skip to 1:10) (It's in cantonese, PS).
Terrified, speechless, horrified by these men who were so obviously not doctors, but claimed to be. Belle sees the beast as the mangy, shadowy, awful incarnation of what once a man.
And that's how I saw the doctors.
They poked me through my clothes, then tried to lift my shirt. I screamed and pulled it down. I would not be defiled by these pretend doctors. They would not examine me. I faced the wall and curled into a ball. I think I started to cry.
They told us to follow them to a room.
We followed them up dark, sick smelling hallways and staircases, past the room that they called the "bathroom". Yup. There was only one. For the whole hospital. It reeked so profoundly of human waste old cigarettes, I got dizzy.
Around one more corner, down one more hallway. They asked us a question. I didn't understand.
"What?" I asked.
"They asked if we brought bedding."
I groaned. The "doctors" opened a door. The immediate smell of unwashed human flesh filled my nostrils. A room with 6 beds. Five of them already filled.
I turned to Sister Smith. "Hell. No." I was almost whispering in my determination. If I entered that room, I would probably get the plague. And bedbugs and herpes. And ..... so many other things.
After much protesting from me, we were taken down the hall, to talk to the hospital boss. That is his only title, considering that he was a fake doctor and probably a fake hospital director.
I refused to let them touch me. Sister Smith said I was hurting their feelings. I told her I didn't care. I wasn't going to stay there.
After a 3am phone call to the Mission President, I found myself in a taxi on my way to Yerevan, the capitol city. There was an actual hospital there with actual doctors. By this point, I was so stressed that I made myself worse.
It was blizzarding outside. And every 10 minutes, I had to stop the taxi to relieve myself on the side of the road. One end or the other. It just kept coming out. My own bile seemed to mock me. No real vomit came up - just the thin lining of my stomach. It seemed to say "HAHA! You can't even keep your own fluids inside of you! SUCK ON THAT!"
After a few more episodes of this, we decided to make use of my bucket.
I wedged it behind the driver's seat, and passed blood and bile into it for the rest of that night. 3 hours in that taxi. Vomiting and excreting the only fluids left inside of me.
When we arrived a president's house, which was a veritable mansion wedged in between two other mansions, probably inhabited by mafia members, we got out of the car. I stumbled up to the door, rang it, and waited. When President opened the door, I stood straight up, moaned "President, can you kill me with your priesthood?" and fainted.
And every winter, when it stops having color, when everything turns to shades of black and gray, we break up.
And it's a BAD break up. Like, we can't even deal with each other for months. That's how bad it is.
Well I'm here to announce.... the world and I are BACK in a relationship! It's warm, and sunny, and great outside.
I just spent an hour of quality time with the sun. Because love is really spelled T-I-M-E. And I LOOOOOOVE the sun. So I guess I spell it T-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-M-E.
So I'm sure you all remember this post, about the top 10 things I should be sorry about, but I'm not.
Since I seem to love lists so much, I thought I'd do a new list. A more reflective list.
Top 10 things I shouldn't be sorry about, but I am.
10) Buying hair extensions. I had them for almost 3 months, and they were great at the time, but that was amost $300. And I haven't used them since. And they're such a hassle, I don't know if I ever will. They're super heavy, and really hard to style (because the texture of the hair was so different from my own), and they gave me headaches. Looked fantastic though!
9) My summer job at Camp Abnaki. It was a great time, but it stressed me out to a level I had never been stressed before. I also acted really immature towards the end, and I regret that. Oh well. Live and learn right?
8) Not continuing Russian. I know, I speak Spanish and Armenian, but I still want to learn Russian. I wish I had kept going with it. It was one of the few classes I ever took that I actually enjoyed.
7) Getting restless with work. I like to be busy. And so when I'm not kept busy, I have a hard time. Always been an issue for me. I guess I shouldn't be sorry, because how many people have that problem? But yet I am. I feel guilty for even getting paid when my time isn't filled.
6) Not pleasing everyone. I went through phases of trying to make everyone happy. Turns out that makes you miserable. So now I live my life by the motto "I do what I want". And this is my theme song.
But I still struggle with it every day. I want everyone to like me and be proud of me. So it's hard when they're not. Or even worse, when people want me to do opposite things. BAH.
5) Not maintaining certain friendships. Yeah. People that don't appreciate me as much as I do them. I still wish I had worked harder with them. Even if it was mostly one-sided. I liked them. And my indignance has ended the relationship. Sigh. Everyone told me that was me "preserving my self-worth". Only recently have I figured out that my self-worth has nothing to do with anyone else.
4) Attending BYU. Most people seem to have a great time there. They "finally fit in" and "love being around people with their same standards". These people "finally fit in" because they're weird, according to the world's standards. I like people. I like people that don't believe the same things. They challenge me.
3) Being a jack (or jane?) of all trades, master of none. I can do a LOT of things. I can bellydance, tap dance, play the accordion, knit, crochet, speak spanish, swim, wakeboard, do the splits, sew, give public speeches, cook, bake, and do all kinds of other things. But I'm not EXCELLENT at any of these things. I wish I had stuck with certain hobbies and gotten really good at them. Like the violin. And swimming.
2)Letting people friend zone me. ALL. THE. TIME. I'm attractive. I'm engaging. I'm fun to be with. But mostly I let people friend zone me before there's even a chance of anything happening. I hate awkwardness. So rather than suffer through the awkward stuff to get to the good stuff, I just let people push me into the "friend zone abyss" before we get to that part. Worst part? I can't stop.
1) Coming home from Armenia. This is a decision that most people will never understand. And the few that do, understand why it was necessary. This is one of the MAJOR things I'm still sorry about. But I shouldn't be. Because of that decision, I learned Spanish. And it turns out, Spanish is taking me all sorts of new places.
So usually I wait to blog until I have something interesting, bizarre, or intelligent to say. Well, I don't know if the following will fit any of those categories, but as I've said multiple times before, if you don't like it, read someone else's blog.
So I went to see The Hunger Games this Saturday. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. When I saw the teasers and previews a few months ago, I was doubtful. Don't get me wrong, they certainly rile you up quite a bit. But it looked like a shoddy production from what I could see.
BLOWN. AWAY.
I don't pretend to be some sort of advanced movie critic, but here's the thing for me - I was 100% entertained 100% of the time. I knew how the story ended, since I read the books, but every part of the moviegoing experience was there.
I felt an agitating but not unhealthly level of anxiety for what would happen next. (Evidenced by my frequent change in sitting position).
I slowly grew to like the Katniss character (which I think was the goal; you're not supposed to like her that much at first).
I believed the character's motivations.
And I was rooting for the correct people. (One of the many reasons Avatar was flawed, in my opinion. I was rooting for capitalism the whole time.)
My only complaint was parts of the soundtrack... I'm not sure if I just didn't get it, or if it was off, but the music seemed oddly placed in some parts.
I fully plan on seeing it again. And again. And I think you should too.
So.... I'm not in the habit of sharing my dreams. But this one was too good to pass up!
Last night, I had a dream that was The Wizard of Oz themed. However, instead of taking place in a forest with a paved brick trail, it took place in the deserts of Egypt. And instead of the three well-known, lovable companions of the popular movie, my companions were: an undead mummy, a flesh-eating scarab whose life I accidentally saved, so he made a vow not to eat me, and a tiny dust devil that was sad he didn't have a body.
Let's just say I'm glad that the original took place in a forest.
