Concentric Thinking, Girl Style

I think that most of the writing I post nowadays is more storytelling and less how I feel and what I think. I used to do that a lot more. I miss that. I wonder what happened to make the pendulum swing this way. Did I have more stories than usual? Maybe. Did I stop thinking and feeling? No, that didn't happen. In fact, I think and feel so much about what happens in my life and during those epic storytelling moments that I can't even talk about it, let alone mold it into some internet share-worthy form.

Is that bad? I think and feel so intensely that I have trouble explaining these things to myself and getting responses back. I have a hard time saying what I think. I never really had trouble doing that before. Ever. I was pretty good at forming opinions and stating them clearly up until this point in my life. Ask my mother. Ask the siblings who got stuck with me. Ask the teachers I had conversations and occasional shouting matches with. Read my lit analysis papers. I've got opinions.

But lately I have trouble saying them. I can see the other side and say, I think you could be right. Maybe this isn't an issue of absolutes like I thought it was. Maybe there is good in this other side too. My feelings are twisted and complicated like they haven't been in years. There are certain things in my life I feel absolutely certain about. My feelings are unshakeable and solid. And those are the things that really matter, so I am probably doing alright. But so many other things leave me floundering. I am left unsure of my opinion, afraid of saying something that will be wrong, afraid of supporting something that isn't completely good.

Probably I just need to practice more, right? Do you all know about the beauty that is Emily Series and the resulting tradition of the Jimmy Book? My sister Erin is my very own cousin Jimmy and buys me blank books, which ends up being less a list of here's all what I did today and more a  mural of blurred emotion in word form. It's cheap therapy. The problem is that sometimes it helps me think clearly and other times makes everything two hundred times more complicated inside my brain.

My therapist of old might have something to say about all this. I probably wouldn't want to hear it.
I give up thinking clearly today. Maybe I should post some Jimmy book excerpts and call that an internet-share-worthy form of writing. Chalk it up to double tasking and wait for a more structured time of life when I don't feel hopelessly jumbled.

hmmm. Jimmy book prose, coming soon. I think.

Guys, guess what!

Remember last summer when I wrote a post about how my life was visiting the Oprah Show and getting a flash makeover? One year later, we've upgraded to Extreme Makeover. Pull out the big guns. Sorry, Oprah, but it's a bigger deal than even you.

Some things have changed since that last time when everybody was stressed and running around like a herd of chickens without heads. This year, I am worrying less about packing up the Newton Family's life and dropping it into another state and worrying more about packing my teensy little car and dropping my own life three thousand miles away. Dropping it, plopping it, like a house on Munchkin Land. The trick, I am finding, is not getting squished like the wicked witch I sometimes feel like. ( Seriously. I get shrewish and shrill and I even wear stripey socks. It's a problem.)

Ahem. So there's my update. I am moving in two and a half weeks and basically flipping out. I am figuring out school and insurance and rotating my tires and breathing deep under the burden of extreme neurosis.*

The most difficult part is that I can't visualize what my day to day life will look like when I move. I haven't found a job or made a class schedule and I haven't actually been there, so basically everything past August third is a blank in my brain. I will know four whole people, and everyone else I love and adore will have to be a skype effort. My list of long-distance relationships is already a lot longer than I would like, and it is about to get tripled! It's a daring, terrifying, adventure!

So the plan is to continue being a chicken with no head and concentrate on organizing my life, packing all my crap in boxes or my car, saying goodbye, and getting there.

This is gonna be really hard, and really good. The goodbyes hurt to think about. And the adventures sound like jumping off a cliff. And I think it will be good for me. Right? Of course right!

(This is the part where I wake up at three in the morning with a musical playing in my head. "I promise you'll be happy, and even if you're not, there's more to life than that! Don't ask me what.)



*Everybody knows I get real crazy when I am stressed and feel out of control, right? I have recently discovered that I cannot, cannot sleep if either of my contacts is upside down with an air bubble, there in the case where I can't see it. They must both be totally submerged in the same direction. I think I need help.  Can I get an amen?

Life described through the lens of the Youtube game

My emotions are currently all over the place and somehow settled firmly in the happy corner all at once. It's an odd mixture of Hall and Oates, Joshua Radin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.* Overall, it just feels like a smile.

* (" I finally feel like I know what Lionel Richie's been singing about all this time!" Name that Friends episode. Also, go Janice!)

It was getting pretty serious there for a minute. Had to throw in some Maggie Wheeler as comic relief!

Mad Hot Words

Once upon a time this week I was driving with my dad and he said to me, " Where the Hell do you think you're going?!" (I was taking Bangerter, obviously..) And I said to my dear brother, sitting in the front seat beside me, "I love the fact that we are becoming a swearing family!"

Sounds sarcastic, right? Not so much. Deadly serious, actually.

Alex replied, with a characteristic raise of the eyebrows and wide eyed stare," Becoming?"

I was thinking about that today. We are not a perfect family. We have our own small rebellions and imperfections, including but not limited to, messy basements, dramatic twenty person conversations, and a tendency to drink more caffeinated liquid than our family health history recommends. My favorite of these is the occasional casual cussing.

Let's be perfectly clear. I consider this a family matter. I was taught to swear by the fine example of my older siblings, specifically Erin. Further, (perhaps damning) evidence is contained in the following justification for swearing, offered by Erin to me at a young age. " Those ones don't really count. Grandma said those. She said to me, "Those aren't swear words! Those are mad hot words!"

According to Grandma, "Mad Hot Words" are all damns and hells. Not swearing. Grandma said so, so I guess it is allowed. Free pass! Snap!

I got home from work tonight and was nursing one of those headaches that is less a headache and more a stabbing, blinding, incessant pain behind one eyeball. Still worked up from the epic argument with a shrewish customer, I said tiredly while hugging my mother, "Oh, Hell."

Instead of giving me a dirty look and telling me some mommish thing about how that language was not allowed, mom half smiled and said, "How did I end up with daughters who swear?" And, gesturing to Alex upstairs, "And a son!"

Simultaneously shouted Responses to her query were as follows:
" Don't worry, Aunt Debbie. I could probably cuss way worse than any of them."
" Whoa! Remember all the times you swore at us? Yes, you did!"
"Mom, sometimes swearing just makes life better."
" Damns and Hells don't count!"

We are wonderful, refined people. Yes, we are.

Announcements! What a terrible way to die!

Hey everybody! I have been sort of absent from the blogosphere lately, due to an exorbitant amount of participation in actual life. I had all these half formed thoughts in the form of half typed posts that I never published, and I didn't really think a whole lot about it. And then Erin the Carolina sister said to me the other day, "Milla, what is going on with your life? You haven't been blogging and I feel like I don't really know what's up with you."

I am used to my siblings telling me to blog, but I didn't know it was such a vital form of communication. I didn't realize it was such a catalyst for insights into my soul. I never really posted all those old posts I had half finished because it was all stuff that happened forever and a half ago. But I guess it is necessary. So get ready for some past tense posts as well as an increase of presently happening posts, posted in no particular order.  There is some adventure telling, coming shortly.

Mazeltov.

Remember Dopamine? Me too.

My brain has been releasing happy chemicals at breakneck speed, basically all day. Setting aside that three hours at work where I couldn't decide whether I wanted to go all shrewish up in there or have an emotional breakdown, I realize that the rest of the day was filled with emotions on the extreme opposite of the spectrum.

I hugged Libby today. I played peek a boo with my Little Lemonade. I had my hair stroked by my lovely sister Erine the Deevine. I drove home with Ben in our little car. Remember the Fig Newtons I haven't seen since Christmas? yep, that'd be them. Maybe tomorrow I'll see them for more than twenty minutes and then who knows what I'll do with myself!

There was also some cheesecake and a belated birthday gift. It was pretty great too.

Trumped

My life has consisted of some straight up awesomness of late, and it is gonna get a whole lot better.

For example:
James throwing boomerangs while I duck with Matthew. We proved that a boomerang can be smacked with a flip flop in midflight.  "That law of physics has been tested!"

Stealing Matthew's nose, a game that was followed with shrieking as we stormed around the house like five year olds. I love that boy.

Roadtripping with my siblings! We saw the GRAND FREAKING CANYON and a solar eclipse turn red on top of a forest fire, and we fed a tiger and got really really sunburned and watched a whole heap of Marvel movies and ate copious amounts of cheesecake. It was probably one of the best weeks of my life.

Working full time. I probably made a thousand plus pizzas single-handedly this week. Love it.

Hiking up to the Timpanogos caves with Daxx Orion Stryker, who talked our way into the cave tour even though it was sold out and we didn't have tickets. Like a boss.

Sleepovers with Amy and Mark, who made me oven smores and soothed my ruffled spirit and gave me lots of dating advice. Mark is a champion at dating advice. Works like a charm, every time.

Crowning Glory:
MY FIG NEWTONS ARE COMING HOME TOMORROW! Which means that it is exactly twelve hours and twenty six minutes until their plane is scheduled to land and then I can hug them all to my heart's content.  Quote bookage from some very excited aunties: "You know what would make it all better?" "What?" "Snuggling with Lemma." " Mmmhmm."
 And that is just the morning! The evening hours are scheduled to indoctrinate previously mentioned Daxx Orion Stryker with the wonderfullness that is the Phantom in Purple Spandex. Basically, it's gonna be a good day.

Your day might be good, but mine will probably still trump it. Life is "Fantastic!" Boom Roasted. 

One Week!

One of my favorite songs by Barenaked Ladies, One Week is also the amount of time left until Erin and the Girlheads will once more reside in this time zone. Oh hey, internet, did you know all the Newtons are coming to live with me this summer and I get to share a room with my nieces?  I'm a little excited. (Read: Yelling about it while I'm awake and dreaming about Emma and Libby while I'm asleep.)

However, the panic is also setting in. I have to clean my room.That tornado of stuff is not currently a suitable child habitat. I have to get everything ready! I have to finish the dresser and I have to make posters or something and I have to find the play pen which suddenly vanished and I have to find a place where the crayons will be accessible! I've got to find that fan so Erin and Ben don't suffocate in that furnace we call the yellow bedroom. Basically, there's a lot to do and I am running on a totally unstructured schedule and I have to get going and get it done so the whirlwind of my brain can settle and let me think again.

On that note, everybody listen to Barenaked Ladies, which is what I will be doing whilst I whirlwind around cleaning everything! Happy June!

Epiphany

I just got done trying really hard to write something brilliant and failing, and then it struck me. Of course I can't write anything worth an editing exercise. It is 1:23 a.m. Why the hell am I still awake?

Maybe I'll be more talented if I start sleeping. I hope.

My apologies, siblings dear. That's all I've got for now. I have to be unconscious now.

(side note: I had to use my computer spell check to realize there is an s in unconscious. What is happening to me?)

Per your Request

Day One, Fall Semester. See Shakespeare over there? Mom told me it was a hazard to sleep in public places. Thankfully, this is a rather more amusing result than the one she was thinking of.

This was actually a creepy story. There I am, asleep between Shakespeare and Lit Analysis, when I am suddenly jolted awake. I look up at the strange man who has just woken me, and listen to the first statement out of his mouth: "Hi, I just took a picture of you."

Uh....how do you say? You are a creeper.

But it was okay. It was just for the newspaper. So I groggily signed the thing he thrust at me and went to class. I came home the next day to my roommates looking at my picture and telling me I am a pretty sleeper. And then I went to church and my Bishop came up to me and asked if I had been getting enough sleep cause he saw me in the newspaper asleep. Also cause I nodded a bit during sacrament meeting.

So what do you think, world? Do I have narcolepsy or am I just a college student? I don't really know. I'm too distracted by my awkward sleeping leg to really form an opinion.