George Banks and the Non-Hallucination

Libby and Emma were playing in my closet today. While Emma was staring through the crack in the door waving to me while we both yelled "Hi! Hi!" Libby was having "a shoe fashion show!" She really likes my high heels, several pairs of which are what Justin refers to as my "streetwalker shoes." I always laughed at this, almost taking it as a compliment, because he says that about any really fabulous specimen of shoe.

But today, as Libby modeled my metallic silver heels, the black pointy stilettos which my family refers to as "Witchy shoes", and the black boots which reached mid thigh on her, I wondered if my immediate facial expression was similar to the one my parents gave me the first time I came home in those awesome pointy heels.

Of course I was seventeen instead of Libby aged. But I gained some empathy for my parents preference of conservative shoe choices.  Cause Libby, Libby looked (how do you say?) ummmmmm WOWZA! in those shoes. it was a shock to my system. She really like my streetwalker shoes. A lot.

I had this vision of George Banks sitting wide eyed at the dinner table, only it was my own face.
Next she'll be saying, "I met a man and he's wonderful and he's brilliant and we're getting married!"Except that our Liberator isn't twenty two. She's six.  And that was for real.

Perhaps in my current residence, I should advocate more conservative shoe choices. If Libby is this way with my shoes, there's no telling what will happen to Little Lemonade.

It's been One Week!

( since you looked at me, cocked your head to the side and said I'm angry! Five days since you tackled me, said get that together, come back and see me. Three days in the living room, I realized it's all my fault but couldn't tell you, and yesterday you just smiled at me, but it'll still be two days til we say we're sorry!)

What? You mean you don't want the lyrics of the best Barenaked Ladies song ever? Weird.

This first week of North Carolina has been quite interesting. And I have a lot of semi-related thoughts that just aren't gonna be such a cohesive thread at 1:25 a.m. So get ready for the whirlwindish, late night, slightly inarticulate version of me. Speaking of which, here is story number one!

Ahem. Story Number One.

I need a desk. And I have been faithfully looking at thrift stores all week, a search which has yielded nothing of any desk value, although I did find an extremely fabulous pair of Shiny Silver Heels at the goodwill, the kind Justin would call streetwalker shoes.I bought them for three fifty and felt extremely pleased with life. Now if only I could find my dang dress which would go perfectly with them. You know, the dress, the one single item I couldn't find and left behind in Utah. See? Tangent. The point of that was that I was out desk hunting with Erin this morning at garage sales and thrift stores, and when I tried to tell her something about this one desk, I found my brain suddenly blank and uncooperative. At this point, my tired, cranky, headachish self said, "Erin! I am so inarticulate!"
She told me that inarticulate people wouldn't probably call themselves inarticulate. Whatever. I still don't know what word I was searching for.

Story Number Two

I got a job today! Tashma! I didn't quite make it out of the food service industry as was my goal, but I did get hired within the first week of moving, which was my goal. And they are gonna let me work full time and train me as a supervisor right from the off, so I'll take it and be giddy. So I am starting work at McAllister's Deli on Monday. Snap!

Seriously, world. Can't tell you the amount of panic versus the amount of relief swirling around in the pool of my emotions. It was getting ready to be Hurricane season. Now it is pleasant and warm, sort of like Lake Michigan.


Story Number Three!

Libby was watching me fill out an application this morning and said, "You're a Robinson?" Yep, I said. "No you're not! You live here now, you're a Newton!"

Whilst I shall not so casually give up my Robinson status, I do like my Fig Newtons an awful lot, and I'll be one of them gladly. I miss my Utah people a huge amount. But there are worse things than to have Emma yell "Hi!" and run to you with outstretched arms in the morning, or catching  "Flierfies" with Liberator, or playing email tag with Ben, or going to Walmart in the middle of the night with Erin. Kay, family. This is a good story. Can't you just picture this happening to Erin and I in the middle of the night?

So we are grocery shopping, right? And it is late. But we both have a craving for, shall we say, recreational calories. So we tromp around for a while discussing all manner of foods and finally settle on Blueberry toaster streudel. And after a few mishaps with a spilled carton of kiwis and actual crawling around on the floor of a Walmart, we got outta that place and drove home. So there we were, in the driveway unloading groceries from the trunk in the darkness, when my foot is smacked by a flying glass jar of pickles! And it surprised me, and it hurt a lot, and I was just processing this when there is another crash! And down on the driveway shatters our jar of salsa verde! The one we stared at last time we went, the one we got this time and talked about and got excited for! SMASHED! All over the driveway, and on us.

Exciting.

So there we were, cleaning up a mixture of salsa verde and glass with paper towel and a flashlight when Erin slices her finger open. And then it was a Christmas colored mess. And we decided it was lucky that my foot broke the pickle's fall, even if it was a painful surprise. I am pretty sure the smell of salsa verde and dill pickles would not be appetizing.  We finally got it all cleaned up and went inside to eat our toaster streudel in the wee hours. And that is how it's done!*

Also. I never finished the whole blogging about the epic roadtrip of my life endeavor. Sooooo!
Coming soon to a blog near you:

Roadtripping with Daddy, including but not limited to,

• Panera Bread excursions, aka the best carbohydrates I ever put in my mouth
• That one time I knocked the car into neutral with my knee and we thought Jed's transmission fell out on the freeway
• Church sites galore. It was awesome.
• How I randomly run into Brighton Staffers spanning the country.
• Dad and his Stamina/ Amy tanks and falls asleep and
• Quotebookage
• How dad is the nicest man on the planet when you are sick 
• Radio Koolaid and Muppet Manners

Mazeltov. Also, look at the time stamp and don't judge.
(And here is my addendum. That time stamp runs three hours slow. Heads up. 12:43? Not so much an acceptable time for such rambling. 3:43? That's more like it!)

*As long as you don't want song lyrics, do you want Hot Rod quotes? (Ancestors protect me!)

Sometimes

you dive off the deep end and move across the country without a job, and the job search is making you stressed, and then your two year old niece come and puts her little arms around your neck and presses her slightly sticky nose to your cheek until you stop typing and kiss her.

And you stop panicking for a second. Bliss.

Boom! Winning!

 It's an Epoch in my Life. Schenectady has been accomplished. Proof!

I felt like death warmed over in this picture. I am faking healthy, but I was really happy.

"What's so funny over there?" "You are." "What's funny about me?" "Your face."

I tried to lay on the ground for this one but Daddy said no. Go figure.

"Dad, we went to Schenectady cause we are big kids and we can!"
"Really? Is that why we went?"
" Yep. That's why."

While we're at it, let's share some other highlights from the Quote Book of the Roadtrip of Epicness.
These gems all came out of Dad's mouth.  ("I am not even joking! I'm really not kidding!" Name that redheaded nephew.)

" You know you're in trouble when you search for salad bars and all you come up with is Dairy Queen."
"You're a brat. Most of the time you're a cute brat, but you're always a brat."
and the crown jewel:
"Sewer rats do not drive Porsches!"

It's been a good week. 

Better or Worse

Hey everybody, I am moving across the country tomorrow. Wait a tic! It is two in the morning and I am moving across the country today! (Hullo! Breathe deep!)

I am a creature of mixed emotions.

Erin asked me the other day, "So are you ripping your heart out a little bit every night?"
Absolutely that is a dead on accurate description. Ripping, for sure.I said the first goodbye today when the Banks family left for a camping trip. I think that one I did okay with. Justin and I are veterans at this separation thing. But then Matthew cried and it made the hole in my heart tear a little deeper, and I wonder how I will handle it when I have to leave for real. It will physically hurt to leave behind all these people I love and adore and need. I know this, because it already does. There's this weird feeling in my chest that won't go away, and it is uncomfortable, and unceasing.

At the same time, the feeling is precious. It means I have something to leave behind. It means I have something to come back to. And I think it means I am willing to go off and find something just as good because my Father told me to, and that makes the pain in my chest seem like a promise instead of just an ache. It will get worse, I think, and stronger, both the difficulty and the hope. I have this feeling that if I can just make myself get in the car and drive away, there will be things waiting for me at the end of this three thousand miles, and it is exactly where I'll need to be.

It's kind of a miracle, really. Someday where I am going is the place it will hurt to leave, and I'll know just the same that I need to go find something new, for better or worse, and maybe just both. Because happiness comes from better and worse, and it's only exciting to live because we get to ride the swells between the better and the worse.

So tomorrow, I am getting in my car and driving away. And it will hurt, and I may find myself in the middle of a state where I know four people filled with terror pretty soon, but it will be okay. It will even be really good. Cause terror is good for us sometimes, and the more uncomfortable things are in the moment, the better the story sounds later. As much as I love comfort, I'd like to have some good stories when I die.


A ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not what ship are made for. Here we go.

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.