Amen.

"What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal." -Albert Pike

All This Stuff

It is that time. That time at work when I have sufficiently (or so I feel) caught up on blogs, am not in the mood for Minesweeper or Harry Potter, have forgotten my crocheting at home, and am left with not much to do. That time when I am resorting to actually posting a blog of my own. That time where I may or may not have secretly logged onto Facebook to snag some pictures so my blog post isn't totally boring like usual.

This is how I feel about the structure of my life right now: fjaow48rjo;sjgsfy

Don't get me wrong, life is great. But I just feel like I don't have time for anything. I go to work for 9 hours (an hour lunch break) and then come home at 7. I spend my evening with Danner, which is excellent, but there is something about sitting in front of a computer being bored all day that exhausts me. So I am a bum in the evenings. (Thankfully Dan's been the same way lately so I don't feel too bad.)

But there are so many things I want to do!! Like....I want to get my sewing machine (shout out to the roommies for getting it for my birthday) out and alter this grandma dress into something cute:

I also have another dress I want to alter but am feeling too lazy to secretly get back on Facebook to find a picture of it.

I want to start making more headbands and master the art of beanie-crafting and actually get a blog or etsy up and running for a little side cash.

I want to make new recipes. I'm thinking about leaving my dinner group to make a mini-dinner group with Dan and his high school buddy/roommate Mason. I think that would be fun, and we'd get to make whatever we were in the mood for.

I want to finish painting my lamp shade. Thanks to Ash for the picture. It has three peacocks on it, and their tail feathers all flow down to create a giant ocean of feathers at the bottom. I've got it all drawn out, the bodies painted, and about a third of the feathers for one peacock painted. Those suckers take forever.



And I want to travel. Like I want to go places. I want to take road trips to random creeks and unknown (or at least rarely-visited) beaches and up huge mountains and just everywhere. I've recently gotten back into StumbleUpon (great cure for boredom at work) and some of the photos that I've stumbled upon have really given me the desire to go places. Here are a few samples:

But alas, my dreams of traveling will have to wait until I'm making bank. Which I'm not right now. However, I did apply to a new job at a place called Rise. Basically you hang out with kids/teens who have some sort of disability (like a severe learning disability, Down's syndrome, etc) or who are foster kids a few times a week. You help them do things like go grocery shopping, apply to jobs, or just do fun things like bowling. It's a lot closer to what I want to do for a career than answering phones all day. And this kid I trained a few weeks ago, Tim, used to work there and his cousin is the director. She personally emailed me the application and I have an interview set up on Monday. I'm really excited to (hopefully) get out of here but at the same time, change terrifies me.

But change is a big, big part of life. ;]

In The Words of My Mother, This Irks My Hide.

I googled that phrase ("this irks my hide") and it's nowhere to be found. Oh Mom and your Momisms. :]

Anyways. THIS is what irks my hide. Go ahead, click on it!

If you're too lazy to read it, these parents in Canada had an adorable little baby named Storm but they are keeping its gender a secret in order to promote freedom of choice and all that crap. This is what the mom said: "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...),"

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for freedom of choosing who you want to be and how to act, but I think this is a little over the top. This is what the dad had to say about it: "If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs." Yeah that's true, you don't ask that. But here's why it gets me.

In The Family: A Proclamation to the World, the prophets clearly stated:

"Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." So, not to be crude, but "what's between (our) legs" is definitely a huge aspect of what defines us. There are certain traits that come with being a male or a female and those are not things that are interchangable. Your actual spirit has either a male or female identity.

Normally I'd say, "Yeah, I don't agree, but do your own thing, hide your child's sex as long as you can." But they have two older boys who they let dress/act/everything however they want. These boys are 5 and 2. They choose to wear pink and they choose to grow their hair out long. So they look like girls and are often mistaken for girls. The 5-year-old has said that he does not like being mistaken for a girl and has asked his mom to tell people he's a boy. When he's called a girl, the parents do not correct the misinformed person because they think if their boys care, they'll correct them. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Though Jazz likes dressing as a girl, he doesn't seem to want to be mistaken for one. He recently asked his mother to let the leaders of a nature center know that he's a boy. And he chose not to attend a conventional school because of the questions about his gender. Asked whether that upsets him, Jazz nodded."

It just disgusts me. I admire the parents' ambition to make their children as free from the influence of the world as possible, but part of me (actually ALL of me) can't help but wonder how they don't see that it's crippling their children rather than helping them. To me it is so sad that a little 5-year-old is allowed to do whatever he wants and then is embarrassed as a result, and his parents don't do anything to help him speak up.

But that's just me.

So.

30 Days of Blogging kinda killed me. Also...whenever I blog it's usually at work and I don't have access to pictures here. Anyways.

I read some friend of friend's blogs and some of them have adorable little babies. However. They take the most AWKWARD baby pictures EVER. (Ash, sorry I know you love all that weird baby photo stuff but it just creeps me out!!) I will give $100 to anyone who calls me out if I ever do something like that with my precious kiddies. (And just so you know....that's NEVER happening.)

The other day I was talking with my friend Peter at work about how girls always say to each other, "Your skirt is so cute!" "Your hair is so cute!" "Your necklace is so cute!" I am guilty of doing this. And I don't know why girls do it so much, I just think it's funny. One thing Peter and I decided was that a lot of times when girls get off on the wrong foot or there is tension between them, they try to bridge the gap by complimenting the other girl. Also guilty of this. Funny how that works, huh?

Hrrmm....what else to blog about. Daniel? No picture. He is awesome, amazing, fun, hilarious, all of the above. And YES, I love him. :]

I get to go home next week for my brother's graduation! Little Travie growin up aahh!!! Speaking of which...HIS PAPERS ARE IN!!!!!! I super incredibly a ton infinity hope that his call comes while I'm home next week. That would be the most amazing thing ever. Keeping my fingers crossed but we'll see what happens.

Well, I have successfully cured myself of boredom for the approximately 4 minutes it took me to type this....now to make it through the next half hour of work until I go to institute with DAN. Maybe I'll eat something, that's always a great (horrible) fix when you're bored out of your mind.

11:11

MAKE A WISH!

Dan

I'd like to make an announcement:

I am running on about 45 minutes of sleep here, but I am happy. I am one of the girls who is lucky enough to be able to say she is dating her best friend. His name is Dan.

More on this later. :]

Pish Posh

Well, I am in the midst of studying for finals. More specifically, I am currently in the midst of studying for the final for my Foundations of Social Inquiry class.

The final is in 4 hours and it may or may not kick my butt, so I wonder why I am blogging. I just simply feel too distracted to study. I am at work.

Tomorrow is the last day of finals, and I have 3 left. My plan is to take the one this afternoon, cram-study and take my Social Psychology one tonight, and then take my Spanish one tomorrow.

I've decided to drop my Spanish minor. I want to become fluent in Spanish and the only things the upper-division Spanish courses will do is teach me about the literature and history of the Spanish language. So, if I drop my minor, I can then graduate in December 2011 instead of April 2012. I can THEN also for reals move to Mexico (remember when I told you all I was doing that?) through a program called ILP to teach English/improve my Spanish. One of my friends told me that you can get a Spanish Certificate from BYU...so I feel that living in Mexico for a few months + Spanish Certificate is just as good as a minor. End.

Well, lots of crazy things are going on in my life. As those of you who know me well may have guessed, many of these crazy things center around boys and I must just say it is stressful. But....it will all pan out. I just hate hurt feelings so I hope none of those happen.

Anyways...I just needed to distract myself for a few minutes. Hopefully I have the restlessness out of my system so that I can STUDY. Wish my luck. Ugh.


P.S. My Travie is in AFRICA.