Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

Mormon women's history moment of the day. I'll photoshop myself in later.

One of the social inventions of the last twenty years has been the quarter-life crisis. As education before career takes longer, living with parents becomes more common, and our society continues to prolong adolescence, those of us heading up on twenty-five start to realize...what the heck have I even done with my life? There are some people my age with careers. Some people with families. Some people have careers and families. I have...a series of interesting experiences. I have only semi-direction in my life. So now I'm trying to figure out how formal I want to make this crisis. Right now, I'm kind of even thinking about throwing a quarter-life crisis party in August (everyone wears businesswear and we watch My Dinner with Andre?). Right now, though, I'm still taking suggestions. One suggestion comes from watching How I Met Your Mother with Jen B. By which I mean The Murtaugh List. Those of you unfamiliar with the episode/Lethal Weapon movies may not be aware of the catch...

Having always wanted, but never read Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I shuffled off to my local Amazon.com and ordered book. Oh, what a fool I was! Six weeks later, I open it up and say, "Wow! This is a lot shorter than I remembered. Oh well." and started flipping through it. "Neat! Pictures!" How cool and graphic-novel-y and post-modern. After the first chapter it dawned on me. Nuts! I ordered the junior-high progressing-readers adaption! That's not to say, however, that I stopped reading. Something satisfying in reading a book in 2 hours. Still, I feel like I got the cliffnotes version. It probably lost a lot in dumbing it down (oh PLEASE tell me it was dumbed down), but it's a nice engaging story. In fact, this is probably a nice middle ground between cliffnotes and actually reading the thing. Junior high rocks!

I finished Robinson's Home , which has a nice, sad, hopeful, sort of melancholy ending and headed off to bed. Then I started thinking melancholy thoughts. Then I started thinking melancholy thoughts about myself. Then I felt really sad. Then my stomach began aching and I felt a little nauseated, so I got up for lemonade and crackers. I've managed to worry myself sick! (Unless I sicked myself worried, because some sort of cold is also going around.)

Man, I hope I die when the bombs start falling. Don't get me wrong: I'm not suicidal or anything, but I have been reading The Road. And Cat's Cradle. And I saw that Terminator movie. In fact, a lot of post-apocalyptic things have been coming across my desk lately and I'm not so sure I could handle that (living in the post-apocalyptic world, that is, not reading about it). It just seems really hard to be witness to the last sputterings of civilization, and right now I am so not in the mood. I'm good with hardship, actually. In fact, one of my companions noticed that the worse things get, the more cheerful I am. Over compensating, I guess. I like to think (wouldn't we all?) that I'd be good even in a "critical time:" Leningrad during the War, Nagasaki after the War, etc. I even thrive on short-term hardship (as far as I've been permitted to know it), because it's so hard-core, so, in Jamie's terms, "club." If I've got any re...

For those of you who don't know him, my dog Frodo is pretty incredible. (Those of you who do know him don't need to be told.) He's perfect for my family: super kind, not aggressive, more interested in people than other dogs, protective, friendly, warm-coated in winter, playful, and increasingly calm. This is incredible, especially when I think about friends of mine who have had dogs that were lacking in this qualities. This is even more incredible when you consider that he just followed me home. I'd wanted a dog for a long time, but ever since Kenny the Cat, the Hedengrens have been largely pet-free. Oh, my sister had a rabbit that I remember and there was a disastrous lizard ownership, but my parents were pretty much insistent that fish is as cuddly as we got around here. Once a straying dog had showed up at my parents' door while I was at school and it made them think, " hmm , dogs aren't that bad," but she got claimed by her owners soon afterwar...

When it started to be summer-y, I went out to the Rite-Aid and bought two types of sunscreen: the facial kind for everyday and the ultra-sweatproof, waterproof spray-on kind for fun in the sun. Even though there were plenty of only-half sunny days, I made sure to be careful with the sunscreen, avoid painful burn and melanoma besides. For example, today. I knew I was going to be out in the sun planting flowers for the fair city of Provo, so I put on my usual sunscreen, then also sprayed down my arms, legs and neck. I even sprayed down my part so my scalp wouldn't burn, even though I was planning on wearing my straw cowboy hat. I made sure to apply 15 minutes before going into the sun so that I'd be well protected. We planted for three hours, even though it only felt like an hour and a half. We planted literally hundreds of zinnias, dreamland red colored (which would be a good font color...), in a planter along Center Street. We worked past blisters and blisters popping and ...