Sometimes I just wish I were a boy.

The other morning, my brother woke me up and showed off the beard he's been growing over Christmas break. And I became pretty jealous.

I mean, women can't grow beards. (Well, some can, but...not me. Seriously. NOT ME.)

And I just laid there in bed half-awake and thought about how nice it would have been to be a boy. I would have been able to grow beards, sport hairy legs without shame and pee in the woods with ease. (That last one has made me envious so, SO many times.)

Other advantages?

Well, let's talk about dating. Ratios? TOTALLY in guys' favor. Also, there's something about the female role in dating that's just so darn passive. Makes me crazy, really.

Also.

No. Periods.

Reason enough, eh?

Yeah. I thought so.

Which shows just how crude we really are:

Our family got the electronic pocket 20Q (twenty questions) game for Christmas. Last night, as we played the card game Phase 10 together, (also a Christmas gift to the family), my mom got the 20Q game out and started playing with it while waiting for her turn in the card game.

She tried several things (some of which it got, some it didn't) and then my brother suggested that we try to see if it would guess 'poop.'

That's right: poop.

Within a few questions we were all giggling like a bunch of third graders as the 20Q game asked seemingly innocuous questions such as:

Is it warm?
Do you hold it when you use it?
Is it colorful?
Does it get wet?

Seriously. We had trouble breathing. (In fact, I have rarely seen my mom & dad laugh so hard.) And when it finally got to the last question, the table nearly exploded in the uproar:

"Is it a poop (feces)?"

So, yeah. We freely embraced potty humor last night. Which, now that I come to think about it, is actually pretty cool.

(It's good to be with the family again.)

Happy Happy Christmas Morning!

This morning the four unmarried children in my family sat around the Christmas tree with our parents and opened gifts. It was lovely. Small, and intimate and lovely.

But for all of you who weren't here with us, I just wanted to send out a general: Merry Christmas!

Because I'm thinking of you too.

Have a wonderful Christmas day.

And I inspire people so rarely

Remember that 'yon candied maid' phrase? The one that popped randomly into my head a week or so ago?

Well, my friend Pat has done some awesome things with it. Well done, Pat. Well done.

And also, I'm still thinking of a way to make up for those two nights of no sleep, Pat.

Hmmmm...

(Oh, and also--I made it to Utah safe and sound, despite the fear of sudden death by turbulence on the way into the SLC airport. Pretty fun stuff, lemme tell ya.)

Oh. Well, goodbye, again.

I'm flying out tomorrow, you know. Probably leaving tonight on the T with my luggage, coat slung over one arm and an umbrella held over it all.

I'll be at the airport for a long time. Without internet access, is what I'm trying to say.

So I won't be able to blog or email you.

I'll just be...

Cut off.

But you'll be alright. Separation is most painful right at the beginning. And by the time you start to feel the pain of my being gone, I'll be right back in the seat of my computer chair, ready to tell you about my trip.

And about how good it is to be home.

Now, don't be sad; this is really pretty good!

I dreamed last night that I got married. I went through the whole process: putting on a white dress, dealing with an evil relative who was secretly plotting to break up the wedding (I think she was a wicked step-aunt; I don't think she was more closely related than that), repeatedly falling into the embrace of my intended...

You know. All the stuff you deal with as you go about your wedding day.

And let me tell you: it was really, really, really nice. Even dealing with the wicked step-aunt (or whatever she was) and her carefully coordinated bathroom fixtures that somehow tied into her evil plot.

And when I woke up, I felt like I'd been given a little gift of night-time happiness. And instead of making me feel sad, it made me realize in what small ways the Lord can extend His tender mercies: in the falling of a leaf, in an email from a friend, in dreams of wicked step-aunts and glorious and beautiful and joyful marriages.

And here's what I woke up with: I had switched to 'third-person viewing' of my dream, and my intended (now husband?) was really enjoying some food. Here is, word for word, what my dream produced:

"To his surprise, he found himself thinking of something other than his love for her for the first time in days. And then, suddenly, was swept up into such a wave of love that he could see how his enjoyment of food, how all the other pleasures of life, were just a small part of the great love he had for her."

Nice, huh? Although, considering it came to me when I was half-dreaming, it could just be a garbled mess. I'll have to come back to it when I'm more awake to be able to tell.

In the meantime, have a happy Monday!

(I know I will, remembering my intended's lovely, lovely embrace.)

The Day There Was No Church

It was because of the blizzard. A Nor'easter, some called it. And calls went out to all the little church members in their homes to let them know that church just wasn't happening.

And the church members felt sad and/or secretly relieved as they gazed out on the poor visibility, the snow-packed roads and the occasionally body-knocking-over wind gusts and wondered how they would now spend their days.

Perhaps they would read spiritual messages to each other. Perhaps they would catch up on their scripture study. Some might even brave the storm to visit nearby members and console one another about their churchlessness.

And others... Others would blog.

Done! DoneDoneDoneDoneDone!

I'm DONE!

With writing that last paper, that is. I still have to get up in...approximately two hours to get to campus, print it out, then attend class. And then work.

And then a movie!

'CAUSE I'M DONE!

Oddity

Sometimes these odd phrases just kind of pop into my head while I'm doing something else, like plucking my eyebrows or something.

Like today: I was thinking about something else, and in came the phrase, "yon candied maid."

"Yon candied maid?" What the heck is that, anyway?

I'm thinking a mix of gingerbread houses and shepherdesses.

Or something.

A brief breather:

Uh. I realize I haven't posted much this past week.

And it is because, you see, this is the last week of classes. And, due to my illness and subsequent obsessive watching of The Office, I...er...yeah.

I'm totally behind.

But I'm still in there. I'm still getting stuff done (by the skin of my little librarian teeth) and I'm still alive.

Just to let you know.

And yeah.

I really, really gotta go. (Work on homework, that is. Not. The other thing. You know.)

Something new to love

A few weeks ago, I saw the Sony Bravia ball commercial for the first time. And I realized just today that I really, really love the music they use. It makes the tone of the commercial something beautiful and wondrous, turning bouncy balls into a glorious, almost gentle colorful snow. And also, it's shot amazingly, amazingly well.

But back to the music--I kind of love it. And I listened to it tonight. And for some reason, it made me get this sad, wistful feeling that I sometimes get when I listen to sad, wistful music.

Lovely, lovely stuff, anyway.

Anyway.

Anyway.

I'm not really sad, per se, just...the music sometimes makes me that way. And that's fine, I think.

See it here, if you like:

If you don't like gross things then DON'T READ THIS POST!

Okay. Consider yourself warned.

I want to talk about how blasted amazing and rather awe-inspiring our bodies are, specifically the ability our bodies have to produce mucus.

Yes, mucus.

They sure can crank the stuff out!

I mean, you can blow your nose (emptying it, or so you would suppose) and within (I am not making this up) 60 seconds you can have a good ol' schnoz-full to blow into your already sodden and leaking tissue. (I TOLD you not to read this if you don't like gross things. You only have yourself to blame, you know.)

But I didn't really appreciate until this evening how blasted cool mucus can be. Did you know that mucus lubricates your digestive tract? And that it is antiseptic? And contains immunogoblins? (You can learn all this and more by reading Wikipedia's mucus entry.)

Makes you feel all respectful and stuff, doesn't it?

Yep. Mucus works hard. And our bodies work hard making it.

So really, the fact that I took a good chunk of yet another day off to finish up the second season of The Office doesn't mean I was being lazy, right? I was just giving my body a chance to rest up and keep churning out copious amounts of lovely, viscous, germ-trapping goo.

Go me.

So, while we're on the subject of controversial topics...

Today in library school we talked a lot about intellectual freedom.

Which, basically says that censorship is never a good thing. And also that, as librarians, we should not restrict anyone's access to any information, whatever we happen to feel about that information personally.

I find this topic very interesting, and the discussion in class was wonderfully enlightening and very stimulating.

However.

That is not the topic I'm going to address in this blog post. (Although, I suppose you could argue I've already addressed it.)

The topic I'd like to discuss is much more controversial and much deeper and much more important and stuff. It is this:

Why do I feel I am a woman who can not pull off pink? Or even that I am a woman who does not want to be able to pull off pink? Who would, if she could, pull off pretty much any other color including dark browns and olive greens and rusty reds along with pale blues and teals and bright dandelion yellows, but who is unfortunately unable to do so due to her being an 'autumn' and thus not really looking all that hot in blue-toned stuff. Apparently. (As if she looks hot in 'autumnal' colors, but whatever.)

But seriously--what do I have against pink? I mean, pink is fine.

I sometimes think of it as a bit frou-frou, a little too much a blond feminine cutesy sort of girly girly thing, but then, I'm a female. I'm a girl. Why should I object to girls being, well, especially girlish?

I guess I've never really been into the whole girly thing, even when I was a kid. You see, as children, my siblings and I loved play-acting, and because we had no brothers (then) the four oldest siblings (all girls) would play together and I would usually play the boys. Because they got to do the cool things like rescue people and swing swords and go dashing over hillocks and stuff. (Lucky boys. With their lucky hillocks.)

I rather scorned the girl toys. While I still played with dolls, I preferred the toy monsters our next-door neighbor (a boy) got to play with, or the He-Man action figure said neighbor also posessed, or the cool transformer toys and...the toy my cousin had: some big machine type thing made up of little cat machine type things that all fit together...something. Anyway--that was cool too.

And not pink.

Or. Well, I think maybe one of the cat machine things was pink because it was operated by a female character, but STILL. That's my POINT. Right?

Or maybe it's not. Because if this female character was hooking up in her little pink machine with all the other machines to form one big machine (part of which, necessarily, was pink) then that shows that pink, and thus a pink-loving female, has power, even if it's a power that's part of a larger male-dominated entity.

Yep.

So, the reason why I'm even writing about this is that I have a pink coat. It was left by the gal who lived in my room before I moved in. And it's a very nice coat. It's warm, and it fits pretty much perfectly (which--hey--a FREE coat that fits PERFECTLY is not anything to shake a stick-sword at) and it's pretty much winter here in Boston now, with its icy sidewalks and its skin-slicing winds. Aaaaand...

The coat is pink. It is pink. It is pink it is pink and...wearing it...I just feel like a pink girl. And I've never really been a pink girl. So...

I just need to wrap my mind around it. And appreciate the pinkness. And find joy and power in being pink-coat-wearing-girl.

That's nothing to be ashamed of.

Right?

P.S. I also read banned books. And they rock.