Best Week Ever (Transplant Update)

There's a show on VH1 I love called Best Week Ever. It's a show about pop culture and is sort of a "week in review" format commentated by comedians. Judah Friedlander, Paul F. Tompkins, and Mo Rocca were, at one time, commentators. After the week in pop culture has been reviewed, someone is declared to be having the BEST WEEK EVER.

I am confident that after last week, if I was someone to whom anyone payed attention, or if I was somehow noteworthy in pop culture, I'd have won the title of having the best week ever.

It started on Saturday, March 8th. It was my niece's birthday. I sent her a tutu which she did not want to try on because she had gotten some Calico Critters bunnies and beds for them to sleep in and a Calico Critters house for them to live in. She wanted to put the bunnies in the beds, not try on a tutu. I was feeling jealous she had a cake and I had none. It's impossible to share cake over FaceTime.

Sunday

Call it magic.

A sunny Sunday afternoon in early March. Sixty degree temperatures. Blondies cooling on the countertop. Apple and Munster cheese slices on a plate on the mangowood table, and some dried salami that tastes nothing like an Italian sausage off the grill. Water and Diet Coke with half a lemon juiced in, aranciata, ginger ale in a glass bottle.

I wore a black and white striped dress to church with red heels and drop (fake) diamond earrings. When I got home I put on mint green jeans and a white tee because it's spring now and I'm not cold anymore. My pants are all too big for me because I've had an "overgrowth of bacteria present in [my] small intestine" since I got food poisoning in November. Now I'm on the most expensive antibiotic in the world. It must have flecks of real gold in it.

The part about the pants and bacterial overgrowth and antibiotics isn't magic. It's science. And too much information.

But that Sunday afternoon was magic.

The Woman with Four Names

I was writing something very different today. It was going to be an essay about how the bus is the best human observation experience. But then I got to work.

There is a woman in my office who has hated me for reasons unknown for the last five and a half years. If you've ever hated someone you have to see practically every day for that amount of time, you know it can't be easy. You could argue that maybe she doesn't "hate" me, maybe she's just been really deep in thought or had "a lot on her plate" for five and a half years, but it's a lie.

She hates me. I know this because she did not hate me the first six months I worked at my job. She was really nice to me, invited me to breakfast meetings and pizza parties she was having for her research assistants, would actually exchange pleasantries with me. But not anymore, not anymore since November 2008

A Wee Woman, Despite the Use of Lard

I'm waiting for some potentially life-changing news. Not potentially, it is life-changing news. But that news also takes 6-8 weeks to get. I'm not good at waiting. So I decided to take a Lifelong Learning class at the University of Utah as a time-filler. The class is a writing class called "Five Short Weeks, Five Short Essays" and is focused on writing non-fiction essays of 1000 or less.

Lifelong Learning is a community program. Anyone can sign up, anyone can take a class. You don't have to be accepted to the U., or have a degree. There are literally no requirements except that you can pay for the class. Obviously, this isn't a "for credit" class, so it's up to you if you want to participate and do the homework and reading, or even come to class. You get out of it what you put in.

Like I said, it's a time filler for me so I have something to focus on whilst waiting for my life to change. I've also decided that I'm going to publish the short essays I write on my blog. It gives me a little more incentive to write them, honestly, because I'll feel more accountable if I have someone other than myself to write them for.

Here is the essay from Week One. "A Wee Woman, Despite the Use of Lard"

Best Of: 2013 Edition

It's the last day of 2013, which means every blog in the land is going to have a "year-end review" or a "recap" or "reflection" post today. This is no different. I posted a "Best Of" list last year because 2012 was a very good year for me and I wanted to remember that later when I have really awful years.

But I kind of like the "Best Of" concept. I think it's a better thing to reminisce on all the good things that happened in a year than focus on all the horrible ones, so maybe this will become an annual deal.

This year I realized that being a single, gainfully employed adult could be a very good thing. I traveled a lot (for me, anyway) and read a lot of books and saw a lot of movies. I like to see the creativity people have and how they put it forth for the masses. So there might be a lot more creative-type entertainment-things on this list than say, personal things.

Without further explanation or hesitation, here is my Best Of: 2013 Edition

Why I Think Jennifer Lawrence is a Role Model

Did you catch the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show on Tuesday night? Yeah, me neither. I was watching  Cupcake Wars On Demand while I laid in my bed with my new companion Nausea.

I'm writing this today because of two things I read/watched in succession on the inter webs. First I watched this video:

A friend posted it to Facebook and, let's be honest, the cover picture of the video on the post was of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, and that's why I clicked to watch.

Food Poisoning

A few weekends ago I got food poisoning.

During my brief stint in culinary school I was required to take a sanitation class where I learned everything there is to know about food-borne illnesses: the symptoms, how they spread, the causes, the fact that there has to be a certain amount of documented cases from the same place before it's considered for investigation. Those things are burned into my memory because of the sheer grossness of learning them.

I can also tell you - off the top of my head - what temperature any meat needs to be cooked to in order to kill pathogens. It's a skill my family utilizes on a weekly basis, generally for Sunday dinner. Fact: any ground meat needs to be cooked to 165* F to kill the bacteria it houses. Your burger doesn't need to be charred, but it does need to reach 165 to kill E. Coli.

Bibliophile

Poor sad neglected blog. It's been a while since I've written anything. On here. Written anything on here. Fact is I've been writing a lot of stuff, but nothing for my memoir and nothing for this blog. It's all stuff I'm not going to tell you about until possibly March. I'm sure that has all 10 of you are wondering what it is I'm writing, and why I won't say anything about it for five months.

So mysterious.

That's how I do things.

Sometimes.

But here I am, back on the blog, writing things. Maybe it's because I decided it's time for a new post. Maybe it's that I have literally nothing to do at work. Maybe it's that I read 3 books last week (true fact) and it made me realize how much I really really love books and I want to write about that. The answer is D) all of the above.

How This College Graduate Kills A Spider

True story: tonight I was sitting here, starting to write this post when I looked innocently to my left and saw a minuscule tan spider on my down comforter. Me being me, I froze while the phrase "Oh shit" went through my mind many times. All I had on my bed with me were not optimal spider-killing items: a water bottle, an iPhone, the Tuesday pill box. I had no shoe, no tissue.

"Rosie," I hissed at my cat, "go get me a tissue!!" She half looked up from her food bowl and looked at me like I was an idiot. "Okay then, come over here and kill it. You're the cat, that's your job." She went back to eating. "Okay," I whispered to myself so as not to startle the spider, lest it run right towards me, "you're a college graduate. You can figure this out." I looked around again. Nothing came to me. Then I noticed a different water bottle on the floor with half an inch of water in it. If I could scoop the spider into the bottle and put the lid on it, it would be trapped and drowned, and I would have no spider guts on my down comforter. 

Basic [Feline] Instinct

Yesterday my cat killed a hummingbird. She left the little bird on my front porch. My mother told me I needed to clean it up because she cleaned up the sparrow Rosie left last week. I opened the front door and looked at the mat.

It was tiny, even smaller than I expected it to be. It was lying on its back, a cream colored belly looking up at me, small dark brown head, teeny little feet (claws? talons?). Once lightning wings now halted and tucked reverently at its sides. She must've hit it hard with her paw. She has strong, clawless paws. There was no blood, no guts. But looking at it, in stark contrast to the apple green doormat, what could be classified as indifference turned to upset.

Everything Has Changed

NYC is for Lovers

On Saturday, June 29th, at approximately 1:03 p.m. Eastern time, I cried.

I cried at wheels up on Delta Flight 1375. I knew I would. I warned Harriet, the Long Islander sitting next to me in 12E, that I would cry when the plane took off and she need not be alarmed. I cried because one of the best weeks of my life was at an undeniable and inevitable end, because I hate saying goodbye see you soon to people I love, because I was leaving the place I feel I belong the most.

I should clarify; when I say "cried" I mean a few big silent tears rolled down my face while my bottom lip quivered and I stared out the window despondently. There was no sobbing or bawling or blubbering, and nothing about it was "uncontrollable". 

A Love Letter to New York

For much of my life I have believed I was born in the wrong geographical region of the United States. A mountainous desert valley that scorches in the summer and freezes in the winter is not  my ideal place to reside. I'm not a nature girl. I believe I really should have been born on a coast.

For years and years I took biannual trips to the California coast. We spent a lot of time in Carlsbad when I was young, and we slowly graduated to Newport Beach once we got older... and after the Carlsbad trip of 2003 when everyone except me got sick. Three weeks after returning to Utah, my kidneys failed for no reason. That was the last time for almost a decade we stayed in Carlsbad.

I always wanted to live in Southern California with the palm trees and beaches and traffic jams. It wasn't until after I stopped driving that I realized California is a car state, just like Utah. It's possible to get around without a car, but it's less pedestrian friendly. Happenstance led me East in my later twenties and I realized I wasn't just born in the wrong geographical region, I was born on entirely the wrong side of the country.