If You Meet a Guy With A Uni-brow

My sweet nephew Porter asked me today if I got married in the temple. I told him that I’m not married yet but when I do get married it will be in the temple. He asked me why I’m not married yet and I told him I wasn’t old enough. I figured that was probably the easiest answer. It didn’t bother me that Porter asked of course, but someone else asked me that question the other day too--a 21 year old man in fact. And I've been asked the question before. I'm never sure what to say. Are people who ask that question looking for me to blame the stupid boys, or to say some self-destructive thing about what’s wrong with me? Of course blaming the boys is more fun, and blaming myself is more natural but completely untrue. Porter accepted my ‘I’m not old enough’ answer pretty quick so maybe I’ll use that one when other people ask me too.

Or maybe I’ll say something like, “I’m not married yet because I have an aggravated fear of abandonment and my hands are out of proportion with the rest of my body.” (Only Sandi will understand the joke-sorry everyone else). I mean come on, that’s like asking someone “why don’t you have any talents,” “why are you so bad at playing sports,” or “why is your sister a lot cooler than you?” All of these questions put a person in a position of either blaming themselves or someone else. Moral of the story: don’t ask a kid with a uni-brow why he has a uni-brow. It will either bring out pent up feelings of anger towards his parents and their gene pool-- causing him to curse his heritage, or it will remind the kid he’s ugly and weird because he has a uni-brow, and he’ll feel all sad and messed up. Just let the kid have a uni-brow and be content about it. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll discover tweezers and realize he may not be able to control the fact that he was born with a uni-brow, but he can pluck and tweeze and make his future a heck of a lot brighter.

True story: my friends Mallory, Celes, and I saw a guy in his mid-twenties at the temple with an honest to goodness uni-brow. He was married to a beautiful blonde girl and seemed quite happy. I bet she doesn’t even notice his eyebrow.

Malad & Course Changes

I went to Malad, Idaho last weekend. You ever heard of it? Don't worry--most people haven't. It's a small town, so small in fact that I got a tour of the whole town in just about 5 minutes. My old roommate Liz lives in Malad and she's going on a mission soon so I went to visit her. She lives up on a hill that overlooks some of the houses and fields. There are just as many cows, horses, and sheep as people, and you have never seen so many tractors. I loved sitting on Liz's porch swing looking out over the fields and animals and tractors. I also loved going to the Malad Drive-In to get a Glamour Burger and a slushee. Oh yeah, and I got a silver ring from the quarter machine. Small town life is so simple and laid back. I thrive in those kinds of situations.

Yesterday I went for a run around the neighborhood. When I left the house I had in mind a route I was going to take. It was a route I'd done before that included a good amount of up and down hill to help me train for the Wasatch Back. At the top of 4th east I was supposed to turn left to go down 2000 North. Once I got there though I just decided I would go right instead. The rest of my run was a course I chose just on the spot. It ended up being a great run, a little more challenging than the original plan but good nonetheless. If it had been a bad course at least I would know not to go there again. I was thinking that is kind of how life is. You can spend your whole life with a planned out course, one you've taken before or one you've heard is a good course from others who have taken it. But in an instant your course can change. Either the course will turn out to be a good one, or one you can learn to avoid in the future. My guess is that if you are trying to do the right things in life--no matter how many course changes you face it will always turn out to be a good one. If it is more challenging than you expected, then at least your legs will be stronger when it's time to run the actual race.

This is the tractor I watched go back and forth from Liz's porch.

Glamour Burgers!

Cinco de Mayo

Have you ever had an experience where you are learning a new language and then one day all of a sudden you can understand 100% of what your language teacher just said? Or you carry on a conversation with someone in the language you're learning and you suddenly realize you're speaking as if this new language was your native tongue? Yeah, me neither. I did have quite the opposite experience though this week. My friend Jenny served a mission in Chile and one of the Chilean Elder's she knew just moved to Provo to learn English. With alacrity I accompanied Jenny on her visit with Elder Mora and got to sit and listen to them speak Spanish. I took Spanish 1 in Jr. High so with that background and what I could gather from their facial expressions, and what I picked up from listening to the Spanish radio station on my way to Provo, I understood about 25% of their conversation. I thought it was really cool to be so out of my element. Poor Elder Mora probably has that experience everyday living in a country who's language he doesn't speak.

We visited him on Cinco de Mayo (which he didn't care about because they don't celebrate it in Chile) and then we went to a Cinco de Mayo party. We came a little late and missed the eggs-full-of-confetti smashing fun but we enjoyed ourselves anyway. In order to avoid any ennui (prounounced ahn-way) amongst my readers I will include pictures of how cool Jenny and I looked at our Cinco de Mayo party. In fact, we were so cool that one of the guys we met there was telling us we HAVE to come to his late-Cinco de Mayo party next week because we're so fun and festive.

I homemade these sombrero's. I found the hat at the dollar store and stapled fabric to it. I also homemade the tiny maracca's you see us holding.

Jenny is really feeling the rhythm of those maracca's.

May Pole Dancing

The Provo City Gallery Stroll is held on the first Friday of every month--and it's a day I wait for with much anticipation. We walk up and down University Ave and Center Street and check out the local art hung in the shops. Most of the shops give free refreshments too. This month they had a vintage flea market inside Velour (a concert hall of sorts for local bands) and a free dance party and slurpees at Sammy's (a cool hole-in-the-wall burger joint just off Center Street). My friends Lauren and J.R. even got themselves drawn as a fruit (J.R. was a raspberry and Lauren a strawberry).I've been doing the Gallery Stroll monthly for almost a year now. I've discovered shops in Provo I never knew existed.

When we were checking out the vintage flea market my friend Jenny ran into a girl she knew. The girl handed her a flyer and told her to come to the pre-season Farmer's Market the next day to do a May-pole dance to bring in spring. We were a little skeptical about what a May-pole dance could be, but we figured it was appropriate considering the Farmer's Market is kind of a family thing. It was raining Saturday morning but Jenny and I went anyway. We bought a cookie from the market and waited for the May-pole people to show us what to do. No one was coming and we waited for awhile. Finally we found the people we saw setting the pole up and asked when it would be starting. They said the instructor didn't come because of the rain and said we could just try to figure it out. We gathered 12 people and luckily there were some little kids who had done this before. We weaved in and out while holding our ribbons and created a cool braid on the pole. Then we had to unwind, all the while dancing to music played by a blue-grass band. It was SO fun to bring in spring with an unusual ritual. Well anyway, I made the paper. Here's the link: http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/307723/17/