Baker Emily?

When I was a kid, I was really into being the best. When teachers gave me a homework assignment, I would think "Mine's going to be the best." and so I worked really hard and turned regular answers on tests into short stories and wrote 15 page essays on John Glenn.

Also when I was a kid, I was homeschooled. But only during the fourth grade. I might write more details about it another day, but all you need to know is that in Colorado, when you are homeschooled, you are required to do 4 hours a day. Or something like that. Unfortunately for me, that left me with like 4 hours of the day to to spare, during which my friends were all at school so I couldn't play with them, my siblings were all at school so I couldn't annoy them, and Facebook, Pinterest, and Hulu didn't exist for me to be addicted to. So I decided to fill the time by becoming a housewife. I didn't like cleaning and I wasn't tall enough to reach the stove though, so basically all that left me with was wearing dresses and baking. And since I wanted to be the best at it, I went all out.

In my head I was a mix between the mom on those fifties' posters and cinderella, slaving away at chores all day (but only the ones I wanted to do, that didn't involve any cleaning products or putting things away) with little thanks, but doing it with grace and poise and singing to my mouse-friends as I went. I loved what I thought was the poetic beauty in it.

I wanted to be this. But cuter

So on the first day of my new persona, I got out the little red-checked apron my grandma had made me, stuck a wooden spoon it it, and proceeded to bake brownies. By scratch. With a whisk. I followed the recipe with exactness, ate a lot of the batter, stuck it in the stove, and thirty to forty minutes later, a perfect pan of brownies was ready. Since I was a housewife in my head, I needed children to cater to. Conveniently (for them) I had four older siblings who would eventually be coming home from school, which meant I had to make after-school snacks for them. So i put powdered sugar on the brownies, cut them up, laid them on a tray and waited for them to get home. Three hours later, my "little ones" (who were all at least 4 years older than me) came home from school, and wasn't I the proud mamma? Drying my (already dry) hands on a dishtowel, I greeted them with a little pyramid of brownies. Which they devoured, and RAVED about. "Emily, you're the best brownie baker ever!" "These are FANTASTIC" etc, etc, etc. Needless to say, I was overjoyed and so ridiculously proud. I was the best.

And so started my love affair with desserts and baking. I quickly began to try more adventurous treats, like crepes and flan. I tried making cookies once but they turned out gross so I decided that all cookies sucked and I hated them, so I didn't bake any for like 4 years. Seriously. But anyway this idea that I was the best baker ever followed me around for years. My first year at college we hosted "Sunday Night Dessert" where we made truffles and crepes and all kinds of delicious things. My sister, Amber, and I even made my dad's famous cinnamon rolls once. They took all day and night and turned out great. I still rarely made cookies but I became Amber and Lucas' baking slave, where they would just text me and say "Come make us waffle iron brownies." And I would do it. Mostly because they let me use their washer and dryer, but also because I love to bake.

Amber and I, the day we made cinnamon rolls. We're baking pros.

So the other night, Amber and her husband Lucas came over, and since our family gatherings aren't complete without at least one dessert (we have been known to make up to three in one night). We decided to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. (And by "we decided" I mean that Amber decided and then said "EMILY! Aren't you coming?" to which I said "ughh... I guess.") So Amber and I went upstairs and started mixing the dough.

It was one of those nights when everything was hilarious, and we quickly became pretty hyper. It all started when the microwave (and by that, I mean me) accidentally melted the butter instead of softening it. I wanted to throw it out and try again, but Amber dumped it in the mixer, laughing that it would be fine. Shortly thereafter, Amber stopped measuring ingredients altogether -- just dumping them in the mixer and hoping it was the right amount. Which apparently usually works for her. I accidentally added twice the amount of Nutmeg the recipe called for, and almost added some obscure, chili-powder esque spice instead of cinnamon. Since the flour hadn't been measured, we tasted the dough and decided we needed more. More got added... much more. So we balanced it out by adding more milk. And then more spices. And then more brown sugar. And we laughed our faces off the entire night.

By the time we forced ourselves to stop, the cookie dough was thick and gluey, and somehow, despite the copious amount of spices we added, had very little taste. As a joke, Amber got a big spoonful of the stuff and took some down to Lucas with an innocent, "I brought you some cookie dough, baby!" Lucas, who was in the middle of killing aliens/Germans/zombies with Eli on the x-box, thanked her, and ate it. No reaction. "What do you think?" she asked.

"It's really good, baby!" he said. Best husband ever?

My mom started to realize something was wrong. "What did you do to it?" she asked.

So we got her some. She ate it and goes, "It tastes.... like paste. It's really gross... Seriously bad cookie dough... How did you even DO that?" Best mom ever.

So we threw away the dough. Thanks to the oats and the strange brown color, it looked exactly like a ton of puke, sitting on top of the kitchen trash. So much for being the best baker ever, huh? All I had to show for my skills was a trashcan full of throw-up, a kitchen covered in flour, and a belly full of paste pretending to be dough, and I'm very seriously considering the possibility that 4th grade me was right to declare that cookies suck and to stop making them altogether. Even though (properly made) oatmeal chocolate chip cookie dough is the most delicious substance on the planet. Sorry, fourth grade me, I've failed you. On the bright side, all the laughing was probably a great workout.

Showers Make Blogging Hard. (An entirely unsatisfactory post that starts in many places and ends nowhere at all)

I'm supposed to be preparing a Relief Society lesson right now. But I don't want to. I also should be showering, in preparation for the YSA barbeque tonight, but I got sunburned pretty badly yesterday and so showering has become a long, tedious, very painful experience that I am just not quite up to right now. So instead, I watched 1.5 hours of So You Think You Can Dance, ate too much food, didn't clean my room, and now I'm sitting on my bed watching the torrential rain outside my window and listening to the thunder boom over my Christina Perri. How poetic. And perfect weather for a barbeque, right? Here's an unrelated picture of a cool license plate I saw the other day:

Every time we plan an awesome YSA activity, the Colorado weather comes in just to show us who's really in charge here. A field day was cancelled due to rain. We went white water rafting down the Royal Gorge recently and we drove 2 hours through one of the worst rainstorms to get there. We plan an awesome "welcome to summer" BBQ and the sky is gray, sunless and dumping the entire contents of the Pacific ocean on us. We just want to have some fun in good weather... is that too much to ask? But oh well. Even a cold, rainy barbeque is better than no barbeque!

In case you couldn't tell, I have no subject for this blog. So let's talk about my life. As usual. Which actually begs the question of whether my generation is incredibly insecure or incredibly narcissistic, given our insatiable need to have our opinions, lives and duck-faced pictures constantly seen and validated by our friends or strangers through various social networks. Honestly? My vote is insecurity (maybe with a healthy dose of peer-based narcissism.) Constant effort to be validated and feel like we're not ignored. We have an inability to be completely at peace with and confident in ourselves, so we seek that confidence through strangers. We're pretty needy, I think.

So let's talk about insecurity, and the repercussions of it. Being pretty new to the non-school ward YSA world, my observations are going to be unfairly biased and lacking the perspective that comes with experience. But I'll share them anyway because I want to. And this is my blog. So grab some salt to chew on while you read.

It has come to my attention that the Young Single Adult wards are absolutely bristling with insecurity. Particularly with female insecurities. The Mormon culture is very family-centric, and the young mormon culture is very marriage-centric, which gives many YSA the feeling that simply because they are in a YSA ward they are unsuccessful. Inherently failing just by being a Young Single Adult. So the single's wards, while being ridiculously fun and laid back, also have this weird under-the-surface broiling tension and competition. Like the slightly metallic aftertaste of salt-water. It's not noticeable at first, when you're overwhelmed with the strong taste of salt (or the bizarre culture of single mormonland) but after a while you are able to distinguish a subtle undertone of metal (or highly pressurized, insecurity-based competition.)  Everyone is competing to find their place in life and make a niche for themselves in the ward, while simeoultaneously doing everything they can to stand-out so they can find someone (anyone) and leave it.

In the rush to find a significant other -- we all end up playing this ridiculous game of musical chairs. Everyone running around looking desperately for a seat, momentarily losing our control and not noticing who we bulldoze over, the friendships we ruin, or how ridiculous we look while we rush for even just a chance at what we (think we) want.

..................

Soo.... I originally wrote that like a week and a half ago, and there was supposed to be more, but I got cut off by looking at the time and realizing I really HAD to go face the shower of fire otherwise I would be late to pick up the guy I was taking to the barbeque. Turns out I was late anyway because my car needed oil and the oil cap wouldn't come off and there was no one home and I live in Larkspur so I just panicked for a minute, lamenting my lack of usable musculature (I don't even know if that's a real word. Or if I used it right. But it sounds good, so I'm leaving it.) for a good five minutes until I decided to just tell my car to suck it up and not explode while I drove 30 minutes to the aforementioned guy's house and made him take the oil cap off for me (using tools, because he's a man. Naturally.) The car survived. The Barbeque was good. The lesson went well.

 Also, I probably have more to add the the abruptly ending monologue about insecurities/competition in the YSA world, but it takes way more brain power than I'm willing to invest right now to properly work through my thoughts, rid them of mean comments and write them in a way that makes a little bit of sense. So I won't. But I might someday, in which case I don't want to totally re-write it all, but I also hate having drafts sitting around my "posts" page, so I'll publish it and maybe link back to it should I ever decide to open that particular can of worms again. Feel free to post your thoughts on the subject.

I should also add two things. One, I make it sound like I'm husband hunting. Let me assure you that I am not. I have big things (think; getting involved in a rad non-profit which could eventually lead to living in Mexico, saving Mayans) coming up that I need to do and I have every intention of doing those things without a rock on my finger.

Number two:  Since I wrote this, I have determined (through talking about it with various men) that most, if not all, of the competition aspect is only felt and participated in by the women. Most (all) of the guys I talked to said they didn't feel at all like the YSA wards are a competition. I attribute that to the fact that there are roughly 2-3 girls for every guy, on average, in active young single Mormonland. I would also like to add that it's not an outright competition, this isn't Mean Girls. It's just a barely distinguishable hint of competition that most girls aren't even aware they're smelling, let alone acting upon, until they find themselves scratching their best-friend's crushes back during Sacrament meeting, starting a huge turf war, and secretly loving the drama (which of course they hate...... right?)

Turns out it's not that hard to invest the brainpower to write about this. But we find ourselves (me, you and the maybe 2.5 other people who have read this far) at another awkward moment where if I don't leave my computer immediately to go take a shower (no sunburn this time, thank goodness), I will be late for yet another YSA barbeque. Which will be followed by a motorcycle ride through downtown Denver to enjoy the lights of the city and ignore the homeless people (sorry, Urban Campers) and drug addicts shooting up in alleys. So really, I have to go. The shower awaits, yet again. I've been putting it off for at least 3 hours now, because showering (and the subsequent getting-ready)  is a long process, this time followed by an even longer process because I should probably try and look good for the YSA thing and the aforementioned drug-addicts. So here I go. For real this time. Kaybye!

While this is not the motorcycle I will be riding on, I saw this in a Red Robin parking lot and realized this is probably the motorcycle that Chuck Norris would ride, it's so awesome. So feel free to imagine me on this bike, with tassled chaps and maybe a trucker hat. Or an Indian feather and braids. Or all of the above.

Why Netflix is the Worst

Note: Prepare yourself for a lot of run-on sentences, Blogland. Sorry, I just don't feel like editing tonight... But know that I do love you, reader, despite my rudeness in posting a ridiculously bad story riddled with extra-long and hard to understand sentences.

Once upon a time, I lived in Rexburg and had lots of awesome friends that lived within a 1 mile radius of my apartment. The thing about going to BYU-I is that there's an Honor Code. It's basically a list of rules that you have to sign before you can actually enroll at the school. Lots of people hate the Honor Code with a fiery passion. They get frustrated and gesture wildly while forcefully explaining the many negatives of it to their friends who all feel the same. They write English essays about why it sucks and turn them in, feeling like they've successfully "stuck it to the man." And then the small spark of passion that inspired the essay dies within the student as the paper sits on a desk for three days, is half-heartedly graded by a student teacher, and given back (at which point the student has wasted all of their energy and passion on writing the essay, feels satisfied, and forgets about the terrible injustices of the system until the next passionate conversation.)

But all of that is beside the point.

Prior to attending the school, I was pretty sure I would hate the Honor Code. Growing up, I can't really think of any concrete rules we had, and as a combined result of my parent's natural lax style and my older siblings getting married, my mom getting cancer, etc, I spent the majority of my high school years with very little parental attention. Because of this, I had ridiculous amounts of freedom. I had no curfew, rarely told my parents where I was, and spent 90% of my time roaming the streets of middle-class suburbia with my group of righteous, sheltered, Mormon friends fellow hoodlums. However, despite my expectations, I really didn't have a problem with the decreased freedom that came along with going to a private church college. I happily followed all of the rules, including the curfew,  for the first... semester and a half.

As my year at school progressed, I started breaking curfew every now and then, not exactly intentionally, but kind of. We didn't need much of a reason to stay out past midnight. Once Brett and i snuck into an under-construction building and explored the apartments and tractors and stuff at 1:00 am. Once Alyssa and I filled a hot guy's car with balloons and covered it with sticky notes... Many times we stayed up late playing Super Smash Bros. on the N64. So basically, I broke curfew because...

Make sense? Now all of that was a very roundabout and mostly irrelevant way to bring up a particular night of curfew-breakage, and more accurately, why Netflix is the worst.

 Usually my fellow rebels were my good friends Brett and Tom, and occasionally Steve. One night, probably around midnight, we decided that we wanted to watch a movie. Not just any movie, but Easy A. Now, both Brett and I had seen it on Netflix instant streaming just a day or two before, so the four of us traipsed over to Brett's house to watch it.

Mildly interesting sidenote: There was an awkward minute when we first walked in where one of Brett's roommates, who had previously (very recently) taken me on a few dates and with whom I had had one of those unsatisfactory "ending" of things (namely, where he kept inviting me to do things and I kept not being able to go, and then the inviting stopped because he felt I was avoiding him, when in reality I was just busy, but I wasn't too upset about it, anyway. So the talking stopped abruptly and I made no effort to restart it, meaning we hadn't talked in a few days... which doesn't properly express the awkwardness, but it was there. Like a faint smell in the air -- one where you can't tell if you're actually smelling it or if you're just going crazy) Anyway, the roommate was cuddling with some girl on the couch watching some man-movie or another, so Tom, Brett, Steve and I just kinda sat there till their movie ended and roommate took miscellaneous girl home, which just added another layer of awkwardness to the situation. I'll write a post to more properly explain later. But that's not the point. The point is Easy A. I mean Netflix.

Rather excitedly, the three of us got ready to watch the movie. (which, if my memory serves me right, somehow included microwaving hot dogs and eating them without plates, bread or buns... but that could have been another time.) So Netflix opens, and we begin scrolling through the "New Arrivals" list, and to our horror, Easy A was nowhere to be found. So we did a search. And sure enough, it was gone. Only available as a disk (which, as everyone knows, is a stupid conspiracy to keep all the good movies away from college students bumming off their parent's account). Overflowing with dissappointment, but unwilling to let our rebellious curfew-breakage be cut short, we proceeded to do pretty much nothing, which included leaving the lights off. We sat there in darkness and talked for a bit, Tom fell asleep in a chair and Brett and Steve and I laid on the floor and fought our own tiredness as the last manifestation of our dying will to intentionally break curfew. I fell asleep. Apparently I talked in my sleep as well, much the boys' amusement. But the point is that our night was ruined by Netflix.

Now fast forward a year or so, and you'll arrive at the present. I was feeling pretty sick tonight, so I decided to ditch the barbeque and night-hike I was supposed to attend, and I really just wanted to lay in my bed and watch a movie. Hulu proved to be unhelpful, so I moved to Netflix and perused their ridiculously pitiful selection of third-rate movies mixed occasionally (hallelujah!) with one that had actually been released in theaters. Unable to find one to fit my fancy, I went to the "just for kids" section, to see what they had there. After passing over a dozen or so made-for-TV Disney Channel movies, I found it. Puss in Boots. I had only seen the first half of it, and what I had seen was hilariously witty and entertaining. I clicked the cover photo with great anticipation. While I waited for it to load and the beginning credits to run, I went to other tabs on my browser. It wasn't long before I realized, through half-listening to the music, that the opening scene was ridiculously long, set to crappy, slow music and showing wayyy too many credits. When finally the music stopped and the movie started, I was horrified to hear terrible fake voices (picture Keanu Reeves trying to sound cartoonish... or being good at varying the tone of his voice...or acting. That's how bad it was.) I clicked to my netflix tab and discovered some really crappy, unfinished style animation to accompany (half a second behind) the crappy voices currently tearing apart my ear drums. What is going on? I asked myself.  I navigated back to the movie page to discover, to my horror, this:

A sneaky off-brand Puss in Boots! How dare they! That wasn't at all what I had wanted. I had wanted Antonio Banderas, not William Shatner. Dreamworks Animation magic, not... whatever guy animated this in his basement. Sneaky Netflix. But I should have known, after all, it had happened to me a few months ago with Kung Fu Panda. Behold, blogland, the sneakery!

Chop Kick Panda? REALLY? With Fists of Fury? I have no words. Off-brand breakfast cereals blatantly copying the national brand, I can handle. But off-brand kids' movies? That's too much.

But never fear, Blogtopia, I have learned my lesson. Never trust Netflix, because when you do, your night gets ruined and you either end up falling asleep and sleep-talking to a bunch of boys, OR alone on a Friday night eating nachos in your bed while writing a blog that wanders off-topic with hopeless frequency but is supposed to be about how Netflix is run by a bunch of sneaky counterfeiters and they ruined your night. Twice. I could have been at a barbeque and on a night-hike, Netflix, but thanks to you I'm sweeping nacho crumbs out of my sheets instead.

Parakeets

I have roughly 3 blog "drafts" trending right now, all of them regarding societal issues about which I currently feel pretty opinionated about, and all of them unfinished. With that said, I'm feeling like it's time to post something again, so I'll tell you another frivolous observation about dating. Really, it's a ridiculous comparison in order to set down some observations about a certain type of guy so that you can have an understanding of him when I talk about it in later stories, without me having to explain it.

 (Side note: I'm nearing the more recent date stories, which puts me in kind of a conundrum. Many of my really good(bad) dates have happened with men who are still my friends(at least on facebook...) and some of them are actually my best friends. So my problem is this: do I publish the stories anyway and hope the bad daters will learn from a blunt, possibly harsh, review of their dates while simultaneously understanding that it is in no way a review of them as a human being, simply of their dating prowess? Or, do I keep these stories locked in my memory until a more appropriate time has passed and an imagined statute of limitations may kick in? Thoughts would be appreciated.)

Back to the point.

I'm going to tell you a secret. I have been on a lot of awkward dates. I have had a lot of uncomfortable experiences with boys misinterpreting my smile as a love song written just for them. I have spent a lot of time talking to boys about their frustrations with dating and how "getting a girl" is seemingly impossible. I also had pet parakeets from 6th grade through my senior year, so I spent about six years training birds. None of those things are the secret. The secret is this: to the typical insecure, inexperienced male, girls (myself included) are just like parakeets. Sounds dumb, right? It is, but hear me out.

Parakeets are pretty. They're cute and funny and when you first see them, all you want to do is hold one. To have the pleasure of it sitting on your finger so you can observe it and love it and care for it.   Mostly you have this overwhelming desire to pet it. But a parakeet is not a dog or a cat. It is a parakeet. It's not like you, either, so projecting your own motivations, desires and attitudes onto it and trying to train it in reference to those assumptions will only lead to you getting bit pretty hard and the bird flying to the upper reaches of it's cage and never coming down. Same with girls. Make sense?

Now would be a good point to acknowledge that this comparison, of course, does not apply to many males. Most guys, in this comparison, would know pretty well how to train a parakeet. They've grown up around them. They can sense how the bird is feeling and respond accordingly. They're good (or at least passable) at it, and they don't need training. I have, unfortunately, had a higher than average number of dates and experiences with guys who are woefully inept at everything dealing with girls. It is out of these experiences that I draw this comparison.

With that said, let's continue. When I got my parakeets my first instinct was to grab them. To wrap my hands around them and hold them like you would a hamster.  Unfortunately, to birds (and girls), this feels like an attack. They feel scared and nervous and they fly away after getting in a hard bite. What you have to do, with parakeets, it slowly approach it with one finger. You have to put your finger a little higher than the branch they're on, so that their natural instinct will be to hop onto the higher branch, because parakeets, like girls, have a constant desire to be higher than all the other birds. They want to feel prettier, sing louder, and get noticed more than the others. If you provide them with the means to feel that way, they will love you forever.

 You have to trick the bird into doing what you want by using it's natural instincts to your advantage, therefore making it think that that you want is actually what it wanted all along. You have to show no fear but also show respect. If you try to approach the bird too fast, it flies away in terror. If you try to grab it with your hand it feels trapped and will bite. It's a delicate balance, trying to train a bird.


So this type of guy -- the unsure, insecure, unused to females guy, is the one who is driven by his hormones and instincts to approach the parakeet and try to make friends with it. Some of them are overwhelmed by a fear of getting bitten, so they satisfy themselves with just looking through the cage and making small advances towards it, but never actually training it. These are the guys you see watching you from a distance, occasionally talking to you with shy smiles and secretly overwhelmed with the desire to ask you out, but they never get up the guts. 

Others are the over-zealous type of trainer. They want the bird (or the girl/relationship) so they reach in the cage and wrap their hands around the bird and try to force it to be trained -- terrifying the bird and damaging any chance of a healthy relationship. These are guys who are still over-flowing with uncertainty and self-consciousness, but they see other guys who approach girls easily, who ask the girls out and get a yes, who can make moves and have them actually work. They see these other guys and think "I can do that." So they try. They do all the right things -- they ask the girl out, they try to hold her hand, they text her. The problem is not that they're doing something wrong, it's that how they're doing it is wrong. It's like trying to sing when you're hopelessly tone-deaf. You may get all the words right, but in the end, it's the tune that matters. So they ask the girl out a little too needily, they let their insecurities and nervousness translate into desperate need. They say something because they think you want to hear it, rather than meaning it. They constantly check your reaction to everything they say or do, to see if it is right. They change to fit what they think you want. They awkwardly and unexpectedly make spaghetti and bring it to your apartment, where they drop it off and leave. They drop by randomly with nothing to say or accomplish then leave and call you on Skype the second they get to their apartment. They suffocate you just like a hand wrapped around a bird's wings.

The ones who get it right, the trainers who succeed, are confident in their ability to develop a relationship with the bird. They recognize that it's not so much what they do, but how they do it that matters. A good trainer can wrap it's hand around the birds wings and the bird feels totally cool with it. The trainer recognizes that they will get bit and accepts it, not letting the fear of pain keep it from trying to get what he wants.

Now unfortunately, I have had a ridiculous amount of experience with the second type of guy. The comparison isn't perfect. Mostly the impression I get from this type of guy is the overwhelming impression that he is scared and intimidated, but he feels like my friendliness is clearly an invitation for him to make a move, so he awkwardly fumbles around and tried to do the right things, but mostly gives me the impression that he's desperate. And if there's anything unattractive, it's desperation.