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.

Is This Real Life? Why You Should Never Give Out Your Number at a Bonfire

The title may actually be kind of wrong, considering that I am actually going to a bonfire this weekend, and I may or may not end up handing out my number. But let me explain.

My first semester at BYU-Idaho, we went to the sand dunes every now and then to  have a bonfire   crash other people's fires. Basically, we would get a car full of people, drive to the dunes, pick a bonfire at random and join their party, because none of us wanted to buy/steal/locate firewood. It was at one of these gatherings where I started trying to make friends.

Now, before we go any farther, let me point out this was a very dark and windy moonless night. No joke. The fire we had picked was super hot and so bright that rather than casting light, it just made everything around it seem darker. This meant that the most you could see of anyone was vague facial features when the firelight chose to lean in their direction. Other than that, not much was visible aside from a general outline showing you the approximate size of your neighbors.

So, I had started talking to these two man-sized outlines, sort of flirting but mostly just talking to pass the time. The taller and bulkier of them mentioned he was into swing dancing, which got me all kinds of excited due to some past experiences I'll talk about later. As the night went on, the fire got smaller and visibility got poorer, but I kept talking to the dark patch of air where (I was pretty sure) this guy was standing. I don't remember his name, but I think it started with a J? Maybe John? Jason? Josh? Anyway, Jackson/Jake/James ended up getting my number and my group left. While the other 12 people in the suburban talked and laughed about an event I had missed due to J-Kid, I laid awkwardly across two laps and under someone's legs and wondered if it was a good idea to give out my number to a random guy I had barely even seen.

The next week was my good friend John Moore's birthday party. I made him this super manly cake, featuring all of his favorite things: me, a million dollars and on the sides: his family, a monkey, the temple, and a missionary name tag. Yeah, we're Mormon.

So anyway, random bonfire guy texted me the day of John's party saying "hey cutie ;) any partyes tonite?" Ignoring the red flags of 1.) an emoticon in place of punctuation and 2.) gross misspellings, I told him about John's party. Fast forward half a day and the party begins. Random friends of John showed up with various desserts, we played ping pong and air hockey and never have I ever. We took tons of pictures.

This is John the birthday boy, not Random Bonfire Guy who's name may have also been John.

About 30 minutes into it, I get a text from Mr. Nameless telling me he was there. And through the door comes someone who gave off an impression like this:

He was way more of a tool than his dune-fire outline could have possibly suggested. The first thing I noticed, (as he pulled me into an overwhelmingly abercrombie-cologned hug) was that his TAPOUT shirt was at least 3 sizes too small. Then, above his acid-washed jeans that had more holes than the average colander, was a giant, rhinestone studded, gun-shaped belt buckle. No joke.  After taking a step back, I noticed the wide leather sharktooth necklace that concealed about half of a neck tattoo. Fortunately, he coordinated well with several leather bracelets, a LiveStrong band, a balance band, and even better, no fewer than 4 silver rings. To top it all off, he had white sunglasses nestled among the gel-covered, highlighted spikes of his hair.

 I wish I was making this up. Or even exaggerating.

Needless to say, I was shocked and confused and a little dizzy from the excessive cologne. So we talked for a bit, someone showed him the cake I made John and he suggested that I make him a cake for his birthday coming up soon. Well, in his words, "Tons of chicks wanna make my cake, but you should do it, dude." Dude. He called me dude. He then called John "broseph." I fought the urge to puke.

He quickly realized (thanks to none-too-subtle hints from me) that we were very, very different and probably should never speak again. The whole party moved to another complex's lounge so we could play murder in the dark, and he left at some point, not saying goodbye to anyone, with a random girl and three slices of cake, never to be heard from again.

I spent the rest of the night seriously rethinking my social habits.

Suck It Up, Buttercup (A rant that will probably offend someone)

There's a sickness running rampant and it's driving me crazy. It's pretty contagious, highly destructive, and honestly? Super annoying. The world is sick with self-pity, and riddled with "motivational/moving" campaigns whose mission statements are to inspire self-worth but really they just allow the sickness to fester. They give platforms for people to force their problems and issues on the general populace as part of an insecure search for validation. They make short documentaries with soft music in the background where people speak slowly and use vague statements pretending they're solving a problem, while really just accelerating the free-fall into a whirlpool of self-pity.  They start blogs where they can vent about (and therefore justify) their unhealthy situation.

 Now, I'm all for writing about or talking about something in order to get it out of your system, figure it out, and move on. But there's a difference between getting something out and becoming focused and obsessed with it. The former is healthy, the latter only blows it out of proportion to the point where you can't see anything other than your problem and you become lost in it. Drowning in a sea of self-pity that you willingly jumped into and don't really want to get out of. Self pity is like a drug. In small doses it can help the pain, but when you abuse it it becomes addicting and begins to control you.

When we indulge our minds and emotions in obsessing over the negative, we become deluded, thinking we are doing something that will change our situation, when really we are mentally creating a pocket of justified complacency where we convince ourselves that because others are going through the same thing, the thing itself is okay. We become unable to solve the problem when we make living in it comfortable and bearable.

When we focus on simply surviving a challenge instead of conquering it, we forget to find a solution and therefore render ourselves incapable of truly overcoming anything because we're too busy whining about why our life is so hard. Our obsession with pitying ourselves is making us immature, self-centered and weak.

I don't know if any of this is making sense. Let's start over.

I once went on a few dates with a guy who would say things like this:

"Having been through more than most people...[insert unrelated claim here]"
or
"Because my life has been so much harder than most..."
or even worse
"People can't understand me because they haven't suffered as much as I have."

And because punching your date is frowned upon in most cultures, I would just cringe inside and change the subject without commenting on his self-righteous attitude.

I mean, honestly. How prideful are we to think that because we have been through something hard we are entitled to say that ours is a harder life than others? Why would our struggles make us better than anyone else? I don't want to imply that your personal issues are insignificant in any way. I just want to point out that no matter how hard we think our life is, there is always someone who has it worse. So we should just be glad that we are not them, and work on conquering our own challenges.

If you are sitting there on your computer in a warm building with clothes on your back and a functioning body feeling like your life just couldn't get any worse, you need to get over yourself. There are people right now who don't know if they will live to see the sunrise again.  Children in Africa kidnapped and forced to be soldiers. Impoverished families who have never known how it feels to have a full belly. Prisoners of War who are being tortured. And the list goes on.

So yes, I am sorry that you're not married though you desperately want to be, or that you can't afford the new iPhone, or that you feel lonely sometimes, that you don't like the way the country is being run or that your life isn't going exactly the way you want it to. But honestly? Join the club. If everyone's life was perfect we would all be stupid, naive, and weak.

 I don't mean to come off as insensitive, because I do understand that sometimes life just sucks. And you are perfectly entitled to feel sorry for yourself every now and then. But when you become addicted to the self-pity, when you love the extreme emotional state that comes with indulging your sorrows, you become weak. You become unable to grow. So we all need to stop wallowing in our own struggles and start losing ourselves in serving others. Because only then will we be able to climb out of whatever pit we have found ourselves in.  In the end, the world keeps turning despite our current crises, and the best we can do is accept that and move on.

Plus, without our trials we would never become better. We would never grow. We would never change our perspective, we would never learn. We would be stagnant.

Michelangelo said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it."


We are the blocks of stone, and God is our sculptor. No block of stone can become a beautiful sculpture without being struck, and struck hard, by a chisel and a hammer. Without losing those parts of ourselves that are concealing our inner beauty and potential, we would only be, at best, a block of stone. Our trials are nothing more than God telling us He knows we have more potential and can become better, stronger and more beautiful than we are now. All we need to know is that in the end, everything is for our own good.

 So let's all stop wallowing in our self-pity. Stop secretly loving to play the victim. Instead of "Why me?" let's start asking ourselves"Why not me?" Let's all remember that we are stronger than whatever we're going through. You have problems? So do I. So does the rest of the world. Suck it up, stop whining and start conquering it already.

Boyfriend...Ish

Warning:This is a fairly lengthy post. Sorry in advance. Also, I really love comments.... hint hint.

The summer that I turned 17 is when I had my first boyfriend. (Unless you count those two weeks in sixth grade when I told Chad F. I would be his girlfriend and then we never talked except for on AIM. Actually, we went to the mall once with another "couple" and dared each other to hug. And once he invited me to sit next to him on his bean bag chair in class and I did because I felt like I had to but it felt weird and I hated it. But I don't count that, so neither should you.)

Back to the point.

The beginning of that summer saw me just getting out of my slacker, ditch-at-least-once-a-day phase, starting to get into art for real, and absolutely loving being single. I neither wanted for myself, nor understood why anyone my age would want a boyfriend.

This is how I felt about my friends "needing" boyfriends and being "in love". Also how I felt about having one myself.

The beginning of summer also brought with it the annual Stake Youth Conference, which is where I met this boy. He was confident, had a great sense of style, and had just moved here from Mexico the year before. (Which will come into play later on, in probably another post.) We flirted and hung out all weekend. The conference ended, we left without exchanging information and I didn't care at all.

The Sunday after the conference I got a phone call from said boy on my home phone. He said he had looked up my number in the Stake Directory and invited me to go to his ward youth fireside that night. (Oh the mormonism!) I drove down to Castle Rock, went to the fireside, and when I went to drop him off at his house we sat in my car and talked for four hours straight. We talked about flowers and music and childhood and goals and dreams and fears and everything and nothing.

Due to a complicated living situation, he had neither a car nor a phone, so I drove down to Castle Rock almost every day to see him. In my head it was just fun, casual, flirting and I had NO dreams or goals about a relationship with him. But he was two years older than me, so I should have caught the hints when he said things like "I feel like I've known you my whole life," or "I never want to stop being with you." But silly little me didn't want to know the meaning behind those phrases so I laughed them off and continued my flirting. One night, after two or three weeks of this, he said,

"It may be too soon to ask you this, but I was wondering if you would want to date me?"

And silly little me was completely shocked by this statement. I blinked and opened my mouth only to realize that my brain had stopped working and I had no words to say. I awkwardly grabbed his hand and realized we hadn't even held hands yet.

I told him I needed time to think. He thought he had done something wrong or there was another guy in the picture. What he didn't realize is that I was woefully unprepared mentally as well as being emotionally independent enough to realize that there wasn't another guy in the picture, there was EVERY other guy in the picture. Looking back now, I realize that he meant no more to me than my good friends. I wasn't emotionally dependent on him in the slightest. Mostly I just liked the excitement and butterflies that came with flirting.

I made him wait a week and a half while I debated. I ended up telling him yes, I would be his girlfriend. Why? Because I thought "I'm almost 17, I'm allowed to have a boyfriend, so why not? Maybe I'll just try it and it'll be fun. Maybe I'm just being weird because I've never had a boyfriend before." Oh, how silly I was.

Things were great for a while, if a little awkward. And then little warning flags started appearing out of nowhere. Let's list them.

1. He called me all the time. If I didn't answer, he would call 3 more times. If I still didn't answer, he would call my best friend and ask her why I wasn't answering my phone and what that meant. 
2. Our phone calls would go like this: *ring ring ring* Me: "Hello?" Him: "Hi." Then the awkward silence would start screaming. So I would say: "What's up? Why'd you call?" And he'd say: "To talk to you." Then more awkward silence.
3. I found myself getting jealous of my freedom. Specifically, I resented the fact that I couldn't flirt with other guys because I was in this relationship. I resented it a lot and it created this little hard pit of negativity towards him and our "relationship"
4. I didn't want to touch him. I mean, we kissed and that stuff, but he always instigated it and when we were just sitting, I had no desire to be next to him, to talk to him, and definitely not to touch him. 
5. He annoyed me. A lot. Little things he did drove me crazy. Like randomly pulling the emergency brake when I was driving. Or trying to hold my hand while we climbed a fourteener. Or calling himself my "little monkey."
6. When he gave me flowers I didn't want them. I saw them as a symbol of his emotional attachment that was way, way more involved than mine. (Probably because I wasn't at all emotionally attached.)
7. When he sent me a sock monkey and candy while I was at Girls Camp I didn't want them. The other girls swooned and got jealous of me and I just wanted it to go away.
8. He spent an entire car ride to the movie theater telling me exactly what he liked about me, despite my efforts to shut him up. Things like "I like your ears. I like your eyelashes. I like your jeans. I like when you ignore me. I like, I like, I like, I like...." And I felt so incredibly uncomfortable about it. The WHOLE time.
9. I didn't want to introduce him to my family as my boyfriend. In fact, they still might not know that we were technically a couple. Surprise!

It got to the point where he was going to Mexico for a month and I was excited about it. I hoped that he would make out with some girl there and then break up with me. Before he left he gave me a card that (among other things) told me that I was like a comet, and when he was with me he was happy and full of light, but when he was not with me the world was dark and depressing.

He got back from Mexico and a full week passed before we had any contact whatsoever. Then he called me and said we should meet and talk. We both knew we were going to break up, and we both knew that we both knew it. But for some reason we wouldn't break up over the phone.

So we had the most ridiculous break up EVER.

I met him at a park in Castle Rock. He was sitting on a bench with headphones in. I walked up to him, we had an awkward hug, and proceeded to sit on opposite ends of the bench. He took out ONE headphone. Just the one. He then proceeded to watch the sun set and ignore my presence completely. So I made a bratty little noise of some sort, and he looked over and said "what?" Then looked back at the sunset.

And I about strangled him with the one headphone that wasn't in his ear.

Here's the thing, blogland. I was totally going to let him break up with me. Let him be the man and end things with me. I was maybe even going to pretend to be a little sad about it as I wished him the best in his life and drove away with one last little wave. But as I sat there and looked at him bobbing his head to the spanish music blasting out of the single headphone, I just couldn't handle it. So I said;

"Alright. This is ridiculous. You are being ridicul--"

"Look at the sunset," He said. "We always tried to see the sunset before and we never made it. But right now, the sun is setting, and we're still together. We made it." At which point he looked over at me and raised his eyebrows and gave a weird little half smile.

So I said, "......Allllllright........ Well, we need to break up."

To which he responded. "Yup."

And then I left.

He called me a year later and said he was going on his mission and wanted to see me. We met and it was the most bizarre experience ever. But maybe I'll talk about it another day. Or maybe not.

So here's what I learned from my first boyfriend (ish). 

1. Don't call your significant other a thousand times in a row. Definitely don't call their best friend when they don't answer.
2. If and when they do answer, have something to talk about.
3. Don't get in a relationship if you're not ready for it with that person. If it doesn't feel natural, it's not right.
4. If you don't want other people to know you have a boyfriend, don't have a boyfriend.
5. Compliments are like hipsters. When handled in moderation, they're fantastic and interesting and special. But when many of them are collected in the same space at the same time, you feel hugely uncomfortable and annoyed.
6. In a good relationship, you don't feel resentful that you "can't" flirt with other guys. You don't want to flirt with other guys because you know you have something way better.
7. When you breakup with someone, take out both of your earphones. Or at least offer to share.
8. Don't go to Mexico for a month.
9. Don't date someone who lives 30 minutes away if you're the only one with a car. Huge amounts of gas money.
10. If you're hoping your boyfriend cheats on you while he's in a foreign country, it might be a good time to break up with him.
11. Don't compare your significant other with a comet.
12. Make sure you are emotionally capable of honestly opening yourself up to someone. The summer that I dated this boy was the same summer that my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer, so all of my (admittedly limited) emotional capacity was focused on that, and there was nothing left to spare for my blossoming young love  extremely needy, clingy would-be boyfriend.

The end.