Why I never wear lipstick:

Because when I was 3 I ATE MY MOM'S LIPSTICK and then spit it out in the toilet. And it tasted TERRIBLE. Why would I ever put that near my mouth again?! It was an awful experience and actually during the same covert operation I ended up cutting off my pony tail at the rubber band along with any bangs I had hanging in my face.

Do you ever have thoughts like "why is God keeping me alive?", in a genuinely curious way. Just wondering what plan He has going on in his head for your life and why he spared you from the many close calls you've experienced in your life? Here are a few of mine:

Germany. 1989. I am 1 year old. We lived in a square 4 story house that had spiral staircases running up all over the place. I crawled away from my mom and ended up hanging by a foot (which was wedged between the rungs of the banister) over a set of steep marble spiral stairs dropping 25 feet into the basement of the house. Talk about a close call...

Germany. 1990ish. My brother Eddie (3) and I (2) were sitting on the floor playing with scissors. He was doing the whole open shut open shut game with me while explaining how truly dangerous scissors were when all of the sudden, open SHUT! as I stuck my chubby little index finger in the middle of all the action. Finger= almost gone. BUT after some swift maneuvering on the autobon by my mother straight to the hospital, my finger remains intact to this day and looking a little cooler and wiser with a scar.

Florida. 14 years old? With the family at our yearly cousins beach club extravaganza and I'm painting my nails with all my aunts and girl cousins. As I go to set the nail polish remover down the bottle hits the table hard and some remover splashes out of the bottle and into my left eye. 2 hours of eye-water-flushing later and my eyesight recovered. It was only a few years later making soap alone in a bike shed that I splashed lye-based liquid (has been known to eat through flesh in seconds) out of a container and into both my eyes (mostly my right) and thanks to more endless eye-flushing and a string of "oh Jesus please not my eyesight" ejaculations AND perhaps it helped that I wore contacts that took most of the heat (they were almost completely melted/disintegrated), I survived. Anyway, I've always said that the Lord must have some special purpose for my eyes because the enemy is always trying to sabotage them. (I just love the word sabotage, like, sooo much. I want to say it all the time. "Sabotage, sabotage, sabotage," say it with me!)

And then there was 2003. Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina. Sitting in my uncle's living room and thinking "oh my, this might be how I die" as I watched trees snapping in half outside the window and an especially ambitious tree went careening through the house and came to rest on the sleeping bag I had just crawled out of an hour before. (At the time I was more concerned about the fact that my cell phone was by my sleeping bag and I might not be able to text my crush back for a while)(didn't think about the fact that cell phone service was impossible anyways).

There's also the morning I woke up and tried to step out of bed only to collapse on the floor and feel pain shooting through my right leg. I pulled myself down the stairs (sound dramatic? it was.) and was brought to the hospital that night to have surgery on my right hip where a staff infection had been festering and (completely unbeknownst to me) close to crippling me. Sweet memorial scar: check.

So, what I know so far is... God has a plan for my life involving my eyesight, legs, index finger, and the ability to hang from great distances by my foot while avoiding falling objects. Sound like a great movie, anyone?

I'm not too concerned about it as long as He knows I'm not going to be wearing lipstick for any of it...

Ode to a Stinkbug

I am a lowly stinkbug. And this is my tale.

I go where the wind takes me, which happened to be- one fateful evening- the attic room of Lindsey and Amelie.

On that cold, dark night, the wind howled and the clouds gathered so that I could scarcely flap my wings. I was at the mercy of the night sky and all alone in the world. Suddenly, I hit a house and quickly clutched my little stinkbug body to the brick, crawling further into a crevice in the wall.

The crevice went deeper and deeper and I followed it, glad to be farther from the night air, until I was creeping through the wall and into the attic room of the house. Warmth washed over my little legs and feet and my eyes drank in the light from a lamp. I surveyed my surroundings: two beds, two couches, some dressers, a shining lamp. My little beating heart began to warm inside my shivering exoskeleton. "Is this heaven?" I thought.

I shimmied up the side of the window by diving onto a curtain and hid myself in the folds of the fabric. And there I hung for many hours, defrosting my stinkbug brain and little stinkbug toes.

What came next was all a blur. There was a scream, hustling and bustling... more lights, more screaming... Lindsey and Amelie had seen something on the window, something right next to me! I was instantly on the alert! What had they seen that scared them so? Why were they screaming at the window in one second and at each other the next. Tossing a Kleenex back and forth like they were fighting over who should hold it. Yelling at each other and then without explanation rolling on their beds laughing. It was all so confusing.

Finally, some sort of strategy emerged out of their baffling interaction and the two tormented girls crept closer to the window, alternately whimpering and giggling. They crept so close to me that I began to realize how close I was to the danger they were going crazy over. My little feet that had been frozen in fear now clicked into survival mode. Whatever was waiting for me on that curtain-that thing that had Lindsey and Amelie so upset- I would be ready to stand my ground from it.

I skittered further into a fold the curtain (thinking a surprise attack was the best option, obviously). When you're a stinkbug, there isn't much you can do physically besides, well, stink. So, you don't have to be like actually giving the old one-two, you can be hiding at a distance. But, for some reason, as soon as I moved, a new wave of hysteria came over the humans and they could scarcely breath they were so undone by either my daring courage or my fearless protective in'stink'ts, maybe they were undone by both, who knows? All I do know for sure is that their little minds were taken over by this sudden confusion and without even looking at what they were doing, one of them (Lindsey) reached out with a Tupperware dish and knocked ME into it as the other (Amelie) slid the lid on top, trapping me inside this plastic prison.

Amid screams and such (were there tears? It was hard to tell from inside my circular jail cell), I was whisked down the stairs to the lower level of the house. All the while I was squealing and crying out, trying to get their attention. "You have the wrong offender!", "I am only a lowly stinkbug escaping the cold and damp", "the true danger is still on that curtain surely!" But to no avail.

Before I could even make out where they were taking me, the wrongful victim, I was suddenly being held only a foot above a giant swirling lake, a vortex of whitewater sloshing and being sucked down and away out of sight. My life flashed before my eyes (hatching, feeding, mating, curtains, betrayal) as Lindsey dropped the entire Tupperware into the water. The top came off and I fell out and was swept away, down, down, down... into darkness.

And it is from darkness that this story is written. A message written to you as a ghost. A forever haunting ghost. My destiny is to torment Lindsey and Amelie for all eternity, leaving a stink or an old leg here and there. And late at night as they sleep I whisper my final words to them on this earth "Not I! Not IIII!".

Even now as my little ghostly stinkbug body is jumping from computer key to computer key, typing this "anonymous" post on Amelie's computer, I am reliving those last moments with a shudder and reaffirmed in my resolve.

So, let this be a warning to all those who hunt Stinkbugs in this life: If ever ye be unkind to a Stinkbug, think on this tale of woes of Amelie and Lindsey, the accursed Stinkbug Murderers, and be ye kind to all stinky things, lest ye be haunted by "The Stink." Ahem (that's me).

The End.

Quicktakes

>I just ordered a mini blues harmonica on amazon. I'm swapping piano lessons for harmonica lessons with a friend:

> Go here for a sweet demo of what I will be capable of in a few months... I hope: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqpamKil3VY

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>Photo of what we tried to do at yoga class last Friday: What won't be pictured here? A photo of me trying to do this in class last Friday.

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>Photo of yoga pose my two goofy friends Jim and Ford attempted after dinner a couple weeks ago. I tried to find a picture of THEM doing it, but all evidence was sabotaged so your hilarious mental images will have to suffice: P.S. In their defense, it's harder than it looks

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>Today I mowed the lawn. I hate mowing the lawn at our new house because we live on a busy street and many peoples drive by at all hours and think I'm just the funniest thing they've seen all day and they're happy to let me know it. So, I always wear the most frumpy unattractive thing I own, turn my ipod to hardcore and give myself a dark and angry demeanor so that people will just let me do my thing as quick as possible. Luckily, it works (but I end up looking like a freak hobo woman with deep emotional issues).

It's a price I'm willing to pay.