The best medicine... wedgie cream?

Today I decided something: I wanna laugh more.

Laughing is my favorite thing to do in the world. Seriously, if you bump into me in the street and ask me what brings me the most joy and what I love doing, I will say "laughing" without even thinking about it. I've always loved to laugh. I think everyone does, but it's weird how I don't really think about being pro-active about laughing these days. I mean, when you're a kid you kind of base your whole world and life and every decision on what will bring the most laughter to yourself and your family and friends. Why isn't that still my mantra?

Rest-of-February resolution: do more funny stuff and laugh more. Be silly. Learn how to be more funny. Practice laughing in every situation (restrictions apply. Funerals? Common. Not gonna do that). Figure out what makes people around me chuckle and do that more.

I gotta loosen up. Get free and live like I'm free! And heck, I'm jobless right now too so I think I have no excuse not to just be crazy happy all the time. What's the sense in being stressed about being UNemployed until I get a job and am stressed about being EMployed? Dumb.

As first act in my new silly self, I declare that I will make it my mission to get at least 3 people to really belly laugh at/with me in the next 24 hours. Am I biting off more than I can chew? Probs. But, even if it fails miserably, it could potentially be a success later. For, as my wonderful boyfriend states confidently, "tragedy+time=comedy." (He first used this little number to pacify me in the aftermath of giving a "girlfriend wedgie")...

...And yes, I am still waiting for that equation to come to it's full expression... *fingers crossed in a sarcastic manner*

Random thought of the day

Breakfast is the best thing that ever happened to this world. Sometimes as I'm falling asleep I'll think about what I want for breakfast and I'll get so excited that it takes even longer for me to drift off. Is that something I should share on the internet?

Today is week two of the job search. In trying to get the most out of my current unemployment, I am determined to embrace everything that comes along with all this (hopefully) short amount of free time.

Things on the agenda include but are not limited to... get a haircut, buy new underwear, blog (check!), renew inspection sticker on van, etc... a.k.a. my life is awesome right now in a "got nothin' going on" kinda way while also being lame in a "no excuse gotta run this errand" kinda way.

I've been cooking more things from scratch, which has been great because I forgot how much I love the process from beginning to end. Ingredients all separated out, mixing things step by step, multitasking, tasting, sharing what you've created with someone AND last but not least (and surprisingly my favorite part) washing the dishes and putting things back in order afterwards.

Also, it's kind of fun to send out an application to something you're actually excited about maybe doing. In my case I'm looking for more of the "we'll pay you oodles and oodles to file your nails" kind of thing. OK, I'm kidding! I wanna work! I want a challenge! I want to contribute to society, dangit!

You guys are awesome for reading my blog and I really am going to try to write more and keep thangs real.

She'll be comin' 'round the mountain.. again.. and again..

Every three months or so I complete and restart a cycle of asking the Lord questions. Every time around I'm a little older and a little wiser, but the questions remain the same: Who am I? What am I doing here? Why do I matter?

Every time I go through this, the Lord is faithful to show me that I am His, that I am serving His purpose and that He loves me.

I think it's important to keep asking these questions, even though I battle feeling like I should know the answers after all this time. But, I think the Lord wants me/us to ask Him often. He wants to show us that he cares deeply about us specifically and especially.

I don't have much to add beyond this thought. I felt like it was worth sharing. The end.

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

>

>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.

>

>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

>

>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.

YOGA- Your Onesy's Got an Aura

Yoga- (noun), "yo-guh"

The act of making a fool of oneself in order to humbly be reborn into the real world.

That about sums it up.

Now, for real, yoga is the most intense, wonderful, beautiful, peaceful, challenging, organic thing I've ever encountered. But, I am not Rodney Yee. I am not Cindy Crawford. I am Amelie Miltenberger, babysitter extraordinare, and I have an imperfect body and less balance than your average Tibetan monk. Thus, yoga does something a little different for me than what it does for my yogi: it humbles me.

Every Friday morning my best friend Lindsey and I roll out of bed around 9:30, pull on something colorful and flexible, throw our hair up into messy buns and show up to our little yoga class downtown for our weekly dose of community organized exercise. Our instructor is a young woman around our age, who could probably do something cooler than Jackie Chan. 'Nuff said. We have girl crushes on her. We try to practice Sanskrit to each other during the week so that when Friday rolls around we have't forgotten everything we learned the week before. Luckily, lots of the poses are called things like "sage" and "cobra," words that are quintessentially known as yoga words. Other phrases like "uttinasina" and "shavasina" take more practice. <(OK, I def just threw those last two in there to brag about my sanskrit skillz, so don't beat yourself up about it).

So maybe we know what the words mean (sometimes), but that doesn't make them effortless. On the contrary, I find that one of the most beneficial things I get out of yoga is just knowing I tried something that a few months ago I would have just pointed and laughed at. Mmm, OK, I still have to stifle grins and cough over my own laughter sometimes in class. When we do things that remind me of my 6-year-old ballet class ("crab crawl" anyone?) how can I resist? It's utterly ridiculous but miraculously healing.

That said and all goofy poses aside, yoga can be a very controversial topic. It's deeply embedded in the Hindu religion and as such I do think there's a certain air of caution that needs to be taken with the class. Lindsey's a great accountability partner and she has caught me in the middle of a few close calls. Sometimes my hippie ways sway my tolerance levels to accept things that I should not receive or at least should question. If it weren't for a good community around me, I daresay I'd be living in a yurt in Nepal with a pet newt named Raj. Having said that, it MIGHT be a total exaggeration..

'Alls' I'm saying is for me yoga is more about a way to have fun and be challenged than a way for me to spiritualize my earth suit. And I like it. So Sanskrit that!

P.S. Just gotta say how funny it is that every single time I went to type "yoga" it came out as "yoda" and I had to go back and change it.

... although I have no doubt that at times yoda can be a very controversial topic too...

Mmhm

You KNOW I made some of this tonight for dinner.

Nothing like good ole southern comfort food make me wanna run home to the bayou...

rerouting... haha..ha

just read through my last post and realized it's preachy. that's not why i started this blog and im sorry that happened! sometimes when we are full of our own awe-inspiring thoughts we think that other people should be too. that rarely works. (never works in my experience). i like my goofy posts about getting fired, breaking a glass measuring cup on my head, licking car hair... that's what this blog is about.

onward and upward!!

A Posted Incomplete Thought Is Better Than No Post At All

I thought I would share an excerpt from a favorite book of mine called Jesus Calling by Sarah Young. It's spoken like a thought from Jesus to you. Every day there is a different short paragraph that never ceases to cut me to the marrow. Today's devotion was no different, and I thought some one might want to share in that...

"Trust Me and refuse to worry, for I am your Strength and Song. You are feeling wobbly this morning, looking at difficult times looming ahead, measuring them against your own strength. However, they are not today's tasks -- or even tomorrow's. So leave them in the future and come home to the present, where you will find Me waiting for you. Since I am your Strength, I can empower you to handle each task as it comes. Because I am your Song, I can give you Joy as you work alongside Me."

One of the main themes the Lord brings to my mind has always been to only let myself think about today. "Tomorrow" and "this week" and *gasp* "next month" are deadly words in my walk, and I am constantly having to hear this message of "letting tomorrow worry about itself." There's nothing else to DO really. I can remember countless times laying on my bed, flipping through my notebook pouring over budgets and projected income lists and bills and crying over the "mass" (to me they were massive) amounts of cash I needed and having to fling all my worries and cares on the Lord because I had no earthly way of making the money needed to cover everything. Time after time the Lord proved faithful to my moving here. I've never gone without food, shelter, clothing or transportation. I've always had just enough, sometimes down to the dollar, and I thank God I know better than to chalk it up to good luck or coincidence.

There was the time a bike appeared in a friends back yard for me to ride to work down the road and not have to walk so far. Or the time a work check came in I had forgotten about just in the nick of time to complete my rent dues. My journal is full of these instances, most of them are stories I don't tell- things between God and myself- times where He's taken care of me that no one could know but me. And yet, it still happens that I find myself looking into that mysterious and shaky future of mine and just barely start to say "what if...-" and then SNAP! I shut those thoughts down and bring myself back to the day I'm standing in. It doesn't seem like much, 24 hours, but it's enough to keep each one of us busy. And I think you'll find at the end of the day you lived that day more fully than you would've if you'd been somewhere else in your head.

A New Era

It's been almost three years since I wheeled my measly belongings across the threshold of Virginia, and now almost a year and a half since I moved to Harrisonburg. To say it's been a long road would be like calling the Appalachian Trail a bunny slope. It's been a real long road. But, today, on this beautiful Saturday morning, after a cup of coffee and a stroll through the downtown farmer's market, I sat in my living room and wrote about how far I've traveled from the outlook I once held and how much I have come to love and even treasure this place and these people.

Gidgit.

I left my heart in Madison, VA with this little corgi-terrier mix.

Well, I've put it off long enough

It's that time. That time where I confess something as unsavory as it is unexpected: I have read, and dare I say it, enjoyed the Twilight Saga! OK, "enjoyed" is a strong word. Sometimes it was lame, downright boring and even occasionally disturbing; but, all in all, the word that kept coming up in my mind: Contemplative. I even found myself engrossed in the story, at times.

Now, I'm not going to go shout about it from the rooftops by any means, but somewhere in my mind I know I can never bash the books again like I used to -before I had actually read them. Because some part of me has a little respect for Stephanie Meyer for coming up with such a series at exactly the right time to sweep the nation during the height of vampire fever. Almost every tween in America with or without an imagination has invested anywhere from 40-99% of their thought life to her story since it's release, I gotta respect THAT. Even if it was a bit ridiculous, I will brave the scoffs and the jeers, the pity and the looks (all from those who HAVEN'T read the series, mind you) and say that I will think back on Twilight as a well-rounded tween-level tale. And it made me laugh out loud on several occasions. There's nothing unsavory about that.

My Idea of a Good Time

Earlier this week we made sushi!

Click on the title of this post to go to my house mates blog for a video of the fiasco (prepared to be bored by my "cooking show")-(you've been warned!)- (seriously though, it's boring) but mostly follow the link to read Lindsey's blog. It's new, and pretty awesome.

Awaiting our meal coups in the Chick-fil-a parking lot

Camping gear= $50 deposit

Gas= $40

Smiling about being outside on the hottest/wettest day of the year w/ no hope of a shower in sight= priceless!

A Once in a Lifetime Experience (I hope)

On Wednesday morning (3am) I left with my house mates Lindsey and Victoria and 4 guy friends for Richmond to attend the Chick-fil-a opening there. It's a huge deal, apparently, and we wanted to go check it out. So, we got there at 5am and at 6 am they count everyone in the parking lot and close down the entrances, giving out raffle tickets and, through that, choosing 100 lucky winners (of the 265 that were present!). These 100 people have the opportunity to win free chick-fil-a for a whole year (52 free meal coupons, so once a week for a year) IF -and it's a big IF- they stay on the property for 24 hours. So, once your number is called, you have a few minutes to gather your camping stuff from your car and set up camp in one of the parking spaces on the property. It's CRAZY! But, we're young and it's an adventure, so we were excited when 5 of the 7 of us made it into the 100! We agreed to split up the coups (as we called them) between all of us evenly. Luckily, they allow "guests" of the 100 who may have driven with them or whatnot, so all of us were given space to camp and fed throughout the 24 hours. While we were there we recognized some other JMU students and quickly joined forces with their 5, creating an unstoppable mega-team of youngsters compared to the shocking amount of over-65 individuals and family units that attend these things from all over the country. (More on that later... *cringe*). Working together in ruthless tact and speed, we secured the three most convenient, strategic spots of the lot. I may or may not have scooted and whirled a disoriented grandmother or two out of the way... juuuuust kidding :O

After all the 100 are called and placed, the true diehard chick-fil-a fans begin the games. (Games: not really games, unless you call just sitting around for 24 hours games...). I haven't shared the worst part of this experience, the part that no one could have guess or controlled, the really sick part: the weather. Yes, the weather. Ahhh weather... how it delighted in torturing us. It's like it KNEW it had 24 hours to play with our little minds. A parking lot full of crazies with nowhere to go...

When we got to Richmond it was POURING hot drops of rain. So hot that wearing a raincoat was like an unbearable punishment, but so wet that you really didn't have a choice. It stopped raining just after we were finished setting up camp, of course. Then, the heat set in... The clouds hung like a thick horizontal wall, trapping the steamy humidity from the rain under itself, and us with it. The sun went to work, baking the clouds which in turn radiated the heat into the mist that was clinging to us. We were wet. We were hot. We were hungry for breakfast.

So we slept. It was the only thing TO do.

I woke up to the drip of my sweat from my eyebrow to my nose. (Sidenote: I don't have a unibrow, I was laying sideways not standing up, OK?). The heat overwhelmed me. Inside the tent was like my own personal rain forest hell. I unzipped the netting and stuck my head outside. The "breeze" filtered down my shirt and refreshed me for a nanosecond. Then it was back to misery. I tried to encourage myself with thoughts like "well, at least I probably slept for a solid part of the day". Wrong. It was 8:30am.

I could continue about the weather forever, it definitely was the major wet blanket (haha...ha...ehh) of the trip. BUT there are so many OTHER interesting things to discuss, like how the heck do all these senior citizens sleep in tents on concrete, and how do you justify bringing a newborn baby to endure the unfriendly climate? There are a million other little eccentricities of such an event that I can't even begin to share. Like how we actually had a great time. How, even though we were miserable, we were laughing the whole time. Maybe because we were doing it together, going through it together, and getting to know each other in a way that is different than the norm. Suffering together - and it brought us close and made us be creative and silly. I know I spent most of this post talking about how awful it was, but really, that was just to make you laugh. My true feelings about the 24 hrs are ones of smiles and good memories. All in all, I will never do it again, but I will never forget the good times had by all. Even the senior citizens.

...So I'll have to say "I love you" in a song

Isn't that the truth? How many times have I stopped myself (and I cringe at the times I didn't) from almost sending a song in an email with a subject line like: "OK, this song explains how I'm feeling, listen carefully to verse three"? If only that worked. If only we didn't have to learn to communicate with our own words what we feel and think.

Moral: Even if your words don't rhyme or flow like a melody, they are more priceless than any R&B hit and whoever you're dialoging with will hopefully resound with what you're trying to say and treat your thoughts the way they deserve to be treated. Respect, yo.

Genuine Heatwave

Bangerang!

It's summertime hardcore in the Valley. Ninety-eight degrees consistently with little-to-no breeze and a spoonful o' humidity. I made the decision of a lifetime last week and craigslisted for an A/C window unit. I got two for $15 from a guy down the street and let me tell you... my room has become the hub for all activity in the house. It stays a cool 70-75 degrees (depending on if someone leaves the door open for a few minutes on the way out, always a sad affair). Getting around the house, though, has become a chore. We finally couldn't take the drab hot-hot-heat anymore and had a water balloon fight outside. It was more like a water balloon failure because Jodi and I just stood ten paces away from each other and took turns splashing one another with cool H2O. Victoria took a video of us and our horrible aim, missing each other from waaaay too close up and laughing hysterically. Later as we watched the vid, we were all aghast at our "video voices." You know what I'm talking about. I don't think I've met a person who just loves the way their voice sounds on camera. It's always nasally and everything you say just sounds stupid. Anyway, we decided to find out once and for all if we really sound the way we hear ourselves on camera, or in our heads. Jodi took turns filming each of us as we pretended to be having a conversation- trying to use our real voices. We hope we're wrong, but we think the voice we hear of ourselves in our heads is not our real voice. That our real voice is in fact a few octaves higher and annoyinger. So, I'd like to take this sentence to apologize to everyone who has to endure my especially annoying voice in real life. I am truly sorry. I only wish you could hear the smooth, collected tone I tune into when I'm talking. I think I'll have to live in ignorance on this subject. If I think about to too much and take it too much to heart, I'll never speak again! So, that's the last you'll hear me talk about it. It's in the past, never to be dug up except on the rare occasion that I hear/see myself in a recording. ... which is fairly often now that my good friend purchased a video camera. Bother. Check our her blog, I think she may have put up the balloon fight vid... but check out her blog anyway, it's about to get crazy when she moves to Boston next month!!! Just click on the title of this post.