The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I am not sure that I would think this site is as funny as I do now if I wasn't taking grammar currently. It never fails to make me laugh out loud. Has "Jesus" saved your soul?

When late morning rolls around and you're feeling a bit out of sorts, don't worry; you're probably just a little eleven o'clockish.

I had a rough night last night, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.

1. I fried my video camera by plugging it into the laptop power supply (accidentally)
2. By shorting out the camera, I froze a tape that I really needed inside of it. I had spent several hours creating a voice over for my Grandma of the ranch documentary I am working on, and then I had to call her and ask if she would redo the whole thing and overnight it to me.
3. I cut 10 hours of video into a 2 1/2 hour video, exported that video into a 2 1/2 hour movie, and have thus far been unsuccessful in getting the 2 1/2 hour one onto my brand new (so pretty) external hard drive.
4. I woke up, did my hair, put on some makeup (a strange thing for me) and came all the way up to campus, only to discover that I had forgotten my laptop. Luckily my sister was at home, and completely willing to hop right out of bed into her car to drive me back and forth to get it from my apartment.

It's kind of an Eeyore day so far.

Weddingbee

I have a new obsession. It is one of the most addicting sites that I have ever visited. Weddingbee. It is a wedding themed blog updated by brides across the country as they discuss everything pertaining to their own weddings.

All of the brides have the cutest handles, like Kiwi, Mangnolia, and my favorite flower, Gardenia. Each new batch of bride bloggers choose a nickname from a group, the newest group being types of desserts. Yum!

I check it obsessively, so much so that I have even started reading through the archives. The posts are organized by bride, and I have read through the complete weddings of 3 different brides. There is no end in sight in terms of reading them all (something I am gleeful about).

I am in love. I am going to buckle down and write daily, so that when Swayzie finally proposes I can become a bee myself!

Proprieting

Proprioception. It took 33-year old Clark 7 years to find a doctor who could explain what this word meant for his life. If you were to ask him to explain this word to you it would take him at least 15 minutes to give you the full meaning. Often called the sixth sense, proprioception is the way that the body determines where it is in relation to itself; a sense that all human beings inherently have. Clark will say that this definition is incomplete, that no person could ever understand what proprioception is until they no longer have it. He completely lost his sense of proprioception 13 years ago, leaving him to stumble through life without any sense of self-awareness. When Clark closes his eyes he cannot touch his nose. Without his eyes open, Clark cannot point to his mouth. Losing his proprioception has meant losing everything about himself.

Clark worked 12 years for Microsoft, where he stared at a screen for 9 hours on weekdays and attended swanky parties on weekends. He was 3 years away from a promotion and a significant pay raise.

One day Clark’s brain woke up but his body would not. He panicked because he wasn’t sure if his body still existed, he wondered if he had died. He told his eyes to open, and they did. He spent 8 minutes telling his body to sit up but it would not. He could see his left leg, which he threw up in the air causing him to roll out of the bed onto the floor. This action knocked him unconscious for 2 hours, until the driver of his carpool group came in to see if he had slept in for work.

He woke up at 1:00 in a hospital bed in Seattle, his eyes only opening after he willed them to do so for an entire minute. He lay there for 3 months while doctors worked him over attempting to discover the problem. He felt helpless and allowed this helplessness to overtake his life, losing his job and all of his fair-weather friends in the process. He found the hospital to be an agonizing place, where time seemed to stop. It wasn’t until he was released from the hospital that he realized time had been quickly advancing all along.

8 months after he woke up he lifted a cup to his mouth for the first time. Each step of the process had to be isolated and done in the correct order. First he looked down at his arm, bending at the elbow and moving the entire arm towards the cup. He made his fingers curve to fit the form of the cup, and after weeks of practice he bent them together around the slender ceramic body. He willed his arm to move up and towards his lips, looking in the mirror across from his bed to guide it to his lips. Without the mirror he had no idea where his lips were, and during previous attempts he had soaked his chest. His sheets and gown had to be changed, an action that took at least 22 minutes each time. The first taste of water presented to his mouth by his own accord awoke a new sense of independence within.

Each jerky attempt at drinking caused him to feel like a marionette on a string. Though the jarring motions were distracting and unpleasant to behold, they broke up the monotony of his life in the stark white hotel room. No one brought him flowers, and he never expected any balloons. He watched summer turn to winter 3 times before he moved home from the hospital for good.

This condition had forced Clark to redefine himself completely. He had learned to use his sense of sight as a blind man relies upon the sense of touch. When he didn’t know what proprioception was, he defined himself using his accomplishments. Now retrieving toast from the toaster without burning himself was an accomplishment. And yet, when he thought about this, retrieving toast from the toaster, he remembered burning his old self a few times. This thought made him smile. Or at least he thought he was smiling, without a mirror to look into it was hard to tell.

"Please drop your trousers"

I went to the urologist today. When I was in the examination room I realized that the rooms are not soundproofed at all. This means that as the older gentleman next to me was having his examination, I was privy to every word while I waited for my own examination to begin. "Drop your trousers", "turn and cough", I heard it all. Apparently he has hemorrhoids and an enlarged prostate. I tried to hum and read all about Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch but it was SO LOUD. I was saved from hearing all of the gory details of the rest of his visit when my Mom called me to chat.

This did have a negative effect on my own visit as I was constantly censoring myself as I wondered whether the person next door to me was listening in. Those are the kind of visits that I don't like sharing the details of.

Ward Activities

I have been thinking about ward activities today. It stems from a discussion (fight?) I had with a friend of mine about a week ago concerning Family Home Evening. I began the discussion defending the point that I didn't have to go to FHE because I don't have a family and thus FHE is not for me because I am not a single. Turns out this is incorrect, and now I am no longer sinning in ignorance. I will just continue to sin in defiance by not going. It is a waste of time and I hate it. So there.
Anyways, this girl in my Sunday School class was complaining about how no one comes to the ward activities and this got me thinking about the true purpose of these ward activities in the first place. Are we having them just so that everyone will come and the activities committee will feel good about themselves? Isn't the purpose of these singles ward activities to give people a chance to socialize. Thus if I do not have the desire to socialize I should not be required to go. It makes sense doesn't it?

Free Hugs

I gave out free hugs on campus for a class project involving doing something outside of my comfort zone. It was awkward, as was to be expected.