Erin The Great

I saw a cat in my courtyard yesterday. Ordinarily I wouldn’t think anything of this except that this morning I left my apartment and there was another cat sleeping my ‘Mini garden’ right outside my door. I know what most off you are thinking… Is she crazy? There is nothing wrong with seeing cats. WRONG! As not many of you might know, my birthday is next week.

Let me tell you a little bit about Provo Utah. In Provo, if you’re not married or at least dating someone by the age of 19 or 20, everyone looks at you like you should be wearing a ‘recall’ stamp on your forehead… You’re not married yet? What’s wrong with you? Don’t get me wrong, I have several friends that this has worked out well for, and I’m extremely happy for them and they are some of the lucky ones, but for the love of Pete!

For me it started at the age of 21 when I moved here from Oregon. In Oregon if you get married before you’re the age of 30 people start to question your sanity. I never feel old and decrepit when I’m back home, but the second I step foot back into Utah Valley, I get the ‘Eye’. Haven’t you been able to nail down a man yet? Ok rude, first off and second, No, but I do have a butt you can kiss if you’re interested.

In light of this constant annoyance, and with the Universe so clearly mocking me, I hold fast as I turn the ripe old age of 26. I’m beginning to think that for my birthday this year, the Universe has offered up a whopper of a practical joke by sending me cats to usher in the next phase of my life in Provo. Thank-so-much! Like I already don’t feel the years waning with the constant reminder that most of the people I know are either engaged, married or having kids. Thank you Provo for making me feel so great and secure about turning yet another year older, single in Provo… Awesome! To this I give a middle finger salute and a bow because I’m in no hurry to rush into anything that could potentially leave me stranded, hopeless and divorced because I was to eager to fit in with the status quo. Happy Birthday to Me!

I wanted to write yesterday on the wonderment that is my mother, but I just couldn’t get my post right. To tell everyone how ridiculously cool my mother is would take more space then you’re willing to read. So I’ll try to paraphrase.

It all started 25 years, 11 months, and 18 days ago when my mother Laura delivered a screaming baby girl into the world at 2 am after 18 hours of hard labor. I was a pain in the butt even then and for that fact alone she deserves to have Root beer on tap in her mansion in heaven (the mansion she deserved for bringing up my brother… I’m only responsible for the big a$$ swimming pool in back ).

Through the years my mother has taught me a lot. She doesn’t think she has, but aside from me teaching myself how to tie my shoes at the age of 2, everything else I’ve learned from my mother. She taught me that hostess doughnuts and a package of double stuff Oreos could mend any tragic situation. She taught me that you should never be embarrassed about knowing every word to every ABBA song ever written because when depression hits, those are the songs that get you through the roughest parts of it. She taught me to have a sense of humor even in the grimmest of situations. She made sure I grew up well rounded thus enabling me to have a story on just about everything. Even though my dad doesn’t know, she also taught me how to TP a house perfectly by using the ‘spiral’ technique so that the toilet paper sticks to the roof better and doesn’t break off as easily as the roll comes floating to the ground.

My mother is one of the most wise and caring women I’ve ever known. She was there during the teenage years when I was usually up to no good. Being a strong support when my world would occasionally come crashing down. She’s my constant through the good times and the bad. When she had cancer, it was her that helped us all continue to have a sense of humor through that remarkably tragic time. She is the glue that holds my family together and through her strength, wit, humor, unconditional love and shining example, I will always be indebted to her for all I’ve learned and the profound impact she’s had on my life. To mother… I salute you! Not many women could have raised the kids you did and still have enough sanity after the teenage years to brag about it. I know the few short paragraphs I’ve written can’t even come close to describing the brilliance of you, but I did my best. Woman! I love you!

There you are… you pull up to a grocery store; you get out of your car. You ignore the panhandlers and the liberals trying to get you to sign some petition to ban something that you have no interest in. (ok, maybe that last one was an ‘Oregon’ exclusive) You walk in with a few items on your mind and as you wander around the store you find yourself wondering where in all of the great space of heaven are these objects even located? Most of the times you can find what you are looking for by thinking ok I need cereal, that’s got to be in the cereal isle. I’m looking for fruit ok produce section. What happens when you’re looking for a miscellaneous object like Marshmallows? Where would you categorize that? Baked goods? The junk food isle? All of a sudden your world comes crashing down as you realize that the store seems to have been arranged by a drunken lunatic! Where the heck are the marshmallows?

Such an occurrence happened to me yesterday when I went to the store with a few friends to get some items for a barbeque today. The stuff I needed was easy… soy and teriyaki sauce, hello ethnic foods isle! For my friend unfortunately it was not so quick and painless. First we entered a think tank… where could they be? As we searched though our options, our options being in the junk food isle or in the baked goods isle, we thought hey, how about by the peanut butter and jelly? It’s in neither of the other two isles it’s got to be there! We searched but no avail! After our embarrassing display of confusion and the inability to find marshmallows we started up and down ever isle. For all we knew, the drunken lunatic who organized the store probably stuck them by all the automotive stuff. After looking and looking we finally found them! To our ironic surprise we found them sitting in the ‘canned vegetables and condiments’ isle… What the? Yeah, because clearly nothing says marshmallows like canned tomatoes and mayo!

Where did the time go?? On Tuesday I sat down to read the book ‘Twilight’ and before I knew it, I’d read all three books. Now it’s Saturday and here I sit absolutely mystified as to where my week went. Not that the week of seclusion wasn’t nice, because it was but more rather now my standards have absolutely shot through the roof as far as men I’m now willing to date.

For any female that has read these books, should have a massive crush on the beautiful, romantic and down right chivalrous Edward Cullen. I was absolutely fascinated by the writing and the story as I read on and on and on…. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I haven’t exactly showered in a few days… don’t you dare judge me! I was so entranced with the stories that I would get upset with anyone who tried calling, texting or who would just show up at my door! (Don’t worry Ashton you’re exempt). I even went so far as to yell at anyone who dared to knock on my front door. Sorry to those of you that I yelled at to ‘leave me the hell alone’. If you’ve read the books, you’d understand and you would have granted me the serenity and peace as I became permanently ingrained in the story.

I know what you ‘unbelievers’ are thinking. You people who refuse to read the books because ‘everyone else is doing it’… well to those people I say pull your head out of your butt and read the friggin book already and while you’re at it, stop judging the people who have no problem disappearing for 4 straight days to read the ‘Genius’ of Stephanie Meyers.

To all you faithful readers I say booyah! Don’t fret ladies! Edward Cullen may not exist but I do know that men like that do! (Not specifically vampires) but wonderful, sweet, chivalrous and downright amazing men do exist! I’ve known as well as currently know many, and have even had the pleasure to have dated a few of them. Love like that IS real and I defy anyone who tells me other wise… poor fools… sell it somewhere else because I’m not buying your weird brand of romantic atheism.

I have an idea… I’m up a creek when it comes to what I want to write about. Maybe I’ll ask all who reads my blog as to what you would like me to comment on or write about. It’s kind of an experiment about my views towards life and certain topics and what not. I basically have an opinion on just about everything so leave me a comment and I will do my best to write about what comes up!

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to go and see ‘The Miracle Worker’ at the Hale Center Theater in Orem.

This was the blind date I went on Saturday. I was a little apprehensive to accept ‘said’ date, due to the fact that you never know how a person truly feels about you until they set you up on a blind date. Most of the time you come home befuddled as to what you might have done to ‘wrong’ your so-called-friends. Luckily this was not the case this time. I had a really fun time and the guy was really nice.

My friend Joey, who was the one who set me up, was also in the play, which is why I think we went… boy am I glad we did. The play was amazing! It was one of the best adaptations of the ‘Helen Keller’ story I have ever seen. The actors were wonderful especially the ones playing Helen and Anne (the teacher). I was almost moved to tears by the end. This is especially difficult since the only movies or plays I have ever cried at were ‘Dumbo’ (that baby of mine song gets me ever friggin time) and ‘PS I Love You.’

For anyone who lives in the Utah Valley area, I highly recommend ‘The Miracle Worker’. It’ll be showing until May 24th.

I woke up this morning feeling quite relaxed and revitalized! Leave it to comfort food and a really entertaining chick flick!

Today is Friday and I was supposed to be going to New Orleans for ‘Jazz Fest’. Unfortunately my friend Melanie who I was going with had her wisdom teeth pulled leaving me to wonder if I’ll ever get to see to Jimmy Buffet in concert… My day will come!

While I was basking in my own self pity last nigh, Wondering if I’d ever make it ‘Jazz Fest’, there came a knock on my door. As I opened my door a bunch of my friend’s came in to watch the movie I was currently watching. It was like the heavens knew that I needed some good female bonding time. Things were going well when there came another knock on my door. This time it was my friend Joey. Fearing he had invaded ‘Girl’s night’, he shot me the look of a dear in the headlights, so I went with him outside so as to spare him any excess estrogen.

Joey came over to tell me that one of his best friends was in town and would I mind going on a date with him? My stomach started to churn immediately as I had blind date after blind date flash through my head. It wasn’t a good experience, especially since I can count on one hand how many blind dates I’ve been on that DIDN’T go catastrophically wrong. I’ve got some good train wreck stories when it comes to this subject. Stories that span from going to a movie (my place of employment at the time), which I got us in so he didn’t have to pay, and then dropping me off a couple blocks from home when it was snowing because ‘He didn’t feel like driving all the way up there’. There was a guy who took me out once and then started stalking me for the next week but not before telling me how cute our kids would be, so we should probably get married because hey ‘I wasn’t getting any younger’. What a charmer! After 10 years of dating… I have great date disaster stories!

Any way, as my friend Joey kept pleading with me to go out with his friend, I was wondering why he was pleading with me. He has several other friends that are girls, but I can’t help but wonder if most of it was due to the fact that the date is for Saturday and I may have been one of the only girls he knew, that was home at the time. Darn my ‘Me’ time. I reluctantly accepted. What’s another story eh? If anything I’ll get to see a free play and have more fodder for my blog!

What do you do when you get to the point where you have SEVERAL stories to share, but you can’t because of who reads your blog. You don’t want to get in trouble with family and friends, or even worse ‘Dooced’. You pass off your lack of creativity as, ‘Writer’s Block’ when all you really want to do is scream.

Which should I talk about first? I have a really good friend needing additional treatment for his cancer that should have went into remission. How about getting in massive amounts of trouble at work over ‘excessive internet usage’ when the one day it was in excess, was the day I tried selling my friend’s cars on KSL as a practical joke. There’s always the story of the ex (that’s now married) that made me feel like I was never good enough, so much so, that I almost literally killed myself for 2 years straight with no break from school even though I had multiple hospital visits and a few surgeries. Now I have to take a few semesters off just to recover. No, I know! You want to here about the time I borderline alienated one of my favorite men that I absolutely love and admire because I decided to turn into a jealous bag of crazy. Maybe I’ll tell you about the time I battled hard-core depression because my body decided it didn’t need to sleep for almost 6 months. I didn’t even know that lack of sleep could amplify depression…who knew?

I realize that I have a tendency to blow things out of proportion, but unfortunately this is just the last couple of weeks in the life of ‘Erin’. The only reason I’m even going off about all of this, is because If I DON’T get this off my chest, I’m going to explode! I’m usually used to life hitting hard, hitting fast, but this is ridiculous. I’m grouping them all together because the last thing I want is for my blog to become a ‘Complain O’blog’. A blog where people check it and think to themselves ‘what is she complaining about now?’ I don’t want that! So, I group the crazy stories together, eat my favorite comfort food (Totino’s pizza bites), watch a chick flick, cry and go to bed. Hopefully I’ll wake up, feel rejuvenated, move past my crazy month, become a good friend again, and turn back into myself. Wish me luck and thank you for listening!

We’ve all been there. It’s happened to all of us. There is nothing more embarrassing than being out smarted by a machine.

I was at the Red Box the other day when I saw someone having a most difficult time trying to rent a movie. I was trying to keep from laughing when the guy saw me. I was totally busted! I didn’t have the heart, more rather my pride wouldn’t let me tell him I was outsmarted by my iPod when I first got it. Leave it to my generation, the generation that was born on the cusp of technology. There are two groups of my generation. There’s the technologically impaired i.e. me, and the techno geeks who know and get everything about it. I’m rather jealous of them.

… it’s not easy being out-smarted by the techno stuff of the world.