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Solid Blog Post 1:
The Wasteland vs. Graceland. I am highly moved/entertained/invested in this tumblr as a whole, but mention this post specifically since Sunshine is one of my favourite films of all time and I cry like a cretin every time Kaneda dies. This post articulately justifies why that is alright.

Solid Blog Post 2:
Kam’s Post about Provo Houses. These are Kam’s photos of two of my favourite houses in Provo.

I always wondered about the history behind these exact houses and was super into Kam’s tidbits about them.

The other week when Andy and I were in the doctors, we saw a girl wearing what looked like Ugg boots wearing pepto-bismol coloured Crocs. I’m not sure which is the greater footwear sin. Andy called them Cruggs and actually found a photos of them on the internet by googling that term. Here they are, in lilac. Mmmmm.

It’s been a little more than ten months since we lived in Provo. I just re-found these photos photos of where we used to live. Looking at them gives me a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. Excuse me if I get a bit squishy: we’ve been on the move/living out of suitcases for over a year now and the vagabondage has me nostalgic for when we weren’t.

This picture sets off a strong rush of assorted memories: sitting on the porch steps eating Otter Pops with Andy, raking leaves while listening to Room on Fire, pulling our bikes out of the house so we could ride over to the Marriott and swim, proudly displaying our carved pumpkins.

About six months into being married, when we realised we had more music equipment than furniture, so we shoved our bed in a living room and turned our former bedroom into a music room. We had long lengths of Christmas lights on the floor and a leopard print rug under someone’s drum kit. It wasn’t particularly rock & roll, but it worked. Andy and I messed around with Velvet Underground covers together in there. I have good memories of Andy making me feel proud of myself for figuring out the easy part of Jesus, even though he’d just worked out the much trickier bits of Pale Blue Eyes. Another favourite memory is coming home from grocery shopping and eavesdropping on Andy and Bret Meisenbach drilling out a genius Spencer Kingman cover. We put the computer back there in that room with all the music stuff. Sometimes it got used for music stuff, sometimes homework. On Sunday Nights when the schoolwork blues worked their magic, Andy would hole himself up back there amongst sheaves of school-related junk. Sometimes I’d bring him brownies and Moses to cheer him up. He always liked the brownies, but Moses could get annoying when he’d sit on the keyboard or take swipes at the monitor.

We painted the lounge green because it clashed marvelously with our $15 velvetty orange couch. If you ever sat on that couch and are now concerned that you may have contracted the kind of disease that lurks in $15 couches: I washed the covers really well, and it’s not like you ever sat on my couch without your clothes on. I’ll be ticked if you find out that you did.

Almost every Friday night, after being out or whatever, Andy and I would drag our mattress through into the lounge and have a sleepover. We’d watch shoddy films on a TV set that had a black spot in the middle, so it either looked like everyone in the film had a mole or there was a fly in every scene. We’d play Nintendo games into the wee hours, then sleep in. When we’d wake up, we’d eat our weight in Marshmallow Mateys, drink orange juice from the carton, and get excited about whatever we planned on doing that Saturday. One time we set up our tent in the front room just so we could get excited about tent-camping.

I also miss the following things from our Provo Life:

• midnight bike rides to Albertson’s vending machines in order to purchase and consume 25c cans of cheap, nasty, grape drink
• BYU library
• nighttime desert air
• not getting stabbed for not having a light for a strangers cigarette
• working for Nu Skin on Centre Street and the bike home from work only taking 2 minutes
• $5.50 matinees
• slow walks to 7-11 for Winter hot chocolates that had a 600:1 mini-marshmallow to hot chocolate-sip ratio
• finding notes and gifts on the porch from people like Sam
• shooting rockets in Springville
• having all my early memories of getting to know Andy within a 20-block radius

Pro:
Not having that gross hairlength where it’s just past your shoulders
Con:
Looking like a total mum

I lay the blame with Jeeves.

Jessica’s photos in print. Andy’s hair looks super slick in that bottom photo for some reason.

I think there’s some sort of magpie in our house that collects my kirby grips and Andy’s guitar picks. I hope to come across his stash one day.

In fewer words, I used to think my life was converging towards a point. That’s Fig.1.

I figured that the decisions I made were designed to funnel me from general things to specifics. Explore multiple career/dating/travel options and then eliminate options and make decisions that concentrate my life towards a point where I’d be a particular person doing a particular job in a particular way. The philosophy seemed to work alright and I liked it. I felt like a free-agent because I was relatively in-control of the speed/acuteness with which my life converged. I figured I could do all manner of foolhardy things without throwing off anyone’s equilibrium but my own. I also made the mistake of thinking that ‘converging’ was synonymous with ’simplifying’. I thought that because my converging means I could shed unnecessary things and minimise my list of ‘things to maintain’ I was bound for a simple life.

I realised the other day that my life isn’t converging anymore at all; it’s doing quite the opposite. That’s Fig.2. The more books I read, the more complicated things seem. The more I see, the more I feel I need to see. The more I recognise my insignificance, the more important my decisions become to me. My life definitely converged to a point (pun!) but it’s expanding again. I’m glad that during my ‘convergence years’ I didn’t make any irrevocably stupid decisions that would have jeopardised the opportunity to expand.

Anyway. I got thinking about what axis the pivotal shift between convergence and expansion occurred on exactly. I was surprised to realise I could pin-point it down to ‘meeting Andy’. Maybe I’m just slow, but I’m shocked that my entire life-scope changed entirely from an isolated incident of what struck me, at the time, as a sheer stroke of good fortune.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that meeting Andy changed everything for me. I rely on someone else for some stuff now and my life is increasingly tangled in his. We’re expecting a baby to join the team soon. Someone we’re responsible for and who needs us. Someone we’ll love so acutely that we’ll care about every experience he has. I don’t really understand how enmeshing my life so stringently with the lives and choices of two others, and getting mentally tangled in concepts above and beyond my mentality could possibly make me feel more free, or as if my life was more simple, but it does.

And neither does Spongebob.

He could at least have gotten Gary.