Dear Spongebob, I ate Squidward. Sorry.

Well, yesterday was a tough day. I had to drive quite a ways to get Olive to her hearing aid doctor. The office was in one of those shopping centers with the crappy Mexican restaurant, the Chinese acupuncture clinic, the barber shop with the spinning pole, and the dreary looking Jewish banquet hall. Olive lives in a rather wealthy neighborhood with big houses and fences and alarm systems. The office was in a neighborhood with very small, old houses with taped windows and surly looking people. Scary. The doctor had a dozen degrees and awards up on the wall, but when he came into the waiting room to get Olive, I shrank away. He looks fairly normal and I'm sure he's a very nice man, but one of those people you just get a creepy feeling from and you watch his every move with wary distrust. He adjusts her hearing aid and tells her she needs to wear it every day so that her brain gets used to hearing again. When we leave the office, I call our friend Margo to let her know we were heading to the restaurant to meet her for lunch. Olive, while I was on the phone, kept saying, you're shouting you're shouting. Finally, once I hung up, I asked her what she meant. "You guys are shouting at me. It sounds like you are shouting." I remind her that I was talking in a normal tone of voice, but it sounded like I was shouting because she wasn't used to hearing anything. She was furious and insisted that me and the doctor were lying to her and shouting. I told her, again, that I have shouted at her for months now and with the hearing aid was the first time I haven't had to. So we get in the car to head to the Chinese restaurant in Van Nuys (which looks like it's pronounced Van New-eeees but is apparently pronounced Van Eyes). The entire way Olive is fuming because it's all so loud and apparently we were doing it to annoy her. I finally make it to the restaurant safely (woo hoo) and lead Olive inside where Margo is waiting. The restaurant isn't some Americanized Chinese restaurant. It's as close to Hong Kong style food as you can get without being IN Hong Kong. Everyone in there is Chinese, speaking Chinese, and eating with chopsticks. There are whole ducks hanging in the roaster and entire chickens sitting under heat lamps. Not to mention the chicken legs and intestines and stomachs sitting in broth. Gag. We just let Margo order whatever and when it came, I ate it with chopsticks to be as authentic as possible. The fried rice had roast duck in it and though it was a little salty, it is the best freaking fried rice I have had since Food Fest at BYU-Hawaii! There was also a platter of "crispy noodles" topped with gravy and roast pig, chicken, and pieces of squid. Yes, that's right. Squid. I ate a big bite of the white squid meat (which wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but certainly not good. Kind of like Vegemite). Then I decided to be daring and eat a tentacle, complete with the little suction cup things. Ladies and gentlemen I'm here to tell you that was one of the most disgusting things I've ever done. The taste was salty and fishy, but the worst part was the texture. It was like eating a finger, rubbery on the outside and something crunchy and hard on the inside. I didn't finish eating the rest of the tentacles. The third platter was some kind of stir fry in soy sauce with rice noodles and BBQ beef. It was all pretty good, except the crispy noodle dish. Olive started the meal furious and snapped at us not to discuss her hearing doctor visit. She was so angry me and Margo were silent for a while, until Olive said something about the restaurant being nice. I thought it was rather funny that she was telling Margo how nice it was when during the ride she kept saying, "Where is Margo taking us?" and was afraid that a "real Chinese restaurant" was going to serve nothing but raw fish. After dinner she asked if we were going to get a fortune cookie. A word to the Americans: fortune cookies are not Chinese. After lunch we walked next door to the Asian supermarket where I bought some Chinese cookies and crackers for the family. The store was like being in China. The music was Chinese, the announcements were in Chinese, many items only had Chinese labels, and most of the patrons were Asian. (I was surprised at the amount of caucasians there, however.) The meat department had tons of dead fish on ice and tons of live crabs, shrimp, oysters, clams, and lobsters. Ewwww. Olive opened a package of cookies to eat while we walked around and we ate some. Really good actually. Margo kept pulling things out that was popular to Chinese people and I kept making faces. I mean, shrimp flavored crackers? I think I want to hurl. And cookies with green onion and sesame seeds? But at least it was an adventure! Olive was slightly panicky about me finding my way home, but despite the terrible traffic, we made it home just fine. The rest of the day sucked massively, but I'm certainly finding out how much crap I can deal with, aren't I? People keep telling me it means something good is going to happen, and I think, 'Can I pick my prize? Like you do at the dentist's office?' But in a little over a week I'll be out of here! Woot woot!

Today's Blurbage

This morning Olive had a dentist appointment. I really hate dentists, as I may have mentioned, and sitting in the waiting room for that long, hearing the sound of sucking and drilling, made me very antsy. I kept expecting the door to fly open and dentists to come in and drag me to a chair. We were only there an hour and afterward went across the street to the mall, where Olive wanted to get a new top and white pants. Those poor sales people. Once we made it home I immediately took a long, much needed nap. I think the current events of my life are giving me an ulcer. Oh goody.
(The word blurbage comes to you today from Jessica Allen. Thanks to her for letting me steal it.)

Enter big long sigh here

So yesterday Olive wanted to go out, again, and as usual it was impossible for her to make up her mind where she wanted to go. We finally ended up at some Chinese-ish restaurant with food that tasted about the same as every other Chinese-ish restaurant in America, despite the fact that the people working there were actually Chinese. At the end of the meal I opened my fortune cookie (which is NOT Chinese) and I kid you not, one side was in English, the other was in Spanish. Need I go into how many things are wrong with this? First of all, it is a CHINESE restaurant, not a Mexican restaurant, so shouldn't any translations be in Chinese? Better yet, don't translate it at all. Glory. For some reason, during the meal my voice left, and Olive insisted on talking, so I kept having to lean across the table to get her to hear me.
After lunch, we were headed home (due to Olive's instructions) and we had JUST reached the corner where we turn to head to the house and she decides she wants to go walk around Poo Park. Sigh. Fortunately, by four in the afternoon I could have time to myself and make sweet bread for the missionaries.
Today's church was great, with one exception. Since it's my last official Sunday, the bishop surprised me with bearing my testimony in sacrament. Not so nice considering all that's been going on. But the rest of it was really good. I come home and almost immediately fall asleep, with my feet hanging off the bed and my shoe falling off. I wake up to hear Olive on the phone talking to Dorothy about how I just "walked in, said hi, and went upstairs". How rude of me (apparently). She's easily offended and even partially invents things to be offended at.
Anyways, as I type this, I'm watching the three lawn-destroying rabbits literally roll around in the dirt and play leap frog with each other. Ever seen a rabbit jump over another rabbit? I should sell tickets.

The first in-flight movie was shown in 1925.

At Poo Park...AGAIN!

To begin, I am completely aware of Freud's theory that dreams regarding orthodontia indicate sexual frustration. Freud is full of crap. Last night I had one of my recurring dreams that consist of my teeth crumbling into tiny bits, so that I spit up handfuls of teeth and teeth parts and spend a great deal of time trying to shove the teeth back into my head. Why? Because I know if anyone notices that my teeth are falling out, they will take me to a DENTIST!!!!! Even in my dreams I'm deathly afraid of DENTISTS. I debate whether or not I should just jerk the teeth out so that they'll stop crumbling into tiny pieces and I'm always looking over my shoulder to see if any dentists are approaching. I really hate these dreams and they seems to attack during periods of my life that are stressful. (Why I got one last night is beyond me since my life is soooooo unstressed for the last, oh, 4 months. Har har.)
At any rate, I've been ill the past few days, including massive body pains, and I've been doping myself with ibuprofen and trying to sleep...trying but failing. If I try and nap during the day, Olive pesters me with questions of "Are you okay?" and "Is this normal?" (Yes and yes.) So I hide upstairs to sleep. This means I actually GET sleep, but eventually she realizes where I am and calls up, "Are you okay?" Sleeping at night is almost impossible because everything hurts so badly, so I'm quite dependent on a nap in the afternoon. Anyways, this is the third time Aunt Phlo has visited while I've been in California, but each time Olive is surprised by it all and all but flips out. I spend 90% of the day assuring her I don't need a doctor, that cramps and fatigue and body aches are normal, and that I just need some time to rest. Showing concern for someone and offering help is great and much appreciated. Showing so much concern that you never leave them alone and they have no time to get better and instead constantly have to reassure you that this is not anything dramatic and you aren't coming down with cancer or something is not. Praise the heavens, she went to lunch with neighbors today and didn't get back until almost 2pm. She had been home no more than ten minutes than she wanted to get out and go somewhere. This is a common conversation. She asks me what I want to do. I say I'm content with reading my book and enjoying the weather. She says I must be so bored/depressed/anxious and want to get out and go somewhere. I say no, but if SHE wants to go somewhere, I will take her wherever she wants to go. "No, you're the one feeling depressed, so let's go wherever YOU want to go." (It seems whenever I try and read a book, she thinks I'm depressed. I have absolutely no idea why. It's very strange.) So I try and insist that I am perfectly fine and that if SHE is depressed and eager for a drive, then SHE needs to say so. I'm not going to fake depression just because she's too proud to admit it in herself. Anyways, today she fell asleep before the conversation could finish and so I tiptoed outside to let her sleep. About four o' clock I assumed (ha!) that she'd abandoned the idea of some kind of trip and went upstairs to lay down for an hour. No sooner had I gotten upstairs than she called up saying "Let's go for a walk!" And so we drove to the Poo Park yet again.
Now, every time we go there, we walk half way around the park and sit on a bench until she gathers enough energy to walk back. On weekends the park is usually full of people playing with their dogs and talking with other dog owners. The cops will come around when it's full and drive (yes drive) along the sidewalk to make sure people are obeying the posted leash law. First of all, I think it's kind of retarded to have the dogs on a leash in a park that was designated as a dog park and that they are endangering lives by driving along a sidewalk frequented by children and animals. Secondly, I find it funny to watch everyone scrambling for their dogs and then stand silently and watch the cop car drive by, pretending as if their dogs had been on a leash the whole time. It's really funny to watch the dogs that know they're about to be leashed and stay out of reach of their masters, who are getting more and more panicky the closer the cops get. As soon as the cops leave, the leashes come off and everyone discusses the "BS" of the law and the cops. Today, as we were sitting on a bench watching the dogs play, a cute little scruffy dog comes running up with a frisbee in his mouth, wanting me to throw it. I'm playing tug o' war with him and notice the cops getting closer, so his owner says, "Keep him there! Keep him there!" And comes walking over to pick up his dog until the cops pass. We feign innocence by chatting and I find out the dog is a chihuahua/poodle and only two years old, his name is Buddy and his owner is Dan, who is originally from Maryland. By this time, the cops are gone and a nice older couple have come to the bench and the two men begin talking while I play with the dogs. Soon they leave and Olive and I are left alone. Here's where the funny part comes in. No sooner had the people left than Olive says, "He liked you. He had his eye on you." This is funny for two reasons. One, she can't see, had sunglasses on, as did he, so how on earth could she see that he 'had his eye on me'? Secondly, every male human under the age of 40 that I talk to or about, she automatically assumes there is some sort of romantic attachment. First, my friend Seth becomes, in her mind, my "fiance". Then my friend Brad becomes by "boyfriend". The more I spend time with him the more she starts discussing marriage. Then some random stranger in a dog park has the hots for me. It's as if there are no other possible relationships between males and females. Generally her harping on my single status evolves into one of two possibilities. Either she begins talking about all the people she has dated (this consists of a lot of name dropping) or she goes off on how exciting my life is going to be, how quickly I'm going to get married and how my children are going to grow up to hate each other and fight. Not joking. You want to talk about birth control, just let Olive tell you how horrible it is to be a mother and how your children will grow up to be disappointments. How helpful. But being a mother isn't acceptable anyways, you know. You're supposed to have a very successful and high status career instead. Not just any career mind you, one that makes you rich and famous and pretentious and irritating and endows you with the right to look down your nose at everyone else. Anything short of this is a grave disappointment. Sigh.
Her negativity is almost cancerous at times. I've noticed it has rubbed off on me and is pretty much sucking the life out of me, like the Deatheaters in Harry Potter. I decided that every time she tries to talk about something depressing or negative, I'd change the subject to something good or happy or at least neutral. Today, as we were driving to the dog park, she starts in on Islamic treatment of women, again. So as soon as she reaches the end of a sentence, I jump in with an interesting tidbit I'd read about Christ in the book Jesus the Christ, thinking the Savior is a good uplifting topic. Does she comment on the interesting and happy tidbit? No, she starts in on all of the horribly depressing things that happened to the Savior. So I interrupt with something like, it's not good to always focus on the bad things that happened, but the wonderful things that He did. Honestly. Tonight, after reading two chapters in the book aloud to her, she once again starts in on how sad it is that "the commandments are so simple and yet people argue about it and make it so complicated". I try and explain that Satan wants it that way because if it's complicated, people will stop doing what's right. I also mention that although the commandments are fairly simple, people still have a hard time following them. In my head I was thinking, "Hint! Hint! Hint!" and was about to say something about how simple it is NOT to take the Lord's name in vain and how often people do it (hint hint hint) but I kept my mouth shut. I swear this place is a black hole for anything mentioned in the 13th Article of Faith. I've been saying arrgghh so much I sound like a pirate.

It helps if you turn your computer on...

So I'm pretty sure I saw Simon Pegg today. I was driving down Wells towards Target and saw a guy walking down the sidewalk. Since I am such a rubbernecker for the slightest thing, I stare, wondering where he was walking to. Then my eyes widened and I thought "Oh my gosh it's Shawn of the Dead!" I almost ran off the road I was trying to get a better look. I swear it was him, but when I googled him, it said he lives in England, so what was he doing in Woodland Hills? After Target, I took Olive to what I have begun calling the Poo Park. She loves walking around an old haunt and seeing (kinda) the dogs people bring. I think it's a bit masochistic to let strangers flaunt their dogs in front of you when you want one of your own so badly. Then over dinner she randomly told me this story of when she brought a piece of chalk on the bus and marked up this little boy's coat. The next day his mother got on the bus and yelled at her "for an hour" and she "cried and cried and boy, she KEPT me cryin'!" I thought that was funny.
So about a week ago I read Olive the book Our Search For Happiness by Elder Ballard. She gushed on and on about how wonderful the book is. It's basically just a brief overview of LDS beliefs, but since she is all but apostate, she found all of it new and exciting. So I decided that since she enjoyed that one so much (and since it made her happier and stopped all the depressing talk for a while) I'd start to read her Jesus the Christ by James E. Talmage. Fascinating book, though I think he could have toned down the pretentious vocabulary a bit so Mom and Pop Mormon can better understand what it is he's trying to say. While I was reading it to her tonight, a brief "A-Ha!" thought sprinted across my mind, one of those thoughts that you file in the Personal Revelation drawer. It briefly stopped my reading because I haven't had anything like that (at all) in weeks! Unfortunately, I couldn't stop to mull it over because I was reading aloud to Olive. It was one of those thoughts/feelings (feeloughts? theelings? thouelings?) that race through your mind so fast, it's almost like it never happened, so now that I'm finally alone, I'm left to try and mull over something that I can barely remember. If that makes any sense.
Do you want to hear something cool? Today I picked up a box of Bandaids and noticed that the label had braille writing on it, so that a blind person could pick up the box and tell what it is. Is that not cool? They do it for Spanish speakers, why not for the blind? Imagine if they did something for the deaf and you got yelled at by a box of Twinkies?

Gooey gooey gumdrops

Aunt Phlo M. Sucketh, the vindictive wench, has sucked all the energy out of me today. I get exhausted walking up the stairs and have to take massive naps to just get through the day. Poo on her. On a lighter note, I finished my book on the Russian spy. Really good. Rekindles my interest in politics again, but unfortunately I won't be able to get into school until August, hopefully that is. Now I've started a book on Bonnie and Clyde. Oh, books. You are my salvation!

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Aunt Phlo M. Sucketh is kicking down the door and I'm afraid I have no choice but to let her in. I had such a horrible week this past week, but after a very long night of praying, I FINALLY felt a bit of peace. Then Aunt Phlo decided to make me feel like crap today, so I spent most of it sleeping. I made sure Olive had lunch, then took a nap, then made sure she had dinner and her pills, then needed to sleep again. Now I'm hungry, which is better than feeling nauseated. I feel bad that she was pretty much alone all day, but I really needed the rest. Consequently, there's pretty much nothing to put in my blog. I'm reading a book called "Comrade J: The untold secrets of Russia's master spy in America after the end of the Cold War." It's amazing! I feel bad for the Russian people, having such corrupt leaders and consequently being so far behind the rest of the First World countries. I'm sure the government doesn't mind them being behind. Russia has incredible strength and resources and if they got their crap together, they'd be more powerful than the US. (Same goes for Brazil.) But the book goes into detail about the kinds of information stolen and who gave it to the Russians and all that. Apparently many of the people who have passed information are still in their government jobs and of course denied the book's contents. So exciting this book.