A Letter to Seester

Dear Seester,


I love you. You are my favorite sister, but seriously. I would really rather you not respond to my random inside joke text with a phone call telling me how you're out with all of the people I'd love to be out with but can't because I A) don't live in Wichita Falls anymore and B) don't have to extra fundage to go down there every weekend. I would also appreciate it if you would refrain from telling me the stories reinforcing how you're the dangerous, mysterious, and cool sister. I know you are. It's painful enough just being the boring, straight-laced, un-adventurous one, but you letting me know that the guy who has been my go-to crush on guy since fourth grade said that you're "super f*&^ing hot" was almost over the line of what I can reasonably handle. Even if it doesn't seem like it bothers me or matters, it does; on both counts. I'm not the cool one. I'm okay with it most of the time. I'd like it if you didn't rub it in...

*sigh*

-§

picture via

In Austin!!

Well....


here I am!



We're in Austin, doing the wedding thing. Man, oh man... this is a total riot. I'll have pictures and whatnot later, but I'm just checkin' in with you guys.


YAY!!

BOO!

When I was a little kid, my dad used to scare me. What am I saying.... he STILL scares me. If he's walking ahead of me and turns a corner before I get there, odds are pretty good that he's stopped and waiting for me to get there so he can say "AGGH!" and make me jump. Because I will. About 98% of the time I will jump and scream and then go, "You turd!!" and he just laughs because it is endlessly funny to him. This is a long-standing thing for Dad. Throughout our childhood, he has moved our stuffed animals and hidden in our beds at night, sat in the bottom of the dark closet, hidden behind the door to our room... Once, all of us came home and Dad's car was there, but we couldn't find him. We probably looked for 10 minutes, and when we finally found him, he was behind the lower rack of clothes in HIS closet. Good one, Dad. Another useful tidbit in this whole thing is that all of the eyesight in our family is baaaaad, which only aided his mischief. So not only was it usually dark when he was laying in wait, it was also usually time for bed, so we've all got our glasses off or contacts out or whatever and no one can see anything anyway.

This has been good practice, it seems, as I have been watching around corners and in closets and behind doors the whole time I've been in Albuquerque. Joel seems to get immense satisfaction from seeing me jump and then me telling him he's a jerk (hahaha). Like how I'm brushing my teeth last night, and when I turn the light off on the way out of the bathroom, every light in the apartment is off. So what do I do? Say, "Oh! Good grief... You jerk!" and turn the bathroom light back on. I didn't have to go very far before he said "AGGH!!" from his hiding place on the ground in the hallway just outside the door. Or this morning, on the way to the bedroom, I look in the office and there is a figure standing there that looks like a Death Eater.



Death Eater.

Ironically, this didn't scare me. It was morning though, and that possibly had something to do with it, but it did at least make me do a double take. He was disappointed in my reaction, and said he was going to take a shower. I sat reading for a good few minutes and wondered why the water hadn't started yet. When I walked past the office, HE was there instead... as in, wearing the coat (apparently, in the office and coming out of the bathroom are the most popular locales for this behavior). Again, for whatever reason, this didn't scare me, but I applauded the effort.

Clearly, one is more apt to make me jump and scream with less prep work. Just sitting watching TV for long enough without moving and then making a loud noise will get me, seriously, every time. What can I say? I'm an easy mark.

Still, my favorite time he tried to scare me was once over 4th of July weekend. I was walking past the office and caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I walked into the office and he is standing on the chair by the door, in a psycho-killer type position holding... a feather duster. We just look at each other and since I'm obviously not scared, and also I have no idea what he was going for with that approach, he just goes,


"Hmm... it appears I may have over-planned this..."

Yeah...
you may have...

MORE Reasons my Dad rules

So I was all happy about my refund check coming in, yeah? The thing was that it got mailed to Dad's in south Texas (which wasn't to ME in Oklahoma...) and he doesn't have a Bank of America in his little town, so you know what he did? My Awesome Dad drove an hour to a bigger city and deposited my check for me so it would get to me faster.


My dad rules. (Love you, Dad!!)

It's Father's Day!!!

...and I don't get to go see my dad, which is kind of crappy. We may use the wonders of technology and video chat or something later, but actually, I'll probably call him and tell him "Happy Father's Day!" and that will be it. I think that'll be fine, though, and he should be rolling through OKC on his way back from somewhere else in the relatively near future, so we're all good.

My dad is the best kind of dad I could have ever asked for. He was (in my little kid mind) mean and deserving of my fear when I was doing crap I wasn't supposed to be doing (Hell, now, too), but that's the way it's supposed to be. He also tempered being mean (which wasn't really mean, it was just him being a parent and disciplining his child when she was being a brat, which I very much appreciate NOW) with much love and stories told by my stuffed animals about Barfy the Beaver (played by a bear that was a hand puppet) that barfed when he ate Dogwood trees, but not when he ate Birdwood trees (no, those do not exist). It actually may have been the other way around, but none of us, Seester included, remember.



I'm on the left, and my sister is on the right


Haha, this is after the opera at OCU (He looks goofy! Love you, Dad!)


All of us in Arkansas visiting grandparents




So, here's to you, Dad!
I love you and Happy Father's Day!!

I chose music.

- - This post is forever long; fair warning for you there. But it's one of the most defining parts of my life thus far, so... why wouldn't it be a long post, you know? - -

I have never actually written down an account of what happened to make me decide to go to grad school. I haven't for various reasons, but I feel like it all happened long enough ago that I can talk about it now.

To be quite honest, I had just planned to get married right out of college, move away from my little hometown and pop out some babies. The truth is that I really only went to grad school because I didn't have any other plans, and without any plans, it just seemed like the next logical thing to do.

Let me back up.


Ok... confession:

This isn't really the story of why I went to grad school. This is the story of why I didn't get married. They just happen to be the same story.

I met the man who was to become my ex-fiancé my freshman year in college. Our relationship appropriately started with him meeting my dad, shaking his hand and introducing himself. We were speaking at the high school where my dad taught, but in that moment, it felt like a first date, and it pretty much went from there. I barely knew him and he barely knew me, but that ended up being really beneficial for the longevity of the relationship. What I knew of him was that he was everything I thought I wanted in a husband: tall, Southern, conservative, Baptist, man's man kind of guy. He was also from a big family that I fell in love with upon first meeting. What he knew of me was that I was attracted to him. What he didn't know was that I was so glad to have found what I thought I wanted, that I would pretty much be whatever he wanted me to be to keep it. Tragically, I think that at the time, that's what I thought was supposed to happen.

Over the course of three years, he molded me into exactly what he wanted me to be: a quiet, submissive, nice, sweet, prim and proper woman. If you know nothing of me, let me let you know that I am loud, mean, cynical and have been known to curse like a sailor on occasion. Those three years of my life were so unlike my actual personality, that Seester once said, "You were not you during that time. I kind of liked you better, but you weren't you." (I have yet to understand the full implications of THAT statement, but I digress) I may tell some of the "wife-grooming" stories later. They're pretty interesting on their own.

Please hear me when I say that the whole stripping of my actual personality from me wasn't malicious on his part. And actually, it turned out to be vital in the figuring myself out process, as giving up everything about what made me me helped me to find out just what that was.

So from the tail end of my freshman year right up until I graduated, he and I were dating. We were dating and visiting his family and talking about getting married and how wonderful our little small town life would be. This wonderful life where he would go to work and I would stay home and clean the house and take care of the kiddies and all that. And it made me happy. It really did.

However, every one of the four years of my undergrad, I was also heavily involved in the opera in the spring. It was crazy. For the entirety of the fall, I was completely content with the housewife/mommy life that was ahead of me. But without fail, spring would roll around and that meant opera season. I would get so immersed in learning the music and staging and everything the production entailed, and a part of me would say, "You want to do this. You can do this." I just told that part of me to shut up and that I would be perfectly content and happy being a mommy and a stay at home housewife.

Let me pause briefly to say that the actual mommy/housewife life was NOT, I repeat, NOT the problem. I would still enjoy that, I'm sure, just as I would have then. The difference is that he thought opera was immoral or... well, actually, there's no telling what he really thought about it because, as he later showed me (and just in time, too), he would say anything to get what he wanted. He wanted me to be a stay at home housewife/mommy and wanted me to do so to the exclusion of anything else, probably because that is what a woman "should" do. Again, don't even get me started on gender roles and what is "appropriate" for a woman, because I'm actually kind of backward. I grew up in a conservative household and I still hold to most of those beliefs, so it's not some sort of feminist empowerment kick that made me resent his assignment of me to the role of housewife, either. It was his presumption that he knew what was best for me, and my erringly allowing him to exercise that control over me. I apologize, I'm rambling... back to the tale at hand.

I'll save the "How I Got Engaged, and Why It Still Sort of Irritates Me" story for another time, but suffice to say that we got engaged over Spring Break my senior year with plans to get married the following August (if you're counting, that's 5 months from engagement to wedding. Yikes). Then a funny thing happened: I learned how to sing. I know, I know... What the crap does that mean? It means that I subconsciously knew that I wouldn't have been able to really succeed the way I wanted to singing the way I had before Saturday, May 6, 2006 (totally crazy that I know the date, huh? Perhaps yet another story for another time). It also meant that until that time, I really had no concrete arguments against my assignment to housewife (arguments for myself, really). In any case, after the performance the next day, my voice teacher that I had been studying with for 7 years by that time came up to me and said, "Well, you finally learned how to sing!" So what did I do? I called the man (since he hadn't come into town to see me sing. Not bitter).

Me: I want to sing opera professionally.

Then-Fiancé: Well, you've never wanted to do that before!

Me (In my head): What the heck? Where have you BEEN the last three years? Remember all those times that I was all "Maybe I want to do opera... no, just kidding. I want to live in a tiny town and have a lot of babies."? Yeah, me neither...

Me (out loud): I just want to try it. And if I fall on my face, at least I will have tried and then I can get it out of my brain.

Then-Fiancé: Well, I hate to tell you this, but you'd never make it anyway.

Me: [...shocked silence...] I must have made some sort of disbelieving noise at this point, but it wasn't words

Then-Fiancé: Oh! No no, not talent-wise. You're just too lazy.

I think it was at that moment that I knew that it was never going to work with him. He was, and still is to this day, literally the only person in my entire life that has not endorsed the idea of me pursuing this singing thing. There was no way in hell I was going to marry the person in my life with that particular distinction. So I took a drive and gave him back the ring and ended it. We haven't spoken in several years (I am not really a person who stays friends with my exes, as a rule). He married about a year later and I wish him well. (Seriously. Why not? He didn't do anything but push me to do what I do now.)


The End





Just kidding. There is one other little thing. About a month after I ended it, I wasn't dating anyone (obviously) and was all lonely and sad (even though I did the breaking. It's still not fun, you know?) and so I started wearing the gold band that was originally intended to be his wedding ring. I know, it's a little (read: whoa...) weird. But I had already bought it and pawning it wasn't even close to worth it, so in the creepy and moderately pathetic haze that was that summer, I wore it on my thumb.

Then something snapped a little. It wasn't a big dramatic thing, but one day I just looked at that ring and all it represented with a sense of empowerment (and a healthy amount of cynicism) and reclaimed it. How? I had it engraved. I still wear it pretty much every day as sort of a memorial to that life and a constant reminder of the decisions I made that have brought me to where I am.
Wanna know what it says? Of course you do. It says:


I chose music.


**Edit: You know, after having re-read this just now, I realize that I didn't actually state what the biggest problem was. I have since discovered, through much hashing with best friends and living through other failed relationships, that the reason it wouldn't have worked was NOT because he didn't support my decision to pursue opera (though that certainly didn't help) or anything related to opera at all. It was a much, much bigger issue than that. He couldn't talk about anything. If he had a problem with something, opera for example, he really didn't know how to just say, "You know, for whatever reason, I don't like the idea of you pursuing this. Let's talk about it." After examining much of the rest of our relationship, it was truly this wonky aspect of the whole thing that broke the coffin. Or put the nail in the camel's back. Or something. Just to clarify a bit what was already a very long, slightly rambly and ranty tale.

100th Post!!

Wow! I can't believe I've already posted 100 times. Geez.


Well, to celebrate this occasion, I feel I should blog about something that means a lot to me. Something that changed my life forever.


a potato.


Not just any potato, friends. This was a life altering spud of epic proportions. I'm not kidding when I say that for weeks after this potato incident, I couldn't go more than 3 days without mentioning it. People, this tuber consumed my thoughts. It's story time:



Over Thanksgiving, my Li'l Brudder and Seester and I went to southish Texas to see my Dad. Not ON Thanksgiving, but the day before, we went to this small town eatery for lunch. It was some manner of barbecue place and so they obviously had baked potatoes. They had something I had officially never seen before, but I was so intrigued, and it sounded so delicious that I ordered it. (Looking back, I am SO glad I did and yet I also have a healthy {ha, healthy} amount of regret tied to the experience. Mainly because after I ate it, I wanted to die. So much potato... anyway, back to the story.)

The potato I ordered ended up being about the size of a softball and a half. That is not remotely a small potato, or even a medium one. This potato meant business. It had my standard potato trappings of butter, cheese and sour cream, but here's where the magic happened: There was a chicken fried steak on, nay, in this potato. A whole chicken fried steak. On/In this mammoth potato. And white gravy, because you can't eat a chicken fried steak without white gravy.

That's the part that I look upon fondly. The actual potato. Eating the whole thing? I don't exactly look upon that with the same sense of nostalgia and general happiness associated with good food memories. *whew*

Anyway, to you who read this and see my delightful potato as an abomination to food everywhere, I am sad for you. Maybe it's just my general Southern upbringing that makes me particularly susceptible to the wiles of foods of this nature, but either way... that potato affected my life more than some people, and for that, it gets its own commemorative blog post.




And now a picture of a lizard on a chaise lounge (because this is what I found when I was trying to find a graphic of the number 100):




hahahahahahahaha


Hiliarious. Explanation here.

My return to the land of the living

I updated my Facebook status to let the world know that I am done with all my school responsibilities this semester (THANK GOD) and my friend John said, "Finally your tweets might be less of a downer all the time... ;)"

So, I formally apologize for my lack of characteristic up-ness in these recent times. At this point, I will not obsess over grades and school and whatnot, as there's not a thing I can do about it (This is my Hakuna Matata reflex. I have talked about it a little before). I'll probably check the online grade postings like it's a cast list waiting to go up, but stress time is officially over.


I absolutely cannot express how glad I am that it's finally summer. I was very, I guess resentful is the best word for it, resentful this semester with regard to my classes. The relief of knowing that all I am truly responsible for is showing up to work is just... so.... nice... *sigh*


I have very high hopes for this summer, too. Last summer was great, don't get me wrong, but my job kept me completely tied to OKC. I literally left the city for 2 days. This will NOT be the case this summer. I have concerts and operas and digging for diamonds (yes, I'm serious. How ama-za-zing does this look??) and who-knows-what else I want to do. Even if I don't get to do all (or heck, any) of it, just having the ability to get up and go feels so good.

And because I'm all about lists, I'm going to make a Summer List. I was going to call it a "To-do" list, but it's not really that. It's more of a "All the things I may have in store for me this summer" list:

• Go to Tulsa to see A Little Night Music and My Fair Lady. I have several friends involved and I had a BLAST last year when I went.


• See Ben Folds in Tulsa or Fayetteville (pending financial situation and desire to see 1964: The Tribute in Wichita Falls the same day as the Tulsa concert)


• Seester and I have been wanting to go to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a LONG time. If we can get that together, it would be flipping sweet.


• My friend Shelley will be in Tanglewood teaching kids at the camp part, but she said that I could (read: should) come see her because it's like "Disneyworld, but for music." Sounds good to me.


• My Alyssa friend and I jokingly talked about starting a store on Etsy to maybe profitably get rid of some of the things that are created when we need a crafty outlet for our creativeness. I was only half joking.

I should also include a couple of not quite as fun (but VERY IMPORTANT) things:

• Learn the Four Last Songs by R. Strauss for my recital


• Do research and/or begin work on my thesis

And that's just the stuff I know off the top of my head. I haven't even thought about 4th of July or my birthday (turning 25. Whoatown.) at the end of July or ever seeing my dad in southish Texas or just going to Wichita Falls at random to see Seester, Li'l Brudder, and my mom. This is going to be awesome.


Summer, I have waited all semester for you to get here:



Let's do this.




Thought I should introduce Li'l Brudder properly, but aside from pics of him with a jewfro, I can't really find a good picture. So ignore my retarded expression, if you don't mind:





However, I also think his jewfro is endlessly hilarious, so here's Brudder and Pops a while back ago:

lawls.