mostly probably

I wrote this for my nonfiction class last semester as well. This post is dedicated to Alice, Michelle, and Beckie, and all of their boogers and snot.
We all lay in the hotel’s queen bed—four of us girls, good enough friends but not especially close. Beckie and I are the tuba chicks. Michelle and Alice play the flute, but we’re opposite in other ways too. Seniors in high school, Beckie and I have had a love-hate relationship since we were twelve, and Michelle and Alice are the innocents. Beckie and I suffer through our school days, skipping class every once in a while to walk down to Target or Wendy’s. We talk, laugh, and make farting sounds with our tubas, French kissing our mouthpieces.

Michelle and Alice will probably be halfway through their junior year in college by the time they graduate high school. They take every available advanced placement class and when Beckie and I get in trouble in band, Alice looks disdainfully at us from her first chair flute position in the front row. All four of us are married now. Despite the fact that the last time I saw her she was absurdly pregnant, Alice still strikes me as a virgin. She and Michelle were always the very epitome of innocence to me.

One night on band tour would change that image forever.

In a stupor caused by too much Easy Cheese and Sour Patch Kids, we decided to see how many of us could fit on one of the dingy hotel beds, a sequel to our experience earlier that day, when we all decided to see how many of us could fit into the hotel bathtub (just four of us unfortunately). We all lay under the covers together, our flannel pajamas sticking to each other’s, uncomfortable as we would ever be.

Suddenly and without warning, innocent Michelle tells us how her older sister once picked her nose and looked at the string of pasty snot stretched from her nose to the booger on her index finger. “The white kind,” she had said. “My favorite,” she concluded, placing the booger, connective thread and all, into her mouth.

It was silent in the room for a moment before we erupted into laughter, causing one of the chaperones to knock sternly on our door. Even Alice, eternally virginal Alice, joined in with the idea of having a cookbook dedicated to boogers. Michelle chimed in, “Yeah! We could call it, ‘Whose Nose Is in the Pot Now?’”

Beckie and I still have a love-hate relationship and I’m sure we always will. Michelle and I get together often to play board games from the 80s and make collages from Redbook and Good Housekeeping. Alice, living with her husband and baby, is still a virgin as far as I’m concerned. But occasionally I’ll get an email from her, with the single message that ties us all together: “So whose nose is in the pot now?”

I wrote this for my creative nonfiction class last semester as well. I don’t know why but I have just really been into reading all this old stuff that I wrote and posting it here. My favorite one is just after this, Marriage Therapy and Owls, so make sure you keep reading.

I shift restlessly in the lavender covers, unable and unwilling to go to sleep, to even close my eyes. I hold my pillow in my arms, bury my face in it, inhaling the smell of him mixed with the aroma of lavender and chamomile left there by my evening hand washing and smoothing routine the night before. I twist a handful of sheet in one hand and stretch in its embrace. It’s been chilled to perfection from sitting on the bed all day without a warm body to bask in it. We have a reciprocal relationship—I warm the sheet as it warms me.

I pull four quilts on top of me. There is the flannel pink quilt Brooke and I made before she moved for good. We sing to the “Bare Naked Ladies” as she pushes the needle in from the top and I push it up from the bottom. We tie three layers of fabric together, making a memory that will offer its warmth and comfort for a decade before beginning to fray around the edges. There is the quilt my mom bought me when I moved out of the house seven years ago—the velvet, baby blue monstrosity that always reminds me of cookies and milk after school and long, homesick nights. There’s the quilt I made from the fabric my Ghanaian students made me—their long, slender fingers first dipping the blocks in dye and then pressing it to the fabric—vibrant, African colors; yellow, red, and purple kente; a patchwork of memories made just for me. Then there is the comforter, the yellow and lavender flowers that I picked out myself, my first impulse-buy as a new independent person. My sister told me it was ugly when I showed her, and for the first time, I didn’t care what she thought—what anyone in my family thought, at last—because I was carving out my own life and had the comforter to prove it.

More than the 800 thread count cotton sheets that cost one of our wedding guests a small fortune, more than the fact that I could lay diagonally, face down and spread eagle and not touch the edge of the massive king bed on any side, more than the calming effect the lavender aroma has on my senses, these quilts, these blankets of memories, are my comfort. This is my world.

Let’s get two things out of the way here. One is I am Mormon. Two is I hate this sign for reasons other than the fact that I am Mormon. This sign offends me in entirely different ways, the most important being that there is no element on the billboard that makes any sense.

It is a pretty basic sign and driving past it at 35 miles per hour (if you drive like a grandma down Main Street in Logan, which everyone does because they’re mostly all grandmas) gives you approximately one second to figure out what the message is. Honestly, and I wish I was lying here, when I first saw this billboard on my one-second drive by, I thought it was advertising an LDS office supply store, which come to think of it, would not be a horrible idea altogether. We Mormons love our office supplies.

The billboard isn’t crowded but I do wonder at the rhetorical reasoning for the random placement of the post-its. I can’t decide whether to go home and Google postmormons, just regular plain old Mormons (because you wouldn’t already know enough about them living in Utah), or office supplies. Or smiley faces for that matter, because I just really think those are cute and probably worth taking a look at. In the end I didn’t Google anything. The smiley face post-it leads me to assume postmormon.org is a kid-friendly website complete with games and free downloadable coloring pages.

If by chance you are able to figure out the billboard wants you to go to postmormon.org, you have no idea what the postmormon.org organization does. Obscurity is not always an advantage. There is no phone number or any other information on the billboard, so if you happen to figure out what postmormon means and want to look into it more, you better hope you have a decent internet connection. And with 98% of the driving population in Logan being grandmas (as mentioned earlier), you can reasonably assume decent internet connections are not all that common. Unless the senior center has WiFi. Anyway, this postmormon place. Is it a movie theater? An antique dealer or consignment store? Maybe an up and coming ice cream shop? I’ll go with ice cream, and they better have pralines ‘n’ cream or there will be certain billboardish hell to pay.

I did think about this billboard on the drive home, however, which may have been the idea of the billboard in the first place, to get people and Logan’s grandma population thinking. I wasn’t curious enough by the end of the drive to actually look up the website, but I’m pretty sure I know what it’s all about. Something tells me there are no free downloadable coloring pages to be had. And that’s just not a website I want to be a part of.

I don’t really have a crush on every boy although I am hitting the rebound pretty hard right now. I just think that’s a funny line from Teen Girl Squad. I think after talking to one of the guys in the lab that I am the only one that does this, but I wanted to mention it and just be positive that I truly am the only unbearably neurotic person left in the world.

Sometimes I write emails (the email in question being a particular email to a particular person who may or may not be reading this particular blog right now and be thinking that I am particularly insane) and after I send them, I go back and read them again. Sometimes I read them through a couple of times and think to myself, “I am a pretty hilarious person.”

Am I the only one who does this? It’s kind of weird but a particular experience I have recently gone through (and no, Becca, it’s not legally final but in my mind it is) has only served to bolster my already inflated ego. I don’t know when the last time was that I struggled with my self-esteem anyway, but oddly, one silver lining to this crisis situation is an increased confidence in myself. I seem to have enough narcissism to go around, and I may be wrong but I feel healthier than I ever have before.

I recognize that this is probably not normal for someone who feels like deep, deep, deep down the reason for their current divorce is because they weren’t pretty enough or thin enough. But through it all I have an increased love for my life and who I am. So maybe that makes me abnormal. I don’t know. But I don’t care enough to stop taking myself out to dinner and a movie on Friday nights. And it most certainly doesn’t keep me from going back and reading emails I wrote. That Molly girl… she’s awesome.

I started a new life yesterday as Molly Asay.

I rocked it.

Single student wards are pretty much the same as always, complete with Linger Longers, Ward Prayers, and FHE grandmas and grandpas. My grandma’s name is Hannah and we were in marching band together. She’s 27. I’m 25. I suspect that she has a serious crush on FHE grandpa but who am I to speculate? They are technically married in an awkward singles ward sense.

I know now why people fall in love with their therapists. Not that I’m in love with mine, per se, but I am thinking about designing and creating matching “Best Friends Forever” bracelets for us to wear. To protect his identity I’ll just say the first three letters of his name are XYZ and he is a man of my own heart. He says things like, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” when I ask him if I can get a drink of water. I ask him if I could get a tissue and he replies, “You can do whatever you set your mind to.” XYZ also opened my eyes to the fact that maybe my irrational desire for our washer and dryer might represent the Defect’s rejection of me. Hmm. So I wouldn’t say I’m in love, but if a comic book ever comes out with XYZ the Wonder Therapist as the superhero (and he’s wearing a pink bracelet that says “I heart Molly”), you’ll know who created it.

In keeping with the theme of new things, I also started a new job and a new semester at school today. I am currently at work as a lab consultant in the English lab on campus and get paid a fair salary of pretty much nothing per hour. So pretty much I get paid an adequate amount for the work I do. So far today I have bummed around Facebook, checked my email, sent a whole bunch of invoices for work done while I was still Mrs. Stringham, written “Molly + XYZ” all over the walls of the lab in permanent marker, and written this blog. And now my shift is up but I think I’m going to “work” an extra half an hour or so just because I can, and because I have class in half an hour and have nowhere to go.

I know that I said that I would go and see every movie possible the second it came out, and I just want all of my devoted readers to know that I still fully intend on keeping my word. Starting with “Bangkok Dangerous.” Yes, that is apparently a real movie, the trailer for which Nate, Michelle, and I had the opportunity of being privvy to prior to seeing “The Rocker,” a movie I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone who is afraid of Rain Wilson’s hideous naked body or really horrible movies. But anyway, “Bangkok Dangerous” looks really incredible. I’m sure it will be the blockbuster hit of the century. If that title wasn’t enough to convince you, try a 90 year old Nicolas Cage on for size! Drink a big long dose of that long, greasy hair/severely receding hairline combination and call me in the morning. Oh la la.

In commemoration of my new life, I hereby proclaim August 24th as my divorceiversary (and since it’s my blog I can make up words too) so next year around this time be looking forward to a great big jamboree. I will be registered at Target and Shoe Carnival. And the Austin, Texas outlets, because oh yeah. I’m moving to Austin.

Good things about this situation include:

1. Going to the grocery store last night and buying only the absolute essentials: 25 million Lean Cuisine things (thanks for the suggestion, Meghan, I probably will never use an oven again), Dreyers pure fruit popsicles, name brand Honey Bunches of Oats and Apple Jacks, pina colada flavored juice (gross), and various other sundry items.
2. Those of you who know the dude formerly known as husband know that there are two distinct differences between this list and what I would have bought say… two weeks ago. Namely, anything name brand. I have always had to deal with Malt-o-Meal brand cereals and haven’t had actual Honey Bunches of Oats in five years! Also, I went a little crazy on the Dreyers popsicles. Whenever I’ve gotten them in the past the dude formerly known as husband has gobbled them up instead of treating them with the respect they deserve. I usually allow myself only one every week or so as a special treat, because they are extremely special! And the Lean Cuisines, well let’s just say I’m not entirely unhappy that I won’t have to make elaborate meals (or not so elaborate meals using an oven) for the next five months.
3. Spontaneously leaving the house at 11:30 at night to go to the grocery store. This seems very spontaneous to me because for the past five years or so of my life I haven’t had a whole lot of spontaneity happening, especially after dark! Prior to that, every second of my life was an impulse decision. Now this trip wasn’t entirely spontaneous, I suppose, since I went to the grocery store with a very specific purpose: sleeping pills. How do single people get any sleep?! I came home today to get the .22 the dude formerly known as husband bought me for Anniversary #4 (I had been asking for one!) and the pepper spray that I have been sleeping with in my hand ready to fire since I’ve been home alone most of the summer. I think I would be too afraid to use it, but as Auntie Kyei said, “Better safe than die.” Good point. The mace and the Professor are coming with me.
4. I fully intend on seeing every movie that comes out the day it comes out, and I’ll probably go by myself because that is precisely how movies should be seen. Today I just might go and see Wall-E since I haven’t seen it yet, but we’ll see. I’ve always really loved taking myself out on the town. It’s odd but one of the reasons I wanted to live by myself is so I could have a whole lot of extra time to hang out with me. But my apartment is big (not the bathroom, it’s puny) and I am getting pretty much every piece of furniture in our house in the divorce. What I’m saying is everyone is welcome to come and hang out with me and help me unpack. I mean watch DVD’s on my laptop. Sorry, no TV in the Molly Palace.
5. No TV in the Molly Palace. This is a good thing since it’s about time I weaned myself off of it, but if someone could please tape “Greatest American Dog” that would be extra spectacular. I miss Preston the Pomeranian already!

Bad news. The truth is I am now officially the youngest divorcee (to-be) and the oldest single person in Cache Valley, if not in the entire Western hemisphere.

The good news is I found an apartment and I got the keys today, and will soon be falling fast asleep (with the help of two Excedrin PM’s, naturally) in my empty apartment curled up with my body pillow that just doesn’t quite cut it as a husband but it’s what I’ve got.

So congratulations to me. Thanks everyone for all of your kind words and support. I am really doing okay. I knew at the beginning of the summer I think that this was only a matter of time, and I have received a couple of blessings from AMAZING priesthood holders that I would be okay and guess what? I really am.

More good news. The church is true.

Here I go again! My, my, how can I resist ya?

I need to get some ABBA going in my life again. What have I done all these years without it? Tonight I decided to drop myself off at the movie theater. I had an inkling that I would love “Mamma Mia” when Michelle went to see it and I asked her if she thought I would like it. She said (quite skeptically, I might add), “Well… yeah… if you like movies where people randomly burst into song… And if you like Meryl Streep.”

Are you kidding? That’s my life! I randomly burst into song! And I not-so-secretly want to be Meryl Streep when I grow up! Since then, I decided that I didn’t care what it took. I must see that movie. Tonight was my lucky night.

Overall I could have done without Pierce Brosnan. He totally ruined every song he sang, but I think he made up for it with his “S.O.S.” duet with Future Me. And no one here is complaining about his bell bottom jumpsuit during the closing credits. If you see the movie, do stay for it.

And by the way, I did go to this movie all by myself. I sat in the front row with my huge drink and may or may not have sung along louder than I should have during “Money Money Money” and “Lay All Your Love on Me.” I give the movie two thumbs up but you’ll just have to see for yourself. Colin Firth, in my opinion, was exceptionally brilliant as usual. And again, do stay for the closing credits. I may not be able to dance worth a toot now but Future Me can move.

I forgot Memorable Monday this week so I’m doing it today. If Amanda can do it, so can I! Today as I was walking through campus, I smelled the most viciously disgusting smell I have ever smelled before. It was a mixture of chicken poop, mud, and the fecal matter of various species, humans included. It brought me back to Ghana.

It was August 2002 that I went down there and I thought I would share some Ghanaisms this week. Ghana represents the best and the worst of me and my life, but overall, if I had one word to describe the five months I was there, it would be funny. KT might be able to appreciate some of these, but I think for the most part you had to just be there.

1. My friend Tori was riding a bike without any brakes (because why would a bike need brakes?) and got a cut in her leg that required a million stitches and oozed pus for weeks afterward. When she first got it, however, we were pouring iodine all over it when a man walked up to us and said this: “Oh, what happened? Car accident?” One of the guys traveling with us, said, “No, she fell off her bike.” The Ghanaian man pondered this further. He looked at her leg, covered in blood and dirt, and replied: “Oh. No problem then.”

2. A sign on someone’s front gate that I passed everyday on my way to work read, “Beware of witchdogs!”

3. My same friend Tori was admired by many and was referred to as “apuskeleke” (Ghanaian for “ho-bag” or “slut”) by others because she was, shall we say, well endowed. One such admirer owned Accra’s only acceptable ice cream shop, and Tori had turned down one too many of his proposals of marriage. We were trying to get ice cream and Tori got this from her ice cream man instead: “You are a swift pancake, a delicate flower, but you can be a sour potato when you want to be!”

4. Auntie Kyei, the woman I lived with while I was there, used to remind us constantly: “Better safe than die.” She was always sneaking ginger into everything we ate (even water) because she said it was good for our vaginas. I swear on my life.

5. We can still be friends. I just don’t love you.

6. Do not urinate here illitrate.

7. The mate says he wants to marriage you. Deny him. He doesn’t love you like I do.” This was said to me by the bus driver. The mate is the one you give your money to when you get on.

8. I became pretty good friends with this guy named Joe. That relationship promptly had to end when Joe, shall we say, assaulted me in his tent. One of our conversations went as follows. “Hey Joe, what’s that noise?” Joe replied, “It’s my cock.” (Sorry for the graphic language in here but Ghanaians are, however inadvertently, perverts.) I thought for a minute. “Oh, you mean a rooster!” Joe shrugged casually. “Yeah, I guess we could roast it.”

9. As you can see, communicating with Ghanaians wasn’t a language barrier as it was things have different meanings. In Ghana, a rubber is simply a plastic bag. Here, it means something else. I was with a couple of American dudes at this restaurant that sits in the middle of a crocodile pond. One of the waiters said to me, “For 150,000 cedis I will put a baby crocodile in a rubber for you.” One of the guys I was with, misunderstanding, replied, “Are you sure it would fit?”

10. I also got an average of fourteen marriage proposals (and propositions) per day. Some were creative, some not so much. Here are a few.

God will make you my wife.
Will you birth my babies?
Tomorrow I’ll buy you a drink and marry you.
My mom wants me to have half-cast babies.
I’ve never married a white woman before.
Who’s wedding are you going to? Ours?

11. We were pretty celebrity in our neighborhood because there were six of us white girls living in a house together. We got called something every time we walked outside. Here are just a few of our nicknames. (With exclamation points because most of the time they were yelled at us.)

Sista!
Sista Akos!
Mrs. White!
White!
Sista White!
Small Girl!
Fine Lady!
Akosoa!
Akos!
Oboruni!

12. And once when I was walking out of the house, a little girl approached me and asked me if I was cold. I wondered if it hadn’t registered with her that it was 110 degrees outside and a million percent humidity. “No, why?” She replied, “Because you look frozen. That’s how white you are.” Unfortunately, some things never change. I hear that in the United States too.

13. Don’t make toilet by Ama or in prison for 2 1/2 years.

14. One song that was incredibly popular while I was there was called “Apuskeleke.” I know, a song about a hooker. This one isn’t by Usher though. I asked the guy who sold me dirt cheap CD’s one day what the lyrics were, and he did me the honor of singing it in English one day. It goes a-something like this: “If you f*** her, your money will finish but her vagina will still be there.” Excellent.

15. There was a butt naked homeless guy that lived outside the grocery store where we got our weekly bucket of Ben & Jerry’s for ten bucks. He generally didn’t say anything, just laid out in the parking lot letting people step over and around him. One day I was passing by and he reached out and touched my leg. I turned around and he started singing, “Oh baby, I love your way! Every day…” How many of you can say you’ve been serenaded by a naked guy? Okay… but a homeless one?

Well that’s all folks. I’ve got FanIce to dream about.

I don’t care who you are. Nobody understands the appropriate way to format citations, bibliographies, and works cited pages. Fewer people could tell the difference between a bibliography and a works cited page. As an English major, I have not had a final exam to go to in the past two years I have attended school. English professors naturally opt for wicked huge papers and massive portfolios. Which is fine. I’m not complaining. I would much rather BS for ten pages than try to guess the right answer from five possible options. I would much rather write an essay on Wordsworth’s influence on British romantic literature (as much as I hate British romantic literature–and Wordsworth, for that matter–and poetry as a whole as a general rule) than sit in a box trying to figure out mathematical equations or multiple choice bubble sheets.

This is what brings me to my blog today. I have decided to take a lover. His name is “Insert Citation Tool” and can be found under the “References” section if you have the latest version of Microsoft Word. What’s more is “Insert Citation Tool” also knows the Chicago Manual of Style! Hurray! He is so smart and attractive and I am just totally infatuated. I don’t anticipate having to write another massive paper until my professional editing course that starts in two weeks, but I hope that my lover and I can hold out until then. He is a dream come true.