Points for style

Tonight Hermiston played The Dalles at football and won, 75 to 6. Considering it was 68 to 0 at halftime, I feel like the final score was actually a victory for The Dalles.

I didn't see the game in person, but I can only imagine that The Dalles' touchdown came after Hermiston had cycled through their second and third string players and started putting their middle school team in.

I mean, The Dalles wasn't quite that bad when I went to school there. Back when we were the Eagle Indians instead of the Riverhawks and had the added distraction of playing through the snorts of laughter every time the announcer said our name. My sophomore year we didn't win a single game, and when we finally won one my junior year, against a school that was also ... whatever the opposite of undefeated is ... defeated? ... you would have thought we had won the Super Bowl by the way everyone rushed the field.

And yet, high school being high school, it was us drama kids who were the "losers." Go figure.

Our softball team was state champions. So were our cheerleaders. All of our women's sports were pretty good, come to think of it. Maybe (and I am being about three quarters of the way serious here) The Dalles should consider an all-girls football team. Or at least putting the cheerleaders in when things get tough.

The cheerleaders could probably at least get style points, which if you've ever played volleyball at the church on Tuesday and Thursday nights, you will know are a very real thing. According to whichever team is losing.

Out of curiosity when I saw the halftime score I looked up the biggest loss margin in high school football history (I'm having one of those "I'm really single right now" Friday nights). According to Wikipedia, in 1926 in Kansas Haven High School beat Sylvia High School by a score of 256 to 0. So basically even if you get beat 100 to zilch, you're not even the best at losing. Let your opponents score anything under 100 and you're just a garden variety loser.

There is something to be said for not giving up, though. My brother got into BYU after he wrote a wryly self-deprecating application essay about the lessons he learned from joining the golf team and finding out he wasn't so great at golf under pressure (He once told me he joined the tennis team to get away from the "stress and pressures of golf").

Somebody ought to be able to parlay this game into a Harvard acceptance then. Surely continuing to play in the face of a 75-0 deficit on the road is worth more life experience points than your parents paying for you to spend three days in Africa building orphanages so that the "tutor" they paid to write your entrance essay for you can testify that you have, indeed, seen for yourself that poor people exist.

After all, I turned it into a pretty good blog post, right?

Football and chocolate

Last weekend when I was in Utah I spent a couple of hours at Dairy Queen with a former roommate who still lives in the area. We caught up, spent some time gossiping about what all our friends are up to (answer: having babies) and then spent some time reminiscing about our year together in good old Apartment 10.

It was at that point that we realized we couldn't remember one of our roommate's names. She moved in about three months before the end of the year and basically only came home to sleep. But still. We lived with this girl. Three years ago we were brushing our teeth at the same sink and today I don't think I would even recognize her if I saw her walking down the street.

That's not how roommates are supposed to be. Roommates are supposed to be like the one I saw this weekend, who told me that she recently ran into a guy who had mistreated me and gave him the cold shoulder.

"I can't really remember why I'm supposed to be mad at him, but I know you were upset about it," she said. "So I ignored him for you."

That's the girl code.

I would have done the same for her if I ran into that two-timing what's-his-name from her past. That's how it works. I may have been constantly exasperated by another roommate's messy ways, but the night she came home in tears because her boyfriend had been a jerk about it when he dumped her, I handed her a fork and we ate half a pan of brownies straight from the pan and talked about how she deserved better anyway.

On the flip side, we were also there for each other in the good times, giving the proper squeals of delight when our roommate paid up with M&Ms when she finally held hands with her crush and spending half an hour analyzing the meaning behind punctuation he used in their last text conversation. It usually went something like this:

"He didn't put a smiley face at the end."
"Yeah but he didn't put a period, either, so that's a good sign."
"I guess."
"He doesn't really seem like the emoticon type, so it's probably nothing."
"Are you sure? Maybe it's his way of putting me back in the friend zone."
"Has he ever used a smiley face in a text to you before?"
"The other day he used a winky face."
"Wait, a winky face? Was it a sarcastic one?"
"I don't think so."
"Well then what are you worried about?! If he used a winky face he's def into you."

Somehow I don't think guys usually have conversations like that. I'm pretty sure theirs go more like this:

"Dude how come I never see Marissa anymore?"
"I asked her to marry her and she dumped me instead."
"Well that sucks. Do you think the Seahawks are going to win this weekend?"
"Against the Packers? For sure."

This is why it is important to keep in mind the gender of your friends before choosing a topic of conversation. Although when I went through a breakup while living at home it was my brothers who came home with ice cream, candy and a stack of movies that night, while my female best friends responded by mailing me a BYU football T-shirt.

I guess whatever your gender, football and chocolate are the answer to all of life's problems.

Every comment section ever written

Flock of ducks making home in city park

View comments...
Bob: Oh great is Obama mandating all cities buy ducks now? Him and his %&#$ regulations.
Dave: You don't like Obama because you're a racist.
Bob: Am not.
Dave: Are too.
Bob: Am not.
John: Are too.
Elmer: You libtards, always playing the race card.
Mike: Oh I suppose Faux News told you to say that?
Janet: Hi friends, I make $5000 a month working from home. Click on www.thisisdefinitelynotavirus.com to find out how you can too.
Dave: Hey you racist, I see on your Facebook profile in 2007 you posted a picture of yourself holding a gun that proves my point you're a Tea Party wingnut.
Bob: Here's a Wikipedia article about ducks that says Obama loves them. Pay no attention to the fact that the editor who just put that in has the same user name as me.
Sasha: The author of this article shouldn't have referred to the duck as a she. It promotes rape culture to assume any animals without fangs are female.
Elmer: Stay out of this, fem-Nazi.
Lisa: Why is the city using my tax dollars to pay for ducks? It's such a waist.
Karen: They're not, idiot. Read the story. Also it's waste.
Jordan: Hey author of the story, you said there are ducks living in the pond in city park but I was there three months ago and didn't see any so obviously you're wrong. A real "journalist" would actually do some research.
Joe: Blame the illegals, its all there fault.
Annie: You mean *it's and *their. I can't take you seriously when you clearly dropped out of elementary school.
Elmer: School is for sheeple. All the teachers are libtards.
Dave: And you're a racist.
Bob: Am not.
Mike: Are too.
Bob: Am not.
John: Are too.
View 197 more comments....

Unhappy camper

This weekend I took a last-minute, very quick trip to Utah to see my new nephew. (For all my Utah friends, my apologies for not having time to look you up. I'm planning to come back for Labor Day). Because we only had three days off, my parents and I thought we would leave after work on Friday and spend the night in Ontario, thus cutting off almost four hours of the next day's drive.

Since we were getting to Ontario around midnight and leaving before dawn the next morning, we thought, why spend the money on a hotel room when we could just pull up to a campsite and throw a few sleeping bags on a tarp?

I'll tell you why.

It was dark when we got to Ontario. Guided by our trusty GPS Yoda ("In five hundred feet, turn left you must") we made our way through the city and onto a dark country road. The darkness shrouded everything we wanted to see, like where the heck the campground was, but our headlights did manage to illuminate a rather large snake lying across the road. It was at that point Dad informed Mom and I that he would be sleeping in the middle.

It was also at this point that Mom revealed that most of the online reviews of our campground gave it one star. She was unconcerned, however, because some people had also given it five stars. We explained to her that if there was a flowchart for rating the campground it would look like this: Do you or a relative own this establishment? Yes --> Five stars. No --> One star.

When Yoda told us we had arrived we found ourselves staring at an empty field. We drove around a bit and soon found a sign with the word "campground" on it, near a mobile home with a large front yard.

"This must be it," Mom said.

"This is someone's home," we replied.

"No, no, I talked to the lady who runs it on her property and she said there's just kind of a random grassy area to pitch tents," Mom said. "I'm sure we're just supposed to sleep on this grass here."

We almost did just that, but once we began to look around for a bathroom, we eventually realized there was a narrow gravel road next to the campground sign, which you were supposed to drive down to get to the actual campground.

We came this close to sleeping in a stranger's front yard. That would have been great. "Don't mind us, we just got tired of driving and decided to lay down on your lawn for a few hours. Here, we got your paper for you."

When we finally arrived at the actual campground we were confronted by a lot of trailers.

"This looks like a trailer park," Dad said.

"Oh yes, I think you can rent these spaces by the month," Mom said.

"Why are we driving past a mountain of old tires and broken furniture?" I asked.

"I seem to remember the website mentioned it was next to a junkyard," Mom said. "But somebody gave it five stars, remember?"

Right.

We finally found a grassy spot between some trailers that had a tent pitched on it. Since seeing the snake Dad was having second thoughts about the no tent thing. I tried to reassure him that the short, sparse grass we were sleeping on wouldn't be appealing to wildlife, but my argument was undermined by the appearance of a baseball-sized frog.

That was a really cool frog.

After putting down some sleeping bags we found the bathrooms, which Mr. Five Stars had said were clean. If that's his definition of clean, I'd hate to see what he considers dirty.

Finally, we were ready to go to bed. We skipped the tent, preferring to enjoy the light breeze and fit in a few extra minutes of sleep. In theory, it was a good idea. In practice, mosquitos.

So many mosquitos.

At some point during the night someone threw a sheet over me, but it was too late. I had already slept soundly through the mosquito buffet. I awoke at 5 a.m. by an intense itching sensation that spread from my ankles to my face, a testament to my night as a blood donor via a hundred tiny, venomous needles that pierced everywhere from my knee to my eyelid, causing them to swell rapidly.

I felt like I had chicken pox. I looked like Quasimodo. Not cool.

When I sat up I realized that the light coming up revealed a swamp on the other side of the road, which explained the mosquitos and the frog. Dad was now sleeping in the car. I stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the water in the shower and was immediately greeting by a horrible sulfurous stench coming up through the drain. I rinsed off in the cold water anyway in an attempt to stop the itching (it didn't work). We got out of there quickly after that.

Normally, I love camping. But I don't think I'll be doing it without a tent again. It may be a great way to become one with nature, but it turns out nature includes swarms of tiny flying vampires.

The Nachos are out of the oven

This week I became an aunt.

Aunt Jade.

Of course, I knew it was eventually going to happen. It's not like babies just spring out of the ground, fully formed, overnight. But little Blaine did decide to come five weeks early, so I have to say I wasn't quite prepared. I didn't wake up that morning thinking "Today I might become an aunt." I woke up thinking "Argh, why is it morning already? I wasn't done sleeping."

I guess I can't complain, having aunt-hood sprung on me in such an abrupt manner. Easier to handle than becoming parent a month ahead of schedule. After all, when Lance texted Dad less than 24 hours before Jasinda went into labor that "this prenatal class is so long Jasinda will have the baby before it's over," he thought he was being hilariously hyperbolic.  (Dad responded "Breathe," to which Lance responded "Hee hoo hee hoo.")

Even my parents thought they would have a few weeks of transition between the day they became empty nesters and the day they became grandparents, but life decided it should just rip that bandaid off all in one week. Actually, they're thrilled about the whole grandparent thing. They embraced the role fully by sitting in the old person section of the chapel at church on Sunday.

Now that the baby is born, we can stop calling him "the baby" and start calling him Blaine, since his parents decided not to announce his name before he was born. Logan took matters into his own hands early on, however, and emailed Lance that he should name the baby Nacho. Much to Lance's dismay, the nickname stuck, and all of us referred to Blaine as "little Nacho" for the past five months or so. A couple of weeks ago he told Logan just because everyone else was calling the baby Nacho didn't mean it was going to happen, to which Logan replied in his weekly email home from his mission, "As for your comment about your future son's name... I'm pretty sure it's so brilliant it's Nacho choice anymore."

We were all taking bets on what type of name the new baby would have. If Lance and Jasinda had named the baby something with a weird spelling Cole was planning to email them back (this was when we thought Cole would be on his mission already) and say "Hey guys, when you were writing the email you accidentally spelled his name wrong."

One time when we were on a long road trip we decided we had to pick the names of our future children right then and there (we had gotten bored with the classic "Next person we pass is your wife") using only words that we saw as we were driving. It was more doable than you think. Lots of car names, like Mercedes, are passable people names, and a lot of cities were named after people to begin with. I do seem to remember someone ended up with a son named Truck though. As for me, if I name my future daughter Meridian you'll know why.

Sunday night, at about 1 a.m., Lance was finally able to run home and grab his laptop and we got to Skype with the newest member of the family. We mostly just marveled at how much hair Blaine has. Seriously. The kid is going to need a haircut in about three weeks. But it's totally adorable. Like everything about him. Isn't it amazing how the human brain is wired to look at newborns and think they're pretty much the cutest thing ever, even when, objectively speaking, they come out of the womb looking like a boiled monkey?

I can't wait to go see him, but for the next few weeks I'll have to be content with baby Blaine being added to the never-ending stream of baby photos on my Facebook newsfeed (yes, most of you reading this are contributors, and yes, I do have a secret list in my head ranking all of your children by cuteness level and yes, I will lie and tell you yours is the cutest if you ask me).

Aunt Jade out.

Dear Class of 2014

On Saturday I'm headed to The Dalles to see my last brother graduate from high school. If I was in charge of speaking at his graduation, this is what I would say:

Dear Class of 2014:

Congratulations on your achievement. Commencement ceremonies like this are pretty boring and five years from you probably won't remember who spoke, let alone what they said. And yet it is important you be here anyway. Get used to that idea, because attending boring yet important (and yet is it really actually important in the grand scheme of things?) meetings is for sure a part of being an adult.

Don't worry, there's lots of really awesome parts of adulthood too. Freedom and money and all of that. You'll see what I mean.

If you were a nerd in high school, you probably told yourself that someday those losers who shoved you in a locker one too many times before dropping out of school will be working for you (or someone like you) someday. Statistically speaking, probably. But before you get too cocky, remember that if things go south for you and you're one of those Millennials who can't find a job after college, those "losers" who dropped out of high school will beat you out for a job at McDonald's because management thinks you're overqualified. So stay humble. Life doesn't owe you anything. Not even a job at McDonald's.

That being said, your choices matter. The secret to success is knowing what you want out of life and then doing what you need to do (ethically) to get it. It's really that simple. You might not get exactly what you want every time ... not everyone can win American Idol or become a famous playwright. But even if you miss the mark on some of those types of goals, you'll sure as heck get closer to success than the people who drifted aimlessly through life, not knowing what they wanted or too lazy or insecure to go after it. Maybe you won't win American Idol and become the next Carrie Underwood, but you might make some good side money from the advertising on your YouTube covers of her songs.

Don't binge drink in college (or after). Failing a test because you're hung over, getting taken advantage of while you're unconscious, breaking your neck after falling out of a frat house window, posting a career-destroying photo on Facebook, getting arrested for underage drinking or puking all over yourself in front of a cute girl does not make you an adult. It makes you someone who made a dumb decision and suffered an unfortunate consequence.

Get experience. Seriously. Life experience. Work experience. Romantic experience. Cultural experience. An empty résumé and Facebook page full of bathroom mirror selfies isn't going to impress anyone worth impressing.

Speaking of romantic experience, I'm not going to give you any advice on that because it's different for everyone. Getting married at age 20 is the best decision some people ever made and the worst decision other people made. Leaving a good job to follow a significant other to a new city was a great choice for the people who are still married to that person 10 years later, but a terrible choice for the people who got dumped three weeks down the road and were unemployed for another year after that. So I don't know what to tell you, besides good luck.

Your credit score is super important. Don't screw it up.

Also: learn how to cook.

Remember your parents will always be your parents no matter what. When you're 25 your mom will still text you to tell you that the thing you liked on Facebook was inappropriate, and your dad will still worry about the guys you date treating his little girl right. The good news is they will seem exponentially smarter the older you get, until eventually when they say "You really should get that checked out" you say "You're right" instead of "Don't worry so much, I'm sure it will be fine." (Spoiler alert: It usually isn't fine.)

People are more important than things, career accomplishments, paychecks, television, your pride, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Don't continually let yourself become a footnote in a chapter of someone's life when you could have played a main character in their autobiography.

And finally ... don't forget to have fun. The concept of forgetting to have fun sounds ridiculous now, but there will come a day when you become so focused on all of your very adult responsibilities that you will realize that you have literally forgotten to do fun things. When that day comes, hearken back to the teenager you are today and tell yourself ...

YOLO.

Don't waste it.

A tale of two mascots

My high school alma mater has ceased to exist.

Sort of.

The building is still there, along with the asbestos and that one science textbook that was so old it became up to date again when astronomers changed their mind about Pluto being a planet. But the name got changed a few months ago and as of yesterday's school board meeting the mascot is officially gone too.

Some people would be really sad about that, but I don't think I mind too much. You wouldn't either if you spent your teenage years as a The Dalles Wahtonka Union High School Eagle Indian. Try saying that ten times fast. How our cheerleaders won state ten years in a row when they had that to work with is beyond me.

I started high school as a The Dalles High Indian. But at the beginning of my sophomore year TDHS combined with the Wahtonka High School Eagles (Wahtonka is a Native American word for "bend in the river." At least that's what they always told us. It might actually be Chinook for "loses at football"). The adults against the merger said that there would be a lot of fistfights at the new school between students who were former rivals. Ironically, the students got along perfectly fine, at least when it came to overwhelmingly voting in the Riverhawks as their new mascot, while the arguments between alumni became so heated that the school board came up with The Dalles Wahtonka Union High School Eagle Indians as some sort of misguided attempt at compromise.

That first year every time we played anyone at sports it was pretty hard to understand the announcers through the laughter every time they tried to refer to our team. By the end of the year the school board decided to drop the word "union" from the school name. It may have been an attempt to bring our moniker down from fourteen syllables to a much more reasonable twelve. Or it might have been because some of our rivals discovered if you tried to pronounce the TDWUHS on our uniforms you got the word "wuss."

Our salvation from trying to write cheers that somehow rhymed with Wahtonka came from an unlikely source. When the principal announced we would all be attending a mandatory pro-abstinence assembly we thought it was phase two of the school board's apparent work on a dissertation titled "Mass Humiliation's Effects on Student Populations." But the presenter turned out to be more stand up comic than health teacher. I don't know how much of an impact he made on the whole sex thing, but he did leave behind an important legacy when in the middle of the presentation he stumbled over our school's name and asked, "Do you guys mind if I just call you T-Dub?"

So we became T-Dub. And the Eagle Indian mascot, while still the school's officially sanctioned nickname, slowly became a relic used by out of town newspapers and tourists who asked "What the heck is an Eagle Indian?" (Don't ask us. If we knew we would have dressed up as one for homecoming).

This year the school board decided the word "Wahtonka" should go the way of  "union" in the name of the school (Following this pattern, I vote the next word to be dropped should be Dalles. The High School has a nice ring to it). And then the state decided it should be illegal to have Native American mascots. They later said you can use a specific tribe name, a la the Florida Seminoles, if you get permission from the tribe, but since there is no Tribe of the Eagle Indians, The Dalles was out of luck.

You would think the school board and administration would have at that point said "Hey we wouldn't be in this mess if we had listened to the students during the merger, so let's just have another vote now." But they didn't at first. Thus ensued an epic battle in which Cole and other leadership students almost lost the now ten-year-old fight for the Riverhawks but proved, in the end, more resourceful and persuasive than their oldest siblings. The Dalles Riverhawks it is.

What is a Riverhawk, you say? It's a bird. The same class of bird as the Seahawk, the class scientists call "It doesn't exactly technically exist," but whatever. Neither do Eagle Indians.