New Moon: Paperback edition

Last week I visited my parents. When I came home I had to clear the pictures off of a new book shelf, because between the signed books that I got for my birthday, and a number of used books I picked up when my mom and I went to Goodwill, I came back with about 12 new books.

Some mothers and daughters go purse or shoe shopping together. My mom and I shop for books.

My family was always a fixture at the public library growing up. Due to our habit of passing books between family members before returning them, we paid so many late fees that the new mezzanine probably should have had our name on it. The librarians loved us anyways, to the point that when they created the waiting lists for certain new books they would automatically add our name to the top spot. If small-town municipal libraries were the sort of places to have super exclusive parties, we would have been the ones sweeping past the velvet rope with a "Don't worry about it, he's with me."

Reading out loud in the car was a family tradition growing up, one that kept my siblings and I from killing each other in the back seat after 10 hours on the road. We actually planned a couple of vacations around the release of the newest Harry Potter book, stopping at the nearest store the day it was released before setting off. After a cross-country drive to a family reunion one summer we actually pulled off to the side of the road for twenty minutes to finish the book before we drove into town.

Once when we went on a week-long camping trip to the beach my mom started reading Twilight in the car, I think in some sort of attempt to expose my brothers to the type of girliness that I, their only sister, had completely failed to introduce them to during my tomboy stage. The boys complained uproariously, but as everyone who has ever read those books knows, they're sort of addictive once you get past the obligatory reference to the smoothness of Edward's chest on every page.

Pretty soon when we retired to our tent at night one of the boys would say "You're not going to make us read that stupid book some more, are you?" in a slightly hopeful tone of voice. By the time we finished the first book they had to swallow all pride and drop their pretenses if they wanted to indulge their curiosity by reading the second book. To do so they temporarily gave up their man cards as the burly male checker at Wal-Mart held up their purchase with a grin.

"New Moon. Paperback edition. Nice choice," he said with a wink.

I don't know why they were embarrassed. When they slunk into the movie theater with my parents and I later that year, hoods pulled low over their eyes, I quickly realized I recognized quite a few of the hoodie-clad bodies ducking down furtively in their seats as my brothers' friends. It didn't seem to occur to any of them that any guy who saw them at the movie was also watching Twilight too.

Of course, the books were better. The book is always better, with the possible exception of Lord of the Rings (Which makes what Peter Jackson did to The Hobbit even more tragic. One of the great mysteries of life will always what type of brain tumor caused the same man who made The Fellowship of the Rings to decide that it would be a good idea to add a love triangle between Legolas and a female elf and a dwarf to The Hobbit. I TRUSTED YOU PETER! I TRUSTED YOU!!!).

Not that I'm mad about that or anything.

In some cases, the book should just never be made into a movie ever. Case in point: The other day I noticed Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame on Netflix and thought "Hmm ... I haven't seen that since I saw it in theaters as a small child. I don't even really remember it." I watched it and immediately realized why my parents never added it to our collection of Disney movies.

Worst. Disney. Movie. Ever.

I can't decide which was worse, the part where the evil priest sings rather pointedly about being sexually attracted to Esmerelda, or the part where he tries to drown a baby, or the part where he quizzes Quasimodo on vocabulary words like "damnation," or the message the movie sends when the beautiful girl chooses the conventionally handsome guy in the end over the guy with the good personality and we're all supposed to consider it a happy ending because really, did anyone actually think that the ugly person would not die alone?

I looked up a plot synopsis of Victor Hugo's book, having never read it, and realize the plot is basically death and sex and torture and more death. Esmerelda and Quasimodo both die. How the heck did someone read that and think "We should really adapt that into an animated movie for five year olds." That's like watching Sweeney Todd on Broadway and thinking "My kindergartener would love this!" and then making a Disney version that's basically the same except only one person dies a gruesome death at the end (oops ... spoiler alert: That's not what happens in the play.)

And then the next generation of children would be in college one day watching the movie with their little nephew and start singing along to "A Little Priest" and suddenly think "Oh my gosh how did I never notice when I was a kid that this song is about CUTTING PEOPLE UP AND BAKING THEM INTO PIES AND EATING THEM???"

Just read to your kids instead. It's so much better.

Who are you wearing?

The Oscars happened tonight. Or maybe they're still going on. Not sure. Don't really care, to be honest. I haven't seen any of this year's Best Picture nominations, so I'm not exactly invested.

Really, with so much talk this year about how the winners are selected by a bunch of out-of-touch old white guys who couldn't even tell The LEGO Movie (and everything) is awesome, why give their nomination choices so much importance? While they do sometimes hit the nail on the head, let's just all admit, Facebook friends, like the peasants we are, that we are all being pretentious when we pretend that we liked The Life of Pi better than The Avengers in 2012. Or that we actually saw The Artist.

(Random side note: I just typed "Everything is Awesome" into YouTube and the first result that came up was "Everything is Awesome 1 Hour Version." WHY???)

The thing I look forward to during awards season are the red carpets before the shows. I'm not very fashion-obsessed, but there is something petty yet satisfying about thinking "I may not be as rich or as pretty as Julianne Moore but at least my dress doesn't remind anyone of moldy bread."

Of course, sometimes I think, "I may not be as rich or as pretty or as talented or as fantastically dressed as Reese Witherspoon is tonight but at least ... Nope. I've got nothing."

The Golden Globes last week contained a lot of bad looks (it's like all the designers forgot what shape women's bodies actually are and were like "Hopefully this random pattern of fabric will cover all the right bits, but who knows?") but this year's Oscars fashions were pretty tame. Everyone is making fun of Lady Gaga's gloves, which look like she just got done cleaning a toilet and forgot to take them off before heading out the door. But this is Lady Gaga we're talking about. Shouldn't we just be congratulating her on not wearing a dress made out of meat?

(Random side note: I've always thought is was weird that instead of asking "Who designed your dress?" reporters ask "Who are you wearing?" like everyone made a dress of someone's skin, Hannibal Lector style. With Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress, that question seems infinitely more sinister.)

And of course, let's not forget that men walk the red carpet too. There just isn't as much anticipation tied to those photos. Oh look! He wore ... a black tuxedo! How groundbreaking! And it looks ... good on him! What a surprise! Just kidding. No man's appearance was ever not improved by a classic black tux.

If I ever became a celebrity or a celebrity's wife, I would buy a classy, flattering dress off the rack at the mall for fifty bucks so that when someone asked who I'm wearing I could tell them "I don't know, I bought this at Macy's and I forgot to check the label before I put it on" and watch Twitter explode. Then take the $15,000 most Oscar dresses cost and donate it to charity.

But since the chances of me marrying Chris Evans are nil, I'll have to stick to being sadly lacking in designer clothing for less heroic and statement-making reasons. I don't mind, minus the occasional moment like this weekend when I found myself sitting knee to knee in a boutique dressing room (it was the only place to sit down) with a rising star in the handbag design world, interviewing him about his rise from eastern Oregon obscurity to designing one of Oprah's top 10 must-have totes for this winter. Then I may have felt slightly self-conscious about my faux leather definitely-did-not-come-from-a-New-York-City-showroom purse stuffed full of pens and notebooks. Which he very graciously did not mention.

(Random side note: At least I'm a step ahead of one of the men in my family who, while Christmas shopping, wanted to know what size of purse Mom wears because he thought purses came in sizes like clothing.)

Well, according to social media the Oscars are indeed over and nobody even tripped on their dress and everyone who judged women on their red carpet look instead of the quality of their acting is a sexist jerk.

Sorry, Internet.

At least I'm not one of the 1,458,283 people who listened to "Everything is Awesome" on repeat for an hour.

Stranger danger

I almost gave myself a heart attack tonight. I was leaving work late and made the mistake of letting my imagination run a little too free while I was walking across the dark, deserted alley to my car. Which meant when I accidentally set my car alarm off while pulling out my keys it scared me half to death.

I jumped pretty high, but I've definitely been scared worse. Once, when I was about 14, I was with some other girls from church delivering cookies to girls who hadn't come in a while when we decided to doorbell ditch and just leave the cookies on the porch. At the final house we made our way through the cluttered yard to the front door, rang the doorbell and scattered. I ended up crouched in the dark among the weeds that had grown up around an old van with painted-over windows, the kind that screamed, "My life's ambition is to kidnap someone," that was up on blocks in the yard. I was just thinking that if I saw that van on the road I definitely wouldn't take any candy from the driver, when all of the sudden the van window above my head flew open and I found myself staring up at a very angry man yelling at me to get out of his yard. I've never run so fast in my entire life.

I've also never been brave enough to look up "stranger danger" in the dictionary because I'm pretty sure I'd see this dude's picture staring up at me giving me nightmares all over again.

Normally I don't freak myself out when I'm walking to my car, though. I've outgrown the phase I went through when I was a very little girl, when my parents would put me to bed and come back later to find me crying over whatever the week's fear was. Everything made me scared, and I mean everything. My parents had to stop showing me the Shirley Temple movie collection they had just inherited because I was freaking out that my parents were going to die or get kidnapped like poor little Shirley Temple's always seemed to be doing so she could go on a proper adventure without them hovering.

They finally bought me a Little Mermaid night light in the hopes that it would provide some comfort, but they found me crying a few days later, keeping myself awake because I was worried if I fell asleep the light would overheat and catch the wooden dresser on fire.

Parents with kids as neurotic as I was back then, just know there's hope that they will turn out relatively normal.

After all, who would have thought that about 15 years later I would intern for the New York Daily News? On my first day on the job when I was filling out paperwork they literally asked me to write down my eye color and any identifying markings in case they ended up having to identify my body at the morgue.

I should have known then what I was getting myself into. My days on the job consisted of assignments like "Go to this super sketchy Bronx neighborhood where there was a gang shootout last night and ask the guys hanging around if they know anything." My nights weren't always any better. Once three friends and I ended up walking through a pretty bad part of Harlem at about 1:30 in the morning (the only explanation I can offer for this life choice is that at age 21 my brain wasn't fully developed yet). A few blocks into our walk we were accosted by a drunk guy who we were sure was going to mug us, but fortunately the only thing he demanded was Ben's secret to getting "three womans."

When I went back to school in the fall I immediately signed up for a women-only self defense class. I'm not sure how much I would actually remember if I got attacked, and my then-boyfriend complained people were going to think he was abusing me based on the bruise patterns I occasionally sported that semester, but it was a really fun class.

Too bad it's kind of hard to beat up a car alarm.

Humans are complicated

If there is one thing I’ve learned as a journalist, it’s that the world is a complicated place. And people don’t want it to be.

Too many people aren’t capable of grasping the fact that the world isn’t divided, Disney-style, into heroes and villains. Everyone falls in a different place on the spectrum, but the truth is that we’re all a mixture of good and bad. Every single one of us.

People don’t want to hear that, though. They want their journalism like they want their fiction, with a clear-cut good guy and bad guy they can in turns root for and revile. And so they get angry if we tell the truth: that the murder victim had a criminal record, that the rapist was a straight-A student, that the two people in a conflict were both partly right and partly wrong.

I get it, it’s uncomfortable. Nobody wants to hear that Paul Ropp, who was sentenced last week to 30 years in prison for shooting a police officer in both legs and killing a police dog last spring during a robbery in Portland, is a gifted pianist with a penchant for jazz who played keyboard in my brother’s band. That he has a family who loves him. And that his partner in crime Steve-O has a magnetic sense of humor that made him well-liked by a lot of good people before he got mixed up in some pretty bad stuff.

Because if that’s the case, then one of your friends could someday go to prison for committing a horrible crime. And nobody wants to contemplate that when they could be merrily tapping away on their keyboard suggesting the villain should be, in the words of one Oregonian commenter, shot by a firing squad and “left to bleed out and die on the street.”

It goes the other way, too. Nobody wants to hear that someone they admire has any flaws, or that someone with flaws might also do some good in the world. And so they jump on the bandwagon to tear down anyone who hasn’t managed to craft an image of perfection. Exhibit A: The guy who is (depending on who you ask) either a sexist pig helping keep women from science jobs, or a brilliant scientist who landed a spacecraft on a comet before being unfairly victimized by oversensitive feminists.

Why can’t he just be the guy who is a great scientist and also made an unfortunate choice to wear a shirt adorned with scantily-clad women on television? Neither action cancels out the other, although you wouldn’t think so by reading Twitter.

People want to shut the media up about this mixture of good and bad we see in the world. They want to make all victims’ flaws off limits and all perpetrators’ good qualities forbidden. They want all of their news served up in a flawlessly-crafted narrative that allows them to be Team Darrell Wilson or Team Michael Brown instead of Team “We’ll never know exactly what happened that day in Ferguson, but it’s probable that different actions on either person’s side could have prevented a tragedy.”

I once interviewed them family of a dead 20-year-old and the family of the friend who dealt him a fatal punch during a drunken fight. One family wanted a story about their angel baby boy being ruthlessly murdered. The other wanted a story about their son’s life being ruined by a harsh prison sentence after he defended himself against an alcoholic drug dealer flying into a dangerous rage. The truth, it seemed after talking to the DA and police, was somewhere in the middle.

That’s almost always the case, which is why picking one side or the other to craft a hero versus villain narrative doesn’t do anyone any good. People need the full story, not the stereotypes. If I ever have a daughter I want her to grow up knowing that a guy with a “promising football career” can be just as dangerous as a guy with a trench coat and no friends. Both types have made news this year for becoming everything from rapists to school shooters.

At the same time, I also want my future children to see the good in the world. I want them to understand that people who make mistakes are still valued human beings in God’s eyes. That people who go to prison sometimes change their lives for the better and make a positive contribution to the world once they get out again, that the fact that someone is homeless because they made poor choices doesn’t change the fact that at the moment they’re cold and hungry.

I want them to understand that everything is connected, and that as much as the politically correct hate anything that remotely seems like “victim blaming” the truth is things don’t always happen in a bubble.

And so I’ll continue to write that the crash victim wasn’t wearing their seatbelt when they died, that the homeowner’s house burned down because they left food on the stove unattended, that the car was stolen because someone left it unlocked, and that the coroner said the victim of the fight would still be alive if he hadn’t been drunk when he got punched in the head. Because my writing those things might make the next crash victim decide to put on their seatbelt, or the next potential car theft victim decide maybe they should lock their car after all.

Humanity is a beautiful, complex, confusing thing. I wish more people would remember that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I, Phone

This week I got a new phone.

I loved my trusty little red flip phone I've had since college, but I read an article about how flip phones are in vogue again for hipsters and celebrities looking to "declutter" and I couldn't bear the thought of anyone mistaking me for a hipster. Or Donald Trump.

Actually, the real reason is some of the calls and text messages people were sending me were disappearing enroute. I can only assume they were eaten by the same monster who likes to collect half my socks from the washing machine while it's running.

I thought about getting a new flip phone, but as smart phones get increasingly more advanced dumb phones have trouble receiving photos, group texts and emojis. (Why are they called emojis now instead of emoticons? Or are they two different things? This is why I didn't want to buy a smart phone until I was old enough to have grandkids to explain these things to me.)

After some research I decided upon the Nokia Lumia 635. It seemed like a good deal, and I already have Windows 8 on my laptop so I knew how to use it.

After bringing my new phone home I activated my new SIM card and turned on my phone, at which point Cortana, the Microsoft version of Siri, introduced herself and asked if she could "be of assistance."

She went on to explain that being of assistance meant using my "location, contacts, voice input, info from email and text messages, browser history, search history, calendar details and other info" to get to know me.

Apparently if it's your phone that does this instead of a real, live person it's called a "personal assistant" instead of "stalker" or "NSA employee."

After reading up on how Cortana would use this information to subsequently choose restaurants for me, present me with articles about my favorite sports team, tell me jokes or let me know I needed to leave early for my appointment because of traffic, I had visions of starring in a high-tech remake of Fatal Attraction and decided to turn Cortana off.

She stalked me anyway. The first time I started to type in a web address on my phone the suggestions that came up were things I had Googled on my laptop. Oddly specific things that there's no way were just general suggestions.

Why does this not freak anyone else out?

She also won't stop alerting me multiple times a day that my friends are having birthdays, no matter how many ways I try and tell her to stop. Just know Cortana really cares about your birthdays, guys.
Like to the point that I'm worried she will steal my credit card number and tell Amazon to send you a present in the name of personal-assistanting me.

Luckily my phone also does normal phone stuff too. I did learn how to make a phone call, although learning how to not call people accidentally by pushing random buttons has turned out to be a bit more of a challenge.

There are a lot of random buttons on my phone that I have no idea what they do. Considering how advanced smart phones have gotten, I'm a little afraid to try them for fear of what might happen. The button with the lightning bolt could have to do with my phone's power, or I could accidentally shock myself with a Taser app. You never know these days.

What I do know is that I don't like how big my phone is. I don't understand how this is progress. We made fun of phones that size from the nineties, remember? It was like "Ha ha look at how big your phone is compared to my Razr." And now those same people are like "Hey look my phone is almost as big as my tablet! It's so much cooler than yours."

Make up your mind, people.

My phone not fitting in my pocket is not cool, it's a huge inconvenience. Is it too much to ask the fashion industry to get with the times and give women smart phone sized pockets?

I suppose the answer is yes, considering I found out the other day the reason women's buttons are inconveniently located on the left side of their shirts is from the days when women all had servants to dress them and it was easier for the serving maids to button things from that side.

I'm supposed to buy a whole new wardrobe every season, but you can't make women's shirts for right-handed people after two hundred years?

But I digress.

Overall I like my phone, despite the fact that I am also slightly worried that one day it will go all "I, Robot" on me and try to kill me (or in this case: I, Phone. Ha ha.)

For now, however, I will enjoy my ability to check Facebook, read emails, look up directions, use Google to win arguments and listen to Pandora while out and about.

I'll have to order my tinfoil hat using a library computer, though. Cortana might not like it.

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.