50 Ways to Say... (Goodbye, 2013)

She went down in an airplane

Fried getting suntanned
Fell in a cement mixer full of quicksand
She met a shark under water
Fell and no one caught her
I returned everything I ever bought her
Help me, help me, I'm no good at goodbyes!

Furthermore...

She was caught in a mudslide
Eaten by a lion
Got run over by a crappy purple Scion
She dried up in the desert
Drowned in a hot tub
Danced to death at an east side night club
Help me, help me, I'm all out of lies
And ways to say you died!

These are words to the hit mariachi-sounding Train song that was really big last year, kind of big this year, and took me quite some time to warm up to, but fortunately I finally did: "50 Ways to Say Goodbye."

Today, whilst I was reflecting upon the fantastic year that 2013 was for me, for some funny reason I was inspired by this song, to compile a list "50 Ways to Say 2013 Rocked My Socks." Here comes the 50:

1) Made it through yet another Christmastime without witnessing or experiencing a kiss under the mistletoe. What the @%#^$*&!? (OK, that's not an awesome quality that 2013 possessed)

2) Became a full-fledged member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and have had innumerable touching and life-changing experiences in just one MoTab year alone

3) Dressed up like Bellatrix Lestrange (the baaaad Harry Potter lady). Little did I know that I have ancient Lestrange blood in me (thank you FamilySearch!)

4) Welcomed beautiful baby niece into my family

5) Was introduced to the movie Austenland and my life since then has never been the same

6) Ate my birthday lunch at the Little America with my mom

7) Played in the Bryce Canyon hoodoos with my friends, and scared the bejeebers out of some random girl who was a stranger, but she was wearing a Basic High School T-shirt, so what could I do!?

8) Met Bronco Mendenhall, BYU head football coach. Say whaaaaat!?

9) Gained a few new favorite scriptures, including all of Mormon chapter 6 and 1 Chronicles 19:13 (behave!)

10) Held my brand new baby cousin Sam when he was only three hours old

11) Made literally hundreds of new friends, with some of my favorite ones being ones I explored Alaska with

12) Flew a flippin' airplane in Alaska! Over glaciers!?

13) Saw my first wild black bear (and puffins!) in the wild! It was wild!

14) Saw a real red fox --- he was gorgeous! I still don't know what he says!

14) Completed my fifth consecutive year with the Jenny Phillips Fireside Choir

15) Ran a marathon! (OK, fine, it was two half marathons separated by three months)

16) Rode public transportation in this state for the first time, and became pro at it

17) Discovered that Michael Bolton is indeed Caucasian and not the ethnicity that I originally thought he was

18) Continued to learn more about myself and about life through the positively interesting dating experiences I underwent

19) Got a new job, and it is my favorite job I've ever had

20) Welcomed my youngest brother home from his Salta Argentina mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

21) Continued my life-long streak of never breaking a bone, never getting stung by a bee, and never suffering from a bloody nose

22) Got a flu shot on my half birthday, woot!

23) Crashed a wedding reception of someone I didn't know (and still don't know). Um... But the people I went with knew who it was, so I didn't feel very bad

24) Moved to a new city, and it was a righteous move!

25) Made friends with very cool Australian people

26) Tried Emergen-C for the first time in my life, to see if it would aid me whilst I was dealing with my colds and such, but it didn't do squat

27) Began getting gladly antsy for my upcoming high school reunion --- I'd like to attend it!

28) Attended a surprise birthday party for my former seminary teacher of two years

29) Discovered that I make the best salmon dish in the universe

30) Discovered that roller-curlers-to-sleep-in is a fabulous idea for my hair

31) Fell asleep in church for the first time ever

32) Went to a relative's wedding reception, and after the bride tossed the bouquet and I did not catch it, my little cousin Cam came up to me as I was sitting on a garden bench, patted me on the shoulder and said "there's always next year, Alison"

33) Participated in my first ever MoTab recording session (made a CD with Bryn Terfel!)

34) Met and actually exchanged sentences with John Rhys-Davies. He is a true and genuine sweetheart! (Gimli!)

35) Spent lots of quality time with my family

36) Played on an inner tube water polo team and made a few really sweet blocks with the monstrosities that are my arms (and by monstrosities, I mean they are monstrously long and gangly and fairly agile)

37) Made a "You Might Be a Redneck" film with my Family Home Evening group (don't worry, it's better than it sounds!)

38) I got a boy to watch the long Pride and Prejudice with me --- triumph!

39) Uncertifiedly (but not illegally) started teaching a Zumba class with my friend Cynthia!

40) My toddler nephew finally arrived at the stage where he loves to snuggle me

41) My friend's first novel came out and I read it and he did a really good job (#ecksdot)

42) Went to Big O Tires for some tire/rock chip fixing and happenstancely met a guy whose dad went to university with my dad... a guy who was my exact age, born in the same town, in the same hospital!

43) On the same evening I went to Big O Tires, I took a pic of this sunset (ermahgersh ert's sehr berterferl!!!):

44) Grandmother sent me a harmonica for Christmas (it was my grandfather's), and I called her up on Christmas Day and played her songs over the phone (best moment ever!)

45) Received a tennis court for a front yard, and played tennis on it

46) Watched my little niece play tennis. She is great. She could probably beat me

47) Leg wrestled said niece ... and her 3-year-old brother. Pure hilarity!

48) Penned a poem about flossing

49) Kayaked through icebergs for an entire day (AMAZING!), held an iceberg in my hands and actually licked it, "used the facilities" in the foliage of the fjords, and flirted with the handsome kayak tour guide (don't judge me; you'd flirt with him too if you were me! ehh but it's over now; I left him in Whittier ;)

50) Accomplished the magical feat of trilling my tongue/rolling my R's for more than 1 second! I did 1.5!

Many, many, many more wonderful things happened during this past year, but for the sake of relating to the Train song, I'm keeping the list down to 50 :)

Here's to a just-as-wonderful (and even wonderfuller) 2014! It is my sincere hope and wish that your 2014 is a glorious one! May the good Lord continue to bless you!

Every Mother's Child is Going to Spy

Tomorrow I embark on my life’s twenty-eighth Christmas Eve. As I’m prepping for the occasion, the “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” song is a plane that relentlessly loops the loop in my brain. (By the way, Alvin still wants his huuuuula hooooop.) How that song relates to what I’m about to write in this post, ye soon shall see.

My memory is wandering far away to my Christmases past, back to when I and my four siblings were all little. Every Christmas Eve, we kids would don ourselves in our brand spankin’ new Christmas pajamas that Mom and Dad lovingly gave us, go pick a basement bedroom for us all to set up camp in, hook up the TV and VCR, plug in our favorite old-tyme claymation Christmas cartoons (as well as the Grinch and the Smurfs and the Magic Flute – can’t forget those!), and stay up forever late watching until we zonked out. Click here to see what our all-time favorite cartoon was:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTD0XHRLCOs

But we would never be sleeping for very long, for late-late-late Christmas Eve/early-early-early Christmas Morning was not just any ol’ average timeframe. It was always a timeframe packaged with a serious and dangerous mission.

I think we maybe did not have a tangible alarm clock to utilize, so maybe we relied solely upon the merits of one or the other elder sister’s body clock. Approximately 4 o’clock ante meridiem seemed to be the traditional hour we five children would unanimously agree upon for waking from our forty winks, for to silently parade back upstairs to the living room to spy on the Santa droppings – er, um, drop-offs.

And it came to pass that we’d wake up unreluctantly at 4:00, not necessarily wishing we didn’t have to briefly leave our snuggly blankies (because HELLO! we’re going to see what Santa brought us!). As I said before, we took our yearly Christmas Morning mission quite seriously, and soberly understood that if we were to have ever gotten caught in the act by our parents, there would've been eightch to pay. Days and days in advance, I would carefully identify what specific tools would play perfectly to my personal advantage on the eventual journey upstairs. My childlike reasoning deduced that the following two items would be mandatory:

1) Miniature flashlight, because the shining of any flashlight bigger than the size of half-a-Barbie-doll would be much too conspicuous in the dreaded case that our parents almost catch us red-handed

2) Extraordinarily soft socks, because any ol’ regular white socks worn on any other ordinary day simply were not the softest of the soft, and surely would make too loud of a sound when colliding on the carpet as I tip-toe

We five kids were so expert it wasn’t even funny. Not once—not one year—did we get caught. In fact, till this very day Mom and Dad probably still don’t know of our schemes ;)

Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight

They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh
And every mother's child is gonna spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly

Now, as decades have passed and I’m fondly remembering those golden childhood years, what is more dear of a memory than all of the magical Santa gifts combined, is the memory of the loving regard we five tiny tots had for each other. We had so much fun together all the time, especially at Christmastime. I can’t help but believe that, because we jointly maintained a special bond as we grew up together, it’s not hard for us to value and keep that bond now.

I feel like that is what Christmas is all about: love. Love, and the person who is the prime source of love and light: Jesus Christ.

Advice from Céline Dion and Alma the Younger: Don't Save It All for Christmas Day

In my workplace we have a very nice, spacious, well-lit, and comfortable lobby that can seat several dozen people. It is a yearly Christmastime tradition for high school choirs from across the state to come each workday at midday to perform in the lobby, while workers gather ‘round on their lunch breaks. I’ve been going down there at lunchtime for the past few days to enjoy the music. Each time I go and listen, especially when I listen to the songs about the Savior, I can’t help but be full of bliss. Those young students sing the songs so beautifully, with an attitude of gentle humbleness because they understand the holy nature of the songs.

This 2013 Christmas I’ve been pondering something that I’m not sure I’ve ever consciously pondered before. I’m pondering how it seems to me that the dear Savior Himself puts a great big stamp-of-approval upon the offering of any sweet Christmas carol or story about Him that is shared in respectful reverence. I sat down in the lobby this afternoon to listen to the choir sing, and I felt the bliss, and I noticed the singers’ veneration, and I don’t know what one word with which to describe it all, but it was just super good, as if God Himself beheld it and saw that it was good (book of Genesis reference intentional, jajaja).

Maybe that’s why we feel so much joy at Christmastime—because at that season we sing things and do things that are particularly pleasing unto the Lord, and in return He seems to smile upon our acts, which smiling we can often sense in our hearts.

As the intensely talented Céline Dion sings on track #2 of her 1998 album These Are Special Times: “Don’t save it all for Christmas Day. Find a way to give a little love every day.”

Fabulous song. If you don’t know it, look it up; I urge you.

These Céline lyrics remind me of a favorite verse of mine in the Book of Mormon. Alma 37:36 reads “…let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever.”

When today's high school choir honored Jesus Christ and His life and service in song, they did so with great care, and I really do think God smiled upon the concert and saw that it was good. :) But I'm gonna be Captain Obvious here and make the suggestion of "Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could honor the Savior and do good works as He would do (and would want us to do) not just at Christmastime, but all the time?"

The Céline and Alma advice, my dear friends, is the way to go: to not "save it all for Christmas Day" but to try to be giving and loving every day. I think it would be a pretty swell thing to be able to sense the Lord's smiles always! In January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and all those -ober and -ember months! Uh huh!

P.S. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all! I hope your New Year resolution will be to become a lover of flossing!

Using "School of Rock" to Speak to Me

So right now I'm sick and I'm home, lying in bed, soon to go to sleep. But before I doze off, I want to record a little miracle that happened to me last night, and trickled into this morning.

By the way, I just finished off a bag of THIS, and it is delicious, and I highly recommend it:

On to the miracle.

Many a morning I write to my awesome friend Sara. I write to see how her day is going, and I also, for some reason (don't ask me why, okay?), write to her the lyrics of the song that's stuck in my head for the day. It's usually a different song each day.

Yesterday the song was a song about being sick, because I had just become sick, and I am still sick, as I've mentioned earlier. Anyway, the song is actually more about being "heartsick" as opposed to head-cold sick, but still sick just the same.

The song is called "Heal Me, I'm Heartsick," and it is from the 2003 American film School of Rock, which stars the one and only Jack Black.

Heal me, I'm heartsick. Hungry. Thought I could survive on you. Hear my heartsick, hungry cry. I'm heartsick.

Pretty eloquent, right? ;) Those are the lyrics I wrote to Sara yesterday. Again, I'm not sure why I feel the need to write out the songs that play in my head to her; it's just a quirk of mine. But a reason I'm thankful for her is because she just takes it. She takes my crazy song lyrics. She even says she enjoys reading what songs play in my brain. Blessed she is. She's a trooper.

Following my writing to Sara yesterday, I felt like poop. And I looked like poop, even when I tried my best at the start of the day to not look like poop. It's just what happens sometimes to a person who feels like she could just keel over from her cold at any second. It was a long day, with so much I just had to get done. When I finally got done with everything, it was dark outside. And as I hopped into my car, turned it on, and turned on my super-old iPod, the miracle began.

Heal me, I'm heartsick. I'm hungry and I'm broken...

I like to put my iPod on shuffle when I drive. This time I chose to start a whole new shuffle, instead of continuing forth with the shuffle that was already in progress. Yes, I chose to start afresh, to start with a brand new song #1. "Heal Me, I'm Heartsick" had a 1-in-4,052 chance of being song #1 in this shuffle configuration. And guess what. It totally won the lottery. And it cheered my sickly self right on up!

Because song #1 could've so easily been any of the other 4,051 songs in my iPod's music library, I counted the "Heal Me, I'm Heartsick" song-number-oneness as a miracle ... as a way of my Heavenly Father saying to me: "Here's something to cheer you up, my child!"

When I heard "Heal Me, I'm Heartsick" start to play in my car at that moment, my heart leaped for joy because I suddenly got the gloriously happy assurance that Heavenly Father knows exactly who I am, He's mindful of me all the time, He knows I'm a music nutcase and sort of a rockaholic and He's okay with that, and He knows the best ways to cheer me up when I need some cheer.

I indeed was in need of some cheer last night after my long busy day that I accomplished in pure illness, and Heavenly Father was fully aware of that, so He did something to help me out. I'm pretty sure He's the one responsible for letting "Heal Me, I'm Heartsick" --- the same song I typed-sang to Sara earlier that morning --- be song #1 of the shuffle configuration.

THIS morning I had to hop into my car again for to transport myself to a place I needed to go, and I turned the iPod on once more. The next song in the configuration was yet ANOTHER song that clearly Heavenly Father understands makes me happy, and because I was still sick and poopy this morning (as well as this afternoon), He seemingly manipulated the iPod again to let that song be the next to play.

I sure do love Heavenly Father, and I know He sure does love me back, and I'm so glad to know that He knows the best ways to cheer me up.

At any rate, here's that other song from today:

His Heart's Got Ears

I'm a church-goer. I love being a church-goer. I love being religious in my religion, which is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've been a religious church-goer all my life. I just did the math, and according to my calculations, I've attended Sunday services nearly 1,450 times. And I plan to keep watching that number grow.

So. Fourteen hundred & fifty times. Who in the world would've thunked that today's Sunday services, out of all those other gazillions of services I've gone to, would be my favorite? If today's are not actually my all-time favorite, they're positively in my Top 3 Favorites, if I were to have a "Top 3 Favorites" list.

Okay okay, fine, I'll finally tell you why I loved church today so much. Good criminy, it wasn't even my own congregation that I normally go to, where I know almost everyone. I was visiting another congregation of my faith, a congregation where I knew almost no one. But what was splendid was that I still felt very welcome there, among all those strangers, and I felt the same peace and joy and enrichment that I feel when I attend my own congregation. Today, however, that peace and joy and enrichment were all part of an entirely different league. It was off the charts. It was terrific.

A lady named Kiersten noticed me a few minutes before church started, and she invited me to sit with her. She said she usually likes to sit clear up in the front of the chapel near the pulpit. And usually I don't particularly care to sit clear up there, so I frequently don't, but today I sat with Kiersten in the second row, center set of pews (our chapels typically have left, center, and right sets of pews).

I situated myself on the far left-hand side of the bench, which caused me to be in extremely close proximity to the front row of the left set of pews. On that row sat a man who was deaf. He sat next to one interpreter, and another interpreter sat a small number of feet in front of them, on a chair, facing them. The interpreter on the chair was approximately five feet away from me, at my eleven o'clock.

The two interpreters tag-teamed. The first one was a pretty young woman with brown hair, very nice teeth (I notice teeth, okay? I come from a dentistry family!), a lovely smile, and a way cute skirt.

The second was a handsome young man with a genuine and gentle countenance...and a nice turquoise sweater. He interpreted the hymns that were sung, and the two certain prayers that always take place in the middle of the meeting. She interpreted the opening and closing prayers, as well as the talks that were given.

I couldn't take my eyes off either of the interpreters, whenever they were sitting on the chair. I tried to make my staring not too terribly awkward. I was so fascinated in learning how to say words in American Sign Language (ASL). Not only that, but I felt the spirit of God --- the Holy Ghost --- so sweetly in my heart, even sweeter than most times I'd ever felt it in my life.

The Holy Ghost taught me something so special in that meeting, as I was focusing on the interpreters. It all really started when I focused on the second interpreter while he led the second hymn. It happens to be one of my favorite hymns. It's #169 in the current hymnal. It always touches my soul to sing it, but when I saw the second interpreter sing it with his hands, it made me pay more attention to the lyrics than I ever had before, and it made the message even more powerful and uplifting to me than ever before. His hands sang it so beautifully. I cried.

Then it was time for the first interpreter to sit in the chair again. It was time for the talks. I generally do a good job paying attention to church talks, but today I paid attention in a totally different way. I hardly ever looked up to my two o'clock to the person at the pulpit. Rather, I kept my eyes on the hands and the face at my eleven o'clock, five feet away from me. Again, I hope I didn't creep her out too much, because I seriously did stare at her for pretty much the whole time she sat in the chair.

The talks consisted of much talk about Heavenly Father, His Son Jesus Christ, Christ's Atonement, faith, repentance, endurance, obedience to God's laws, and blessings that God gives His children whenever they do obey. For lack of a better adjective, it was so sweet to watch the first interpreter's hands talking about these holy topics. It was like nobody in the history of mankind had ever talked about those things as kindly and earnestly as these two interpreters did today.

Needless to say I was just all-in-all quite moved by what I saw during the duration of the meeting (sometimes I even kept my eyes wide open during the prayers, just so I could hear the prayers in ASL). I felt Heavenly Father's and Christ's love for me fresh within me, and I learned something too. Oh yeah! I meant to tell you what I learned from the Holy Ghost three whole stinkin' paragraphs ago! Here goes nothin':

I learned that God has a way of speaking to every one of His children. Usually hymn #169's message reaches me through my ears and plants itself firmly inside my mind and heart. But today it reached me through my eyes, by way of the second interpreter's hand gestures and tender facial expressions. The message reached me loud and clear, as it normally does through sound. But today, it reached me loud and clear in the same loud and clear way it reaches the man whose ears don't function the same way mine do. His heart's got ears --- ears that work perfectly. I looked back at him and the young woman interpreter during the closing hymn (#250 in the current hymnal). They were singing together with their hands. There was a bright and wonderful glow about them. "Happy [were they], happy [were they]." I could tell the song was bringing them cheer.

This was nuttin' but a whole bunch of rambling, but I just had to write it all down. To whomever just read this, congratulations for making it through! I can show you how to say "endure" in ASL, if you'd like! ;)

Slanderer Repellant

In Old English it's deofol. In Now English it's devil.

The Saxons called it diuval, and the Greeks possibly started it with their διάβολος (diabolos), meaning "the slanderer."

Several years ago at Brigham Young University – Idaho, I took a Media Law & Ethics class. For reasons unknown, the most memorable lesson from that class, for me, was the one about the difference between libel and slander. They both basically mean "to defame someone," but libel does it through writing, and slander does it through speaking.

I think the Now English word still holds true to its original Greek definition, and that the following statement is correct:

"If the devil is the slanderer, thus being a defamer, and he is everybody's adversary, then his mission is to try to defame everybody, implicating that everybody's got some 'fame' to begin with."

The "fame" that everybody's got… I really do believe that everybody in the world has something very special about them. Everybody's got a special light somewhere inside.

Granted, that may sound cheesier than the biggest cauldron of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ever brewed, but I said what I meant and meant what I said.

How does a singular person get to be defamed by the slanderer? It happens when a bad little birdie whispers "you're not good-looking enough" into your ear and you buy it. It happens when you get the stinking inkling that you're a doomed and rotten person just because you make mistakes. It happens when something warps your judgment into deeming it nobler and far more dignified to not forgive someone, than to forgive.

The slanderer slanders in sly and tiny ways. It certainly takes effort on our part to keep our lights bright and our slanderer repellant fresh on our skins, but it can be done. I am definitely not constantly free of all slanderer sludge, but I can recommend the following repellant brands that I've put to the test:

-Being honest and maintaining integrity

-Being kind in deed and in thought to others and to yourself

-Striving patiently to keep self-improvement a priority

-Making and working towards righteous goals

In my life, I've discovered that my prime success tool is remembering I'm a child of God, that there's a way I can communicate with Him and stay close to Him, and that He loves me and longs to offer His help whenever I need it.

The devilish defamer is everybody's adversary, and his mission is to drag down as many of us as he can. But guess what. As many of us who have διάβολος for an arch nemesis, also have God—who is our Heavenly Father—for a greatest ally. Each of us is God's child, in a majorly real sense. And God, who adores us, and whose power infinitely and eternally trumps the enemy's power, stands up for His children who choose to stand by His side.

Dejected Rejects: A freewrite about the worst day of my teenage life, and how it suddenly got better

Preface: The bulk of the following body of writing is written from the perspective of what was a very frustrated Alisonian teenager. Present-day Alison earnestly deems the Nevada All-State Choir as a wonderful organization that is run by exceptional and talented people.

I was a high school senior. I was possibly the biggest choir nerd my school had. I and somewhere around four other choir nerds from my school had all made it into the Nevada All-State Choir. (That choir’s audition process can be found in the dictionary underneath “nerve-racking,” and blessed were we to have been able to survive it.)

It was a particularly rainy day, sometime in the springtime. 'Twas the day before the huge and hugely fantastic concert for which we had been preparing for months. We had roughly a dozen amazing songs memorized. We’d even gotten to know the extravagant Jabberwocky by heart (and my heart still knows it till this day). It was dress rehearsal day. Dress rehearsal was to occur on the college campus. There were only a few minutes till call time. Tropicana Avenue was the best route from our neck of the woods to UNLV. Tropicana was where we were for what seemed to be time and eternity, stuck in the worst traffic I had seen in all my eighteen years. What made it bad? Bad rain that contributed to a smorgasbord of nasty automobile accidents. Yucky slugs on the sidewalks parallel to us probably got to UNLV swifter than we did. But we finally got there. Rehearsal began at 10:00:00am and we made it there in one piece at 10:00:11. SCORE! Right? Nooo.

Nope. They kicked us out. Kicked us and cursed us for being terrible children because only the most horrendous of children show up to the illustrious Nevada All-State Choir’s most important rehearsal of the season a measly eleven seconds after start time, when they soberly understand and revere that rehearsal to be most important above all other rehearsals, so they brave the ridiculous weather and treacherous-above-all-treachery traffic, obey all traffic laws regardless, at last arrive at campus, park legally in the next best spot yards and yards and yards away from the rehearsal’s designated building, book it like there were banshees, Tyrannosaurus rexes, saber-tooth tigers, great white sharks, Alfred Hitchcock birds, Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come, and angry leprechauns right on their tails, just so they could get into their respective singer seats as close to rehearsal start time as humanly possible. Good gracious, I am so beside myself due to how infinitely awful these children are that I daresay I need hours upon hours of psychological therapy!! said each Choir administrator.

The total number of kids they kicked out of the Nevada All-State Choir that stormy and dismal day was more than ten, close to fifteen. It wasn’t just us from our high school. It was several more from other high schools who courageously endured the same travel hardships we did. Vividly, as if it were just this past springtime half a year ago, I remember entering the rehearsal room—soaked and breathless—witnessing the rest of the Choir barely beginning their first warm-up of the session, desperately wishing I were safely sitting and warming up among them with no fear of being under condemnation, watching one stern administrator walk toward us and then lead us to the corner of the room near the glass doors through which we’d just come, waiting for “the boss” to decide what to do with us. I remember us standing there in that corner of shame for many grueling draggy moments, thinking they’d possibly let us just take our seats and we’d all let bygones be bygones. Falsehoods. Bygones were not to be bygones. The boss and all the boss’s administrative minions were determined to make frienemies of us, but in reality they failed to do that by instead making pure enemies of us; for, a frienemy is someone who likes you but secretly despises you in a tiny way or two, but an enemy is someone who doesn’t like you at all. How could you like anyone who hardheartedly sends your glorious and well-deserved All-State dreams through the shredder of doom?

There’s a moral to this story, and it comes in two halves. (And no, the moral is not “Well, uh, duh… just give yourself more extra time to get to your destination” because we DID give ourselves plenteous time, thank you very much.)

The first half of the true moral of the story is “Bad stuff happens to good people…” Like we’ve all heard multitudinously in our lives.

The second half is what we, as good people, can do about the first half: “…so try to help lift each other up.”

Here’s the positive way the worst day of my teenage life turned:

After gloomily trudging out the glass doors, departing from the beautifully-sounding Nevada All-State Choir that would forevermore be our destroyed destiny, we dejected rejects—we remarkable choir nerds from across the Battle Born state—decided to drown our sorrows together, as newfound friends in misery, in a Denny’s breakfast. We went there, sat down in there, circled around a big ol’ table, consumed our scrambled eggs, pig meat, pancakes, French toast, and juices, made each other laugh and smile, and resolved to shove our tears off a cliff.

I recall there being a girl among us named Beth, who I think attended Las Vegas High School, who was kind and bubblesome, who had really long, pretty, and curly brunette locks. Aaaaand that’s all I have to say about her. I just mentioned her because I remembered her specifically.

Now, the story I just told depicts “bad stuff” that wasn’t deeply heartbreaking, but it was rough enough for a sad teenager to notice her spirit significantly brighten when she was surrounded by friends who wanted to share cheer on a misfortunate day. Similarly she noticed her spirit brighten when she reciprocated sharing the cheer.

The point is: tough stuff, of varying degrees of severity, happens to all of us. When any one of us is undergoing a trial, whether it's kind of big or kind of small, our heart feels so much lighter when someone shares cheer with us. It's especially such a lovely feeling to know that we have helped make someone else's heart light when that heart was once very recently heavier.

My 12th Patriot Day, and Life's Sanctity

It's a Patriot Day tradition in America to ask out loud: "Where were you?"

"Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day?" is how the Alan Jackson song goes. I always remember vividly where I was when I first heard the news.

I was a Basic High School sophomore, chilling with my fellow marine biology classmates, 2nd period, waiting to start dissecting squids, when our teacher asked what seemed to be a pretty odd question:

"What does '9-1-1' mean to you?"

[Puzzled looks on our faces for a moment or two…] "Emergency," said one. "Urgent," said another. And those were the best answers we could come up with.

Our teacher, whom I remember being a kind and frank and red-headed lady, noticed that none of us had any idea what she was getting at, so she continued speaking her thoughts:

"Look at the clock. It's around 9:11am. Today is 9/11. And yes, 9-1-1 often means 'emergency.' Have you heard of what's been going on this morning back East?" I think none of us had heard; planet Earth had not yet entered the era of everyone having access to a world-wide-web-endowed smartphone. Social media wasn't a thing yet. Everyone didn't know everything about everyone else in everywhere, in every place, at every possible time. Our teacher was the only person in the room with a computer and with Internet; thus, she was the only person in the room with the back-East scoop.

She proceeded to explain to us a little bit about everything: the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania crash, the planes, the hijackers, the rubble, the smoke, the firefighters, the fatalities... She spent maybe 10 minutes talking about it with us, and then we continued forth with our squids.

I'm not sure I can speak for all my fellow marine bio classmates, but I, for one, didn't know how to digest what our teacher had just reported about the morning that was already being nationally termed as "9/11." It all sounded quite alarming, but to be able to wrap my head around it seemed a farfetched concept. For, in all my 15 years, I'd never known my country to be attacked, to be at war, or to go to war... That was something I had only read about in history textbooks. That was World Wars One and Two. That was Korea and Vietnam. That was the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. That was not now. Nowadays war didn't happen.

But things were different now. It took a while for my 15-year-old self to really internalize that things were different, and to this day I think I'm still trying to get used to the idea.

Two years ago, my youngest brother & I visited Sandy, Utah's 9/11 memorial,
which honored the Utahns who were present at the attack sites.

America and I observed Patriot Day for the twelfth time today. I daresay, on this 12th anniversary, my heart was touched more profoundly than on all previous anniversaries. I think it has something to do with something else besides 9/11 that my mind has lately been pondering over and over.

My mind has been revisiting something I heard a girl, who's roughly my age, say precisely a week ago. It went like this:

"We talk about the sanctity of life all the time. Usually when we say 'sanctity of life,' we regard either the birth or the death of a person. But a person's life is sanctified all the time, not just when they're a baby or an elderly person."

It was a fantastic comment. Life is a sacred experience no matter how old the person, whether afflicted or healthy.

A month ago, one of my coworkers and dearest friends (I feel like perhaps I have a lot of "dearest" friends :) got into a serious bicycle accident. He got pretty shattered up inside. God only knows how he survived. I'm pretty sure my whole office and I kept him (and his family) in our prayers constantly, from that initial moment we received word of his wreck. Miraculously he returned to work only one month later, for which God was to be thanked. I remember when he walked in wearing his usual suit and tie. He looked so good; I could hardly believe my eyes. His smile and cheerfulness were brighter than I had ever remembered them being. I could tell he had missed us, and the office.

If there ever was a Dutch oven that baked tangible miracles of angel-light countenances, my friend was one of those miracles. He walked back into our office, after being gone for so long, with a totally noticeable glow about him. It was when I saw that glow that I felt God's love so vibrantly in my every fiber. It was there in that office, very much so.

Sanctity of life: my mind zoomed right to it when I saw my friend for that first time after his bike accident. I realized that, if my nice car were to suddenly be dropped into a boiling, bubbling, burning volcano, it would be infinitely more meaningless than if I were to suddenly lose my friend.

I think this is a similar epiphany to the one Americans experienced on that first Patriot Day. They realized that it was their loved ones --- their people --- that mattered the most, more so than virtually anything else.

(Here's one last utterly random thing that popped into my head that I feel prompted to document...) Believe it or not, a few days ago I actually shared a stage and sang with the great, one, and only James Taylor. The last song on the program was "Shower the People You Love with Love." Terrific message that song delivers, and so pertinent with what I've been trying to say here in this blog post. Let's shower our people with love, for they are our treasures.