What Is It I Do In My Spare Time These Days, Anyway?

As you know, I am a writer.

I mean, that's why I have a blog. Because I enjoy writing, and because some of my best writing is done about my life. I enjoy writing about things that happen to me, even when those things are miserable and they make me want to yell phrases like "POOP IN A CHUTE!" which is a recent acquisition mostly adopted for the amusement of the Prodigy, and according to my mother does not befit a young woman of nineteen. But I'm not nineteen this summer. I'm eleven years old and whiny and childish, because I have no life and I spend my free time writing as four eleven-year-olds.

And that brings me to my primary use of time that is not spent working, this summer. I write, yes. I usually spend my time writing bad fantasy that I pretend is decent, the occasional realistic piece which I tend to believe is better than my fantasy stories, and very, VERY occasionally, poetry. I've always preferred to read poetry rather than write it, because no matter how hard I try, I cannot match Dylan Thomas, who wrote BEAUTIFUL poetry, or Emily Dickinson, who I love because I know that we would have been friends in an alternate universe, or Walt Whitman, who is my Favorite. Poet. Ever. And yes, that three-word phrase deserved the special attention it got. I love Walt Whitman. O Captain, my Captain. I just get CHILLS every time I read that poem.

But beyond WHAT it is I write, I should probably explain that I have spent much of my free time this summer writing four eleven-year-olds. And they are not just creations out of my own head. No, no, no. Three of them are accepted characters who show up at the very, VERY end of a series that I love dearly and which has brought much joy to my life. One is my own creation, and I have to admit that she's sort of my pride and joy because I made her believable enough to fit in with the other four.

If you haven't guessed, I am referring to the children of Harry Potter, who show up in the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, book and movie. I only actually write about one of his kids though. But more on that later, because it would be probably prudent to explain how this happened.

I mentioned that I had made these two awesome friends at college, and they both have names starting with M, so I have to give them nicknames anyway, because if I just call them the M's then it would be too easy to start a series of jokes about "M&M" and then they would never, ever, ever forgive me, and while I would laugh at myself for maybe five minutes- oh, ha ha, Sarah, you are so funny- I would then proceed to beat myself in the head with a frying pan.

Anyway, they are both awesome, and the one of them, who I'm just going to refer to as Superwholockmarauder (which if you don't get that then you haven't been paying attention to like my LIFE), shares a lot of my obsessions with British television and books and things. So we decided that we were going to write each other stories over the summer, and possibly continuing on into the year (because we're roommates for this next semester, but we live on opposite sides of the country and stuff), and because we both ADORE the Harry Potter series, and because it is very easy and intriguing stuff to write about, we already had it lined up. She decided that she would write about the Marauders, who consisted of Harry Potter's father and friends, and also Harry's mother and her friends. And ever since we started following each other on the website that shall not be named, I hear a lot of things about OTPs and shipping and James and Lily and I just love it dearly, because I can always look forward to a chapter of her story when I'm having a sort-of-decent week but an overall depressing summer.

I, on the other hand, chose to write about the other end of the Harry Potter timeline, which consists of Harry's children, Ron and Hermione's children, Neville Longbottom's children, Draco Malfoy's child, and so on and so forth. For those of you unfamiliar with the way it works: Harry marries Ginny Weasley (my personal OTP for those of you who speak the language, if not, then disregard this parenthetical) and has three children: James Sirius Potter (named for grandfather and grand-godfather of sorts), Albus Severus Potter (named for Dumbledore and Snape) and Lily Luna Potter (named for grandmother and probable BFF of mother). I write about Albus, because he is a middle child and I relate to middle children; also, Albus is the most like Harry, which I find interesting, and he is the one featured at the end of Deathly Hallows, so he was given more of a personality for me to work with. I love him quite a lot. Ron Weasley marries Hermione Granger (which everyone who reads the books has been saying "WOULD YOU PLEASE GET TOGETHER" since their third year) and they have two children: Rose and Hugo. I write about Rose. Rose and Hugo are probably thus named (because who in their right mind would name their son Hugo?) because Ron and Rose begin with R and Hermione and Hugo begin with H, and in addition, by naming Rose a flower name, they're sort of giving a nod to Lily Evans Potter and Petunia Evans Dursley, who were flower names as well, and also to Fleur. The only other flower name in the series is Pansy Parkinson, but she can just... yeah. Never mind. The last mentioned child in the series (last character introduced in the books, in fact) is the son and heir of the Malfoy fortune: Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy, only child of Draco Malfoy and a girl named Astoria Greengrass. She's not made up- J.K. Rowling herself ordained this match from on high- and I am glad of this, because I would NEVER have been able to think all of these characters up myself. However, I can manage a few, such as my last one. Neville Longbottom, instead of ending up with Luna, had instead a fun summer of nargles and pudding with her, and then fell in love, eventually, with Hannah Abbott of Hufflepuff, and they were married. Neville was Herbology professor; Hannah was landlady of the Leaky Cauldron; it's a good time. J.K. never gave them kids, or at least she never said if they had kids. I gave them children. In my HP-next-generation-universe, Neville and Hannah Longbottom have two daughters: Frances Augusta (known as Frankie affectionately) and Norah Alice. I decided to write Norah, because Norah is younger and more shy and timid and I know what it's like to be shy and timid, and even though I'm the talented older sister in my family, I know that the Beauty must find it frustrating to live in the long shadow I cast, and in some ways, I find it difficult to live in her shadow.

But anyway, these kids- Albus, Rose, Scorpius, and Norah- are all the same age, eleven years old (in the year 2017, that is) and they are starting Hogwarts, and I have written all sorts of things about them, such as how they became friends and the pranks they pull and the fights they get into and there's even a villain I invented, who's trying to figure out how to do something that has been decreed by J.K. herself magically impossible. But he's a crazy, and telling any more would be, well, telling. Wink, wink.

  

(Above, from left to right; Albus, Rose, Scorpius. There is no picture of Norah because the only pictures of Norah are the ones I've drawn, and 1) I have no scanner and 2) I am a crappy artist and you don't deserve to have your eyes bleed if you read my blog.)

This is what I do in my free time, primarily. I write a chapter about ten pages long and every week I email it to Superwholockmarauder, who emails me her chapter on the Marauders and their escapades. It is a great deal of fun and quite innocent, as I have no plans to make profit off it, except for profit in the form of praise and appreciation from Superwholockmarauder, my mother and my sister, and maybe a few people on the internets.

Writing about universes that already exist and were invented by other people is called fanfiction, and it is something I have always enjoyed the idea of, even though I didn't know it had a name. I have to admit that fanfiction sometimes gets a bad rep- people see it as cheating or ripping off the original author, and the pornographic fiction series Fifty Shades of Grey is more or less fanfiction- the author read the Twilight books and was disappointed that they didn't have sex until like after they were married, like people should do, and so she wrote three books of smut and made millions. CURSE YOU, SIR. CURSE YOU.

Anyway, this is what I mostly do. I do other things, too- lately I've had a period movie streak, watching all of my mother's Jane Austens. I watched my favorite Mansfield Park with every Doctor Who fan's favorite Billie Piper and the divine Blake Ritson. I watched Sense and Sensibility with Willoughby who looks like a pug and a teeny, tiny house that they live in. Then I watched the Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in my mother's room, and I was like OH MY GOSH ALAN RICKMAN WAS LIKE ATTRACTIVE BUT NOT BUT YES, because I still hear Snape when he talks but Colonel Brandon makes the Snape voice forgivable. And I watched Northanger Abbey with Felicity Jones, which is a good version- very cute, and with John Thorpe as a perfectly pimpled pig.

Sometimes I've read books- I re-read all of my John Greens after getting a new one for my birthday, and I read my Jasper Fforde books which are JUST. SO. FLIPPING. GOOD. and I re-read The Host and Madeleine L'Engle's Time series, which consist of well-known A Wrinkle In Time and lesser-known A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and An Acceptable Time. These are all lovely books that combine religious principles, physics, and sometimes even magic in a way that is wholly unique from other authors and is still just beautiful.

Sometimes I make things- I had a few days where I was making Popsicle-stick marionettes, because it's fun and easy, and sometimes I make bracelets or necklaces. My mother is helping me make a dress, because making clothes is fun and cheaper than buying them. I've made many, many graph-paper designs in my graph-paper book, where I color in squares because I can.

And sometimes, I waste a lot of time on Facebook and Pinterest and the website that shall not be named and  very occasionally 9gag, which I feel somewhat guilty about frequenting because while it is a hilarious website, it is also wildly inappropriate and I feel bad about laughing about many of the jokes on it. However, it is a way to pass the time- you can spend hours there and be surprised they've passed when you next check the clock. If only my one job were like that; but real life is slower than the internet.

These are all things I'm grateful for, these things I do, because they show me that I am a fairly educated person and that I am good at creating things- at making bracelets or marionettes or dresses or small universes for characters to live in. Creativity and the desire to MAKE things is something that will stay with me throughout my life, even when I have nothing else. If I become poor and sick and starving and dying, I will still have my imagination, and it is there I can return to even when I have no other home. And that jam is permanent, like raspberry preserves or grape jelly, the constant jams in my house. It will always be there for me.

My Jobs, An Overdeveloped Imagination, And A Brief Reflection Upon The Nature Of Satisfaction

I have a job. Well, I have three jobs, actually. And I know it is probably generally in bad taste to blog about one's jobs, but I'm not criticizing them. Or if I am, it's only a little bit and it's a fairly just criticism. I will say this: I am trying to be very, very fair about this, and I feel the need to post about this because I think it is just so important to have a job that you enjoy doing, or at least one that does not leave you drained physically and emotionally at the end of it.

However, I am nineteen, unmarried, in charge of making my family dinner only once a month, in charge of doing my family's dishes one night a week, and in charge of taking care of my laundry every other Wednesday, because every other Wednesday I have no work. I don't work Saturdays or Sundays, either, but those are 1) my mother's laundry day and 2) nobody does laundry on the Sabbath in my house. It doesn't happen. So I feel that I can put up with one of these three jobs in particular that tends to drain me physically and emotionally, because I have had the job for maybe a month now, and while it neither pays well nor is fun to do, I am composed in the belief that I, Sarah Eliza Abramson, can do ANYTHING for a summer. Except sell my body, because while prostitution is no doubt a lucrative profession, I would feel somewhat guilty about paying for my tuition at a Mormon school with money that I earned by breaking the law of chastity.

That was a joke. Don't get too mad. I'll admit it was off-color.

These are my jobs:

Job #1: I have no problems with this. The company I work for sends me a big pile-o-papers once a month. I take these papers, I find certain little numbers and things on them, compose them into an organized and detailed list using Microsoft Excel, and I email this list back to the company. I do not mind telling you that while the hours on this job come in spurts, it pays quite well, and I am able to earn more than you would think.

I like Job No. 1 because it contains exactly the right amount of mind-numbing tedium for me to turn on Spotify or Pandora or Windows Media Player while I'm doing it, and then I can just kick back and listen to music and enjoy myself while I'm working. The pay is also good, and I have a very fair employer/supervisor who forgives me when I'm occasionally late with something, bless his heart. It is a very good job and I am well satisfied with it.

Job #2: Two days a week, which vary, I go to my employer's house and babysit their children. They have two tiny girls, age three and age eight-ish months. Both are adorable and quite well-behaved for their age. Frankly, I've seen kids behave much worse, because I've been one and because with the Beast, the Beauty, the Angel, and the Prodigy in one family, there are bound to be various shenanigans. I work from the morning to any time in the afternoon from three to five. They also pay me pretty well, although for the sake of anonymity I do not choose to disclose how much they pay me, nor their names, nor the names of their children. I'll just say that they are very fair and they treat me really well.

I like Job No. 2 because the kids are cute and relatively low-maintenance, although I am keeping busy. I don't mean that I neglect them; I mean that my brain is free to occasionally drift off while I work, and the constant change of pace involved in the job makes it interesting. Taking care of an infant is also a good experience for me to have, and I have learned a lot, and I mean a LOT, about babies in the past two and a half months. It's good stuff to know, considering that my ultimate life goal, like many other Mormon girls' ultimate life goal, is to eventually get married in the temple and become a wife and mother. Having experience with babies is probably a good idea, and three-year-olds even more so, because I caught this three-year-old in mid-potty-training, and that, too, has been an experience.

And finally, there is Job #3: Two or three days a week, depending on the week, I go to my other employer's house and I babysit their nine-year-old daughter. This is an okay job. It pays okay, though not enough (trying to strike the balance between honest and fair) and on some days I will even admit that it is fun. It is however, an immense drain on my brain. To illustrate why this is, I shall introduce to you the imaginary world that I am forced to live in, two or three days a week, from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon:

It all began before the Pixar movie Brave came out in theaters. The lassie I babysit shares certain quirks of nature with the main character of that movie, Princess Merida. Princess Merida- P.M.- this shall be the code name for the young lady whom I have been entrusted with. P.M. meets me on the first day, we play soccer for half an hour, she shows me her plastic bow and arrows, tells me about Brave and how excited she is for it, we play outside most of the day. She is Princess Merida, from the movie Brave itself, and her character is gleaned from the snippets of previewed scenes she's seen on the Disney Channel. My character is one that I mostly made up; the long-lost sister of Princess Merida. I had no name at first, but eventually I was christened Casey, to be called Christina when I was in trouble (because it was my full name and our evil stepmother Grizelda enjoyed calling me by my full name, which greatly annoyed Princess Casey.) We lived in the forest and I used shotguns to kill things and she used the bow and arrows and all was fine and good. I even enjoyed this game, for a while. We had an aunt who lived in the woods and was the guardian of the forest, named Lily (Lilianne, but Lily for short) and we were both thirteen years old and we each had a pet bear, because bears evidently feature strongly in the movie Brave. I have no idea, having not yet seen it.

Basically the premise of the game became to avoid our stepmother, Grizelda, because she made us wear pink, sparkly gowns with brass buttons and high heels and corsets and all sorts of horrid things, instead of us running free and wild in the woods as God intended, or perhaps just the fairies, because P.M.'s parents are not religious.

I was just FINE with this game.

One day, P.M. wanted to stay inside and she watched High School Musical 2. I hated the HSM series already (mostly out of a desire to be contrary to the Beauty, who loved them) and this confirmed my hatred, because P.M. adopted a character from the HSM movies as yet another sister of Princesses Merida and Casey. And who did she pick? Not nice Gabriella. Not sweet little Kelsey who plays the piano. Not Taylor. No, she picked lovely obnoxious Sharpay.

And with the addition of Sharpay to the party, the game began to bring itself indoors. Sharpay was the tattletale. She told on Merida and Casey to mean stepmother Grizelda. She got her own pet bear, a welcome-to-the-family gift from enchantress aunt Lily, and the three of us were the crown princesses of Scotland and these bears were magical, and they were called "the bears of our country," and then we would have sessions with the bears where P.M.'s bear screeches were as realistic as any baby howler monkey in the zoo, but twice as constant and much closer. Princess Merida's bear was Fluff; Princess Sharpay's bear was Beary; and mine, with my desire to bring the game to a higher linguistic level, was named Sylvan. Mine was a vain hope.

Grizelda began to hold balls and make all of her stepdaughters go to the salon for constant makeovers. Sharpay loved this, but Merida did not. And before you ask, I was always Casey. P.M. did the constant switching from role to role, and she still does. She does this so seamlessly that I sometimes wonder if she has schizophrenia.

I beg your pardon. That was not a nice joke to make. I won't do it again.

We had to take "dates" to the balls, of course, and just because it annoyed my character and made P.M. laugh personally, the "songs" we had to dance to were about makeup and the color pink and "girly" things, which annoyed Merida and Casey. Grizelda, in the spirit of the movie Brave, was always trying to pair her stepdaughters up with various uncouth gentlemen by the names of Walden, Waldini, and ongoing variations of the name Wald-anything. Eventually, Casey got to pick a date, and we called him Jack. I was fine with this. I was able to pretend, for a while, that Jack was Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who/Torchwood fame, and I was able to shut out the rest of everything. But I forgot that P.M. was also Jack, and because she was Jack and every other character, it became her primary object to torture my character in the field of romance. Jack, after the manner of every soap opera ever invented, became... guess who... our long-lost brother.

Yeah. I dated my own brother. How's that for drama, huh?

Going outside had at this point died; it rained one day and P.M decided she was going to wear pajamas all day. Ever since then, she has worn pajamas all day. We don't go outside anymore. In fact, we don't leave her room, except every now and then to use her parent's room or the stairs or the upstairs bathroom as the realm of our imaginary universe.

The next person to be kidnapped from perfectly good fiction to this game was Hermione Granger, of the Harry Potter series. P.M. and I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban one day. The next day we watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The next time I came, lo and behold, we had a new sister in the ever-growing family! I know that most of you are going, NOOOOOOO NOT HERMIONE! HOW COULD YOU!?!? I will defend myself here by saying that I tried to stop her, but P.M.'s response was to this, "Oh, it's a DIFFERENT Hermione Granger." Right. A young female magician with curly brown hair, and P.M. even has and uses Hermione's wand, bought in Orlando, Florida, at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios, and you tell me it's a different Hemione Granger. Right.

Upon reading back through this, I sound quite bitter. I sort of am. It's Hermione Granger. YOU DO NOT KIDNAP HERMIONE GRANGER. Nuh-uh.

Well, Hermione became the fifth long-lost sister in the Evans family- did I mention we adopted Sharpay's last name? Yes, we did. Merida, Casey, Sharpay, Jack, and Hermione EVANS. Shudder. The five of us each had a pet bear by now; Hermione had an infantile bear named Fairy (named by me) and Jack had a bear named Willow (also named by me, thank goodness). We had several days where all the bears did (and P.M. was all the bears, too) was attack each other, and every time this happened it was Casey's job to separate all the bears from each other and tell them not to hit each other. I suppose the expressions on my face when I pretended to scold the bears was mildly amusing, because P.M. would roll about laughing every time I said the word "No." In retrospect, this is probably the primary reason why I am not a huge fan of this job.

What happened next was that the five of us underwent "princess/prince ceremonies," where we underwent an awkward coming-of-age ritual in which we answered "would-you-rather" questions (toned-down ones, of course) and repeated solemn oaths to be faithful and good princes and princesses. After that, our aunt Lily had an epic showdown battle with stepmother Grizelda, and then aunt Lily took the five of us to Ireland on vacation, along with the bears.

Now, let me clarify something here. When P.M. is being Aunt Lily or Merida or Hermione or Jack, she is perfectly bearable. When she is being one of the many suitors of Princesses Merida, Casey, or Hermione, she is only slightly less bearable. It is when P.M. manifests her inner drama queen in the form of Sharpay Evans that I begin to wonder if I ought not to be committed to a mental institution for accepting this job in the first place.

On our Irish vacation, Aunt Lily was to be out of the room every "night" from ten thirty to seven o-three. Why this mattered so much, I had no idea, until P.M. told me that her favorite number was three. And Sharpay, in comparison with Merida, Casey, Jack, and Hermione, is fifteen years old to their thirteen years old. (How are we all thirteen anyway? Are we quartuplets?) She is therefore left in charge. Sharpay turns the imaginary television set (because we're in the Scotland of antiquity and 2012 at the same time) onto a channel called the "Pink Girls Channel," in which the characters talk about clothes and boys and makeup and the color pink. This is meant to drive Casey crazy, which I obligingly allow her to see, and it annoys the other siblings and the bears, whom I usually have to calm down. Then Sharpay goes to sleep, and the sleeping arrangements are such that Sharpay has to sleep with Casey, of course, even though they get along very badly, and what ends up happening is that Casey (by will of P.M.) kicks Sharpay off the bed because Sharpay flops on her, sleeptalking about her boyfriend Troy (name and character also borrowed from the HSM series; evidently he broke up with Gabriella for Sharpay) and about makeup and things, and then Sharpay wakes up and yells at Casey and picks up one of the baby bears and throws it; Casey has to calm it down (being the bear expert) and then gets in trouble the next day with Aunt Lily because Sharpay tells on her. This occurs some fifty-odd times in your average playing-with-P.M.-hour, which lasts about four in imagined time. Also in Ireland, Casey got a new boyfriend named Austin Powers (guess what movie P.M. had watched the night before?) and proceeded to go through various dramas with him, culminating in him cheating on her with some man-stealing floozie named Princess Leila, who is unimportant except that she's a man-stealing floozie.

As a result, Princess Casey Evans turned from a carefree, wild forest child into a bitter, thirteen-year-old, man-hating cynic who is unpleasant to be around. She is my only character in these games. P.M. dominates everybody else, which is fine by me.

I play this game with P.M. for seven hours a day, two or three days a week. She asks me as soon as the garage door closes on her mother's car, "Hey, wanna play Brave?" That's the title of our game- still based on where it was started, although it now does not remotely resemble the movie Brave. And I, because I am thinking about getting fired and not getting money and starving during the school year, smile very naturally, without gritting my teeth even, and say, "Sure, let's go." And then we sit for three hours in her bedroom. And then we eat lunch, which if I'm lucky I can stretch to half an hour, and then we sit for another three hours in her bedroom. And then she worries about the weather for half an hour while she waits for her dad to come home.

I hate this game, because it is doing a very good job of ruining several movies for me. I will never be able to watch HSM the same way ever again, because for a tiny, twitchy redhead with energy to spare, P.M. does a great job being a sixteen-year-old bratty, bipolar blonde diva. SERIOUSLY, the kid should be an actress. I never want to see the movie Brave, because she has effectively managed to ruin it for me. I'll watch the movie and I just know I'll end up thinking about "This isn't how it was in the game!" and then I will say to my brain, "SHUT UP!" but it won't work, because the louder you yell at your brain the louder it thinks at you.

I hate this game, because it's the same thing, over and over and over and OVER and why do you always want to play this, can't we play something else? Can't you stare at a T.V. all day like every other kid in the history of ever? Can't you read a book like me? Can't we just sit there and write stories? Can't we play a board game? Can't we do SOMETHING BUT NOT THIS AGAIN?

I hate this game, because occasionally I do enjoy myself when I'm playing, and then when my character is happy, with a boyfriend, for just a few minutes, P.M. gets a devious twinkle in her eyes and decides that she wants to cause Casey untold misery and bad luck in the realm of romance. And Sharpay rubs it in: "Why can't you keep a boyfriend? Because I'm so much better than you, that's why." And really, that kind of hits close to home. Not with my own sister, but with my girlfriends who were skinny and pretty like Sharpay from High School Musical, who had boyfriends and dated and stuff and I didn't and don't, and Casey, poor Casey, gets a boyfriend, and for a moment the girl inside Casey Evans who is Sarah Abramson can imagine that she, too, has a boyfriend, and it's kind of a nice feeling, and then that is torn away by someone who has never understood what it is like to lose someone you love, be it to skinnier, prettier girls or because it just wasn't right.

I hate this game, because Casey takes care of these bears and teaches them to sit still when they're being groomed and not to hit each other and not to scratch and bite people, and P.M. decides, because she thinks it's funny, to make them disregard everything Casey ever says, because she finds my facial expressions and voice funny, and it makes me wonder if my own children are someday going to laugh at me when I try and teach them things, and I am never going to laugh at anything my mother tells me to do in seriousness ever again, because it hurts.

I hate this game, because I am trying to be a good person and participate in the game. I am trying to earn my wages, as piddly as they are, and I am trying to enjoy myself because in the brief moments when the game is fun, I look at the clock and lo and behold, a whole half hour has passed, and that's a lovely long time in a playing-with-P.M.-hour. I am trying and trying and trying to enjoy myself and with the constant influx of bad luck that happens to me in this game, not because God ordained it but because P.M. did, and I find that every time something happens I have to fight the urge to ask her why it happened, why does everything bad happen to Casey, why can't something bad happen to Sharpay or Merida or Jack or even, God forbid, Hermione.

I hate this game, because no matter how hard I try, it always ends in disappointment for me. And I feel like I'm drowning in this disappointment, like it's mirroring my life, like it hurts so much to play because my life has nothing serious in it right now, and yet many of the exact same things are happening in my life and in this stupid, stupid game.

But I will tell you this: as low as this brings me, it gives me confidence in this: my imagination is deep enough that I can understand it. Honestly, the only reason P.M. probably wants to play this game so much is because I do a credible enough job with my role that she feels free to express her roles. P.M. is an only child, and I am very sorry for her. She doesn't have ready-made playmates. If I ever got bored I would say to Judy, "Let's have a play," and we would play that our bunk bed was a camper and we would play with our Beanie Babies and Maggie the Magic Cat and Savannah, the pony with magical pink hair. P.M. doesn't have that, and she probably appreciates being able to do that with me. I suspect that this is the only reason I am not fired from my job yet, because when I'm not there, I doubt her parents are going to play this game with her. Not that that's a bad thing.

And yet, that's probably why I take this so seriously: because in trying to be enthusiastic and do a good job, I am developing my skills as a soap opera actress (like seriously, I could probably get a job on a soap if I can't make enough money for college) and my imagination, as occupied as it has to be with finding dialogue suitable for Princess Casey Evans and for movement and watching and imagining that P.M.'s pink-trimmed bedroom is a ritzy hotel suite, a salon and spa, a bus, an automobile, and everything all at once, is being involved and drawing these parallels to my own life and adding things, occasionally, to the world that I'm building with P.M. Someone who didn't care as much, or who didn't have as deep an imagination, would probably laugh this off and say in a bored, condescending tone: "Yeah, what a silly little game." They would laugh at P.M.'s whims and when they got tired of it, they would go downstairs and watch T.V. and leave P.M. in forlorn loneliness. I don't do that because I'm afraid that she'll tell her parents and I'll starve this year in college, not because I don't want to.

So even though I go to P.M.'s house every day and I play this stupid game where I never come out on top, I am exercising my imagination and keeping it fresh and new, and I am making money, as piddly as that amount is, and I am trying to make a child's world a little better, because I suspect that P.M. is lonely and that she enjoys it when I come over and play with her all day. And really, how many other kids have jobs where you get to play "Let's Pretend" all day? I shouldn't complain. Maybe I can think of something new to add for the game tomorrow. Wish me luck, because when I'm there I won't have this perspective and I'll wish I was home, and/or knocked out, again. This knowledge is satisfying, and that is a spoonful of jam on a piece of bread, even if this bread has gross little crunchy things in it.

The Effects of Crippling Introvertedness Upon The Delicate Soul Of My Person

It's been, I don't know, a week since I posted anything. And that is because my life is uninspiring and boring and frankly rather sad.

Of course, you've heard all about that. I've explained how lame I am at least once in all of my previous posts. So I'm not going to dwell on that anymore than is necessary- I've quite milked the topic, and there's really not much more I can get out of it. I'll save those last few drops for myself.

Speaking of drops, I would have to say that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl who moves home for the summer and has only two or three half-jobs of minimum wage or less, no driver's license, and too much on her mind is dreadfully in want of a good, ugly cry.

Don't get me wrong, I hate crying. The reasons I cry are not a good thing, unless I'm watching British television or reading John Green, and then the reasons I cry are so good that they hurt. But every now and then you need to cry- it's as good a stress reliever as anything else.

Stress reliever, you ask? But you have no life, Sarah. How are you stressed?

Plenty of ways, I can assure you. Just suffice it to say that I've been depressed lately. And it's not the boy thing, it's more like the lonely-in-general thing. I mentioned in a previous post that I end up watching from the sidelines more often than not. I feel like that a lot right now, because every time I get on Facebook I see people who are doing things and being happy and having fun. I read a lot of posts where people talk about their kids. I read a lot of posts where people do things with their significant others or siblings or friends. I see pictures and jokes and I think, "Sarah, what prevents you from doing these things? Why is it that you don't have a life?"

There are a few reasons, again. One of them, probably the primary one, is the crippling shyness that has afflicted me since kindergarten. I had no problem being friendly in Joy School, especially not when my mother was the leader. It was kindergarten that scared the bejeezers out of me. We moved right before I started kindergarten, and my first year of school occurred in a small, old school building, two floors, made of stone, called Chancellor Street School, for grades K through 2. Grades 3 through 5 or 6 (I forget which) went to Goodnoe Elementary School. I went to Chancellor Street School and I attended a class taught by a lady named Mrs. Sautter (who scared the bejeezers out of me almost more than the whole idea of kindergarten put together, and whose real name I have no compunctions about using because I will probably never see her again). I sat next to a girl named Susanna A. (real name with no compunctions again) and she chattered in my ear almost constantly. I went to church that first Sunday and I met a girl who we'll call Perpetually Smiling, because I always felt like she was. She had my kindergarten teacher, but in the afternoon; that or she just had the other kindergarten teacher. I forget which. Her mother was my mother's Visiting Teaching companion, and later their family moved to Arizona, and until I went to college I never heard from Perpetually Smiling again. (Turns out she was in my freshman ward- lived in my building, in fact.)

But other than that, kindergarten was awful- I remember one day we were coloring picture frames, and we were supposed to take them home and glue our picture in, and I colored the part that would have been under the picture, and this snotty little boy named Nick (I think) goes, "YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO COLOR THAT PART," and I go "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH" because I was probably the biggest crybaby in the history of ever.

First grade was a little better with the crippling shyness- this year, Perpetually Smiling might have been in my actual class, because I remember having a playdate with her. (A rare thing, as regular readers may remember.) I had an AWESOME teacher named Mrs. Cattani. She was seriously the best teacher ever. I got slightly more used to the creaky old halls of Chancellor Street School and I wrote a story (published by our Young Authors deal where we each wrote a story and they made it into a book) entitled "How Paul Got Lost," which was about my just-born baby brother, the Angel, getting himself lost in the supermarket. My work was stellar and my illustrations were even better. I was a true literary genius, at the tender age of six. My mother made us a cake at the end of the year that looked like a book, and had all of our names on it.

Second grade was even a little better than first grade, but not by much- I had a cool teacher named Mrs. Lowe. It was the year that they sold Chancellor Street School to some company and moved K, 1, and 2 to Goodnoe Elementary. I had a class in the super-cool second-grade hallway, and we had some cool stuff happen in that class. There was a boy who was blind, and he had the white cane and the Braille machine and everything Nicest boy ever, name of Patrick. I got my first pair of glasses and lost them a week later. I began ballet, gymnastics, and karate lessons; I hated karate, I loved gymnastics, and I REALLY loved ballet. We learned to write in cursive. Mrs. Lowe put shaving cream on our desks; men's shaving cream, because it smelled funny. We wrote cursive letters on our desks in shaving cream. We never had Christmas parties, only Winter celebrations, because there were Jewish kids and kids who celebrated Kwanzaa and  every kind of kid in our school. Adults were educated and intelligent (because the two concepts are not mutually inclusive) and the kids were friendly; you could ride your bike on the street and not get kidnapped. We lived on the same street as the public library. We lived in a little brick house, rented from the Blakes, across the street to the left. The Beast threw his basketball and his baseball against the neighbor's garage to practice; her name was Desiree and she might have complained about it to my parents. We lived directly across from the Kobyluchs, who were British. The Beauty was maybe a little older than their younger kids, Thomas and Emma, and we went over to play sometimes.

Third grade was awful because we moved from Bucks County to York County that summer. I remember moving into the blue house in Red Lion and seeing the girls across the street, playing outside in the summer heat, and thinking, "Maybe one of them will be my friend." Not so, Sarah. You were looking in the wrong direction. We moved in and I remember thinking how BIG it was- far bigger than the brick house in Bucks County or the townhouse in Cherrywood Drive or the apartment I don't remember. I remember going to school and meeting people and wondering if any of them would be my friend; when nobody was openly forthcoming, the shyness returned in full force.

In December of that year, I began violin lessons through the school. My father arranged it. He taught me in addition to what I was being taught at school. Through my lessons, which occurred once a week on Day Three (not always Wednesday, mind you) at two in the afternoon. There were three other kids in my lesson: some person who played the cello, a boy who played the violin, and a girl I eventually came to know as the Tuba-Viola Girl.

I was not properly friends with the Tuba-Viola Girl until April or May. Then I learned that she rode my bus and in fact lived in my neighborhood. Then when we figured out where our houses were, it turned out that she lived directly behind me. Our backyards touch from end to end. After that, I had a friend. Even though she was in neither my third-grade class nor my fourth-grade class, we were still very good friends. She came over to my backyard in the summer and we played soccer. (I had been enrolled in local soccer teams.) She came inside sometimes and we just talked about things. She tried to make me clean my family's messy, toy-filled basement. I liked her unequivocally, and she made no judgments on my shyness or my strangeness or my love of books or the fact that I was ridiculously awful at soccer. We practiced our instruments together occasionally.

Anyway, you get my point. My shyness gradually decreased until junior high, when it shot up again owing to the increased number of people in the school. Seventh and eighth grade were the lowest parts of my life. Ninth grade was a little better. People were more mature and less judgmental. After that I had band, and my sociality skyrocketed.

But I am not good at making friends. And I am still extremely shy. I often find it painful to hold conversations with people I don't know very well. As I gradually get to know someone better the pain eases and often fades entirely. I have problems calling people on the phone. I am always at a loss for conversation.

I wish I had been friendlier as a kid- I can fake it pretty good now, even when I don't feel like being friendly, but there's no replacement for genuine friendliness. It's something I wish I could go back and fix just a little bit. Not entirely- I wouldn't want my life to change completely, but I would make myself a little easier to talk to, a little easier to hold up my end of a conversation, a little easier not to feel nauseated when I have to talk to one person or a whole roomful of people. I like people and I want them to like me, but I'm not very good at showing it.

I guess this is one of those pieces of bread that has the nasty seeds and things in it, but maybe a dollop of jam will come my way soon. I'm just stuck in a little rut, that's all. Don't mind me.

An Addiction To Austen (Although Alas, The Amount Of Alliteration Is Aboundingly Absent)

I just finished watching Emma. Not the really good one that everyone loves, not the Gywneth Paltrow/Jeremy Northam version that's good because it's funny. The new Masterpiece Theatre one with Romola Garai as Emma, Michael Gambon as Mr. Woodhouse, and the incredibly talented Blake Ritson as Mr. Elton. I sort of wish he could have been Mr. Knightley because I like him so much, but Blake Ritson is too young and too attractive to be Mr. Knightly. Jonny Lee Miller did a perfect job.

As you may have surmised, I know way too much about this movie, although this is mere superfluity, and you should see me on Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, which are probably tied at this point for my favorite movie. I used to really love Pride and Prejudice as THE number one on my list, but recently that's changed, and my new favorite book is Mansfield Park. A lot of people don't appreciate Mansfield Park as much as P&P or S&S, because they say that Fanny Price is an unbearable goody-two-shoes, or that she's insipid and has no personality. THESE ARE LIES because Fanny is not unbearable, although she is a goody-two-shoes. But I say that in a good way. I identify with Fanny Price. And she is not insipid, just shy, and she has plenty of personality. In fact, Fanny is supposed to have a great personality. It's just that nobody notices it except for William and Edmund.

But seriously, I am an Austen nut. And I know that SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS become English majors because they love Jane Austen, or Shakespeare, or whoever it is they love, but I will say that while Austen may have gotten me started on the path to the English major, it was the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, and yes, even Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and Meg Murry who have kept me there.

I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was ten years old. I already had experience with difficult language, as I had been reading the KJV Bible (as published by the LDS church) and the Book of Mormon my entire life, and they use antiquated English. Because of this, I found Austen easy, even light reading compared to what I was reading with my family every night. I count this a blessing, because I was able to better understand the stories.

My tenth year was also the year that I began to dislike the race of men in general, but after reading Pride and Prejudice, I quickly found a few who remained in my imagination as the best of their sex. I had been reading about villainous Wickham, it was true, and Mr. Collins reminded me of every stupid boy in my fifth-grade class at the time, and Mr. Darcy was a little grumpy at first, but Charles Bingley seemed almost too good to be true. Mr. Bennet I liked, because he slighted his wife, and Mrs. Bennet annoyed me to no end because she was in every way the antithesis of my own mother.

I find it odd that there are no mothers in Jane Austen's world who are anything like mine. Mrs. Bennet is just... Mrs. Bennet, and Mrs. Dashwood is too emotional, like Marianne. Fanny's mother in M.F. is neurotic, and Lady Bertram, who is more of a mother to her, is also neurotic, but with the gentleness of having a nice husband and a big house and not living in Portsmouth with a drunken sailor husband. Emma's mother is dead, and so is Lady Elliott; Catherine Morland's mother is never around in Northanger Abbey but Mrs. Allen is kind of superficial and Mrs. Thorpe is very superficial. I SHOULD WRITE A PAPER ON THIS.

That paragraph was sort of a digression. My mother should feel honored that she's not being compared to any of them by me. My mother is alive, sensible, not melodramatic, and hard-working, and she only goes to the doctor when there's something REALLY wrong, not just because she has a slight cold or a sniffle. If you can't tell, I sort of love my mom a lot.

But anyway, I know a lot about these books and movies because my nine years of complete love and faith in only six books has kept me mostly sane. I mean, I knew girls who were like, OHMYGOSHINEEDABOYFRIEND in high school, even girls who went to my church and were "supposed" to be sort of "above" that kind of behavior. I kind of wonder if I would have been like that if it were not for Fitzwilliam Darcy, who existed as one of my several fictitious boyfriends during fifth and sixth grade, junior high, high school, and what I have completed of college. For those interested, here is a list:

Fitzwilliam Darcy
Edward Ferrars
Colonel Brandon
Edmund Bertram
William Price (who just really needs a woman because Jane Austen never gave him one)
George Knightley (but not John, because he's already married)
Captain Wentworth

But not Henry Tilney, because Northanger Abbey is my least favorite of Jane Austen's works. Partly because of John Thorpe, who I despise with a passion beyond any other Austen males, and partly because Catherine Morland is ridiculously stupid and partly because Henry Tilney is too smart for Catherine and he always makes jokes that she doesn't get and HOW CAN A SMART GUY LIKE HIM ACCEPT A STUPID GIRL LIKE CATHERINE. Maybe I just resent him for it. Fine, he's on the list too.

Henry Tilney
(and beginning the non-Austen boyfriends)
Edward Fairfax Rochester
Heathcliff
Gilbert Blythe
Kenneth Ford
Teddy Kent
Beverley King
John Brooke
Friedrich Bhaer
Theodore Lawrence
Calvin O'Keefe
The Wizard Howl
Thomas Schofield
James Tarleton
Domitan of Masbolle
Nawat Crow

And frankly, with the number of people on that list, I would probably have had more boyfriends than the loosest girls in my high school.

These men (although some of them wouldn't have existed in an Austen setting) are one of the reasons I probably should have been born in 1795. Another reason is that people DIDN'T DO STUPID THINGS unless they were STUPID. For example: Elizabeth Bennet spent time with  Wickham, became friends with him even, but she didn't, like make out with him and then regret it the next time she saw him, because in 1805 or whenever P&P is set, that would be one of the things that was Not Allowed. There were a lot of things that were Not Allowed in the early 1800's, such as being alone in a room with a member of the opposite gender, walking anywhere alone (unless you were male), drinking more than was appropriate, or public displays of affection. At least, these things weren't allowed among the upper middle class. But my point is, Elizabeth Bennet was smart, and she did nothing she would ever regret doing with Wickham, except perhaps believing him when he said that Darcy had victimized him. Lydia, on the other hand, was stupid, and she ran away with Wickham and got herself knocked up and had to get married, which is something that used to be looked down upon and frankly should still be looked down upon, and MTV isn't helping with that and the whole Sixteen and Pregnant thing. I've never seen that show and I never want to.

Overall, I would loved to have been born in an age when chivalry appeared in full force, minus the armor. I would read these books and think, "What happened to Darcy? Where are the men of integrity, like Edward Ferrars? What happened to men who are capable of thinking and thinking of others, like Edmund Bertram? Where are the patiently waiting men like Colonel Brandon? Where are the intelligent ones, like Mr. Knightley?

But then I remember that there are advantages to living in this day and age. Here, for your edification and amusement, is a list of fifteen things I like more about today than the world of Jane Austen

15) Naming my teddy bears Darcy Edmund Wentworth and Edward Ferrars Rochester (Darcy is purple and I have had him for eleven years. Edward is white and I have had him for fifteen years.)
14) More to read than histories, Shakespeare, and poems
13) Blogging
12) British television
11) Slightly more comfortable underwear
10) Cell phones
9) Indoor plumbing
8) Movies where I can watch men in breeches being chivalrous and imagine that they were all of them always like that all the time, instead of them probably being ordinary humans and disillusioning all my hopes and dreams
7) Paperback books
6) Washing my hair every day instead of every now and then
5) The Internet
4) Pants
3) Hugging boys, when they happen to be huggable and willing to hug
2) My religion
1) My family

These are all pretty good reasons to have been born in 1993, so I won't complain. Especially because I know that God wouldn't have put me right here exactly if he didn't have some reason for me to be right here exactly. Life is good, even if I do envy some girls their men in breeches. Like this guy. :D

Some Observations Upon The Nature Of What Is, Thus Far, Spinsterhood

I've been thinking lately, about my life.

I mean, this blog is about my life, so I don't really need to tell you that, do I? You can just assume that it's going to be about my life. Never mind. Moving on.

But I've been thinking, and it's because of the way I see what other people are doing that makes me want to share this thought. I might sound bitter. I might even possibly sound... pathetic. But bear with me, because I am neither bitter nor pathetic, even though it will sound that way when you read this.

It started probably in my childhood, when my parents may or may not have encouraged me to believe that "kissing was gross" and that I should never try it. I used to hide my eyes when I watched people kissing in movies. This happened until I was about ten or eleven. Then I would peek through my hands. Eventually I allowed myself to watch, and nowadays I'm sort of like, "Well, it looks better than the kids in my high school practically having sex in the hallways."

But I was... I guess you could say sheltered, because my parents didn't really highly encourage the idea of playdates. We had them, and we went to birthday parties, but the idea was that you had to behave really well to have playdates, and people didn't even ask us on them very often. When I say "us" I mean the Beast (although he probably went on the most as an actual child), myself (who went on the least total), and the Beauty (who's gone on more as a teenager than as a kid). Our parents didn't encourage us to have houseguests over very often, either, because our house was a mess and they had to clean it up for us to play with friends and that was a lot of work for them, so they said, "You want friends over, you do it." And every now and then, we did, of course, but more often than not we just played with each other. I feel like the Beauty and I are closer because we played together. The Beast stopped playing with us when he was about nine, and we missed the masculine presence of his Beanie Babies and the way they always had super powers and saved the day and stuff.

So while I did have friends in elementary school, mostly starting in third grade with my neighbor and possibly one of my best friends, the Tuba-Viola Girl, I was still lonely. I still preferred to read than to actually play, and I made friends at school and we talked at recess, but I didn't spend a lot of time with friends outside of school.

And up to this point, all of my friends were female. I tried having male friends in kindergarten. That ended when the creeper kid sitting next to me told me I looked pretty on Halloween and I was thoroughly traumatized for life, thus beginning a pattern of my experiences with boys. Second grade I sort of had a male friend, but he never said anything. I was the friendly one of the pair of us, and I was mostly the shyest kid in my first-grade class. Third grade, the year my family and I moved to good old Red Lion, I chased a boy around the neighborhood because he was willing to play tag with me, and then everyone started teasing me. "Sarah LIKES him. Sarah LIKES him." OH COME ON PEOPLE, I WAS EIGHT. I liked everyone. Except people who insinuated that I liked people.

After that, I didn't make male friends anymore. In fact, in fifth and sixth grade, I had a group of several friends, who we can call the Evil Genius, Bookworm I Miss, and Channeling Luna Lovegood, and the lot of us spent every day on the playground abusing boys roundly. We invented a brief sign language, as I recall, where we referred to boys by brushing imaginary dirt off our hands. Yeah. It was fun.

In seventh grade I was introduced to the phenomenon of a full orchestra. I had been playing violin since third grade, but I had only had a few full rehearsals. Now, the Tuba-Viola Girl and I were thrust into the world of junior high orchestra. And since my father was and is a prime violinist and I already had some inborn musical ability, I was made the first chair of the second violins, which is like the alto section leader of the orchestra. And if you don't get that, you should join a choir or an orchestra. But there were two boys on my right, in the first and second chairs of the first violins. And there was a boy... on my left... who was my stand partner... and we had to talk to each other every now and then.

Years of growing to believe that boys were gross, encouraged perhaps unconsciously by my parents, made me scared of this boy. I really don't know why, now that I think about that time in my life; he was six inches shorter than me and was possibly one of the nicest boys in the orchestra. The guys sitting on my right were unimportant, although the first chair was a real primo donno about some things. But I was scared of boys, going into seventh grade, partly because they had traditionally been unkind to me and partly because I had grown to distrust the lot of them, excepting my father and brothers.

But eventually I found out that I could talk to this boy like I could any other person, which is to say, like the way I talked to girls, but without mentioning anything like Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. (That would be as close as I got to talking about things that were pink or sparkly or cutesy.) And then in eighth grade, when the Evil Genius moved to Central and I gained two friends, the Concert Pianist and the Ballerina, I learned that I could in fact talk to boys, because now I was the first chair of the junior high orchestra and I had to talk to them every now and then. It was like, "Oh, okay. They're human." I mean, there were still a few jerks- I remember one gym class where I was incapable of playing volleyball and this boy yelled at me about it and the Ballerina, who was fortunately in my gym class, yelled back at him. I forgave him for it eventually, though, because he turned out to be nice.

See, eighth-grade Sarah? Boys are okay. They aren't scary.

In ninth grade, I learned that boys liked girls. Like, sometimes they would make out with girls in the hallway. Innocent little me was traumatized by this. I also had a friend who was in his senior year of high school, a friend we'll call the Songster. He helped me out with the talking-to-boys thing because he went to my church and he was super nice and he tickled me a lot, by which I mean poking me in the diaphragm until I was sure it left bruises. He also cracked every knuckle in both hands on the bus from seminary to school every morning. The Songster is probably my best guy friend in the world, and it's him I have to thank for teaching me that wow, boys aren't scary after all!

After that it was all uphill, especially because I joined the marching band next year and if you know band kids, it's that they're usually dating someone. Usually. I was the exception.

And it is this that I have made an extremely long-winded introduction about. I was the exception to most high-schoolers in fact; I considered myself dispassionately from about my junior year of high school; I wasn't bad-looking, per se, but I was not beautiful, either. All of my friends were gorgeous and thin, which made me larger by comparison, but I was not, and still am not, ugly.

Yet nobody ever asked me out. Nobody ever wanted me.

See what I meant about how I might sound bitter? I'm not, I promise you.

It was like I had heard my parents tell me, "Kissing is gross," or that I figured out that boys were gross, and it was like a shield formed around me, and this shield just grew larger and larger as I went through elementary school, junior high, and high school. By the end of my sophomore year, when I turned sixteen, the magical age of dating according to Mormons, that bubble was a mile wide. I had a circle of friends who I can collectively refer to as the Super-Talented Band Geeks, because we were, and because a lot of the most talented people in my grade were in my circle. All of them dated. I had no perpetually single friends because I was the perpetually single friend. And it's true that I didn't get my license and more often than not I did not do Wednesday-night yoga or go to Rita's or have movie parties with my friends. I spent time with them at school and at music practices and that was it. My bubble kept boys away.

I am not bitter about this bubble and the way it affected my life in high school. I am wondering if maybe I am bitter about the fact that the bubble is still there.

I will tell you the truth, because I'm not ashamed of it. I have been on four dates in my entire life; at least, four dates that I counted as dates because the boy asked me and it was definitely a date activity. Two of them were with my best friend the Songster; once we went to Hershey Park for my sixteenth birthday and once we went swing dancing in York. The other two occurred at BYU. I have never had a boyfriend. I have never been kissed. I have had my heart broken a lot.

I wasn't terribly social in my freshman ward at BYU, but I was one of the ward music chairs and I was forced to be in the spotlight at least part of the time, so one would think, as it is, after all, BYU, that I would get my fair share of dates. Not necessarily true. I hid in my room a lot because I was lame. I spent a lot of time on the internet. I watched all the really pretty girls in my ward go on lots of dates and I went on two.

I had this bubble, here in Red Lion, then at BYU, and now in Red Lion again. I think maybe I have to learn something about myself before the Lord will let this bubble pop. In fact, I don't think it's a bubble that pushes people away. Now I think it's a sheet of bubble wrap, the kind you wrap something delicate or breakable in to keep it from shattering. I think that God might have wrapped me in some bubble wrap until someone who knows to handle me with care comes along, someone who can be gentle with me. And that is my testament to the Lord's love for me. I think he loves me a lot and he knows that I'm special. He knows that I have to wait for someone who will treat me right, so he wrapped me up to keep me safe until that person comes along.

This started as a post about how oddly I think of boys. This ended as a post about how glad I am that boys think oddly of me. And I am really grateful that they do.

The Various Obsessions Of Which My Life Is Composed

My sister and I just watched Mean Girls on my laptop. I have no idea how we managed to do it, as I usually have the most extraordinary bad luck with finding movies on the Internet to watch. It was my second time seeing that movie; the people who showed it to me first were my future roommates and excellent friends M and M- they're both M's, oddly enough- I'll have to come up with witty nicknames for them later, so that we don't have the same problem that I would have with my three J's, who are the Beast, the Beauty, and the Prodigy, respectively.

But anyway, we were watching Mean Girls. It was the Beauty's first time seeing the movie, and I wanted to show her the movie because pretty much everyone has seen that movie, except me until a few months ago, and there are a lot of quotes/inside jokes in that movie that the Beauty didn't get and I wanted her to get because they're just really funny. I mean, I know it was probably not the best movie choice for Sunday, but it was funny and definitely worth it, because the Beauty now likes the movie and I was reminded that I like it too. It was fun, because the Beauty and I don't do things together often enough, partially because I have a job and partially because she sleeps a lot. I mean, we are usually in the same room at any given moment, as we share a bedroom, but usually each of us is doing her own thing, Writing. Singing. Blogging. Reading. That sort of thing. The kind of thing one would prefer to do alone.

Watching Mean Girls was fun, but once I was done, I was reminded that there are movies and books and T.V. shows and things that I just like SO MUCH BETTER than Mean Girls. My family is familiar with most of these things, as are M and M; it's a good thing, because I'm going to live with them next year and there will be much obsessing and nerding about going on and they will understand my inside jokes and so will my family, most of the time.

So here is a list- not in Top Ten format, I'm afraid, but that's because I don't have just ten. I have a lot. And counting them up and putting them in reverse order is too much work. They have no particular order; I typed them as I thought of them. (Yes, I am very lazy today. It's a Sunday.)

Books (because they were my first love and they shall be my faithful companions forever):
All works by Jane Austen
All works by Charlotte Bronte
All works by Lucy Maud Montgomery
All works by Louisa May Alcott
The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
All works by John Green
All works by Tamora Pierce
Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Host by Stephanie Meyer (but not Twilight, please note)
A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voigt
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
Howl's Moving Castle, Castle in the Air, and House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones
Enchantment by Orson Scott Card
Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card
Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott Card
The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and sequels by Douglas Adams
Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
The Eragon series by Christopher Paolini
The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
Once Upon a Marigold and Twice Upon a Marigold by Jean Ferris

Movies
Pride and Prejudice, either 2005 Focus Features or classic Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle
Jane Eyre, either 4-hour Timothy Dalton or 2011 Focus Features
Sense and Sensibility, Masterpiece Theatre/BBC 2008 version
Mansfield Park, version with Billie Piper as Fanny
Persuasion, classic version with Ciaran Hinds
Penelope
The Princess Bride
Harry Potter movies
LOTR movies
Hunger Games
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Howl's Moving Castle
A Wrinkle in Time
The Seeker
Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea (but not that awful third movie, because they completely screwed it up and it sucks)
Little Women (starring Winona Ryder as Jo)
Hook
Finding Neverland
Peter Pan (starring Jeremy Sumpter as Peter, which was a very good call on the part of the casting directors, because he's perfect)
Sherlock Holmes and SH Game of Shadows
Star Trek (the newer, I really did like that movie)
Where Eagles Dare
Avatar (yes, with the blue people)
Tron: Legacy
The Avengers
Captain America: The First Avenger
Tangled
Hoodwinked
Ratatouille
Flushed Away
Despicable Me

T.V. Shows
Doctor Who
Sherlock
Avatar: Last Airbender (haven't seen Korra, don't ask)
The Big Bang Theory (but only sometimes, and only for the snarky comebacks and the erratic behavior of Sheldon Cooper)
House (but only the first two and a half seasons or so)
Criminal Minds (select episodes)
NCIS (select episodes)

That's what I like; although it must be noted that I've read many more books and seen many more movies, but I have seen very few other T.V. shows and I therefore have little basis of judgment on T.V. shows. Suffice it to say that in general, British television is better than American television, and I like those first two on my TV list completely and without reservation.

I like all of these things a touch better than I do other things, and although I don't obsess about them all the time (just a few of them), I do like to think about them every now and then. For example, how would Sense and Sensibility translate to real life? Would there be a problem with Mr. Dashwood's life insurance, or did he just leave all of his money to John? If Elinor is still artsy and Marianne is still musical, are they classical artists and musicians, or is Elinor a bohemian outcast who wants to move to her own studio apartment in New York and is Marianne a punk-rock singer with her own band? What is the little sister, Margaret, like? Is she the pestilential thirteen-year-old or is she a little more mature than that? Is Willoughby the town stud/heartbreaker? Why is he such a creeper to begin with? Is there a modern way to have thirty-five-year-old Colonel Brandon crushing on sixteen-year-old Marianne and have it NOT be creepy? What would make modern Edward Ferrars a nice person; that is to say, why wouldn't he just cheat on Lucy with Elinor? Neither of them would ever know. If I move that novel, one of my favorites, to the modern days, there are just so many questions that need to be answered, so many ideas that pop into mind. And it's not just S&S; everything is subject to my whims. I have this idea for a story where it's the Little Mermaid meets high school, but instead of being a mermaid, she's homeschooled all of her life and she wants to try to go to public school. Or something. I'll figure it out as I write it.

I guess these sorts of questions are the reason I chose to be an English major- they EXPECT you to ask these kinds of questions and then write ten-page papers on your findings. It's a lot of fun. I can read something, and then I can chatter about it extensively on a Word document, double-space, MLA and bingo, I get to turn it in. It's a free pass for obsession. And since I would have done that anyway, I now have an ironclad excuse for it. A spoonful of jam if ever I tasted one.

A Portrait of the Author's Family As They Are Currently

I am a nineteen-year-old-female, from the general Central East Coast area. I was born in a town called Silver Spring, Maryland and my family lived in Maryland until I was about five, upon which we moved to Bucks County, PA for three years, and then when I was about eight we moved to the town of Red Lion, where we have lived for nearly eleven years.

My parents are musicians, which explains why I know the jam and bread line from The Sound of Music. My mother is a pianist, and she accompanied musicals in high school and she played for vocalists during their lessons. So she knows musicals. My father is a violinist, and he has played in the pit for quite a few musicals, including Les Miserables when MY high school did it. So he also knows musicals. My dad is also a mathematician, and he does that for a living. He solves codes for the government and it's super top-secret and if he told us what he did he would have to kill us!!!!!!! Just kidding. But his work is classified, and therefore it has an aura of mysterious coolness about it, even though it's mostly calculus and boring stuff like that. He works for the Department of Defense/National Security Agency. It's pretty legit.

Anyway, my parents met, and their story, which is completely adorabibble, will probably be the subject of another post, because I like telling that story. But they met and eventually got married and have had five lovely, angelic, beautiful, well-behaved, mature, perfect children.

In case you couldn't tell that was sarcasm... we are not really any of those things. Except maybe one or two of them. And only sometimes.

My brother, the Beast is the oldest. That is obviously not his name, although it would be really cool if it were. He's a year and five months older than me and he's a very chill dude. I was going to give you his initial, which is J, but I have a sister named J and another brother named J so it would be very confusing to have all of those J's in the post at the same time, so my siblings get awesome code names, sort of (but not really) in accordance with their personalities. But I digress.

Upon first seeing the Beast, people tend to be intimidated, but they quickly learn that underneath the scary, poker-faced, metal-band-bodyguard look is a very nice, if somewhat blunt, comedian. The Beast is one of the funniest people I know; he can rattle off whole scenes of the Shrek movies or Pirates of the Caribbean or The Dark Knight without a single qualm. He has a knack for voices and for funny noises; despite the fact that he insists that he does not sing, his is a vocal gift, though not int the traditional sense of the word. Mom is always like, "Go send your resume to Dreamworks or Warner Brothers or Pixar or something! Seriously, they could use you!" And I totally agree. He's gonna be all embarrassed at me, especially if he reads this, which he probably won't.

He hates the attention- he got his Eagle Scout some few-odd years ago and he was like, "Why do we even need a Court of Honor? I don't want all this attention."  Despite these probably embarrassing things I am telling you about him, he still won't admit to any of them, because he hates to perform.

He is also as tough as he looks, which is very tough. I mean, the guy slices his leg open at work with a hedge trimmer, goes to the ER and gets fifteen stitches, and isn't terribly bothered by it at all. Sits there like a brick, while they work on him, according to my mother. The Beast is a lot like the character for whom I code-named him- large, louder than life, intelligent, and just a little bit hairy.



Yeah. That's him. P.S.- This was his favorite movie when he was three, so I feel that it is especially appropriate. And now I had better order my tombstone and plot because he will kill me when he finds out I have stated this on the Internets.

Next comes me, and since this is my blog, I feel no need to describe myself in any great detail- my name is Sarah, and I like to read a lot and write a lot and listen to music and watch British television and eat food and blog. I could well fit into the general descriptions of "short" and "plump" and I wear contacts or glasses. That's me.

The next person in my family is the Beauty, my only sister. I kind of like her a lot, except when I want to go to bed and she wants to stay up late. Then I don't like her at all. But I forgive her for this because the Beauty is such a wonderful person. I tell her just about everything. We get on the Internet and giggle at funny things. She has the most adorabibble laugh.

I named her the Beauty, also stolen from Beauty and the Beast, because she really is beautiful. It's like, unfair how pretty she is. I was born a relatively cute child, but she was born with HUGE DARK EYES that just brimmed over with laughter all the time. She grew up and she stole all of the looks. I remain colorless, and she is vibrant, splashing with color and fire and passion- for that is the Beauty's take on everything. She is a love-or-hate person, with very few things reaching a middle ground. She has super-long hair, so long she can sit on it a little, and it's her pride and joy to have long hair. She's seventeen (I was going to write fifteen, but then I realized, mercy me, that I am old) and she is a hot babe.

This is an example: We go to a day-by-day EFY session in Logan, Utah, when she is fourteen and I am sixteen. I am in a group with "older" youth and she is in a group with "younger" youth. I find her at the dance and we chill. A guy in my company asks her to dance and asks how old she is. She says fourteen and he says, "Wow, I thought you were eighteen." This makes my sixteen-year-old self proud and jealous, which is often an accurate description of the way I feel about the Beauty.

She is also smart and a really, really good singer. Like me, she writes, but unlike me, she is better at being consistent with her writing, with getting the awful first draft out of the way, before she starts to edit. I lose interest in an idea mid-paragraph and don't pick it up again for two years, and as a result I have like several hundred different half-baked ideas lying around in my room or on my computer or in my Martin's potato chip box, which is where I keep old story ideas on paper. She has two or three thoroughly developed ideas within thoroughly developed worlds. I'm not sure which is better. I love her to bits and she thinks I'm annoying, because she got used to having her own room for eight months and now I'm back to spoil it. But I think she loves me, too. Sort of.



Even though Belle has brown eyes, not green, she still bears the most resemblance to the Beauty (my sister, the Beauty, not Belle, the beauty- oh, never mind, you know what I'm talking about)

The next child in our family is the Angel. The Angel is a boy of twelve. I call him the Angel because he is completely innocent and sweet and harmless and Christlike. Unusual qualities for a twelve-year-old boy, you might say; but then, the Angel is already unusual because he is moderately autistic.

The Angel was born on New Year's Day of 2000, which made him the Y2K baby or whatever. He was a normal enough baby until he was about two, during which time my mom was freaking out a little because he didn't say much. He did however have a fondness for music, especially the MOTAB Christmas CD we would listen to during the holidays. He loved that CD and he was so excited to listen to it every year- still is, in fact.

He was diagnosed with autism at the age of three and he started therapy. During his third and fourth years of life, he watched the movie/musical "The Music Man" twice a day and as such I know a great deal of this movie/musical by heart. He could recite the entire movie, and he would often choose inopportune moments to do so, such as the middle of Sacrament Meeting. At full volume. He grew out of the Music Man phase and moved to various other phases, such as Barney and Elmo's World (not the rest of Sesame Street, mind. Just Elmo's World) and Thomas the Tank Engine (that one is ongoing) and Little Einsteins and so on.

He has had a phase where he was obsessed with the shape of a sign on a stick, or a lollipop, because it was something being held up by a stick. He used to steal my parents' credit cards and walk around with those and pencils like they were signs. That moved to an obsession with road signs. Then my dad played a game with him, where he would say what was on the road sign backwards. "Pots," "Deeps Timil," and "Etatsretni" are all part of my vocabulary now.

But he loves movies and shows, and he especially loves the credits- he will watch the whole movie, beginning to end, and get really annoyed at you if you skip the credits, because he likes to write them down. Yes. you heard correctly.

But most of all he is gifted in music. This stemmed from the MOTAB Christmas CD, which I already mentioned. He loved it, and eventually when my mother started to teach him how to play the piano, he began to show an interest in music- and then we realized that he had perfect pitch and he could tell you the key of a song by listening to it. I mean, I have pretty good relative pitch. If you play the note, it's likely I'll know what it is. But he can do it out of the blue. We put in the MOTAB CD this past December and there was this one song where they kept changing keys and it was like a field day for him. He loved it.

That's the other reason I call him the Angel. Someday, in the great beyond, he'll be among the heavenly choirs. Who knows- he might even sing a solo. He sang one in Stake Conference. I was devoutly proud of him, even though I was in Utah at the time. I am always proud of the Angel.



He would probably be that awkwardly blond one in the back- it's the closest to his hair color.

And finally, there is the Prodigy. He is nine years old and he is as smart as a whip. His reading level is college equivalent, according to the tests. He's in seminar, a special program where they talk about stuff with all the other smart kids. He learned to read at the same time as the Angel, although admittedly he was three and the Angel was six. That was also around the same time they were both potty-trained. The Prodigy is a fun brother to have, because while he is not as tall or as grown up or as naturally musically inclined as the Angel, he is not autistic, and he is smart enough that he's mostly not annoying. Mostly. Sometimes he is, but that's life, and I'm willing to be patient, as I don't see him eight months of twelve. He's a great kid.

He has a fondness for me which I do understand; being nine years old and a slender nine years old at that, he is often used as the throw pillow of the Beast and the verbal grindstone of both the Beast and the Beauty, and even very occasionally the Angel, who is innocent and childlike but has picked up the ability to tease the Prodigy. It's not hard to do- the Prodigy is a sensitive little bloke- but he often feels like everyone picks on him and nobody is nice to him but Sarah. Most of the time this is, sadly, true. I'm guilty of being mean to him, too, but I have tried to apologize for it, because me being mean to him feels wrong- like I'm betraying a sacred trust.

The Prodigy has a penchant for stating the obvious, but then, what nine-year-old doesn't? He loves video games, as do the Beast and the Angel and frankly also the Beauty and myself. He loves to read- he's working his way through the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons. He loves Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which are excellent books, and he hates being bored with a passion, like me. In that respect we are very similar despite our ten-year difference.



I promise you, the Prodigy is not as frightening as this baby. This baby is cute, but it is frightening. The Prodigy is just cute.

That is my family. Dad, Mom, the Beast, me, the Beauty, the Angel, the Prodigy. I love them all to bits, and they love me back because I'm lovable and perfect and everything- but mostly because people love their families. And before anyone protests that statement, I define family as the people who love you and whom you love, regardless of blood relation. I'm just lucky that my family happens to be my biological family as well as my spiritual family.

Obligatory First Post

So hi. Welcome to my blog, and stuff.

I have tried keeping a blog before, and it simply did not work because 1) I would always forget about it, and 2) I had other things to do anyway, like school and work and writing other things. However, I think I can make it work this time, and there are a few reasons for this. I like the Top Ten format, so we're going to go with that:

10) It's easier for me to blog when I have free time, as it is with everyone. I have a lot of free time this summer, being only employed during the day and having a complete lack of social life. Therefore I have a lot of free time in which to blog.

9) I really honestly do like to write. That's what I do in my free time anyway. I write stories and occasionally poetry. Poetry comes more often when I'm super traumatized by something or in love with someone and stuff. But I digress: I will work on this one the way I would a story.

8) I plan to add this one to Facebook and update the blog posts to Facebook, so I will feel OBLIGATED to post regularly- it's like writing a status, but longer.

7) I feel a lot more free to nerd about here because I know less people will read this than they will my Facebook posts anyway.

6) I waste too much time on Pinterest and Tumblr and it really needs to stop... I had a life once... this, believe it or not, should help. I have to actually DO things to blog about them, right? Well, actually, don't answer that question.

5) Other people do it, so why can't I?

4) I like the idea of a blog one day becoming my resume, so look out world, here's my resume.

3) I like the idea of blogging in general.

2) Right now it is eleven thirty at night, and I have nothing to do for the next half hour, even though I should be getting in the shower, so why not make a blog? That takes about half an hour, right?

And finally, 1) I like to let people know what's going on with me, but since I have no life and can't tell them in person, blogging is the way to go. :D

Those are my reasons. Are they not magnificent?

Also, I should probably explain about the title. "With Jam and Bread." It is the lyric of the well-known song "Do-Re-Mi" from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. I have no particular fondness for this musical; in fact, I can think of several that I like better, soon to be the object of another blog post, but I was thinking and thinking and thinking of something witty, yet philosophical, for the blog title.

I wanted to use a book title like my friend L, who named her blog "Pride and Narratives" (HOW WITTY IS THAT, RIGHT?) but I thought, no, that would be cheating! So naturally, I stole a song. But I wanted a bit of a song that meant something, and I was thinking, something deep, something philosophical, and my brain goes, "Tea, I drink with jam and bread!" and I go,  "Bingo! It addresses several things I like at once!" 

Firstly there is food, which is always a very, very, very, very good thing to address. 

Secondly there is a lyric from a musical, and one by Rodgers and Hammerstein at that, and they wrote the best musicals as we all know. 

Thirdly, it does in fact form a philosophy- I don't drink tea, and it has nothing to do with tea, but with life- which on the whole is a wholesome, healthy, good thing, like bread, but every now and then we get a little treat with our bread, like jam. 

Or we get the kind of bread that has twelve different kinds of grains that they didn't bother putting through the wheat mill, no, they'll just stick it right into the bread, because EVERYONE just wants to bite down into a lovely ham-and-cheese sandwich and go, "OH MY GOODNESS ME I THINK I JUST BROKE A TOOTH ON A BONE OR A ROCK OR SOMETHING," but it turns out to be a grain of wheat. Bread like that bothers me greatly, because while it may be healthy and good for you and will help you fight cancer and live longer and become as close to immortal as humans can get, it is also disgusting and makes no sense to my palate, which is very sensitive upon the issue of texture. 

That was a digression and a rant. I do that periodically. But I have had this argument with my mother too often. For some reason, she LIKES this bread with little chunky hard things in it. Chunky is a word that should only apply to ice cream, peanut butter, and beef stew. Not bread.

But I guess that bread is like the bad things in life. It may have disgusting seeds in it, but you can still eat it. It won't kill you. Unless the seeds go down your windpipe and you choke to death, but that's a very remote possibility.

No, overall, bread is good. There's white bread, which is so cheap and disgusting that you know it's more or less recycled carbohydrate waste. There's Italian bread, which is good for sandwiches and toast and just about everything. Wheat bread, but without the seeds, is healthy and delicious. French bread, which is for special occasions. Rolls, which as their name imply, may have you rolling through life if you eat too many. And every now and then, you need a spoonful of jam for your bread.