Highs and Lows

HIGHS

1 – Pioneer Day weekend, usually something of a fake-holiday, wound up being pretty good. I spent the whole weekend by myself – which would ordinarily depress me but, after the bustle of the past month, felt quite refreshing. I even found the time to clean my kitchen. I washed all the dishes, scrubbed the sinks, scoured the microwave and stovetop, and even mopped the floor. Martha Stewart would probably cross herself before entering, but the place looks MUCH nicer.

2 – I was naughty – I went to Barnes and Noble and bought some new books yesterday. I SHOULD be saving up for some new clothes, but I feel I’ve been neglecting my intellectual side recently (well, I DID just power through some Dickens, but beside that…)

I picked up The Bell Jar, which means I now have two books by Sylvia Plath that I haven’t read. Also, I grabbed The Sun Also Rises (I’ve never actually read any Hemingway novels and am excited to remedy that) and Lolita (beautifully written, but the plot’s a bit… squick). Finally, Barnes and Noble has some really cheap collections of classic literature, which I usually ignore because I have most of them (and they’re boring), but I saw they have a large collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with endnotes. Okay, there are, like, twelve endnotes, but the first one points out how bestial courtship tales like “The Frog Prince” and “Beauty and the Beast” are ACTUALLY parables about how sex is evil until you’re married, so I just had to pick it up.

Pretty nerdy, huh? Yeah, it’s totally great.

3 – July’s the biggest money-pit month of the year – worse for me than even Christmastime. I’ve made it through with minimal impoverishment. I won’t exactly be fat and sassy next month, but I’ve developed a liking for peanut butter sandwiches, and I get paid on Friday.

4 – My recent creative blocks seem to have cleared up. I didn’t get NEARLY the writing I’d planned done over the weekend, but, since I planned pretty much twenty-four straight hours of writing interrupted only by sandwich breaks, I’ll settle for what I’ve got, which is about ten pages of novel (a lot of it snatched from earlier drafts, but revised and polished) and a spanking new sketch. It’s got zombies in it.

LOWS

1 – The new ward situation has me a bit down. My initial enthusiasm’s worn off a bit. We’re a couple months in now, and I’m still finding it difficult to socialize with these people. They’re not BAD people at all, mind. I’ve always had a bit of trouble making new friends, so my current solitude isn’t all that surprising.

2 – I still haven’t sold my old car yet. I had planned on selling it to my little brother, who just wanted a clunker he could use for a couple of months down in Provo. I took the car in to get it fixed up for him, only to find a $450 repair estimate lying in wait for me. Wound up being a bit much for me, so that fell through. I’ll need to just take a couple snapshots and post the thing on Craigslist or something just to get it out of the parking lot.

3 – I bought a new pair of jeans recently – pretty nice looking, too. I wore them to the improv show one night. The show was fantastic – as our shows tend to be nowadays – but I wound up tearing a hole in the knees.

Moral of the story: Improv doesn’t like new pants.

4 – The wonderfulness of a three-day weekend has been dampened somewhat by my return to work, where I found 35 voice messages waiting for me. Bleagh.