Free Writing

I was just going through one of my old email accounts and stumbled upon a draft of an email from 2004. I'd forgotten that sometimes I would write emails to myself when I was needing to vent and didn't want the material to make it into my actual journal (you know, don't want my great-grandkids knowing my deepest darkest secrets), so a lot of this stuff is pretty melodramatic. Emphasis on dramatic, I mean, gee whiz 19-year-old Tiffany!

But... I did find one fun little gem.

See, also around this period in life, I was practicing "Free Writing" pretty regularly. It was something I'd heard about in a film class, I tried it, and I LOVED it. Basically, you sit down and without thinking, just start writing as fast as you possibly can, ideally faster than you can even think. It's supposed to free up your subconscious, and there were a few times that it actually helped me solve some problems by knowing how I really felt about things.

Other times though? It would result in absolute jibberish.

Back story: This came from a time when I was in a very confusing boy situation. (I do not miss those.) So here is my free writing from 3:30 a.m. on December 12th, 2004. (pardon the mis-types, I was trying to type as fast as I could.)

I am so mad at myself. I wish that I could just get away 

and visit somewhjere like Japan. I think it'd be cool 

cuz that where I am the best dancer In japans they walk 

around like this, and it l;ooks really funny. Als, who 

knows about drunk people these days. Do you think they're 

always drunk. Like maybe they're just h=aving some 

fireworks because of the shooting star. I domn't know 

if this willl even work on a computer, but maybe it will. 

I can type pretty fast, even thought I'm pretty much 

falling asleep, this girl will help us out. Wait== 

she doesn't exist. Odd... but probly she just didn't 

like Yoshi.

....????

Do I really think Japanese people walk funny?? Why would I type "they walk around like this" and not explain it better, what do I mean?!

What's stranger, is that did my subconsious already know that I would audition to dance at Tokyo Disney three years later? Cuz I'm pretty sure that thought had not crossed my mind until at least a couple years later...

And I didn't really see a girl, did I? What is that?? I'm pretty sure that I would remember something like that.


But seriously. Free Writing. You should try it.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2092165_tap-subconscious-through-free-writing.html

p.s. Here's a funny image of a free write I found... poor poetry-hating high schooler...

Things That Scare Me: A List

------------------------------------------------


Drowning.

Icy Stairs.

Failure.

Needles.

And...


These things.

Not kidding, I am losing years of my life people! My heart literally starts to race every time I start to pull on that cursed "Peel here!" tab. And no matter what I do-- I've tried going slow, going fast, pulling it part way and then banging it on the counter to open it the rest of the way -- it ALWAYS pops open when I least expect it, and holy flaky biscuits, it is the WORST!

I have the prettiest spreadsheets around.



See? I told you so.

Who said spreadsheets had to be all black and white and boring??

Ok, just felt like I needed to share that to the world*. (*The seven of you who read this.)

Back to work.

16 Million Records Take a Long Time to Copy.

I'm a little bit stuck at the moment. I'm working on this fairly large project (UK Incoming Passengers Lists from 1878-1960, in case you were curious) and because it is so huge, this query to transfer everything to the right database is taking its sweet time. I've worked on every other non-SQL-related thing that I could, but now...

Stuck.

Normally I would bask in the glory of being forced to take a break, but here's the thing-- I have two rather complex projects due tomorrow. And I need every second I can get! Isn't that awful? That I care that much?

And then I got to thinking... and this not an unfamiliar feeling. This is a somewhat unhealthy trait that I've had for as long as I can remember.

*I want to be perfect, and I do NOT want to get in trouble.* (This being unhealthy, seeing how sometimes I completely stress myself out about it.)

I vividly remember the first time I got in trouble in school. Place: Herbert Mills Elementary School, Reynoldsburg, Ohio. Year: 1991 (First grade). Activity: Drawing a picture of what we had done the previous day.

My fellow classmates and I were quietly concentrating on the task at hand. I was focused on my beautiful drawing of my brothers playing with me in the rain, complete with umbrella and rain boots. I finished myself and my brothers, our house, the trees, the grass... all that was left was the rain. I picked up a light blue colored pencil and started dotting the paper with little dashes to make the rain.

It made a light "tap! tap! tap! tap!" sound on the desk.

It was only a few moments later that I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Miss Johnston, my nice, young, sweet, pretty teacher. "Tiffany," she said in a gentle whisper, "can you try not to be so loud sweetie?"

I. Was. Mortified.

I don't remember if I actually sobbed or if I was just painfully on the verge of tears. I just remember it was the worst feeling in the world.

It's kind of funny, because I feel like I'm pretty laid back about so many other things in life. For example, I don't get bugged that Sean never ever changes the toilet paper.  Not kidding, he will without fail get a new roll out and place it on top of the empty cardboard tube, instead of throwing the empty one away and switching it out. No no, instead of being bugged, I am secretly keeping a tally of how many times in a row he has done this. And when he gets to 100, I plan on giving him some sort of prize.

So why is it that there are certain situations that I just completely and utterly over-stress? 

You know what I think it is... besides my difficulty in accepting that I am not instantly perfect at everything (which I'm getting better at it, thanks in large part to my decision to learn to play tennis)---- I have this fear of authority. Getting scolded by a boss/professor/dance teacher... terrifying! (But then again, I'm pretty sure anyone would be terrified of Colleen when she's upset, especially when you know your battements [*baht-ma's] weren't as high as they should have been...)

A fear of authority. It made me a wonderful little kid, but as an adult... I think it's time I loosened up a bit.

So I'm going to do everything I possibly can-- I can still at least try to be perfect, right?--but come end of day tomorrow, what's done is done. And what isn't, will count as delayed, and-- oh well.

As Modest Mouse so aptly reminded me by just popping onto my Pandora-- We will all float on alright.


p.s. I couldn't find a good picture on google, hence my re-creation of the mentioned work of art. I'm pretty sure I drew houses like that when I was seven.

Mandatory 2010 Recap

Sean was kind of laughing at me last night because as we were driving to our friends' house, I was asking him what his favorite parts of 2010 were. "I'm pretty sure you asked me this exact same thing last New Year's Eve..." he said.

And I thought about it... and ya, I'm pretty sure that I did. And I'm pretty sure that I will every year. Because hello, doesn't everyone do that?? The year comes to a close and you recap, that's just what you do! "You don't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been".

I feel like that's a saying, but maybe I just made that up.

Anyway, for the anals of history, and because I have a faulty memory sometimes, I thought it would be good to record some of the momentous occasions of 2010 right here on this blog. So here we go...

***Warning: The following is very long. Don't say that I didn't warn you.***

THE YEAR 2010

January-

• Living in our cozy apartment in south Provo. We've only been married a little over 2 months.
  
• Sean starts his busiest semester to date.
• I get promoted to a Content Reviewer at work (I'm still at Ancestry.com).
• Sean is still at Home Depot. He still doesn't like it much, but they pay him pretty well and work with his school schedule, and since it's only part-time, it doesn't drive him crazy.
  
• Alysse moves to Florida. Again. Sad for me, but happy for her as she gets to dance in the Lion King show! She takes Chasten along, of course.
  

February-

• We go snowboarding for the first and last time of the season. Nightboarding at Brighton. For like 3 hours. I know, pathetic.
• First Valentine's Day of the marriage! We go on a small shopping spree at the Gateway and eat at Biaggi's for the first time. The butternut squash pasta is amazing.

March-

• Um, I'm sure stuff happened... but nothing comes to mind. Oh! I started this blog last March. Kind of sad that I only have 12 entries for having started it so long ago, but could be worse I suppose.
  

April-

• We decide to make the move to Orem and start our apartment hunt. After a few weeks, we are inspired to turn down a street and we find the For Rent sign we were looking for. We talk to the renters, are able to sell our old contract, pay the deposit, and we are in!
• Sean finishes his crazy semester with a 4.0!
  

May-

• We make the move to our much more spacious basement apartment in Orem. We love it. The Rogers, the couple living upstairs, are so nice. The ward is so nice. The neighborhood is so nice. Having two bedrooms and a laundry room is so nice. Only thing is, our last place was furnished... so now the furniture collecting phase begins.
• I turn 25. Twenty-fiiiive. That's like, not early twenties anymore. As I can rent a car now at regular rates, I am officially grown-up. We celebrate by making banana boats up the canyon with friends and play some games at our new place.
  
• Another one of my best friends decides to move thousands of miles away, and suddenly Sydney is living in Nashville.
• I get promoted again at work! This time to a Project Lead. I am very excited-- I really enjoy this new position.

June-

• Summer is upon us. I try to play tennis with Dana and/or Sean whenever possible. Sometimes I feel like I am really improving. Other times, not so much. But it's always fun.
• Sean has been playing on an indoor soccer team with Adam, my brother. I can't remember when this started, but I know it was going on around this time...

July-

• Boating with Brooke, Preston & Sierra. I can wakeboard!! (This was so momentous, I actually mentioned it in an earlier post.)
  
• Family vacation to Anaheim! Beach, H&M, Earl of Sandwich, Griffiths Observatory, Six Flags, and pool parties. The kind of pool parties where I am actually swimming in the pool! This also was so momentous that there is a post about this.
• Fourth of July, aka Fun with Glow Sticks, and Thomas Family Reunion. I guess I was on a roll in July, cuz these are already in the blog too.

August-

• Yet another one of my best friends, Dana, decides to move cross country when her husband gets a job offer to teach sound engineering in Maine. MAINE. Doesn't that just sound about as far away as a person could go? Alysse, in Florida, is a close second, but still-- doesn't Maine just sound so remote and inaccessible? How many people do you know that have ever even been there? This officially makes 2010 the year that my best friends have all moved away.
• Sean sells his jeep. :( It is really sad, but with us living so close to school, we decide it would be a good chance to save some money. I would have rather sold my sentra, but it has low miles and a lot better gas mileage. I really hate that it's gone, mostly because of sentimental reasons (it reminds me of when we were dating...) but the money it's freed up has been great. I just have to pretend that we still have it... it's just parked at someone else's house.
  

September-

• I get called to be a primary teacher! (Yet another occasion marked by a blog post.) I help out with the sunbeams for about a month before I get moved into the 8 - 9 year old class. They are such good kids, I'm gonna miss teaching them. This next year though? I am back in sunbeams. I am excited but a little anxious!
  

October-

• We did it! Happy one year anniversary to us on October 15th! We celebrate by staying up in Park City, because we love it there. It's such a beautiful fall weekend, and we eat far too much good food.
• Another huge first-time-in-my-life event: the dentist finds a cavity. I have never had a cavity before. Luckily, it is so little that I don't even get a shot when I get it filled. I like to think that that doesn't count as having a cavity.
• Halloween activities! Pirate murder mystery party, UP decorating at work, carving my best-ever pumpkin... see my Halloween blog post for details.

November-

• The month of sickness. I get a cold. Sean gets a cold. Sean's cold turns into bronchitis. My cold goes away, but I get a weird pain in my side. Go to instacare. They run tests. Good chance it could be appendicitis. Go to hospital, get CT scan. Not appendicitis, a cyst. I should be ok. This is good news, except that I was kind of hoping that an appendectomy would get me out of my Mexico border crossings project at work.
  
• Thanksgiving. Went to my grandparents' house in Nephi, then Sean's parents house. Then to see Tangled with Sean's family. Loved it!
• Sean has been researching TVs for months, and with Christmas coming Best Buy has a really good deal on the TV Sean really wants. So, we strike a deal... and we get a 50" HDTV. It's, like, really nice. The best feature is that the TV connects to the internet, so we can watch Netflix. We have seen a lot of random documentaries thanks to this feature.
  

December-

• It is the busiest December I think I can ever remember. For Sean's parents we decide to try and scan all of their old slides and pictures, and this eats up a LOT of time. Meanwhile, there are a million Christmas parties-- my company party at the Zermatt, just my team's party, party with my mom's side of the family, party with my dad's side of the family, party with Sean's family, parties with different groups of friends... don't get me wrong, it was fun all of this partying, but it was busy!!
• Christmas -- Christmas morning at my parents, Christmas afternoon at our apartment for our Christmas, then Christmas night with Sean's parents.
• New Year's Eve-- We went over to Aaron & Megan's and ate pizza/played games/watched the countdown/did fireworks, very fun and not freezing cold like first night would have been!

Okay, I just saw that the battery is almost dead and I think I would cry if I lost this post, so I'm going to call that good on the recap. 2010 was a good year, but here's to making 2011 even better!

Sleepy Slurrings

I've always thought sleeping is fun. It is one of my favorite things in the world and I look forward to it every night and nap time I get. But it wasn't until I married Sean that I realized just how funny it can be. Here are some gems from the past few months.

Example #1:

It's a Saturday morning, and surprisingly I am awake before Sean. I'm not ready to get up though, so I'm laying there thinking about what I'm going to do that day when I hear Sean giggling to himself.

Me (not sure if he's awake or not): "...Sean? What's so funny?!"

(pause...)

Sean: "Oh...I just thought of the funniest joke in my dream!..."

(pause...)

Me: "Ok... what was it?"

(pause...)

Sean: "I was just thinking how funny it would be if we gave one of our kids the middle name of "And"!!! Hahahaha...."

(His eyes are still closed--I am now sure he's not totally awake.)

Me: "Huh?... so like 'Sean AND Greene'?"

Sean: "Ya!" (He laughs again, then slowly, his smile turns into a confused look as he reaches full consciousness and opens his eyes)-- "Oh.... ya, that's not funny..."


Example #2:

I've already been up for a while, but I need to wake Sean up to drive me to work. I've barely nudged him when his arms wildly flail at me and he sort of sits up and yells "BLUE!!!", followed by "Free light!! That counts!!!"

"Whaaa?!" I say, completely freaked out by this sudden outburst and how close he was to smacking my face.

"No, no, not 'counts', like numbers", he explains (his eyes are still closed), "COUNTS, like vampires, like Dracula."

"OOOH..." I say, "right, of course."

"Ya... we were playing a game with lights. And whoever turned the most on won..." He trails off... opens his eyes...

"Oh, wow. I must have been dreaming."

Um, yes. I gathered that.

----

That's it for now, but I'm sure there will be much more sleepy entertainment in the future. I, for one, am excited. As far as sleeping companions go, I think I definitely lucked out.

This is Halloween, This is Halloween! Halloween, Halloween...

That song has been stuck in my head all weekend, and I don't even know how the rest of it goes! I just keep singing the chorus over and over. Oh, that, and then Sean and I decided the next part is "in this town, we call home, everyone gets a Halloween bone!" Not sure what a Halloween bone is, but that is what they get. It sounds Halloweeny, right? Like, I picture everyone in the town getting a bone that is a piece of a skeleton and they have to put it together like a puzzle. Ooh, and then it comes to life when you put a hat on it! Frosty the Skeleton. And he dances around all claymation-like, all through the night and until the sun begins to come up, and then he collapses to the ground until next Halloween. Halloween bone. It's a good idea.

Well let's get started, shall we? I've just added a few photo highlights from this past week of Halloween celebrations. There are more on facebook, but let's be honest.. I'm super tired. So this is all I'm doin for now. So...

Halloween Event Number 1: "Murder Among the Mateys"


This last weekend my friend Michelle and I hosted a Pirate Murder Mystery party and it was pretty legit. Everyone looked awesome, and if I do say so myself, our apartment looked spectacular. There were candles everywhere, skulls, old silver dishes, cobwebs, a really old accordion, lace, a pirate flag, mugs, bottles, a wooden steering wheel, a sign for the tavern, pictures from the time period all burned and old looking...



I totally got these pictures off of Ancestry.com-- they're from the National Archives (in DC) so you know they're authentic.

Anyway, here we are as Commodore Clearing and Thumbless Jackie:



(Except in this photo I have thumbs... I was wearing gloves for some of the night with the thumb part of the glove tucked in so I would appear thumbless but... it was pretty frustrating so I took them off quite frequently.)

And here is everybody!


It was a great night. Now, on to last Friday at work-- first of all, I've worked at Ancestry.com for four Halloweens now. It was a pretty big deal the first year (each department decorates their area for the little trick or treaters), but it keeps getting bigger each year. It is so fun, I love it. Anyway, our department did UP and it was super cute!

Here I am, as a Wilderness Explorer, with my good friend Kevin.



And here we are with the floating house and Doug, while doing the Wilderness Explorer motto: "The Wilderness must be explored! Caw-Caw! Roar!" They don't announce the winner of the department decorating contest til Monday, but I think ours should definitely win the cutest category...


Alright, and finally Saturday night-- pumpkin carving! My family gets WAY into pumpkin carving. Simple jack-o-lanterns are unacceptable. Unfortunately Sean and I got there a little later than we wanted so we had to improvise, but I like what we came up with. He made this way cute owl, and I made.... drumroll please... a goblin from Troll 2!!! I love it so much!! For those of you who have never seen it, PLEASE do! It's been voted the best worst movie of all time. Last I checked it's free on Hulu, so you have no excuse. Really, you can thank me later.

But yes, back to the picture, this is us and our pumpkins. Oh, and wearing our dinosaur costumes. (We are dinosaurs dressed up like humans.)



And just for your viewing pleasure, here is a closeup of my masterpiece, complete with hair and a goblin's favorite food-- part plant, part human!


So in closing, even though Utah Halloween was last night, since there's still technically 10 minutes left... Happy Halloween!