resolution for the new year {2014}: build my portfolio

i've had this writer dream forever. i've tweaked it over the years, and i've dabbled here and there, but i can't get it out of my head. but the problem is that i don't really have writing samples, per se. i have blog posts and journal entries, but nothing really concrete, aside from a couple personal essays i wrote in pat madden's essay class a few years back. i have these aspirations of writing something more serious, and then it never happens.

so, this year i want to dedicate time (hopefully each day, if only for a few minutes), to writing for real. i think blogging kind of counts, especially if the posts are of the more essayistic variety (and let's face it, i should be doing more of those anyway). but i want to start to put together a portfolio, since many of my dream jobs require something like that.

por ejemplo, a couple weeks ago, joanna goddard of cup of jo posted a job opportunity working as a writer and editor for her blog, which has a pretty huge national readership. in my opinion, i could totally do something like that--write interesting and meaningful posts and build a brand. but i don't have the experience i would need to even feel comfortable applying.

that's what i want to change this year--write more, on a more consistent basis, with the intent that i will actually do something with that writing. i even bought this book to help me :)

love letters

i like to call myself a writer sometimes. mostly this is because i have been an english major for so long and have written a lot, academically, but it's also because i just...like to write. i like to write in my journal, i like to write on my blog, i like to write the family christmas letter. i like to write people notes because i feel like i can say it better on paper than i could in person.

i've noticed that i also like to write letters to the guys i like at any given time of life, the really big crushes that took over my life. i've been reading through some of my old journals, and there are several instances where i wrote letters to my crushes instead of actually saying anything. for the most part, i didn't say anything to them because i was pretty sure they didn't like me back and, therefore, it would have been incredibly embarrassing for me to confess my undying love in any fashion. sometimes i wrote the letter just as an outlet for me, to clear up my own feelings and figure out what exactly i was thinking.

But I'm starting to come to a realization: you haven't forgotten about me, and I don't think you will anytime soon, not that I'll let you, though I did try that...and it didn't feel right. But I'm pretty sure you talk to me more than you talk to almost anyone else...

i guess i need to write it all out because my feelings/relationships/prospective relationships are almost always confusing. is that me, or is it just life? i don't know.

If you had any inkling that I was feeling like this, you'd probably run in the other direction. Believe me, I wish I wasn't.

i remember, in elementary school, all through my days at cesar chavez, i loved david apana. i knew his address, i knew his phone number (549-6785), i convinced my friends to three-way call him--i loved him. one day, i wrote him a letter expressing all of my most intense grade-school emotions, and before i could talk myself out of it, i put it in the mail (because i had his address memorized, of course.). almost immediately after the postman picked up our mail, i wished i had that revealing letter back. i mean, obviously it was an awesome letter with different colored pens and probably stickers and maybe some of my mom's perfume spritzed on. but, even though we are talking about snail mail here, i was putting myself in a vulnerable position.

i needn't have worried--nothing was ever said about the letter, so i have no idea if he ever even received it. of course, nothing ever happened between me and david, either, but that was probably for the best. since then, though, i've been more careful about wo i share my love letters with.

i like the written word. it's a way to be both personal and distanced at the same time. and that comes in handy when you are a girl with a lot of feelings and not a lot of guts.

crushing

last year, i tried to make a comprehensive list of all the boys i've ever liked. this was right on the heels of 1) my essay class and 2) my reading of bossypants and is everyone hanging out without me?. i thought a list like this would be useful when i eventually write my autobiography/memoirs/collection of essays.

anyway, this list. it's pretty lengthy. it starts in kindergarten. i had a preschool crush but i can't remember his name, so i started things off with wally, who also has the distinction of being the only crush who ever made me bleed (thanks to slamming my face into the classroom floor...i guess i liked the bad boys back then). and, of course, the list comes up to the present. over half of my total crushes come from these crazy college years.

it's been a while since i had a really good crush. this is both a good thing and a not-so-good thing. on one hand, it means i can actually get things done. but on the prospects-for-marriage front, it's not really that fun.

at these times, i usually say to myself, you need a good crush to take your mind off of the crazy other stuff that is going on in your life.

and then, typically, the heavens are opened and i am blessed with a big ol' ginormous crush. prayers are answered, am i right?

but it is often a large case of "be-careful-what-you-wish-for"-itis, because a crush for me usually ends up taking over my life. i want to be with the person all the time, i'm thinking about him all the time, i hope he's thinking about me all or at least some of the time, i start to daydream about how it will be if/when we start dating. it can get a little overwhelming, for me and for the guy, if he ever knew.

a boy once told me that he didn't really have crushes. it was a foreign concept to him. this, in turn, was incomprehensible to me. how do you like someone then? what does it feel like when you think about that person? or do you not really think about them? does that mean you are so easily able to compartmentalize your feelings that your day-to-day life isn't really affected at all? thinking about it now, maybe he just hadn't found the person who would make him feel the flutter of a crush.

this is what came up when i googled "exhilarating." i think it sums things up pretty well.

i'm not sure if i'm that point again where i'm ready. i guess i can't really control it, but crushing on someone is exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. maybe that crushless boy has all the luck.

kid phases

a little over a year ago, we had a discussion on our kitchen floor. the discussion wasn't about the kitchen floor; rather, we were all sitting on the floor talking. in the dark. it was a magical night.

we each asked a question that everyone had to answer. the best and most memorable question was about our childhood phases. it was hilarious to hear about the wacky stuff we did as kids. kids are so weird, yet so awesome.

i went through a phase where i loved to make "concoctions." i would shut myself up in the bathroom for hours and just mix stuff together. powder make-up, comet, clorox bleach gel, bath salts, shampoo--anything i had handy would go into the brew. there were probably some poisonous gases wafting around. but i don't seem to be any worse for the wear, so that's good, i guess. my mom would sometimes find my potions after the fact. i particularly remember mixing up something green in a film canister that my mom later found, puzzled. why didn't i become a chemist or something? or, because i don't actually like chemistry.

i went through another phase when i was a little older where i always wanted to be out in nature. so i would take a book out to the backyard (just like now, i was never too far away from reading material) and find a spot to read. sometimes i would just pull a plastic chair into the planter behind the swing set and lean back against the tree that was in there, always wary of the pokey burs that fell from that tree and dotted the yard. or, other times, i would find a tree to sit it. we didn't have huge trees in our yard, and i wasn't much of a climber, so my chosen perch was in a small tree whose limbs were sturdy but not high off the ground. after a few months, though, i guess my constant perching became too much for this little tree, because one day i was sitting in it, heard a crack, and then fell to the ground. it was a shock. and that pretty much ended my nature-reading days. until college, that is.

did you go through any funny phases? i have more, but we'll save those for another time :)

just a few things about me

1. when i was a kid at cesar chavez elementary, we would have school-wide reading contests. i wasn't super athletic, so this was totally my game. i mean, i read on my own, outside of school anyway, so if i could actually win something for it, there was no way i was going to pass up that opportunity to shine.

each week, we turned in a sheet with all the pages we had read. those baby-sitters club and bailey school kids books were good to me.

these reading contests were also one space where being a mormon was a distinct advantage. i'm pretty sure none of those other kids were regularly reading the book of mormon with their families. 531 pages, baby!

if we were the top readers, we received medals. i think one year i won five medals. the next year (probably the book of mormon year) i read so much that i got a trophy. a trophy for reading! so awesome. i thought it was especially cool because it had a magic lamp on it, and i loved/still love aladdin. i think i still have that trophy somewhere. that might have been the last trophy i ever got.

2. i really love march madness. during the season, i have no idea which schools are really good or what duke is up to. i know what's going on with byu and whatever i hear from my dad or my brother or from rare occasions when espn is on, but that's it.

but once the selections are out and the big dance is upon us, i cannot WAIT to get on espn.com and make my bracket(s). i bug my family to make their own, too, so we can have a family group. last year i forgot to make a bracket on espn.com and i was so bummed for the rest of the tournament. this year i am in three groups and have two brackets, so i'm happy.

mostly what i like is that espn does all the work for you and shows the odds of the match-ups and then tells you who wins and loses and calculates all your points and everything and it's all right there in front of you. i'm no bracketologist, obviously, but it's fun to make picks and hope that i end up with a pretty good bracket, even though i have no idea what i'm doing, really.

writer's block

there are days when i feel an urgency to write--to post something on my blog or fill a page in my journal. there are days when i have so many things to say and document that it seems like there isn't enough time to get it all down.

but sometimes, even when i want to write, i can't. i can't think of anything to say.

that happened to me yesterday. it was almost like i wasn't even thinking anything, or at least not anything that i felt like recording.

then, like magic, all of a sudden i had a hundred ideas. nothing groundbreaking, probably, but something--something to put out there, something to express. something to show what i'm thinking, or that i'm even thinking at all.

writer's block is the worst.

thoughts on saturday

first of all, it's 45 degrees right now. whenever i write "degrees," i always want to say "dees-grees," like rick dees, the legendary dj, because i used to listen to "rick dees and the weekly top 40" on kiis fm every saturday when i was growing up. those were the days. but i digress. this time of the year is one of my favorites, when it is just starting to warm up and you don't have to wear a coat but it is still breezy and a little chilly so you aren't sweaty and hot. probably it will get cold again before spring really hits, but i'm going with the sun for now.

last night, i went to smith's for some provisions (read: cpk pizza and trix cereal). the provo smith's on a weekend night is always an adventure. as i was walking out, a girl and a guy were walking in. the girl veered toward me and said, "oh, your hair is so thick. it's so pretty." and then walked away. it was really weird and really funny at the same time.

this is a cool essay, because 1) the author ghost-wrote a ton of Sweet Valley High books, which, how awesome is that? and 2) she captures exactly how i feel about graduate school sometimes all the time:

How different were any of us, despite our attenuated lives as graduate students, from anybody else? The darkest of dark secrets: how much I hadn’t read, and didn’t know. How little I felt I had to say that was different, or new, or mattered.
Your task, my thesis advisor in Oxford told my tutorial partner and me, is to be original. Your thesis won’t pass otherwise.
I haunted the bookshops, certain my argument had already been written. Afraid to ask him: is original the same thing as different? As important, or relevant, or even good?

people should watch alias. it's so great. i just finished the fourth season, and i think it might be my favorite. and jennifer garner is awesome, you guys. i'm grateful argo was nominated for stuff this year, only because it meant jennifer garner went places looking amazing.

see what i mean?

and, finally, we heard this song at the cougarettes concert and we've been obsessed with it since then. when i saw the show the second time, i decided the dance to this song was my favorite. (couldn't get the real video to play, so you have to look at teen wolf, apparently.)

have a great weekend!

where are the good guys?

i don't profess to know everything about dating or to be any kind of an expert, but i have observed a lot in my dating years. after being in provo almost seven years, it would be almost impossible to not observe a whole bunch of dating shenanigans.

one of the things i have wondered through the years is whether there really are awesome guys out there, guys who know what they want to do or who know how to treat women or who understand what is really important in life. there are so many men around who don't seem to know that, like the ones who are more concerned about making a friendship weird than trying to cultivate what could be a real relationship. or the ones who just go around having random hook-ups and call it "dating." this is not to say that there aren't also girls who don't really seem to know what it's all about. and. another disclaimer, i know not everyone is so focused on dating and marriage. some people are super focused on school, which isn't bad. but there comes a time, maybe when you're in your mid-20s or so, when you should probably start thinking seriously about settling down and acting/being spouse-worthy.

last week, one of my friends shared something with me that showed me, once again (he actually does this fairly often), that there are good guys in this world. i hope they really aren't as much of the exception to the rule as i sometimes think, because we need some great guys these days, for a whole host of reasons. anyway, so this friend was at the aforementioned stake dance. he, like most people, went mostly for social reasons: to scope out the cute girls. he realized, though, as he noticed several girls sitting on the sidelines all night, not getting asked to dance, that this was a somewhat misguided purpose. he realized that, as a good Christian man, he could be doing more. he resolved to ask those girls to dance and rethink his reasons for going to activities. clearly, going to a stake dance to meet people and have fun is not a bad thing. but is it the best thing? my friend saw that there were some needs that he could help fill. as a girl who has been there, has been the one who doesn't get asked to dance, this feels especially important.

i guess my point is that my faith in guys has been restored. sometimes it feels like there are no jim halperts out there, no really good guys who do things the right way and know what they want and treat people right. but i know there are. and as someone who's trying to be a good girl, i know there's a good guy out there for me.

bonus picture of john krasinski as jim. isn't that just a good-guy face?

high heels and headbands

one thing that held me back from getting a blog for awhile was the burdensome task of choosing a URL.

{insert quintessential courtney phrase here.blogspot.com}

there's a lot of pressure in that! once you've got a URL, you can't really change it. you're stuck with your decision. 

"sophisticated simplicity" i came up with pretty fast. i love that da vinci quote, and i love the talk from president uchtdorf that quotes the quote. i still love the concept, and hopefully it applies, in a least a small degree, to what i try to do here. 

eventually, i bit the bullet: highheelsandheadbands. i mean, i love high heels--anyone who knows me will tell you that one of my favorite things to do is put on a new pair of heels as soon as i get them home. i love headbands, as many witnesses can attest. on two separate occasions, years apart, i have won awards for having versatile and attractive hair accessories (which has also made me think that i need to be better about letting people get to know me so they can find something to look at beyond my headwear). i figured these two things would be timeless, would always describe me. 

not so. i still like those things in theory--not so much in practice. 

i guess this is less a commentary on my failure to choose a URL that i would like two years later than one on how much my style and, in some ways, my personality, has changed in the past couple years. i was just thinking today, i'm glad i've kind of figured out my style. but then i thought, who knows how long this will last, though?

so i think i'll stick with highheelsandheadbands. it's alliterative, which is always a plus. and maybe there is still something in those two things that is quintessentially me.

on embracing your weirdness

i've had several conversations with people about this lately, and i feel like i can finally contribute something to my blog.

i always thought that, if i wasn't successful in dating, which i have to admit has been the case for basically all of my adult life, that meant there was something wrong with me, something that i needed to change about myself. when i say change here, i mean change some of my personality traits, like i thought maybe i needed to be different, be more flirty or laugh less loudly or like different things. i believed that there must be something about me that was holding me back.

as i've gotten older, i've gotten away from that, at least when i think about myself and dating. i've come to believe that it is more a matter of timing than of having to change yourself in order to be more "dateable." i realized that i don't need to try to be anyone else when i'm actually pretty awesome in my own right. now i just need to find the guy who also thinks that.

but it recently came to my attention that i still apply my former flawed logic, that not dating means you need to change something about your personality, to other people. i know a couple people who are very awkward, to the point that it is sometimes hard to be around them. and all this time i've been thinking that, if only they could get over that and be different, change something that is such an inherent part of them, they'd be so great and people would for sure want to date them. and how lame is that of me? i remembered, again, that it's all about timing, finding the right person at the right time. so, that guy who bugs me--i need to remember that he's not for me, and that's okay, but there is someone out there who will love all of him and embrace all of that stuff that drives me crazy.

my comrades (the people i talked to about this issue) and i did decide, though, that there is something to be said for bettering yourself. we hear about aligning our lives with that of the Savior, and that is where self-improvement takes place. there might not be one ideal personality, but there is one true way to live your life. we can always be working to develop the attributes that are embodied in Jesus Christ. as one of my friends put it, the change is principle-based rather than trait-based. i know one person who had a reputation for being kind of mean and cold, and i think this person realized that was holding him or her back from being really happy. so, this person consciously worked to become more positive and friendly. and the change was amazing. i don't know for sure, but i think this person really did get happier and, to a degree, more successful in dating, or at least more confident that everything works out eventually.

to sum up: i'm not going to expect people to change their personalities anymore, and i'm going to keep reminding myself that there will be someone someday who is willing to accept all my weird things. that's one of my worries, too, that guys will think my weird things are too weird and won't be able to get over that i don't drink juice or that i can't even look at snakes. but that's dumb, because there is someone for everyone, no matter how trite that sounds. and, i'm going to keep doing the things i can to become more like Christ--the only way to be truly happy, with or without a man.

i'll end this with one of my favorite quotes. i can't remember if i've posted it before or not, but it's too perfect for this subject to not share again.

that dr. seuss, he really knew what he was talking about.

summer rainstorms

one of the best things about summer, besides the sun and no school and flowy skirts and sandals and being outside and the sun staying out until 9pm and ice cream and love in the air, is the summer rainstorm. i haven’t been in that many rainstorms this season, but this weekend i got caught in two in two days. 

saturday i walked to the other side of my complex in search of a party. when it turned out to be taking place in lehi instead of provo, i decided to take a walk around the block while i was out. i felt a few raindrops, but i kept walking, and within two minutes, rain was pouring down. i was getting soaked, but the combination of warm air and cool rain made me smile rather than run back inside with my hands over my head. 

and on sunday, i spent the afternoon on the balcony, and as i sat up there in my camp chair, the sky changed from bright blue to light grey to dark, muddy slate. the rain started slowly, again, but soon it fell hard and fast on the awning above me. i was covered and protected from the wet, but then the wind changed and i could feel the rain. 

this is pretty cliché, but i love the smell of rain and the smell of the world after it rains. everything is clean again. it’s exactly how i feel right after i get out of the shower and before i have to decide what i’m doing with my hair, which ruins the reverie.

some thoughts on adventure

i've never really considered myself an adventurous person. i'm not the girl who tries longboarding to impress the guys or who will plan a super spontaneous trip to vegas just because we all have a free weekend. i don't try exotic drinks--people are always getting me to try exotic drinks, and i should in the name of being adventurous, but then i just can't do it. i mean, it even took me about five minutes yesterday just to get up the courage to attempt a cartwheel.

and then there are the adventures you see in movies--international spies being chased across europe, using a different identity at each stop, having shoot outs and car chases and love affairs in each city. or the adventures that involve some kind of elaborate puzzle or cracking an ancient code and traveling to rome and paris and finding the holy grail buried underneath the pyramid at the louvre or staying in america and discovering a treasure map on the back of the declaration of independence and finding love along the way. adventures of these kind mean travel to exotic locales and being involved with all sorts of interesting and sometimes dangerous people.

 

i don't typically go on those types of adventures, the type that everyone thinks about. so,

courtney

adventure

except that maybe it does. maybe courtney does equal adventure, and i've just been thinking about it all wrong. 

because maybe, with the right attitude, anything you do can be an adventure. maybe going to the grocery store can be an adventure (i know it can--anyone who has ever been to the provo smith's after midnight, especially if it's the saturday night before fast sunday, knows what i'm talking about.)  maybe going on a morning jog can be an adventure. maybe reading on the front porch can be an adventure. 

i hadn't thought much about this before, but then i had a couple friends who were always talking about "going on adventures," which i thought was interesting, but then i realized they were talking about the things they did everyday, the normal things that just happened to happen to them in the course of a day. and that got me to thinking--what's to stop me from treating everyday like an adventure? and then i thought again, nothing!

so there you have it. everyday is an opportunity to have a great adventure. and i've realized that i need to find someone who sees life like that as well. because then we can have amazing adventures together, and then we can have amazing adventures with our children and show them how beautiful and magical life can be. doesn't that sound delightful?

the best kind of sunday

there are two kinds of sundays, in my experience. first, there are those sundays where you wake up and everything is covered in snow, even though snow has been forecast for weeks and nothing has happened. of course, snow will fall on the one day you walk around in precarious footwear and a dress. and you also know that the consequences of this massive snowfall will be around for days, if not weeks, forcing you to take baby steps around campus in order to avoid a slip on the ice (one of your most dreaded occasions).

but second, and most importantly, there are those glorious sundays where the sun is shining and the breeze is gently wafting and you come home from church and keep your front door open all afternoon and you go sit on a blanket in the beaming sun and stick your too-white legs out from under your skirt and then lay on the lawn of the library with your friends and later play games and laugh and laugh.

yesterday was one of those sundays. i can't wait for spring.

the wonder of facial hair

i have always been very anti-facial hair.

i was one of those girls who, when the age-old "beard card" question emerged at byu, silently agreed that guys should just deal with shaving and buck up about their beards and mustaches. i've recently come to feel a little differently, though.

girls don't ever have to think about facial hair, for the most part at least. i don't have to get up everyday and grumble about having to put a sharp razor to my face in case i need to take a test or in case the honor code police comes down on me. but guys do. and they don't like to put that sharp razor to their face, not to mention the possible razor burn or the lack of warmth due to lack of hair.

so this year i gained some appreciation for facial hair. i guess i put myself in the man's shoes and realized that it would be a bummer to have to worry so constantly about the little hairs growing out of one's face. also, these boys became my good friends right at the start of no shave november:

and then this was the christmas card they sent around. so i'm pretty much okay with mustaches these days, though i don't know how i feel about them long term. we'll see about that.

and how could i not love mustaches when they are so cute?

handlebar mustache. get it? from urban outfitters.

mugstaches!

and i can't wait for the second annual mustache party in honor of casimir pulaski day. that was a magical party.

mustaches for everyone!

resolution for the new year: to not letting friendships fade

i've been surfing the internet more than i usually do lately, mostly to look for cool blogs and inspiration for this creative kick i'm on.  

(and, can i just say, one really awesome thing about these blogs is that the women who write them acknowledge that their sites only portray a small part of their lives. they seem perfect, because they are churning out crafts or putting up pictures of gorgeous interiors, but they readily admit that they are not perfect. but along with that, the blogs i've been following lately are created by women with families who seem genuinely happy with their lives, and often they are stay-at-home moms, and often they are not lds. i think that's pretty cool, and it's something i want to live up to. the end.)

 yesterday i came across sometimes sweet, and this was part of one of the first posts i saw. the author, danielle, is talking about one of her best girl friends, whom she met during college.

But then things changed and somehow we drifted apart. There were never hard feelings, but she got into a serious relationship at the same time I moved in with another group of friends, and we fell out of our norm. It would have been impossible to keep our friendship going at the same intensity- as life changes relationships change too. And although we understood this, we let what could have been a shift turn into a total end.

Sometimes Sweet, "Now and Then"

the same idea comes up in this song, "5 years' time" by noah and the whale, that i've been listening to for the past few weeks. here's the song for your listening pleasure. (for some reason i couldn't get the official video, which is awesome, to upload to my blog. so i'll have to settle for music only.)

at the end he says, "in five years' time i might not know you/ in five years' time we might not speak/ in five years' time we might not get along/ in five years' time you might just prove me wrong." the whole song they are having so much fun, fun, fun together, but then he realizes, hey, what about the future? we might not know each other in a few years.

i think about this a lot. i can think of a few different friendships of mine that are currently in this kind of liminal space. we have tons of fun when we are together, and it goes just back to the way it was before we drifted apart, but somehow our lives have changed. we don't keep in touch regularly, so we don't know the details of each others' day-to-day activities. and i'm not mad about it or anything--how could i be? i'm as much to blame as anyone--but it does make me a little sad. 

because, like danielle says at the end there, every relationship changes as life changes, even the relationships you have with people you see every day. but if both of you don't put in the effort to preserve your friendship in its new form, it will simply fade. 

it seems to me that if there is someone who means a lot to you at one point in your life, they should probably mean a lot to you at the other points of your life, too, though probably in a different way. i've let many of those important people just slip away from me, and now i think that i should have tried harder to keep something going. i think that i usually just shrug my shoulders and say to myself, 'well, i've grown beyond that friendship, and we're both in different places in our lives now.' but does that even make any sense? if i really cared about them, wouldn't i want them there through all the "different places" of my life, and wouldn't i want them to think the same about me?

sometimes i worry about this happening with the friendships i have now. i wonder, will we even talk once the convenience of this relationship leaves us? but, really, it's up to me (and hopefully the other person) to keep it going when we live farther away or when our lives are different. if we drift apart, it's partly my fault.

the moral of danielle's story is that it's never too late. both she and her long-lost friend wanted to reconnect during their years of little contact, and both always seemed to lose nerve. but, eventually, they got together again and figured out how to become good friends within the framework of their different lives. and, like charlie fink says in "five years' time," it's up to the people in the relationship to prove that they can last.

i'm all for this; it is a little scary, because it means putting myself out there, and i usually run away from such things. but i've never understood the logic behind restricting yourself from having as many friendships as possible (it's why i react so violently against the idea of a "friend zone"), so why would i just let these great friends/great people slip out of my life?

so, another resolution: to reconnect with old friends and not be satisfied with the mentality that "oh, we're just in different places in our lives now." because, let's face it, i can use all the friends i can get.

a writing exercise

1. Write down the first word that you think of, right now, and write about it for five minutes. Stop, at five minutes on the nose, mid-word if you must.

2. Take the last letter of the last word (or half word) that you wrote and think of a word that begins with that letter. Write down that word and write about it for five minutes.

3. Repeat step 2 as many times as you feel necessary to get the creative juices flowing.

smell
i think often about how certain smells are associated with certain times of the year or even certain times in my life. the hard part is that i usually can't recall them on command, and i couldn't tell you off the top of my head which smells come with each season. but every once in a while a scent will hit me, tickling my olfactory sense and triggering some memory, whether vivid or faint.
like, the smell of coffee reminds me of walking into disney's california adventure, which is a place near and dear to my heart. and, for some reason, it always smelled like coffee when we walked under that golden gate bridge.
or, yesterday, as the clouds rolled into provo to signal impending rain and that clean muggy smell permeated the air, i was again flooded with images. of carefully sidestepping big gushing crawling slimy worms that confetti the sidewalk. or of curling up in my bed under my big green fluffy precious moments blanket, good book in hand and fuzzy sock on foot. the smell of rain means a bath for the world.

if my doorbell was like this, my feelings would be more certain

world-d-doorbell
pretty much since we moved in seven years ago, our doorbell at home has been on the fritz. this isn't too distressing, by any means, because the previous owners had one of those really annoying melodious doorbells--ding dong ding dong, ding ding ding dong. my first instinct, when i get to a door, is to knock anyway. knocking can be loud, i grant you that, but it is mostly relegated to the door area. the doorbell, however, is more intrusive. when you push it, you know there is a little box situated somewhere in the house that will probably wake up a baby from a nap or something. my little brother's twerpy friends used to come to our door seeking him out and, instead of knocking like polite little boys, they would ring the doorbell incessantly. my feelings about doorbells are uncertain.