Apologies and an announcement

First, I'm terribly sorry to those of you who actually followed this blog that I have been neglecting it for so long. If there's anyone left still willing to read this I just wanted to let you know that I won't be taking this blog up again, at least not for the foreseeable future. I've recently changed my email and with that I've been assigned a new blogger account and decided to start a fresh new writing blog. It won't be like this too much because I'll be focusing on reading and writing and my struggles and adventures with it. If you'd like to check it out this is the url: http://blackmarksonwoodpulp.blogspot.com/  I welcome your comments and ideas and I hope you'll join me :)

Inspiration

This week, overall has been one of these:

I've had it reaffirmed to me why I don't generally spend much time watching or reading the news. It's just so incredibly depressing. This week I read about a man who massacred 77 people and thinks he deserves a metal for it, a man [suspected of killing his wife] who blew up his house and his sons in a suicide double murder, a quote by a woman getting a divorce that read "the marriage ran its course" [as if marriage is a disease], yet another person declaring that their religious beliefs and their political beliefs have nothing to do with each other, and the list goes on and on.
As positive and optimistic as I try to be, some days it's hard not to get dragged down by all the negative things that I see. We live in a depressing world.

Thankfully, though, that's not the only adjective I would use to describe it.

As I mentioned last time I posted, I am participating in a writing contest that is still ongoing. We've gone through the initial cut and 2 challenges thus far and somehow I'm still hanging in there. Poor Tim has been wonderful, enduring my panic attacks and freak outs at every submission deadline, always telling me that, no, my entry doesn't suck. He's fabulous. This experience, though the contest is nothing very formal or prestigious, has been a growing experience for me. The challenges have been tough and somewhat bizarre and forced me out of my writing comfort zone. The most amazing feeling though, is seeing my entries passed along each week and knowing that means that people actually voted for what I wrote. They liked it. For someone who's only ever tentatively shared her writing with classmates and close friends, it's an amazing feeling. It makes me want to keep trying, to keep pushing myself because maybe what I'm doing isn't a total waste of time.

Geek-out time:

This week, Tim and I moved date night up to Thursday for a surprise. UVU was having a date night event for students centered around
That's right. A Harry Potter movie night complete with blankets and pillows spread throughout the ballroom it was being shown in, HP-related refreshments like pumpkin pasties, cockroach clusters, and butter beer. Before going in to the "theatre" you could spin a wheel to get "sorted" into a house [I was sorted into Ravenclaw and Tim got put in Slytherin]. I was happily surprised at the number of people that came and it made me smile when everyone clapped and cheered for Mrs. Weasley and Neville. Basically, it was a total BLAST! I laughed, I cried, I geeked-out. sigh. I really am going to force my children to read this series.

Maybe the best thing about the night though, was how much watching that movie made me want to write. I left the movie last night with this absolute burning desire to create something. To be able to write characters as amazing as Snape, Dumbledore, and others. I want that so bad I can't even articulate it properly! haha. I talked to Tim about it and how I felt like I could never do something that incredible and he reminded me that the only person saying that was me :)
It's frightening though, some of you may know, to look to someone that you respect and admire so much, someone who has so much talent and has used it in such breathtaking ways as J.K. Rowling has. It's scary to look at that and want to experience it because where you see your role models today is so far from where you are at the moment. The mountain seems insurmountable.
The important part is that you can climb it.

Really though, this week J.K. Rowling has been my inspiration. I watched this video

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

this week and I was surprised to learn about certain aspects of her life that I had not known before. Wanting so badly to write something good, it was encouraging for me to hear her talk about how, when she was at her lowest point and began really focusing on the book series that would make her famous, she didn't know if anyone would like it. She didn't know if it would be published. She didn't know how long the tunnel was or when, if ever, it would end.

I may never write the next Harry Potter, or anything particularly famous. I can't see into the future. All I can do is what I do now.

Things that make me smile, things that make me think

On Friday I entered my submission to a little writing contest that a blog I follow is doing. The writers of the blog are published authors who teach writing in college [one of them was, awesomely, my teacher last semester]. The contest is set up as a Project Runway foil and, considering the initial "contestant" process was to enter the first 150 words of a middle grade or YA story, I figured I'd try my luck. Voting opened today [and ends Friday] so I'm trying to get the word out for people to go check this out. They received over 60 entries and readers get to vote to help narrow those down to 12. You don't have to subscribe to vote, just go here to read all the awesome submissions [seriously, I think I was more excited to read everyone's work than to enter the contest] and then go here to vote for your six favorites. I'm not even going to tell you what one's mine to try and sway your vote. Really, just enjoy them and vote for your favorites then keep following as the selected contestants go through the various challenges in the coming weeks. I know I will!

Okay, last week I was introduced to what I now consider the cat video to beat all cat videos and I have to share it. If you know this guy then you will be better able to appreciate the music in this video. Could you have choreographed the cat better? I submit that you could not!

And just to give you some of the great warm fuzzies, here are two adorable videos of a phenomenal cat named Oskar. I want to adopt a kitten now :(

In other news...

Today I was able to watch our campus forum. Mark DeMoss was the speaker [no, I'd never heard of him before either] and I thought he had some good things to share. He headed a civility project for a few years, promoting decent, civil behavior in the political as well as personal spheres, something I could definitely get behind. He mentioned the protestors that are ever present outside LDS General Conferences every April and October and his disappointment that so many of those people claim to be representatives of Christ from his sect of Christianity. What he said in this case, I couldn't have put in better words. He said "The first amendment may give me the right to demonize you [Mormons], but it does not make it right." I love this. For me, it articulates the misinterpretation that I think many people take in regards to freedom of speech today. Don't eat me.

Christenings and Strange Encounters

I firmly believe that wedding money is one of the best things ever [and we just recently received our pictures back from the big day so we can work on sending thank yous to all those wonderful and generous people, don't worry mom]. Seriously. Admittedly, we have gone through most of it already [don't worry, it's been spent on responsible, needed, adult-y things] but we recently received some additional gifts. One of these was a gift card to a local store in Delta that was contributed to by a number of people and added up to a considerable sum so we decided to take a field trip this weekend, it being Martin Luther King Day and all. We were informed that this particular store carries KitchenAid mixers which was a tempting idea but we weren't sure we could/should make such a large purchase. Further inspection of the store quickly made that decision for us as there wasn't much else we'd spend that money on there. And so it came to pass that we purchased our KitchenAid Artisan Mixer:

We are seriously excited, I mean, these things are AWESOME. We'll die at some old age and we'll be able to put this in our will because it'll still be working like new!
It is Imperial Black with [it says it on the box] Unique Planetary Mixing Action. [Okay, I may have made up the "action" part]. Tim and I think it came from Star Wars and have yet to name it, suggestions are welcome.
Last night we decided to make our new appliance a real part of our little kitchen so we made chocolate chip cookies [you can make 9 batches at once if you want in these things!] from a new recipe. They weren't the best we'd ever had but they were ultimately satisfying.


So, yesterday I was pondering about Dr. Seuss, specifically his well known book Oh the Places You'll Go that I'd bet many of us have read many times, and how, as great as this book is, it misses an important and relevant idea - the people you'll meet, again.

Whilst walking about campus yesterday morning, I was approached by a young man that I did not recognize but who knew me. "Emily, right?" He asked me and I had one of those "OhcrapohcrapohcrapwhoisthisandhowdoIknowthem?" moments as I tried desperately to recall a name, place, event, anything. I came up empty. It turns out that he was in my second ever EFY group over three years ago and he has a much better memory than I [he even asked me about my brother who had gone to the same session]. He'd done some school before leaving on his mission but until yesterday I was completely oblivious to the fact that he even attended BYU. So it got me thinking, the places we go and the people we meet are all amazing and wonderful and great things to look forward to, but it is intriguing to me, the people that we meet again. Those people who's initial presence in our lives was small who pop back into your life [ be it ever so brief an encounter] out of nowhere one day, years down the road. This is a big world. If you've ever been to a city like L.A. or N.Y.C. it's easy to feel like you're lost in a crowd, one of the literary millions of people roaming the planet. So isn't it fascinating that, out of all of that chaos, connections and ties, even something as little as an EFY group-mate, can bring the same people back through your path? I think so.

Reflections

I know, how presumptuous of me to fall off the face of the planet in October and not say a word for over two months! It could be argued that several posts should have come out of the whole getting married thing or at least one for Christmas. What can I say, I got a little wrapped up in things and I'm still learning how to breath [and sleep properly] again.

Anyway, that's not what's brought me back tonight. I received a call from my dad about half and hour ago to tell me that my Uncle Bob, my dad's older brother, died in his sleep last night.

Did you feel that? The stifling silence of shock and disbelief that those of you who have had close family members pass on may be able to recall at hearing the news. I couldn't believe what I was being told and, to a certain extent, I'm still not sure I believe it. The only family members that have died before have been ones that I didn't know or hadn't seen in years and I've never had someone closer than my grandmother die during my life-time.

Bob lived with the youngest brother [Jim] who has never been married either, in the home they grew up in about 45 minutes away from my house. Since all of my mom's family lived at least, but generally more than] 11 hours away, we saw quite a bit of my uncles growing up at various Buhler get-togethers [namely holidays] and on days when they would baby-sit us.

A sad fact: I was never close to Bob.

Bob was the kind of uncle that was 1 part intimidating and 2 parts amusing. He wasn't much older than my dad but he always seemed like a bit of an old coot to me. On days when my parents were out of state and he was the one to watch us for the day we'd hardly ever see him. You only knew he was there by the sound of the vacuum coming from the basement and my dad's word-working area. Every once in a while he'd come upstairs for a drink or to make sure we hadn't burned down the rest of the house and he'd give us all a 5 minute lecture about how we were all going to get black lung and die because of the amount of sawdust my father allowed to sit piled up on the basement floor. We thought he was crazy and, as kids are apt to do, would giggle about it once he'd disappeared back downstairs in his personal quest to remove all traces of sawdust from the premises. I don't think we ever asked him if he'd like to watch a show with us or play a game.

It seems like all the things I know about my uncle happened before I was born or at least before I was old enough to remember. He worked as a trucker for years, crisscrossing the country time and time again. On occasion, he would slide a remark into a conversation about certain places he'd been and seen if people were discussing them. He also seemed to have quite a thing for motorcycles, something he and his brothers shared, and he had an accident when I was very young that made it so he never rode again. He and Jim kept up their parents' house and the small garden [they grew rhubarb] between the garage and the fence that separated their property from the neighbors who gave us creamsicles when we were visiting one summer.

The things that I knew Bob best for were his smoking habit, his small dinner-table tirades about various government corruptions, and falling asleep after dinner every Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve without fail. The way he'd stand in doorways, having just trailed in from a cigarette break, made him look like a character from Grease even though high school was far behind him.

I'm looking back tonight and seeing all the gaps in our relationship, all the places when I could have made an effort to get to know him, give him someone to talk to. Having an understanding of what will happen after this life doesn't much lessen the pangs of regret you can feel, the chagrin of being one of those people who assume someone will be around forever and, some day, you'll get around to thanking them, appreciating them.

Bob died of some kind of neurological dysfunction that has made its presence known before in my dad's family. That he died in his sleep, I am grateful beyond words. That I hadn't seen or spoken to him in over a year, the term remiss doesn't come close. There were a few things that came to mind as I initially heard the news.

One: He never got his thank you card for his wedding present to Tim and I [we've been waiting on pictures from our photographer and so haven't sent them yet].

Two: Was he happy?

The very little I knew about him and the way his life was during most of mine always made me think that he must be very bored and at least somewhat unsatisfied with the way things had turned out what with never being married and not having a job to keep busy with and all. But a child's perception of other people's lives are always simplistic and idealistic. For all I know, he never wanted to have a family and he didn't mind terribly about the way things had happened. I wish I knew. I hope he was.

So, Uncle Bob, I hope you'll forgive a niece who didn't take the time to know you and I hope you'll let me try when we meet again. Until then, rest peacefully. I know you're being taken care of.