Cerebrate Good Times

In high school I had three best friends who meant everything to me. I was one of those teenagers who never wanted to be with my family, but spent every moment possible with this adopted family of mine. And because they were good people, it worked out well. I think we had a mostly positive influence on each other, and we made it through those awkward years largely by supporting each other. Predictably, things changed after high school. Two of them went to school in southern Utah, I went to BYU in Provo, and one stayed in Salt Lake. Three of us served missions, and then came the rest of the details of life, with two of my friends settling outside the state (and then eventually me too). After I met Katie she struggled with me wanting to spend time with other friends anyway, and as kids came along I never really had time for a social life. This summer is our 20th anniversary of high school graduation, and there is a Facebook page dedicated to the event. People were posting photos o...

I had an interesting experience a couple weeks ago, and as my de facto journal this is probably the best place to record it. I enjoy the sketch comedy show Studio C that airs on BYU Television. It’s family-friendly, fun, and probably some other nice word beginning with F. Fuchsia? Anyway, a couple months back they put out a call for extras, and I signed up without really expecting anything. Then I got an email saying I was in. So on Thursday evening I went down to Provo for the dress rehearsal. Mostly I hung out in the green room with the other extras. We talked about the instructions we had been given for the different sketches, and there was a TV in there where we could watch what was happening on stage until it was time for us to go on. It took a couple hours to get to our sketch, but finally we went backstage. Someone from makeup powdered our faces a bit (any excuse to wear makeup!), and then we were on. From what I had seen before, the extras usually hung around in th...

It’s time for a moral conundrum! As if we need any more of them in our lives. But here we go. The first summer after we moved in, we noticed these huge crazy orb weaver spiders that loved to build webs on and around our house. I found it quite charming and did what I could to avoid disturbing them. We were unable to use the back door for a month, unless we ducked under a spider web with a behemoth the size of Shelob sitting in the middle of it. I don’t have any particular fear of spiders, but crouching underneath one that could arbitrarily decide to jump onto the back of my neck can still be a little unnerving. The next year they were not only building on and around the back door, but on the side of the house around the air conditioner. I’m fairly certain they didn’t actually rupture the copper tubing that was the cause of the Hot Mess that last summer became, but who knows. I decided to clear away the webs in the doorway, hoping they would get the hint and stop building there. ...

My friend Johnny claims he once saw a plane land on the road behind our junior high school and then take off again immediately. So for the past 15 years, I’ve been making fun of him for seeing things, since to my knowledge nobody else saw it. But to tell the truth, I have technically seen a UFO, which probably rates much higher on the insanity scale. It was a summer evening and I was probably about 12. I think I was doing the dishes or something when my older brother came and told me to check out something outside. So we went out, and off in the distance by the mountains we could see something. It looked like a giant inflated tire on its side, and it was slowly moving along to the north. I suppose we lost sight of it after a while, and then never really gave it much thought after that. Do I think it was little green men? No, of course not (everyone knows little green men prefer trapezoidal craft). It’s far more likely to have been an escaped balloon from a tire shop or something. B...

Once when I was on vacation with my family, I woke up early in the morning and, in the dim light of the motel room, was certain that I saw a disembodied jacket and pants coming towards me. I put my head under the covers and then took another look, but it was still coming. In a panic I woke my brother, and then it was gone. I ascribe the nightmare to a commercial for VF Factory Outlet that had clothes moving without people in them. To this day I have not set foot in their store.

One day when I was in Korea , we were sitting in a little restaurant eating lunch when one of the girls working there came up to me and asked me for some help. There was a white guy sitting at another table, and they were having trouble communicating with him So they wanted me to translate what they wanted into English for him. My companion at the time was a Korean, making me the only other white (which they equated with “American”) guy available. So I went and sat down by him and started jabbering away about what they wanted. He looked at me blankly. It turns out he was from Spain . Eventually, using two of the three Spanish words I knew, I got the point across to him, but it has always been a good lesson about preconceived notions.

Things have been a little bit hectic lately, so my blogging has suffered, which has caused waves of unhappiness to radiate from my regular readers. Those waves have spread throughout the world, causing death and destruction. So, in a fit of guilt, here I am. When I was a teenager, I would occasionally go for a drive late at night. Of course, that was back in the days when you could make minimum wage and still afford gas for your car. Anyway, one night I drove way out to the west side of the Salt Lake valley, by the Kennecott copper mine. I approached a T-junction and had to turn left or right. I hesitated for a moment, then decided to turn left. As I entered the intersection, I saw a car on my left also entering the intersection, going pretty fast. I hadn’t been able to see it because of the level of the road. So I think they had the impression that I cut them off deliberately. I sped away, embarrassed, only to see them make a U-turn and start following me (we were the only two ...