Cabin Fever

On Saturday morning Skylar, Duncan, and I went up into the mountains with our friends Andrea and Shane to stay at a cabin and go snow-shoeing, which is a fancy way of saying "wear comically-large shoes and walk in the cold."

Andrea and I went to high school together. To prove it, she brought to the cabin a video of the two of us performing a song and dance on stage about kissing under the mistletoe in 2001. She showed this to Skylar, which is an actual hate crime.

Andrea and I were in the same choir together in high school, which is proof that the talent range at our school was wide since Andrea had an incredible voice and I mostly just mouthed the words so I wouldn't ruin things for the group.

We brought our dogs to the cabin, mostly so we could force Duncan to wear doggy shoes made for the snow.

Ebola

I basically didn't see Skylar for about two weeks because he had some big test on Friday that he had to study 34 hours a day for. And I know that there aren't 34 hours in a day. Don't look at me. I tried to explain that to him and when I did he was like "WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME WITH THIS CONVERSATION I NEED ALL 34 HOURS TODAY TO STUDY."

His brain has been totally fried. Last weekend we were driving home from somewhere and I was trying to coordinate schedules with him. We had this whole five-minute conversation where he gave me his input and answered my questions. We finished the conversation just as we were pulling into the driveway.

When we walked inside he immediately asked me a question that was fully answered by the conversation we just had and in which he had participated so I reminded him of this. He just stared blankly and said "we talked about this already?"

It's one thing to not remember a detail of a conversation from two days ago, but we had literally just talked about this thing and as I recounted the entire conversation, including the parts that he said, he had no memory of any of it.

It was really impressive, actually, the way he has figured out how to put his brain on auto-pilot.

Give me drugs

Skylar has some big test this Friday and I've got Strangerville Live on Friday and both of us have been wandering through our lives like zombies for about two weeks.

Sky has been spending an unreasonable amount of time studying in the cafe area of Barnes & Noble, or as he still calls it, "Barnes & Nobles."

I'm serious. I can't get him to stop doing this. He refuses to acknowledge the pain he is causing me. This is basically a hate crime at this point. If I could change only one thing about him, it would be this. Well, actually it would be the toothpaste spit he doesn't wash down the drain in the bathroom sink like a civilized human should do. Or I would change the fact that he's only at the beginning of grad school and instead make him a billionaire so I could retire and work on my garden. Or, rather, have my people work on my garden.

I'm not doing labor if I have a billionaire sugar daddy.

I've been lecturing him on a regular basis about "priorities" whenever I think he should be studying and he isn't. Skylar doesn't need the lectures. He's a responsible grownup, even if he does say Barnes & Nobles. But if I'm not bossing someone around, who even am I?

Matt's Stairwell

[Strangerville Live is THIS FRIDAY. Please get your tickets, if you haven't already!]

I think I may be the victim of the world's most elaborate prank. When Matt bought his house a few years ago I swear he promised me that we were just going to do a little remodeling. Since then, we have gutted so much of the house that I'm not actually sure there is a single original brick or piece of wood left.

The problem with being the silent brooding artistic genius that he is is that he's never satisfied with the way things are. "JUST LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE" I want to scream at him every time he lets me know that he's torn down another wall or ripped out another light fixture or demolished his entire yard.

He knows what he's doing, so he's able to do most of the projects himself, which is good because he is satisfied with no contractor ever. I want to call and issue a warning to anyone he hires to help him.

"You can't get away with woefully sub-par work at his house like you can at mine," I would like to tell these people. "Matt's not the pushover you're talking to right now."

It's true. I've hired contractors before. They could literally burn my house to the ground and accidentally bring in a colony of rats and I would be like "THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE HERE'S 12 MILLION DOLLARS."

Pictures & Distractions

I haven't done Pictures & Distractions in a while and I don't know if any of you care but I miss it and I'm feeling 1% less lazy right now so here you go.

Also, speaking of not being lazy, please don't be lazy yourselves and get your tickets to Strangerville Live. The show is next Friday all y'all. And you know I literally never say that. Jolyn and I both promise nudity if you come. Meg promises modesty. Our promises cancel each other out.

In other news, it's Valentine's Day and Mr. We-Don't-Celebrate-Valentines-Day-In-THIS-House-So-Don't-Get-Me-Anything woke up early to make breakfast and give me a sentimental card. After I read it and told him I thought he said we weren't celebrating he yelled "THAT WAS A TRICK SO I COULD PROVE THAT I'M BETTER THAN YOU!"

So things are going super well.

And now, your Pictures & Distractions:

A Good Year for the Reservoirs

When I was a kid my grandpa lived in southern California and he was obsessed with the Weather Channel. He always seem to be acutely aware of the likelihood of a storm on any given day in Salt Lake City, even though he lived a 12-hour drive away.

Grandpa was also the most paranoid human being I have ever encountered in my life. I have somewhat crippling anxiety, and I 100% inherited this through my mother's father. Grandpa was convinced that the life of every single person he knew was hanging by a thread at all times, and he regularly issued all of us both comically specific and ominously general warnings every time we saw him.

It became a family game to keep a list of these warnings and reference them from time to time.

One time my mom and I had lunch with grandpa while he was visiting Utah. I think I was about 15. As we each walked to our separate cars, grandpa to his and mom and I to ours, he called over to us, "it's a sunny day and you'll be driving into the sun, so you need to be careful."

It was so earnest and intense, the way he said it, that it took us a few minutes to realize how funny the request was. He literally warned us that the sun was out, and he did it in a tone like we were swimming in a pool with sharks and didn't know it. We laughed for the entire drive home and to this day, now twenty years later, my mother and I regularly remind each other to be careful about driving when it's sunny.

Confessions

(Woot. Strangerville Live is next week. Get your tickets if you haven't already. Support Jolyn. She supports you.)

When I was 14, my older sister Krisanda offered to drive me and my best friend Sam to our local movie theater. I don't recall what movie we were seeing. This would have been around 1998. I want to say it was Titanic, but I know that Cathie McCann would never have allowed me to go see that film without her and her hand over my eyes so I wouldn't be tempted by boobs. Sam had been issued a similar embargo.

I don't remember why, exactly, but neither of us ever seemed tempted to break the rule and sneak in to see Titanic without our parents.

In any event, Krisanda offered to drive us to see a movie that was definitely not Titanic and certainly contained zero to negative zero boobs.

We were on summer break and it was a rainy day. Krisanda was in high school and had regular access to the white family Astro van, which was something of a sexmobile in the 90s.

We were free, independent, and cruising the streets of South Jordan Utah, nary a parent or guardian in sight, when suddenly, for reasons I still don't know to this day, the van swerved off of the road and into the front yard of a little house.

Vomit

Skylar found vomit in our backyard.

Actually, Duncan found it first. We noticed that Duncan had taken an extreme interest in one corner next to a climbing rose bush. A big snowstorm had come through, dropping more than a foot of powder. Duncan spent a few days frantically digging through that snow at that spot for reasons that were unknown to us.

We kept wondering what was going on, assuming that maybe one of his toys was back there. Then I came home from work a few days ago to confrontation.

"Did you vomit in the backyard?"

He said it more like an accusation than a question. Like I was in trouble. And I immediately became defensive, so defensive in fact that I probably looked more guilty because of it.

Then I paused, reminding myself that if I vomited in the yard I wouldn't be ashamed of it, and I would have probably written about it on the internet by now, so to whatever extent Skylar was accusing me of something, the shame projection was misguided.

Skylar apologized, "but to be fair" he did remind me that I have a history of vomiting in the backyard. It happened last summer, in fact. Skylar had made lamb chops for dinner and I ate too much of them. I had taken Duncan outside to do his businesses when I suddenly started thinking about how barbaric it is that we rip meat off of bones with our teeth and the next thing I knew, I was projectile vomiting into our raspberry bush.

Auto Signature

I was in the middle of my third year of law school when a professor with whom I did some work noticed that her secretary had been sending emails out with an auto tag line after her name. I know that doing this is possible. I communicate with people professionally whose emails have some inspirational quote automatically inserted at the end in a font very inconsistent with the body of the message. I've just never quite figured out how to do it myself, which is how so many of you have received pathetic email responses from the Stranger account that don't even include any brainlessly life-changing catch phrases.

The professor was sitting at her computer, reviewing some message the secretary had sent to a large group of law professors across the United States when I suddenly heard her gasp and say "how long has this been going on!?"

She said it like there had been an affair of some sort, and this caught my attention and intrigue.

I asked about it. The professor told me to come over to her computer screen.

At the bottom of the secretary's email and in large bright pink font appeared the message:

THOSE WHO KNOW GOD DON'T NEED ANSWERS THOSE WHO DON'T KNOW GOD DON'T DESERVE THEM