Things Are Looking Up

Skylar no longer has time for basic news. If I'm being honest, I'm jealous of the result, but not of the means and methods to get to that result.

Medical school rotations are somehow even more miserable than my worst expectations. I'm talking about my experience with them, of course. I don't know how Skylar feels about it all, exactly. I can only make an educated guess by collecting the evidence and scrutinizing it. Bags under his eyes. His mysterious disappearance every morning before I wake up. The perpetual state of verging on tears. 

He slumps into the house every evening and inhales whatever slop I've just finished cooking. "I only have five minutes," he'll say. That means he's about to take residency on the west end of the couch, put on noise-canceling headphones, and study until midnight.

"What happened today in the news?"

Help me I'm poor.

A couple of quick things:

First, your comments on the Shannon recap are giving me life. Also, SOMEONE IN THE COMMENTS LITERALLY FOUND HER GRANDMOTHER IN THE FILM. Stranger is 100% adding "reunites families" to its resume. It will go right underneath "once trolled TMZ so hard they had to send a cease and desist." 

Second, we launched a Patreon for Strangerville and Strangerville Live. Meg and Jolyn have both been threatening me through local mafia groups to do this for a while but I just haven't because lazy. 

For those unfamiliar, Patreon is a way you can support content by paying some small monthly amount to help with production costs. We launched the Patreon because we have some plans to expand, this site, Strangerville, and Strangerville Live in 2021 and we are hoping to be able to do that without forcing Meg to sell one of her children on ebay. 

Shannon: A Recap Of A 1961 BYU Film About A Very Naughty Girl

When I saw there was a BYU film from 1961 called “Shannon” I pulled the trigger and that’s how we ended up here. I have not seen this. I know nothing about this film other than its fabulous name. I will be recapping it as I go.

The film begins with a young woman walking around taking roll at some sort of party. You always know you’re in for a good time when attendance is being recorded. The attendees of this event are young women who are supposed to be 16 but are actually all 95.

If We Ever Do Meet Again It Will Be Zion To Me

We decided to take the weekend off and drive down to Zion National Park. This was a risky thing to do, we admit, considering our last few attempts to visit the place. 

Zion is one of the most beautiful places on the face of Oprah's green earth. The problem is, everyone else on the planet has figured this out. When I was a child we would go to Zion on a whim and have the place basically to ourselves. Now Zion sports Disneyland-like lines nearly every day of the year.

A few years back we tried to visit in March and the trails were comically crowded. Like, to the point where we were literally shuffling our feet in a four-mile long line of people for an entire day. Every hike felt like navigating the subway during the worst possible rush hour. After that trip I decided that I would never return and would instead just have to live with my memories of the park.

An Impossible Way To Live

My husband, who art in heaven, hallowed be his name, decided to become an absolute terrorist two nights ago.

Look. He's stressed and exhausted and exhausted and stressed and I am the June Cleaver to his Ronald Reagan or whoever the hell she was married to. I cook him meals. I cheerlead him out the door every morning. Well, not literally. He leaves at like negative eleventy o'clock every day and I'm for sure not getting out of bed for that. But figuratively I slap his butt in a "good game" kind of way as he heads off to the hospital or affairs or whatever it is he does all day.

I'm the most supportive spouse of all time. I'm so supportive they should name a bra after me. A good one. One of the ones from the commercials of women jumping in slow motion where they have the voiceover from Jennifer Aniston or whoever is in charge now soothingly saying "finally, a bra for women, made by women." One of those. They should name one of those after me considering how supportive I've been.

So now that I've educated y'all on how incredible I am, you are prepared to gasp and pearl-clutch when I tell you that Skylar what's-his-bottom INTERFERED WITH MY BEAUTY SLEEP two nights ago.

Dishes

"Did you have company in here today?" Skylar was asking it sarcastically, and I knew that was the case, so I guess that's why I responded "just my handful of potential suitors who won't attack me in the comfort of my own home office."

The inquisitive ambush was prompted by the five empty glasses strewn across the desk where I was was working. Skylar was already in the process of reaching around me to gather them up before I even finished playfully threatening infidelity and divorce.

I don't know how it happens, really. I don't remember bringing them all into the room throughout the day. I feel like I only use one glass, shepherding it back and forth between the kitchen and my little office to retrieve water when I'm thirsty or bored. And yet, somehow half the cast of Beauty & The Beast is huddled around me by the time Skylar wanders into the house that evening, demanding to know why I've decided to be so wasteful. 

Companionship Inventory

When Skylar and I got married my mother—the woman who birthed me into this world—the being from whom my body emerged through a process she has since called "a bloody massacre"—the person is supposed to live her life in absolutely loyalty to me—that mother committed an absolute hate crime against her only son.

She didn't mean to hurt me, I think, when she told my husband—the man who swore to worship me in front of all the angels in heaven at an extremely expensive party where I had to pay for napkins that must have been made of pure gold considering how much they cost—my mother gave that man advice that has resulted in a scheduled and weekly torture session for me ever since.

"Good marriages require you to be on the same page," she told him. "So I'd suggest you pick one night a week to have a planning session where you can talk about what you have going on over the next seven days, schedule quality time, and discuss any areas where your relationship might need work."

Well, Skylar what's his name frickin loved this idea. And the next thing I knew, a recurring event was added to our shared calendar on Sunday nights. "Companionship Inventory."

Skylar had just learned this phrase from some absolute monster of a person who decided to start teaching him Mormon lingo so Skylar could slip it into conversations with me at random. Within just the few weeks before this, he had told me "the Holy Ghost goes to bed at midnight" and to "return with honor" when I left the house. But none of his new phrases caused me as much immediate emotional pain as "companionship inventory."

Happy Birthday, SkyMan

Today is Skylar's birthday. I spend a lot of time on the internet gushing about him or sharing with you the absurd things he does, like drink Pepto Bismol as a snack, or charge a karaoke stage while high on cold medication and bring the house down with a surprising rendition of "It's Raining Men." 

I periodically like to remind people of the time my husband showed up in sweats, high on medication, and forced himself onto a karaoke stage. pic.twitter.com/Kfy7uGZDGR

— Eli McCann (@EliMcCann) January 10, 2021

There are surely people who follow me here or on one of the six thousand social media accounts that is currently rotting my brain and who start to roll their eyes the dozen times a day I start a tweet with "MY HUSBAND." I don't blame you. If I wasn't me I would totally follow me just to to make fun of me. 

But I can't help it, and you wouldn't be able to either if you were fortunate enough to be married to Skylar. 

Treehouse in the Mountain

Skylar is turning 31 thousand, or so you'd think the way he complained about his aching "dainty ankles" today when we went snowshoeing for a few hours in some mountains 40 minutes from our house. 

We decided to retreat to this place after Sky's parents found an absolutely adorable treehouse turned into an airbnb here and gave us a gift card for it. It's Sky's birthday this coming weekend so we booked the only two days available for this place in the next many months to come and headed eastward on Tuesday afternoon.

The treehouse is truly off the beaten path. Far into the snowpacked back canyons beyond Park City. The instructions on how to get here, as provided by the owners, were essentially, "do not use gps, for the great explorers of our time have yet to chart this corner of the earth. Drive east until you see a large tree that looks like a bear then take the second star to the right, straight on til morning."

The Year Of

I explain this every year but some of you are forgetful and some of you are new and I love the sound of my own voice, so I'm going to explain it again. 

I don't do new year's resolutions because they suck and I'm edgy and like to rebel against societal norms. I used to do resolutions. But then on January 2nd I would swiftly break every single one of them with reckless abandon. Then I'd be like "welp. I guess that didn't work out. There's always next year." And then I'd continue being the colossal suckface you all know and love. 

Then in 2013 I was in Palau and I was deeply depressed. The new year had started. I had been suffering from a state of mental fog and I was in the pits of despair, feeling trapped and hopeless. One day while sitting in my office I just had this epiphany—it was basically that I was the only person who could change my situation and so if I didn't want to keep feeling the way I was, I needed to do something about it. After some introspection, I decided that a lot of my struggles stemmed from an attitude problem. I had fully decided that my life was a sad one, and I was viewing each day from the perspective of defeat.