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Sarah
Saturday morning, I had a talk with my father. “Have I told you what my brother Tony once taught me about love?” he said to me. We were talking on the phone, of course. He had just finished painting the family bathroom in preparation for Thanksgiving. Among our many lovely guests will be Manfriend. The family wants to put its best bathroom forward.
I couldn’t remember what Dad’s brother Tony once taught Dad about love.
“He was engaged to this woman. Karen Garff. And one day she disappeared. They had been spending every day together, but one day, he called her, and she didn’t answer. She avoided him. Later he found out she’d been seeing someone else. He was heartbroken. That’s why he went to Europe.
Sarah
A couple of weeks ago, Manfriend finally asked the question. “Sarah,” he said, “what are your love languages?
Love languages, if you don’t know this already, is a shorthand way of referring to a set of theories by a guy who says, essentially, there are five different ways to show love: physical affection, words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, and gifts. These are the five love languages. We each preference a language or two, meaning we’re more likely to communicate our love for people in one or two particular languages (e.g., by saying the words “I love you,” by hugging, by doing the dishes, etc.) than we are to love people equally with all five. In return, we’re each more likely to notice love that is shown to us in a love language we prefer. In other words, we’re a little dense.
Team,
This week marks the one-year anniversary of this, The Apron Stage. On November 1, 2008, we went live.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AS!
To commemorate this sort of ridiculous and awesome passage of time, I (Sarah) thought I’d pull together a sort of unauthorized history of the origin of The Apron Stage. (Unauthorized because I’m pretty sure that the other writers will think it’s way too long and navel-gazing.) I thought it would be good to revisit the beginning–to see what we were hoping for, what we were worried about, and who should get credit for what. (Levi, turns out, gets a lot of it.)
I thought you might enjoy it too. Yes? Because, let’s be honest, we were nothing but girls emailing each other before you joined us. (Except Louise, who was already a literary rockstar.)
So thank you–thank you for reading, for commenting, for guest posting, and for putting up with the next 1200 words of history.
You deserve congratulations too.
s (and r, l, and l)
P.S. If you didn’t know it already, the blog was Rebecca’s idea. She started it all–first by knowing each one of us; second by harassing us to write for her, which we successfully procrastinated talking seriously about until August 1, 2008. Open curtain.
The swine flu, apparently
Sarah
I’m writing this from the torpor of the swine flu.
That’s right. The swine flu. Be glad the internets are between us.
If you are like most people—and here, I will give you the benefit of the doubt—you will now ask how I know it’s the swine flu. See these symptoms? I have those.
To be fair, as far as I can tell, my fever only lasted one day. And even then, it was only arguably a fever, scoring in at a 99.4 (which my med school friends tell me really isn’t particularly feverish, even though my body temperature the rest of the week has hovered around 96.9-97.7). Still, for that one night—Saturday night—when the idea of being touched and the idea of not being touched both made me cry, it was bad enough. My eyes hurt, my neck hurt, my chest hurt. I had chills, my head was hot, and I sneezed and coughed and wracked and wished that I were disembodied, that I were vacant, that I wasn’t.
Thank goodness for Nyquil.
And jack-o-lanterns? They’re scary.
Sarah
In the town I grew up in, Halloween meant chaos.
It meant teenagers cruising the streets, knocking over mailboxes, smashing pumpkins on sidewalks, throwing eggs at houses and middle schoolers. But it’s okay because—surprise—the middle schoolers were running loose, swinging flour socks (yes, that would be an athletic sock, filled with flour; oh my gosh, it hurts so bad) and spraying shaving cream on little kids dressed as ghosts, fairies, dead zombie-rockstars. The middle schoolers would make the little kids cry. But the little kids would also cry when they didn’t get the kind of candy they wanted, when they couldn’t take a second handful of candy from the cauldron-shaped candy bowl, when their friends got more candy than they did, when the wind blew too hard. Etc. Later in the evening, it felt like anyone would cry at any time for anything, including (ironically) (or appropriately) feeling ill for eating too much of the candy they cried to get.
I eventually volunteered for candy duty so I would have an excuse not to go out with my friends, who, incidentally, were the ones who taught me how a flour sock feels. And at some point during candy duty, I would look out from our front porch and review the Halloween scene: dark night, windy, leaves a’swirling, and a parade of big and little kids, all with stomach aches and tear-streaked faces, glaring eyes and homemade weapons, or squeal-y cars and mean laughs.
I hated Halloween. Everybody was their worst self.
Sarah
The following is a response/sequel to Friday’s post. I was really touched by the thoughtfulness and willingness with which those of you who commented commented. I have to confess: I’m not sure how good I am at saying what I mean. (See below.) But we’ll get through it. And it can be a good time. And we can learn to love each other better along the way.
We can be both hungry and full. Yes? I mean, I’m living on lots of levels. I’m banging on all cylinders. I’m riding high and low, stretching out, tucking in. I’m hearing eighty voices at a time and feeling wind on my face, blood in my wrists, tenderness in my heart, and hardness and apathy and the thrill of the ride all at the same time. You too?
Case in point: My often-expounded Airport Parking Model of Happiness. We feel emotions on at least three levels at any one time. There are the almost instantaneous feelings of delight, frustration, discomfort, pain, etc. This orange tastes good. That man is good-looking. Ow, rock in my shoe. Am I blushing? These transitory feelings are like departures and arrivals.
Then there’s short-term parking. This is how we’re feeling today, the last few days, this week, the last couple of weeks. When people ask, “How are you doing?” they’re usually asking about short-term parking. It’s been a rough week. I got an A on a test on Tuesday and I’m still riding high. I’ve decided I really like my job, and I’ve begun looking forward to waking up in the morning. Etc.
And there is long-term parking. This is how we’re feeling over the course of the last few months, the last few years, the general aggregate of our lifetime, etc. My life is a good life. I live constantly amidst fear. Loneliness is always with me. Faith sustains me.
We feel on all (at least) these three levels at any one time, right? And sometimes contradictorily. My life is pretty good overall, but this week has been really hard and I’m not presently happy, except that sunset is so beautiful I want to tell someone.
The Airport Parking Model of Happiness, my eighty internal voices, and what they represent are the reason that I am not—I don’t know—I’m not as concerned about a lifetime of feeling hungry as I would otherwise be. Because I am perhaps too aware of at least this reality: We each have a LOT going on. Inside of ourselves. In our minds and hearts. And bodies.
Sarah
The following is an inordinately long post, posted out of order (Sarah! on a Friday!). Please forgive both aberrations. I wanted to write about this topic next/now, and I didn’t want it to get lost in this past Monday’s wild Columbus Day festivities. Things will be back to normal this coming Monday (when I will post a sort of second half to this post). At least, as normal as it gets around here.
Last March my father sent me an email in which he encouraged me to lose weight. “I do not write this lightly,” he said, essentially. “I have been praying about this, and I know that, though you are fit in your own way, even good men might be less attracted to you than they would otherwise be.” And then he asked this question: “Do you want to marry enough to become very trim?”
When I read the email, I cried. He wasn’t wrong, of course. I knew that, arguments about Being Who You Are and Beauty Coming From Within notwithstanding. Enough men have said to me, “You’re the coolest girl I know; I’m just not attracted to you” to know that he was probably right. And he certainly wasn’t being callous. He had never mentioned my weight to me before. Never said anything about my eating or exercise or lifestyle choices or anything. And, in his email too, he offered up his own weight loss resolve: he’d felt the heavens telling him too he needed to lose some weight. About 30 pounds. He’d decided to begin eating a restricted calorie diet and exercising. He suggested a website or two he’d found helpful.
I cried anyway. I hated that this could be true—that it was true. And I felt so embarrassed.
I decided to act in defiance. (Uncharacteristically, I might add. I’m both lazy and prideful enough that I really don’t act unless I believe in the cause I’m behind. Otherwise, why get off the couch? Spiting other people isn’t worth doing squat.)
I pitched an experiment to a fitness trainer friend: Let’s create a perfect Sarah-fitness plan, one that, if I stuck to it perfectly (but reasonably), would have me be at some ideal/target weight in some predefined length of time. Six months. Nine months. Twelve.
Then I’d do it. I’d exercise. I’d lift. I’d do cardio. I’d count calories and avoid dairy or do whatever the plan said and then, at the end of the experiment, I’d look the way I’d look, I’d be the way I’d be, and I’d know, Once and For All (hear the spite there?) whether the only thing standing between me and trimness was me—or whether everyone else was wrong, I was an exception, and I could live my life the way I had been. Which is to say, happy but overweight.
I didn’t stick to the plan. My summer was hard and full of efforts to accomplish some difficult professional goals. I counted calories for a couple of weeks. I lifted for a couple of weeks. I tried to do some cardio. And then, of course, towards the end of the summer, I ran a couple of times a week prepping for the half-marathon. These were all nods to the plan, but they were not the plan itself. Still, my fitness trainer friend hung with me, sending me occasional gchats of encouragement: “How are you doing, Sarah? How’s your eating going?”
Because that, it turned out to be, was the thing. The eating. More specifically, the not eating. The hunger. Read the rest of this entry »
Louise
January 2007
I remember you, Louise Roos, Loesje, Weezie, Lulu, Rooster. I remember you by all of your names even from this 46-year distance. You’re wearing that red wool blazer with the emblem over the pocket that you got for your birthday, and you know you look good. You always know when you look good. Red was then and still is your favorite color. You will paint your living room a bright red and wonder why it takes other people’s breath away. But you are an adrenalin junkie. You like cheap thrills.
You like the cheap thrill of seeing Dean K. and swooning into your diary about how he called you “sweetie” and kissed you on the back of the neck at that fireside at the Stevens’ house. My question: What is a thirty-one year old man doing, kissing a 17-year old girl? Haven’t you noticed that when you meet him downtown, he is always strolling with an entourage of young boys? He is looking for Mann’s Tadzio of DEATH IN VENICE, a book you might want to read soon.
SORRY! THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO GET PUBLISHED YESTERDAY, BUT MY SCHEDULING SKILLS WERE NOT UP TO PAR. APPARENTLY. SORRY, TEAM. SORRY.
Sarah
Which means I’m in West Virginia at a cabin with friends, dodging this post.
But I’ve arranged with the other AS women to swap my Monday spot this week for Friday’s spot. I know, I know. Everything’s topsy turvy. Just keeping you nimble and on your toes.
As a peace offering, I give you these: two recommendations for things that delight me.
1. A poem. (To explain where I’m at these days. Good goo, being 20 is/can be roaring.)
2. A book. (My favorite Columbus story. Also, it’s false. But so, so cool.)
Hooray for the Americas–and everyone who lived in them pre- and post-Columbus.
Sarah
Recently I have been listening to “Remember Lot’s Wife,” an address given by Jeffrey R. Holland, a member of the LDS Quorum of Apostles, to an arena full of BYU students. In this talk, Elder Holland sets out to explicate the short and quippy Luke 17:32: “Remember Lot’s wife.” Not a verse often quoted for its significance or lyricism.
(Lot, you’ll remember, is the nephew of Abraham, who, with his family, was ordered by God to flee Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities God decided He needed to destroy because, Elder Holland explains, God had “had as much as He could stand of the worst that men and women could do.”)
What Elder Holland says the verse means, at least here, at least in one context, is this:
Apparently what was wrong with Lot’s wife is that she wasn’t just looking back, but that in her heart she wanted to go back. It would appear that even before they were past the city limits, she was already missing what Sodom and Gomorrah had offered her. . . . In short, her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future. That, apparently, was at least part of her sin.
Elder Holland explains that sometimes our desires to look back to/go back to/yearn longingly for a past that will not—and should not—come again (or stay forever), is a way of not having faith. Of not being godly.
