"College isn't the place to go for ideas." --Helen Keller

Oh, I beg to differ, Helen Keller! These pictures are proof that college is the place to go for great ideas. If you could only see the thousands of others! Oh, sorry, that was in bad taste.
Helen Keller was blind.
So, the other night, I came home from a walk to find Jen alone in the bathroom, with a facial-cleanser beard, making faces at herself in the mirror. Just one of those impulses, I guess. But it looked way too fun to just giggle about it and go to bed, so I joined her and we took about 80 pictures and it never stopped being funny to us.
What a great weekend.
It's spring break here at the moment, so we've had lots of time to just be silly and lazy and eat lots of good food. Ashley and Kathleen are out of town, and we miss them, but to console us we have the company of Buddy the Rat! Our friend Christian is also out of town, and he needed someone to watch his pet rat while he was gone, so we're rat-sitting. Buddy is way cool. Here's a picture of him, hanging out on Annie's shoulder. And Annie looks like Amelie in this picture.

School was off Thursday and Friday, so it's a 4-day weekend. So far, we've:

Made and eaten chocolate trifle
Watched at least 4 movies (including The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night")
Made fake beards and moustaches and taken pictures of ourselves (but you already knew about that)
Slept in until 1:30 in the afternoon
Blatantly disregarded unneccesary chores
Gone on long walks
Talked leisurely while listening to music in the kitchen (although we do that a lot anyway, but these times it had a different quality since it was during vacation)
Hung out with our temporary pet rat
Cooked luxurious meals like chicken curry and scones and eaten them luxuriously
Had a slow-motion kung-fu death fight
Discovered new balancing games on The Orb
Read whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted
Discovered that Annie can actually RUN on all fours...as in on her hands and feet. Really bizarre-looking.

Isn't that a wonderful weekend? It's just so gosh-darn pleasant. I had to work for part of it--until midnight last night--but coming home has been like...not working. Um, wait, lemme think of another way to phrase what I'm trying to say. It's like coming home after school on the last day of the school-year. Even though you still had to go to school, while you're there, you don't mind, and when you come home, it's almost like you were never at school at all. Because all that matters is that you have endless days ahead of you, filled with a staggering amount of possibilities. And home is almost bursting with freedom and happiness and laziness and doing whatever the heck you feel like doing!
Yeah, its more like that.
Even though it's only a 4-day weekend. (Aside--love how "spring break" at BYU-Idaho is 2 days off of school.) We usually have really nice weekends in my apartment anyway. But it's pleasant to sit there and look over the last 3 days you've enjoyed and think that it's still not over.
This weekend has also included several fabulous realities. Two today, one special and one just silly, but I'll share them both. Silly first. Today I was on a walk and as I was passing a house, I noticed a flag-pole in the corner of the yard. It was in the corner closest to the street, so I also noticed the small plaque in front of the flag-pole. So of course I leaned over to read it. It said, in gilded letters:

"ON THIS SITE, IN 1879, NOTHING HAPPENED"

Isn't that great? I was so happy. Okay, now special. It was just really cool, and I don't know if I can do it justice in words, but I'll give it a try. We were watching a movie in the living room this evening, and the living room lights were off. I noticed through a crack in the blinds a brilliant orange color. Now, Rexburg is known for it's gorgeous sunsets, and it looked like one of those famous ones. So I went to open the door and take it in for a moment. But when I opened the door, it was like another world. It was a gorgeous sunset, all right, startlingly orange tinged with pink, spreading over the clouds and taking up the entire western sky. But we were looking at it through a filmy mist of softly falling snow. I can't describe what it did to the light, or what it felt like to be a part of it. It was like this crazy Wizard of Oz kind of moment. To walk through a darkened, blandly-colored house and open up the door to a dazzling, completely different world. It was so surreal, like watching the sun set on a different planet or something. It was really cool.
We also discovered this weekend that there's actually an incorrect way to use a stethoscope. Like, as in, if you put the ear-things in the wrong ears, it doesn't work and you can't hear anything.
I thought it was a lie, but my roomates a nursing student and has a stethoscope and we tried it and its true.
Totally, bizarrely true.
To all you Mormons out there, enjoy General Conference tomorrow!
Good night, and good luck. Over and out.

"Objection! The way he moved his lips happened in one of my nightmares." -Brant, "Comic Frenzy"

Hiya friends! Decided on a little change of template. I've tried to do this several times before, and somehow couldn't manage to keep it this way. I think it'll stick this time. I also added a link to my friend Carrie's blog. She's fantastic...go read what she has to say about the world. (Hey Carrie, if you're reading this, you're fantastic. And hey, you were there for the story of the Lava Springs adventure, told later in this blog. Good times, friend.)
Just for the record, the day I discovered the hair similarities between John Lennon and myself was a pretty cool day.
So remember in my last entry how I decided that I'd throw unjustified guilt to the wind and have a great weekend anyway? Well, the moment I decided that, things got ridiculously fun. I decided that The Adventure of Saturday Night would be better told than written, so click to hear the story. (It was apparently longer than allotted for an audio post, so it's in two separate ones. But it's a great story.)
Lava Springs Adventure Part I

Lava Springs Adventure Part II

It was certainly a memorable weekend, and one that I look back on with fondness.
Sunday was tons of fun, because it was, at long last, the first Playmill meeting! I'm not even going to try to describe how much more excited I am about this summer. I think its reached an indescribable level. Indescribable...? Did I spell that right? Aw, screw it. Looks good to me.
We ended the night by heading into Rexburg and taking headshots and group photos, which took a long time but it was tons of fun. My favorite moments were as follows. The guys were taking their group photo and David Walker was sitting in the middle of the couch and they were all getting into place, etcetera, when 5-year-old Maggie yelled "David! Rip off your shirt!" It was fantastic! I love that kid. During the Merrill family portrait (Maggie's family, they own and run the Playmill), Maggie was being a goofball and we were all laughing, and Patti finally said "I think Roger and Heidi were drunk when they conceived her!" Another fabulous moment. And as every fabulous moment seems to also need an awkward counter-moment, there were a couple of those too. Jeff (my boyfriend...weird, still not used to saying that) is also going to Playmill this summer, so he was there for all of these goings-on. Our photographer Travis was arranging all of us for the big group picture of everyone, and as he was placing people, he said "Okay, let's see, we've got two married couples...you two (JD and Melissa), come and sit next to eachother over here and...you two (Adam and Andrea), come sit opposite of them over here. And do we have two people dating? I saw someone holding hands earlier...oh, you (me) and you (Jeff), come sit next to eachother over here." Travis totally did it on purpose to make us feel awkward, but we were all laughing about it and went with it. Travis is an amazing photographer, and I can't wait to see how the shots turned out. As soon as they're up on the website, I'll put a link up.
Well, I've got a interview with the Rexburg Opinion Center today...wish me luck. I'm also in a directing final scene with a few friends, and I've got to be memorized by tomorrow, so I better go look that over.
To close, the immortal words of Douglas Adams on the logistics of time travel:

"The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk.
The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well."

May God bless you in all of your endeavors! All of you inspire me. Until next time, this is Liz, saying good night, and good luck.

If you ever feel down, just think that out of 200 million sperm, YOU were a WINNER!

Hello friends! Isn't this a crazy picture? I can't decide if it's darling or disturbing. I think a little of both. But it's a baby, so that makes it mostly darling. For some reason last week was like "Kathleen and Liz intense baby yearning week." I guess it's still sort of carrying over. Oh, babies! Cute, tiny, squishy babies!
This, so far, has been one of those weekends. I can't decide if it's been great or horrid. There's been lots of fun, but it's sort of been tainted by the fact that I've got this awful cold, and I feel really guilty about calling in to work today and then having fun. Somehow, on matter of principle, it seems like if you call in sick to work, you should be too sick to do ANYTHING...smile, laugh, eat good things, enjoy time spent with friends or roomates. It's a little silly, but I can't help but carry around this terrible weight of guilt. Should I feel guilty? I don't know. If I'm supposed to, I could repent somehow. But if not, I could just enjoy myself as much as I can with a chest-cold. I've almost reached the conclusion that since I can't figure out which would morally and ethically be the right thing, maybe I'll just take a leaf out of Slartibartfast's book. "I say hang the sense of it and try to keep yourself busy." Tentative plan of action: Attempt to ignore my guilt as it's mostly unjustified and have a good weekend. It is, after all, one weekend. And in the grand scheme of things, most of the time, you're dead.
Playmill Meeting is tomorrow! Finally! It couldn't come soon enough. I've been hanging out a lot with the kids who'll be up there this summer lately, and I just get more and more excited and more and more incredulous that I'm going to be a part of it. Tomorrow we're taking headshots, signing contracts, talking and somehow it's all becoming more and more real. How on earth did this happen to ME?
It's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately.
So, life is grand and congested and occasionally complicated, but generally sublime. I think I'll take a nap. Or listen to some Danny Elfman.
MMMmmm, yeah.
Love you all more than banana ice-cream!

"The one great sorrow of my life is that I was born caucasion." -JD Taylor

This picture is of a Comic Frenzy show, during one of the greatest rounds of the dating game ever. That's Brant as someone I don't remember, JD as a Mexican jumping bean, and Jeff as Christian. Genius.
Okay, the biggest news items are as follows:

1) There's this boy. And I like him lots. And against all odds, it's mutual. Hizzah! My sister and I are currently dating guys with the same name. How fun. (I feel I should disclose that they are actually two very separate people.)
2) It refuses to be spring in Rexburg.
3) Christian got a pet rat named Buddy.

Oh yeah, and there are some amazing people in this world. I just spent an hour or so reading my sisters' and all their friends' blogs. What incredible people! They just blow me away with their wisdom and wit and capacity for just about everything great. You all rock my world.
I had a lot more to say, but do I remember it? No siree. Oh, I was also going to mention that I have TB or something. I feel fine, but I can't laugh or talk for very long without coughing my lungs out, and my voice is generally much lower than usual.
Golly, it's 2am. I think blogging time is over. I think its sleeping time now. Or at least reading time.
I close with the deep, inspiring words of Ben Parkes from a Comic Frenzy show this weekend:

"Being dead is like being pregnant...you crave stuff."

"The heart has its reasons, that reason knows nothing of." --Pascal

What a full week it's been! Lots has been going on, but I don't know that I've got it all figured out well enough to write it all. So I'll just write and see what ends up coming out.
It's been a great full week, but a lot of that fullness came from confusion. And joy. And some more confusion. I've been staying up until all hours of the morning thinking about all kinds of things. Which is especially convenient because I work a 6am to noon shift for the next three days. Anyway.
Some confusion was eliminated by a little experiment I did tonight. I don't feel like going into detail on a blog, so if you wanna know the whole story, talk to me. I had a guess as to how the experiment would turn out, and I was actually right. I guessed that things wouldn't go well, and they didn't, but to my surprise, instead of being disappointed I was more just annoyed. Stupid boys who are hard to understand.
Hm. I don't feel like writing more about that. It's too vague without names and details, and now is not the time nor the place.
Other adventures this weekend, I nearly knocked a tooth out on a chair during stake conference on Sunday. I don't know exactly how it happened, but it hurt a lot and it was in the middle of a talk. We had conference in the Hart gym, so we were sitting in the stadium seats, and while trying to sit back down after a little trip to the bathroom. Somehow in the process, I tripped and sort of slid down 3 rows of chairs on my stomach, stopping only because my face hit a chair. My gums were bleeding, and I got all bruised. It was pretty fun.
Also last night, Christian hosted a sort of informal Playmill dinner for everyone who's going to be up there this summer. I have this to say about that: A) Christian is a really good cook. B) I am ridiculously excited for Playmill. We ate, sat around, looked at pictures from past summers, asked questions about working up there, and listened to dozens of great stories of adventures there. There were some really great ones, including the time Jon Peter fell through the ceiling during "Joseph," the time Ryan forgot his knife as Jud during the knife fight at the climax of "Oklahoma!," the wolf that almost came into the back door of the theatre, the time Christian was so in character that he accidentally swore onstage during "The Foreigner," and the time Chalise accidentally found herself onstage carrying a fire extinguisher during "Secret Garden." Things like that are bound to happen when you're doing 130 shows in one summer.
I don't think I have much more to say, actually. Kudos to all for being great people!

Oh boy, I got joy, I do! I do!

It starts in my heart and grows to my toes in a minute or two!
Okay, listen to this first and then read on, MacDuff!

That's right! I can't believe it! I'm so disbelieving and humbled and excited and exhausted. I'm exhausted because I haven't been able to sleep or eat decently since Friday or so for nervousness, and now I still can't do either for excitement and happiness! How wonderfully ridiculous. Feel free to check out the website and click on "Playmill Cast" to see who I'll be working with this summer. Some are familiar faces, some are brand new. I'm excited.
Anyhow, that's the big news and I don't have much else to say. Except that I really was dismayed by my towel falling into the toilet today. In an amazed kind of a way. I just laundered the silly towel yesterday!
Okay, well, I love you all! Bye!

Hey I think I discovered awesomeness

Hi everyone! I was just sort of browsing around the blogger website to see if there were any other cool things I could do to my blog, and look what I found! "AUDIOBLOGGING"! This discovery has brought me a great deal of joy. So here's my very first audio-blog. My voice sounds really weird and low, but that's because I haven't showered yet. So I sound sort of like Eddy Izzard meets Strongbad and lends Liz their combined voices. You know how it is.
I totally plan on using this far more often. Love you all!

Sometimes the mind, for reasons we don't necessarily understand, just decides to go to the store for a quart of milk.

I would just like to state for the record, which may possibly end up being a medical one, that when I started this blog, there was definitely some semblance of sense to it. I was trying to find a picture and a quote to show how close to losing my mind I am. But in the process, I found this picture and it made me laugh, and then I found this quote and it also made me laugh. Usually I like to have the two sort of go together, and the entry itself to carry on the theme, but the closest tie I can find is that goats produce milk.
Oh well. I guess a blog entry about me losing my mind should be somewhat nonsensical.
So I'm losing my mind. Or at least coming very close to doing so.
I still don't know about Playmill. They were supposed to let us know by today sometime, but everyone's still waiting. The strain is really beginning to wear on my nuerosis. Does that even make sense? Yes I say it does. So if I'm cast in Playmill, they'll let us know by way of phone call. My heart's all tired because every time the phone rang this weekend, it's done a somersault. AND there's a rumor that some mysterious person wants to ask me on a date, which would be more than fine with me, especially if my roomates' hypotheses are correct, so with that knowledge, my heart does TWO somersaults for every ring of the phone. Hopefully I'll know the outcome of at least one of those things by tomorrow. Keep you posted. In the meantime, here's to another day of cardiac acrobatics.
It's one in the morning. I hate to bother you all with my self-centered rantings. So I think I'll try and go to sleep. Perhaps one day after I've cracked, psychologists the world over can study this last wavering chunk of written insanity and try to figure out what went wrong, and then use it to cure other patients.

Albert Einstein is attributed with once saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I think that's true. Like checking the Playmill website over and over again and expecting to actually see the cast list posted.

And now let us kiss with tongues!....awlearghlearwlg!

After much debate and discussion, and the advice of several people, we have decided that "awlearghlearwlg" is the noise that kissing with tongues makes, according to Eddy Izzard, written out phonetically. I really wish there was some way to actually get you to hear the noise according to Eddy Izzard.
I would just like to say that that man is a genius. I'm madly in love with him, which just goes to show that I don't have a type that I fancy. All I require is whackiness and intelligence. It may seem like a broad spectrum but you'd be surprised. That's him in that picture up there. Handsome, eh? He may be a transvestite, he may swear a lot, he may only be 2 years younger than MY FATHER, and he may have said that Mormons are from Mars, but that pales in comparison to his genius, comedically and in general. And I don't think I spelled transvestite right. Oh well. I know at this point, you may be saying "But he's a transvestite! As a woman, that's sort of off-limits for you." But aaahhh-ha, that is where you are wrong. Eddy Izzard fancies women...NOT GAY.
And that's right, I'm using the British "fancy," and opposed to the American "like."
Anyway, enough of executive transvestites. Just go check out his website or something. To get a good feeling for his comedy, I recommend watching the "Flags" clip from "Dress to Kill," along with "Venn" from "Circle."
You know, it's really a shame that British slang sounds ridiculous in an American accent. I think I've wanted to be British since I was three. There are only 2 things that I've wanted for as long as I can remember: to be an actress and to be British. Lucky for me at least one life-long dream is possible. But back to slang, it just sounds stupid and, I don't know, "wannabe-ish" to try and use English slang when you were really born and bred in northern Utah. (Has anyone ever thought about how bizarre and somewhat vulgar that phrase is...? I mean, "born and bred"? How crass...) The fact that I can't, in every day conversation, say things like "fancy" and "loo" and have it sound legitimate is one of the great torments of my life. Good thing I've got this great web blog thingie, where I can write and say British things and people can just read it in a British accent and pretend that its how I actually talk.
Also currently on my list of things that annoy me are wonderful, attractive, intelligent boys who don't want to date me. I apologize if you don't want to hear me ranting, but it's my blog so bugger off if you don't like it. And points to me for "bugger." Actually, that's all I wanted to say on the subject, as there's not much more to it than that.
Moving right along, does anyone know how tragic it is to think you own Sonny and Cher's "And the Beat Goes On" and then discover that you DON'T? It's terrible. That's what just happened to me. But on the bright side, strawberry jell-o was on sale at Broulims, so I ate 3 containers in one sitting and that brought me great joy.
OMIGOSH, I can't believe I forgot to mention this super-important announcement until now! Guess who got his mission call???? CASEY HALLING!!!!!! Elder Halling will be serving in Portugal, reporting to the MTC in June! Hoorah and hizzah and sis-boom-bah! We're stoked for him.
Well, I guess after an announcement like that, anything else would seem anticlimactic. So I guess this is it. Rock on, yo.


Would you believe that the individual in the picture up there and the one in this picture here are the same person? Impressive, regardless of any stigma attatched to it.

It was so lovely beyond what you could see.

"There is a curious paradox that no one can explain: who understands the secrets of the reaping of the grain? Who understands why spring is born out of winter's laboring pain, or why we all must die a bit before we grow again?" --El Gallo, "The Fantasticks"

I've been thinking a lot lately about the law of opposition. It's so strange how we as people, as emotional beings, are affected by the things around us. How they make us feel, I mean. There are people dying of AIDS by the thousands, genocide and "holy wars," slavery, starvation, disease, natural disasters all over the world. And yet I, here in Rexburg, Idaho, can spend an evening laughing with friends and not have it cross my mind once. That somehow strikes me as terrible. What right do I have to be happy and carefree for one night when there are still people dying and tears being shed? Even on a smaller scale, I feel horribly guilty for laughing and being happy when I know that a dear friend is suffering in some way.
I guess the problem is that we're just not emotionally big enough to hold all the feelings we "ought" to. We're just people. Our minds and souls aren't big enough to carry Hiroshima, cancer, birthday parties, rock concerts, and hugs all at once. If we tried, we'd all be dead.
I wonder how it will all even out after out lives are done. If there must be opposition in all things, does that mean that the good and the bad we have no control over all end up being equal in our own lives? I realize it's a lot more complicated than that. This whole concept would be a lot simpler if I was purely existentialist. But that would ruin the fun of the philosophical journey, and life would be a lot emptier.
I was talking to a friend last night and we were discussing life's confusions and the ouches we have to go through. We know that we'll learn from it and have this great store of knowledge and strength later in life, but we'd really like to have all that without the pain. It would be nice to just fast forward every now and then to see what happens in the future, and to have the result of trials without the trials themselves. Although if it worked like that, there'd be NO POINT to life.
Okay, so there are my current hefty thoughts for this entry. Hope you enjoy pondering any questions it raises in your minds.

No Map
How close the clouds press this October first
and the rain--a gray scarf across the sky.
In separate hospitals my father and a dear friend
lie waiting for their respective operations,
hours on a table as surgeons crack their chests.
They were so brave when I talked to them last
as they spoke of the good times we would share
in the future. To neither did I say how much
I loved them, nor express the extent of my fear.
Their bodies are delicate glass boxes
at which the world begins to fling its stones.
Is this the day their long cry will be released?
How can I live in this place without them?
But today is also my son's birthday.
He is eight and beginning his difficult march.
To him the sky is welcoming, the road straight.
Far from my house he will open his presents--
a book, a Swiss army knife, some music. Where
is his manual of instructions? Where is his map
showing the dark places and how to escape them?

--Stephen Dobyns