oh britney*

According to Wikipedia, “Hit Me Baby One More Time” came out in 1998. That would make this year the 10 year anniversary of Britney Spears’ debut into pop culture. Let’s consider it appropriately celebrated by the release of “Womanizer”.

Confession: I LIKE this song. I do. I tried fighting it. But now I get chills every time I hear it. I just listened to it three times in a row.

Womanizer, womanizer, woman womanizer, womanizer . . .

For those of you who don’t read tabloid headlines while checking out at the grocery store, here’s a summary of Britney highlights of the last ten years:
• Britney releases “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” 10 years later, 70% of population still wondering what this phrase means, 30% know and won’t tell.
• Britney dates and dumps Justin Timberlake. She didn’t like his gorilla pad. Oh wait, I mean brillo pad.
• Britney gets a valuable diamond from the bottom of the ocean.
• Britney gets married in Vegas. Britney gets annulled in Vegas.
• Britney dances with a python.
• Britney kisses Madonna.
• Britney marries K-Fed. Has 2 kids. Does not put them in car seats.
• Britney learns that her head is not very round. Because she shaves it.

So happy anniversary. Here’s to 10 years of making me dance in front of the mirror.
Even if I am slightly ashamed to admit it.

*I REFUSE to make the title of this post a play on words from a britney spears song. But if i were going to do that I would probably use one of these stellar titles:

-email my heart
-soda pop
-not a girl, not yet a woman
-bombastic (10 bucks says she doesn't know what this word means)
or of course...
oops, i did it again
-

lizard psychology

This is Norm. Squint, you can see him.



This is Norm's penthouse.



He resides in our living room.

For those of you who don’t know how Norm came to us, let me tell you. Norm, the lizard, came in the mail. U.S. Postal Service to be exact. It’s a miracle really.

Norm faked his own death twice this week.

I don’t have the most affection for Norm but I thought I’d check on him one morning. He was sprawled against the glass, eyes closed, slightly blue. Dang. The sight of the dead lizard was upsetting so I turned his bowl around to eat my Cranberry Almond Crunch in peace. When I went back over Norm had changed position (although still sprawled, shut-eyed, and blue). So he wasn’t dead after all.
The next day, Sierra texted me to say that Norm was dead for sure this time. The roommates shook his house, poured water on him, and did many other obnoxious things to verify it. But once again, Norm deceived us, came alive and crawled on a branch.

I don’t understand Norm.

Here are my theories,

Norm:
a. really is nearing death and these are just signs of illness. Or of hunger because we haven’t fed him in awhile.
b. hates us because he’d rather be named Dragon Slayer.
c. is actually a girl. And tired of his/her plastic wrap ceiling. Wants to call Hillary Clinton.
d. was awake when we watched Count of Monte Cristo and learned that faking your own death is a sure way out of captivity.
e.is haunting us with his ghost when he leaves consciousness. This explains why food randomly goes missing from the freezer.

So who knows if the days of Norm are numbered or not. But one thing’s for sure, cats aren’t the only ones with nine lives.

The Wal-Mart Problem

Anyone who knows me knows that I LOVE food. I want to marry it. My love for food is maybe only challenged by my love for Harry Potter and/or listening to Disturbia on the way to school. So naturally, I love the place where all food comes from: the grocery store. The average American consumer probably doesn’t enjoy going to the grocery store, but for me it is a pilgrimage to the Mecca of all things edible. There are aisles of possibility at the grocery store.
So much to my dismay, I was peer pressured into grocery shopping with my roommates at Wal-mart. I hate Wal-Mart. Besides the unusually high ceilings and the pervading sense of gray, I have strange feeling that every time I walk through those automatic doors I am contributing to some corporate conspiracy that is taking over small businesses worldwide.
Obviously, the only way to combat this spoiled shopping experience was to be decidedly grumpy the whole time. It worked for quite a while: all through the produce section (too many peaches, too little apples) and into the bread aisle (no wheat to be found). But then . . . I saw it. Post Select Cranberry Almond Crunch. The best thing that ever came in a box. There it was, the gem of all cereals, for the very low price of $2.78. Normally it was in the exorbitant range of $4.99, but, here, the miracles of capitalism brought this joy into the range of my college budget.
It was a dilemma indeed. Because I still hate Wal-mart. I do. But in that moment I had to resist the urge to run gleefully to check out with a cart full of Cranberry Almond Crunch. So, folks, we have a Wal-Mart problem. Is it cheap prices and bowls full of cereal . . . or gray, oddly echo-y, crowded, and monopolizing? The jury’s still out.

Silver Linings

After a bit of a nearly-quarter-life crisis, it has been my goal to become an inherent optimist.

My new philosophy of life was partially cemented by an episode of Friends, where a little girl played by Dakota Fanning frankly reminds an unhappy Ross that “whiners are wieners”. Yes, it came from a Friends episode, I know, but still, the principle is true (and the phrase is catchy).

With this new goal I’ve noticed that the world is a beautiful shade of silver. Not gray. Silver. The phenomenon of cause-and-effect has shown that even the most disastrous causes can prove to have angelic effects. My sister (go Beck) recently noted how Hurricane Ike, despite the troubles, is giving the Church some spotlight. Not finding a job I wanted allowed me to change my major to something exciting. My window doesn’t have a screen, but at least now I can launch projectiles onto unaware passersby.

Life is good. Maybe even metallic-ly so.




2 Nephi 10:20

The Rules of Unneccessary Freak-Outs

Since our friend Tropical Storm Edouard completely ruined my beach plans, I am left to sit here in my living room, complain about a blister, and ponder the human tendency to FREAK OUT. Good old Edouard has reminded me of another tropical acquaintance I once had, Hurricane Rita, circa 2005. Rita showed me what happens when the world freaks out. For those of you who may not be familiar with that yet, this is what happens: People wait in a 2 mile long line to get a tank of gas, pay $20 for bottled water, and wait in traffic moving at the pace of 2 feet/min. All in all, most of this turned out to be completely unnecessary. The hurricane proved not even strong enough to propel my brother’s skateboard-kite hybrid and all those who ended up stranded on I-45, with no gas, felt like suckers for missing a 6 day vacation. Granted, Hurricane Katrina had just happened so nerves were a little on edge, but then again New Orleans’ peripheral looks like a contact lens. So anyway, this left me with my first rule of freaking out:

Freaking out when a hurricane is coming and you live in a bowl: OK

Freaking out when a hurricane is coming and you live on a cookie sheet: not OK

Moving on to example 2 of the freak out instinct. This morning during my scholarly scour of the Houston Chronicle, I came across a peculiar showcase of human nature, “145 Die in Northern India During Stampede at Shrine.” My first thought: Whoa. I guess those cows aren’t so sacred after all. But upon further examination, I realized this was not a stampede of cows or other such quadrupeds, but of HUMANS. A HUMAN stampede killed 145 people. That’s 29 basketball teams, or 20 mini vans, or 5 classrooms of kids, or in other words a LOT of people. Apparently, a rumor quickly spread that there was a landslide so the Hindus visiting this shrine (located on a cliff) went completely berserk. People were pushed off the edge and/or trampled resulting in the deaths of mostly women and children. (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5922320.html or for a similar story see Alma 30:59) But in the end, the only avalanche was the one of panicked pilgrims trying to run away. It’s shocking to think this many people died because of . . . nothingness really. So here’s rule 2 of freaking out:

Freaking out when you may trample small Indian children: not OK

Freaking out when you may trample apostates named Korihor: OK

All this caused me to reflect on freaking out in my personal life. Apparently, it’s something I do often. However, I feel my occasional hyper ventilations are very often deserved (i.e. anytime I’ve had to go ice skating) and in the end, when I realize the problem was nowhere near as big as I made it to be, it was much easier to deal with (except for ice skating, that’s still a big problem). So I suppose hear is my final rule of freaking out:

Freaking out when it results in death, destruction, carnage, chaos, paranoia, etc: not OK

Freaking out when it results in anything else but the previously mentioned problems: OK!!!

Or at least in my personal, prone-to-freak-out, opinion :)

just a thizzle my nizzle: an only slightly hypocritical essay on pop culture

I, very unoriginally, have an obsession with black people. Especially the thug/life-50 cent type. The affinity for the Afro crowd is so cliché I almost considered giving it up at one point. But this phenomenon spreading through white middle class suburbia is hard to resist. For some reason, me and my peers are always trying to one up each other on our street cred (of which we really have none) and become more like our brothaz [sic]. It’s all fun and games when we jam Young Jeezy and strive to use “gat” in regular conversation, but I’m beginning to think this perceived cultural appreciation is simply racism in modern form.

Even now, I’m not sure what is that intrigues me exactly, but I can trace my slighted obsession back to the day I left Houston, TX. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: a truth I learned while immersed in white bread Thousand Oaks, CA. My love became absolute when I announced at a Young Women’s sleepover that I “really liked black people” and then the super cool Mia Maids delivered an issue of Slam magazine to my house. Moving back to Houston I went to a school with a 30% minority population, at least according to shoddy yearbook facts (they also claimed we only had 200 Asians . . . right . . .) I learned true R.E.S.P.E.C.T. when I got shoved by a shorty in the hallway for moving too slow. I learned there was one corner of the courtyard you just didn’t stand in unless you wanted to get doghoused (definition still unknown). What I never learned, however, was whether these people created the stereotypes or the stereotypes created them. It was hard for me to think anything but the former, when girls like Ufoma and Shameeqwa* wore their “apple bottom jeans and the boots with the fur” to class and made consistent C’s.

Enter Marti, a fellow coworker during my summer of temporary employment. Marti was an older black lady who liked to talk. She started her life story by relating to me how she’d been on food stamps, was currently on disability pay from the government, and had no husband. Just as my eyes started to glaze over, thinking that I’d heard this sob story before and it probably had something to do with the giant sitting in the room named Race, Marti’s story took a different toll. She had a college degree, was a Republican (gasp), liked to read Greek philosophy, and had previously been an international government employee until congestive heart failure and a run-out husband (who was white) left her broke. Marti started talking about how disappointed she was in her daughter: a musical genius, soccer star, and young mom who was throwing it all away to make it as a rapper. She wished her daughter would stop speaking “ebonics” and start speaking English. And this got me thinking. Maybe I’d got that chicken—and—egg situation mixed up after all. Maybe the stereotypes were creating the people. It’s not so hard to believe, since every time I turn on the radio I am reminded that “shorty wants a thug” or that it’s normal to “bag you like some groceries” (ew, seriously, who gets away with saying that? Answer: Young Jeezy, who is one of my least fav people ever). I can only imagine that some of my fellow classmates at Klein High were acting the way they had been indoctrinated to, through what they voraciously defended as their “culture”.

So here’s my point: kudos to all those who use rap as an art form and not as a way to capitalize off an already downtrodden ethnicity. Because ever so quickly the “culture” of thugs, drugs, and ho’s is finding its way into white mainstream America where it may permanently settle down. Can’t we embrace the culture that is actually culture? Like, I’m thinking, Diana Ross, Langston Hughes (my favorite poet to date, which is only partially due to the fact that his poems are short), Miles Davis, Scott Joplin, and even Talib Kweli (a cut above the rest of the rappers, in my opinion)?

In the words of my aforementioned favorite poet:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America

*names have NOT been changed