Breaking Up is Hard to Do

I just got broken-up with for the first time since high-school.  I haven't had a ton of relationships in the past, but it's interesting to note that I'm usually the one doing the breaking.  I won't pretend that it hasn't been hard.  I've been very humbled, very emotional, and very loved by many good friends around me.  I took some time off from school. I've been doing a lot of writing, and a lot of thinking, and all of it has been good therapy.

I'm not posting this for attention or for sympathy, really, I think I'm out of the worst of it - definitely feeling more normal and happy. The reason I am posting this is out of gratitude.  Gratitude for the experience, for what I learned, and feeling like I did the best I can.  I have had a lot of regrets in regards to past relationships, but after this one, I have very few.  Also, and probably most importantly though, I want to express gratitude for the spirit and personal revelation.  I've tried very hard to stay close to the spirit through this, and to stay worthy of its promptings.  I have gained much understanding and comfort from my Heavenly Father and know that I will never be alone, even when I feel the most alone.  Thank goodness for my understanding of the plan of salvation and for a knowledge that everything happens for a reason.  I am so grateful for a loving Heavenly Father who always knows what I need better than I do.  This is a lesson I hope to never forget.

Happy Happiness

My mission trainer has been studying and posting about happiness lately, and so I shared some of my thoughts with her and she quoted me on her blog here!  It's kind of long, but well worth the read.  Enjoy!

On Dating

So....I was pondering tonight about how I wanted to blog, but how my brain felt pretty fried and I couldn't think of anything I wanted to talk about that would NOT come out as just a whine about my week and my tiredness.  Then I remembered a post I had written back in September but was too chicken to post, and then the day I almost got up the courage to publish it, Exodus asked me on a date and I never felt good about it.  But.....since Valentine's Day is this weekend, I am justifying doing a dating post. So - don't take this too seriously - remember I wrote this about a week after I started school last fall - and it is kind of interesting to see how the timing of this post all played out ;)

A picture for good measure....me and brother Bill-bo.  Just to show how desperate I was ;)

When I was in Utah last week I had a great discussion with Panda about our dating lives....seemingly nonexistent for me it seems.  Welcome to NOT Utah!  Back in our hay-day the 2 of us would unabashedly ask boys out ourselves.  We were strong girls!  We didn't need to wait for boys to ask us out, we could take the initiative and show interest!  However, eventually we learned that something happens to a boy when a girl takes the reigns.  They lose interest.  The cat and mouse game disappears. 

Someone once told me, "boys want to chase, and girls want to be chased"  and as much as I fought it, it holds true for me. And even though scores of boys have told me they would love it if a girl asked them out for a change, deep down they know it would never work out. ( it never worked out for me) Why is that?  Doesn't it seem a little unfair that we girls have to just sit around and wait for the boy to be interested? Why does a girl being in charge hurt their manhood so much? Why does a girl who doesn't run away become less desirable?

Well once I stopped pursing the man of my choice, the next lesson I had to learn was to not fall in love....well at least not fall in love until fallen in love with.  There is nothing more heart breaking than being in love with a boy that has no intention of loving you back....even if they care about you a lot.  This just comes with practice, I call it "crushing practice".  Crush on a boy until there is no hope, and then find another to crush upon. I have not yet mastered this, although I am becoming much more numb to the effects. 

So what am I doing about it?  I'm not pursing. I'm not crushing.  I'm trying to find validation from other sources because I don't need a boy to tell me I'm wonderful. Heck, I know that I am freakin awesome. I am making myself flirty and available...and workin on the being nice thing. I am not the cookie cutter, and I'm proud of it. Deep down I know that I don't want to be the girl who gets asked out by every boy, because all she gets are the shallow ones, but gosh it'd be nice to have a little more lovin up in here! 


P.S.  Don't get me wrong...dating in Spokomton is way way better than dating in Utard.  Way way better.  Way way less heart breaking.  Just much more infrequent. ;)

Dirty Jokes

Well....if I don't have time to blog, I'll at least use my unproductive lunch time to post some funny jokes rather than take a much needed nap...... anyways:

So, if you're Russian to the bathroom, and you're Finnish when you're done, what are you when you're in the bathroom?

European!!




This little boy is sitting in church next to his mom when he announces loudly that he needs to go pee.  His embarrassed mother takes him out, and explains to him that he can't say that so loudly in church and so next time he needs to go to use a codeword.  They decide the codeword will be "whisper" so next time he needs to use the bathroom he should say "mom I need to whisper".  The next Sunday however, the boy is sitting next to his Dad in church and needs to use the bathroom, so he says, "Dad I need to whisper"  So his dad, not knowing the codeword says, "OK just do it in my ear"

Guess Who is Not a Slacker?

I started blogging as a way of record keeping that wasn't a journal, since I have a difficult time with that.  It may seem lately that I have lost interest in this goal and/or have nothing interesting to say. Both of those are incorrect.  The truth is I'm drowning.  I think my bishop put it best last week when he related me to a duck  - he said that my feet were kicking furiously under the water, but I seemed totally calm and collected on the surface. (one of the nicest compliments I've ever received.)

Having said that, I'm not going to complain about my schedule, responsibilities, or workload, because it accomplishes nothing, and I'm sick of complaining.  Instead, here is what I have learned so far this month:

• Communication is important - even if it hurts sometimes
• Happiness is a choice (I keep having to learn this one huh?)
• I have a heck of a lot of stuff to be grateful for
• Even though I question my decision to go into this field often, in the end, I really am happy where I'm at, and happy with what I do.
• Heavenly Father is watching out for me....and probably carrying me a lot more than I realize
• I can multi-task.

I have heard from multiple techs that their 2 years in the program were the hardest of their lives. I definitely didn't think this was going to be as hard as it has been, (it's community college right?!?!) I feel like grad school would have been a walk in the park compared to this, but I'm doing it, I'm almost 1/3 of the way through, this is going to be the worst semester, and by golly, I can do hard things!

Dental Saga

Question:  What are appropriate things you would allow students to practice on you?

Being in a program where as a student I started taking x-rays on people 3 weeks after I started, I feel like I need to be more willing to be a guinea pig for students to practice their skills on.  That was definitely the thought process I had after I got an email for affordable dental treatments from one of my instructors....that and I don't have dental insurance.  So I signed up.  I hadn't had a cavity in years, so i figured I was safe.

Well, they didn't find many new cavities, just old fillings that had cracked and needed to be replaced.  They found 3.  I decided to get them done the week after finals, during Christmas break. Remember that day my car got totaled in the middle of the night?

Yea, it was that day.  I don't really want to go into the details, but they ended up actually replacing 4 fillings, and it took 4 hours, 4 hours of excruciating holding my mouth open, sore neck misery.  It wasn't a great day.  Well, by the time the anesthetic had worn off, I could tell they hadn't shaved the filling down enough, my bite was way off.  But they specifically said, if your bite is off, just come back at the beginning of next semester (3 weeks away).   Even though I had a great break, it was despite the fact that I couldn't bite anything on the right side, and had to be super careful with how hot or cold things were that I ate.  I called the dental program at SCC once school started again to get it fixed, and this is what the instructor said to me:

"Why did you wait so long to call me to get this fixed!?!?!  You shouldn't have waited so long, I would have come in to fix it over the break!  That must have been miserable for you, and it's not good for your teeth to be like that for so long!"

  Why thanks.  It's fixed now (it took her about 3 minutes and was painless)  And she totally remembered me as being that girl who was in the chair "forever". Well I at least hope that dental hygienist student passed her final.

Starting School Again

Well, another semester has snuck up on me.  I kinda of hate that I'm still in school sometimes (although after I graduated, I definitely was a proponent for staying in school forever) and am hopeful that someday (Summer of 2012)  I'll finally be done going back to school. The first day of class was...boring.  I managed to not fall asleep, mostly because we ended about 3 hours earlier than expected.  We moved our class into a new building, brand new constructed just for us ;)  super high tech, with our own WORKING x-ray tube....and there are not outlets built into the table for laptops.  Stupid place for SCC to cut corners in my opinion, especially since our department head specifically said that within a few years she wants it to be a requirement that students use laptops.....hmmm.  Good luck. 

   I wasn't too nervous about our first day back at clinicals...but maybe I should have been.  Let's just say it wasn't the best couple of days, on top of the fact that they tacked an extra hour onto our clinical time (who does 9-hour shifts anyway?)  I screwed up royally on a "pediatric" patient (I used the quotations because most sites wouldn't have considered them pediatric....but....) and I probably got a tech written up, for a stupid mistake.  But all-in-all after 3 weeks off, I probably shouldn't be so hard on myself.  I sure didn't kill anyone.

Here's me enjoying the snow in an igloo me and Bill-bo built

   I realized something today.....I pretty much hate winter.  I love the pretty snow, I enjoy some of the sports (especially if you consider snowmobiling a sport)  but I dislike the season.

  Here's why.  When I go to clinical in the morning....it's still dark.  When I get out of clinical in the evening....it's still dark.  So, no sun during the week = unhappiness.  Then....when I go to work on the weekends at night...it's dark.  When I get off work in the morning....it's still dark, and then I sleep through the day so that when I wake up....it's almost dark.   So, no sun during the weekend = unhappiness. One of my classmates decided that everyday when we leave, we're going to try and notice that since the days are now getting longer instead of shorter, we should try to notice the change.  I'm sure up for it.