I LARP you

Every Wednesday at Sugarhouse Park a group of like minded individuals come together and spend an hour or so LARPing. For those of you who have been living under rocks LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. Basically it means that a bevy of people dress up in actual armor and beat on each other with fake swords. Every week, weather permitting, this happens, and every week I sit and watch. I don't watch them because I want to mock them or belittle there passion like so many passerby's who stop and gawk. I don't watch them because I secretly want to construct and then wear my own chain mail and whack others with a foam spear. I watch because I love watching; I think it's supremely interesting and quite cool. Not cool like Freddie Prince Jr. in any teen movie ever cool. Cool because I feel like if I asked any of them why they were there, in the 90 degree July weather every week their answers would be something like this.

"Well Jessica, we come out here and do this because this is what we love. Because for a few hours every week we get to connect with other people who share our interest. We get to connect with a time in history that is awesome but long since past. We come here because at this place in this time we can forget our worries and our day jobs and truly be ourselves. WE come here to embrace our passion instead of denying it. That is why we come here."

And to me the fact that they are willing to come, risk embarrassment, and bodily harm all to do something they really love doing is extremely cool.

Ben Folds and the Deathly Hallows part 2

Usually Thursdays aren't the highlight of my week. I mean to be honest Thursday is probably one of the most over looked days. Most weeks it's just the day before Friday. But not this week. This week Thursday was the highlight. This week on Thursday so many of my dreams came true. First I went to see Ben Folds live with my dad. It was awesome. Ben Folds is amazing live and he is witty and clever and he made a Ke$ha song classy. He also had a super hot bass player, with the moody hair and the slight awkwardness and musical skills and the yeah. All in all one of the best concerts I've been to. THEN I got to go see HP7.2 with my friends. Actually I wasn't actually with them because we bought our tickets separately and I ditched them to sit in the middle of the theater. Seriously I was in the exact middle of the theater. It was a thrilling experience. I laughed, I cried, I fell in love with Neville Longbottom. Basically my life is complete. And basically that was my Thursday. Feel Jealous that yours wasn't as cool as mine.

Bumps and bruises

Good news folks the upbeat piece promised after my last horribly depressing/long winded/soul searching crap-o-post is here. Thank heavens.

So I just impaled my second toe on a tooth pick. Yeah. I was trying to be all productive and clean my room, and I went to pick something up and BAM! Searing pain rushing through the pointer toe on my right foot. I look down to see half a toothpick looking up at me from said toe. WTF! I mean it's a tooth pick. And it wasn't even sharp end in, it was the splintered end of a broken toothpick. Who would have thought that possible? Yet here I am, a few minutes later bandaging my toe wondering if I still have remnants of tooth pick in my toe. That is when I realized that this is really just the latest in a recent string of bizarre self inflicted injuries. Seriously I don't know how I do it, and how my body has not just quit on me yet. Don't believe you, well here is a detailed list of all my the injuries I have acquired in the last month or two.

1. Burn on the inside of my right leg. I bumped the exhaust pipe on my dad's motorcycle, Stan, whilst trying not to spill milkshakes upon dismount. For the record I didn't spill a drop.
2. Parallel bruises on my left leg. The cause is still a mystery. I think it was from mowing the lawn, but I'm not entirely sure. How does one bruise ones thigh while mowing the lawn? What can I say, I guess I'm an aggressive mower.
3. Bruised shin. I know this doesn't sound that whacky, but I got it from tripping up the stairs. Yes, up them.
4. Scraped knee. I thought there was one more step in my basement and instead of just doing that weird trip thing like most people I ate it. Hard.
5. Scrapped up wrist. I found out my mirror had sharp edges the hard way.
6. Bruised cheek. I was bending into my car to get something and somehow rammed my face into the corner of the door with a large amount of force. People asked me if I was being abused, and if I won the fight. Yes, I am my cars bitch, and no my car won the fight won't let me forget it.
7. Thats all I can think of recently, but I also have scars on my leg from dropping an iron on my leg, on my elbows from tripping while playing fugitive and from trying long boarding. And am pretty much constantly discovering mystery bruises.

So the moral of this story is that I'm pretty sure that I'm either going to develop skin that can withstand bullets or I'm going to die young in a freak accident involving ice cubes, a very sharp spoon and an army of hummingbirds.

California, but sadder

*WARNING this blog goes from mild ridiculousness, to nostalgic wishfulness, to serious life appraisal. All those looking for witty banter about the worlds problems skip this post. If you don't care about my life's problems (which I don't expect you to) skip this post. Also it's all sort of stream of consciousness-y. Which is not the best or most understandable writing style, but the easiest for me to just do. So really don't feel that you have to read this. But you can. You have been warned*

If you're reading this I assume that you read my blog, which is weird to think about because apparently people do read this blog. However I'm going to keep pretending you don't read this blog so that I don't feel self conscious about ranting all the time and having the people who evidently read this blog think I'm an angry person, which I'm not, I just sometimes feel the need to rant about things that bug me and what better place to do it than on a blog that nobody reads. Right? Right. So back to my initial point, if you are reading this, which I'm assuming you're not, I'm assuming you've read my previous posts specifically the one about my spring break in California and its high levels of awesome. If you haven't read it do so now, or don't, I don't care. Anywho the moral of that story was that California is awesome and I had an epic time with no sadness involved.

This past weekish I went back to California for the marriage of Chris and Kristina. It was beautiful, but that's not the point. The point is that there was a lot more sadness this time around. Seriously even when I was happy I was sad. I really didn't understand it. I mean I was IN California, the state of my heart where I am meant to live forever. How could I be sad? I wasn't sad last time. Was Utah starting to brain wash me? There was some panic. Don't worry though I figured it out. Want to hear my conclusions? Well you get to. When I went back for Spring Break it was like a greatest hits reunion tour. Everyday was jam packed with awesomeness. Every waking hour was spent doing all the fun things that California has to offer. It was like a salve on my wounded Cali-sick heart. It showed me that all my friends still loved me, and that the state still loved me. It was perfect because thats what it was planned to be.

This time around it wasn't like that. Every minute wasn't planned. It was like I was living my old life again. Like I had spent the last year on pause and someone had finally gotten around to un-pausing me. I spent everyday just doing things that I did when I lived there. Going to campus, chilling with my old dorm buddies, chilling at an apartment, strolling through Westwood. And I realized that it felt so right doing all those things, but also kind of wrong. Because the thing about being paused for a year is that when the big hand from above hits play you don't feel like you missed anything, but you did. Everyone else has spent the last year living while you've been frozen. Things change, not drastically, but enough. Enough that I had to realize that LA California is not my life anymore. Everyone there who knew me still knows me, and loves me, and welcomes me back with open arms, and its great but not the same. I'm a visitor. To them I'm a temporary distraction and to me they're what I want my life to still be. It's no ones fault. It's just how life goes. I'm sure it's happened with some of my friends from high school. The difference is I don't care about my high school life. That ended, I was glad, I let go and moved on. I haven't moved on from California yet. My life in California is still something I want and crave. It's like that stupid ex you just can't get over because nothing else has measured up yet. You think you've gotten over it but everything is compared to that ideal. And then you realize that you're life has been in a holding pattern, but what can you do?

This weekend was the realization. And hopefully it will help me to get over California. Hopefully I will stop waiting for things to be just as good as they were in California. Things in Utah are always going to be different, but does that mean worse? Does that mean I have to just keep waiting for California style living? NO! No it does not. So from this day forward I start getting involved in my life. Or something like that. At the very least I hope that I can be ok with the fact that Utah is not California, and that California is not waiting for me.

Sorry that got a little heavy into the where my life is going, and all my problems and that. But this is something I had to work through, or some cheesy junk like that, and I promise that my next post will be both light and witty.