Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, has been on heavy rotation for the past two days and have had some time to marinate.  I’ve always liked Beck, not all of his songs, but on each album I can usually find a few songs that I really like.  But I really like this album in its entirety.  It’s the first of his albums that I’m not skipping tracks.  I know this isn’t supposed to be his best work (according to the music critics), but I like it the best.  I think his collaboration with Danger Mouse worked out well.  This album makes me want to throw a party with good friends or go on a long road trip.

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Whenever I walk around the grocery store, I always take a strange delight in seeing misplaced products.  A box of Cocoa Puffs abandoned next to the Bounty paper towels, a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix left next to the jars of Ragu.  It’s interesting.  I wonder what happened in the aisle that triggered the abandonment.  I think it’s pretty inconsiderate of people because then the stockers have to put everything back in place but I have been guilty of this on a few occasions.  The only time it is really horrible is if it is a perishable item that needs to be refrigerated or frozen.  I’ve seen packages of cheese, cups of yogurt, and a bag of defrosting peas abandoned before.  That’s just plain wrong.

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On the flight back from Mexico, the husband was completing his first-ever Sudoku puzzle in the back of the in-flight magazine (after doing his customary giggling while flipping through the SkyMall magazine).  Puzzles like that don’t really appeal to me.  Neither do word searches and crossword puzzles.  I used to really love logic puzzles with the matrix where you put x’s and o’s in the box as you solve the problem.  That was probably the only puzzle I liked.  I was thinking about why I disliked puzzles and it reminded me of this one Sunday School teacher I had.  I can’t even remember what grade I was in but he would basically tell us a bible story for 30 minutes and then hand out these crossword puzzles with no clues.  That’s right, no clues.  Just an empty grid of boxes.  He would tell us to fill them out using real words and whoever was first to finish the puzzle would win.  And he only had ballpoint pens for us to use!  So there was no erasing.  The puzzles were impossible, but we kept quiet for the rest of the time because we were so busy trying to figure it out.  I think a few kids actually “won” but he never checked their answers because it was usually time to go and I suspect they didn’t use real words.  Maybe that’s why I don’t like puzzles.

We had the aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, and parents over for a BBQ on Sunday night and it was a ton of fun. Spending time with extended family always reminds me of my childhood.

Here’s a rare glimpse into my childhood.

I post these basketball trader cards not for self-proclaimed cute factor but because I recently realized that I cannot comprehend a time when I was less than five feet tall and only eighty pounds.  I don’t remember being that small.  I was terrible at basketball but enjoyed every second of every game I ever played in.  I begged my parents to let me quit piano lessons and use the money towards registering me for a summer basketball league.  I loved it when I got an accidental rebound and the coaches rewarded me with a play they drew up especially for me.  I loved getting rebounds.

When I think back about my childhood, I feel like my mind has always been the same.  I’ve always been thinking the same kind of thoughts and it’s been a pretty fluid transition from childhood to adulthood as far as my minds goes.  I don’t know if that makes sense.  I don’t have the mind of an eleven year old, but the thoughts I had at eleven years of age still make sense to me today.  My body, on the other hand, has always just grown and developed– seemingly independent from everything else.  Often against my will.

So many things have changed since age eleven.  And then so many things are the same.  I still love basketball, even though I do more watching than playing these days.  I still stay up late at night reading fiction– except now my reading is accompanied by the rhythmic breathing of the husband sound asleep next to me.  I still like to write, but now it’s typed on a blog instead of by hand in my bound journals.

I like holiday weekends because of the extended leisure time but I also really like holiday weekends because you get to skip the groggy Monday part and get right to the “oh, tomorrow’s hump day already!” part.

I remember in 2nd grade, whenever it was someone’s birthday, we would all take a half sheet of construction paper and write one sentence on what we liked about the person. The model sentence went like this:

I like <insert birthday person’s name> because <he/she> is _______________.

Then we decorated the paper with drawings, usually somewhat related to our concocted sentence.

Each student’s paper would be collected and bound together with a plastic spiral binding and the cover laminated so that by the end of the year, everyone had a book full of reasons why they were liked.

Pretty great idea, right?

The only downside is that inevitably, some students said that they couldn’t think of anything they liked about some of the students. So Mrs. Chafin, my second-grade teacher explained that we could write “because he/she is UNIQUE” which meant that they were different.  Which no one could really protest against.

So you could basically leaf through your booklet and find out which kids didn’t like you or didn’t have anything nice to say about you. Kind of a downer.

To this day, whenever I hear someone say, “That’s really unique” or “She’s really unique” I can’t help but think it’s just code for “I have nothing nice to say about that” or “I don’t like her.” Even if that’s not what they mean.

It’s terrible. Elementary school teachers, be careful what you teach!

I’ve created a new category called random memories. A lot of times while I’m driving or cooking or doing some other mindless task, I recall really random memories.

I do want to write a disclaimer in that they might not be accurate memories. I think over the years, memories have an odd way of morphing in your mind. Especially if you’ve told the memory and it’s changed a bit, the altered memory tends to stick.

Here’s an example:

I remember when I was really young my sister and I would love to watch 3-2-1 Contact.

This was when educational shows were still cool to kids.

In one particular episode, a group of kids had a jug of milk that they were taking turns shaking. Eventually, the milk turned into cheese. (This sounds a bit far-fetched to me, I haven’t researched the plausibility of this– but be a good sport. This is like a mini-memoir. Anything can happen!)

One of the girls opened the jug and spread the cheese/cream on a cracker. She then proceeded to shove the entire cracker into her mouth. While she was chewing, someone asked her, “How does it taste?” Her mouth was so full, she couldn’t respond. And when she tried to, it was disgusting to watch. You could see cheese and soggy cracker coming out.

My dad (oh yeah, he was there too) saw this incident and jumped on the opportunity to teach us. “See? This is why when you’re tasting something, make sure you don’t take too big of a bite so that you can still talk.”

I’m pretty good at interviewing. I think this is because I started receiving interviewing tips at a young age.