Texts that made me LOL.

In the past week, I have experienced several hilarious text conversations. Because my phone is lame and is constantly telling me that I need to delete my messages in order to receive more, I am documenting those conversations on here so I can always remember them and so my phone will stop whining at me.
So here they are:

Conversation #1: Co-Worker Collin

Collin: [gross picture of a bleeding, sliced eye]

Me: Ewwwww. Why must you send me these gruesome pictures?

Collin: It's from one of my textbooks haha

Me: You poor unfortunate soul.

Collin: In pain, in need. I'm not a very busy woman, though.

Me: Haha oh but you are, Collin. You truly are.

Collin: Did you get that I was doing little mermaid?

Me: Haha yes of course I did, Collin! How dare you question my Disney song repertoire.


Conversation #2: Childhood–Present BFF Ashley

Me: Earth to servant, this is queen. Wilk plan is a go.

Ashley: On my way! My carriage should be arriving there soon.

Me: If by your carriage you mean your wooden cart pulled by cows.


Conversation #3: Rambunctious Ryan

Ryan: Pizza is going to be at 7:45. By the way.

Me: Sounds goody good good good.

Ryan: Goog

Ryan: ...

Ryan: Good

Me: Goooog! Haha. Is that how you say "good" in your native troll language?

Ryan: No, it is actually how I say I'm going to burn your house down tonight...with you tied up in the attic, next to an equally doomed sloth with a Cara t-shirt on (in honor of human Wednesday). Ours is an odd language.

Me: Hahahaha! Oh dear me. May God have mercy on my soul.


Conversation #4: Mirthful Mother

Mom: Home safe?

Me: Haha yes. That was a little delayed.
(She sent the message about two hours after I had already arrived back to my house.)

Mom: Your response or my inquiry?

Me: Haha your inquiry of course.

Mom: Oh haha to you.

Me: Let me laugh mother, let me laugh.

Mom: I am just thinking that I am so funny, so child you let your mother laugh or at least just think that I am funny.

Me: I do think that you're funny! That's the whole reason I was saying haha so much.


Conversation #5: Fretting Father

Dad: Do you understand that it is dangerous to stay logged into Facebook even when you're not using it?

Me: Yes, I always log out when I'm done using it.

Dad: I just read a story about a college boy that gained control of the camera on several teenage girls' computers and took pictures of them nude. He tried to use the pictures to blackmail them. Google "hack Facebook accounts" to see how easy and dangerous it can be. The only way you can be safe is when you're not connected to the internet at all, so limit your exposure!

Dad: And do you close your laptop when you're not using it?

Me: Well that's super creepy. Yes, I always close my laptop and put it away in its case.

Dad: I thought so. Good job.


Well, now I'm off to delete these from my phone. I've noticed that I use "haha" a lot while I'm texting. Hopefully that's not annoying to people, but it probably is because I even started to annoy myself just reading how many times I wrote it in those texts. I guess I just want people to know when they make me laugh. Maybe I should just use a dollar sign or something to signify that I am laughing instead of saying "haha" all the time. That'd be funny.
The money is with the funny.
Haha.

An adventure is...

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” 

—G.K. Chesterton, “On Running After One’s Hat”

Eat. Pray. Love.

About a month ago I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love. I actually really liked it, even though I had my suspicions after watching the movie. Although I don't think I will be embarking on an international, year-long adventure of self-discovery any time soon, there were others things from the book that I want to apply to my life. 

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“Of course you were,” Felipe said. “You were young and stupid then. Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we’re doing? Do you think there’s any way humans can love each other without complication? You should see how it happens in Bali, darling. All these Western men come here after they’ve made a mess of their lives back home, and they decide they’ve had it with Western women, and then go marry some tiny, sweet, obedient little Balinese teenage girl. I know what they’re thinking. They think this pretty girl will make them happy, make their lives easy. But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”

“I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teaching about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like a fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”

“Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”

The dentist is not my friend.

First off, I realize that I totally failed at writing episodes from my study abroad experience on here. It was a nice thought. Truly, it was. But realistically, it's not going to happen anytime soon. I am a busy bee. And also sometimes a lazy bee. But, perhaps, one day when I have mountains of time that I have no idea what to do with, I will return to this project and give it the justice it deserves. And when that time comes I will probably be elderly and decrepit and won't even remember what my name is, let alone the amazing things I experienced in Europe.
Alas.
Such is life.
So now, rather than expend this energy and time to record my glorious time in Europe, I am going to write about my recent experience at the dentist's office. Judge me. I don't care. It was horrible. And I need to get these negative emotions out of me somehow.

I used to have faith in the dentist. In my younger years, it was this faith that lead me to wander back into the caverns of his office as a believer, following and blindly trusting the smiling woman who wore blue pants and dangled face masks from her neck. She was an adult, she was a professional, and she was being nice to me. What wasn’t to trust? 

She led me to the chair and I sat down, happily. She leaned it back slowly and tied a humiliating blue napkin bib around my neck. Then, in conjunction with her superior, the dentist himself, she commenced the torture sequence. And I was glad for it.  As long as they gave me a free toothbrush and a puny package of floss at the end, all of this torture was fine by me. 

I was such a child then.

But I am no longer a child. And for this reason, my experience yesterday at the dentist’s office was different. When the smiling blue pants woman leaned back my chair, rather than submissively accept what was happening to me, this time, my brain began to question things. 

“What are you letting her do to us? You don’t even know this woman.”

“Quiet,” I told my brain. “It’ll be fine. She’s a professional.”

But as she slapped the enormously heavy mat over my chest and vital organs, and stuck the x-ray  machine right next to my mouth, I began to think my brain had a point. 

“There’s a reason this giant bib is so heavy it’s practically crushing our lungs,” my brain whispered. “It has to be thick enough to protect our vital organs from the poisonous radiation.”

With horror, I realized my brain was right. And then I realized something else.

“But what about you, brain?” I asked. “You aren’t protected?”

“Exactly.” 

Despite its position of being practically in direct fire of the radiation machine, my single most important organ, my brain, was left protected only by my meager skull. 

Something about this seemed wrong. If getting fancy teeth x-rays meant taking a free tumor home in addition to the toothbrush and floss, then I was out. No, thank you. That’s what I say to free tumors.

Yet, I did nothing. I just sat there, helplessly and mindlessly staring ahead as the smiling woman crammed a peculiar and pink plastic contraption into my mouth. After she felt satisfied with its position, she commenced to run back and forth from the computer to my mouth, snapping x-ray after x-ray.

After what seemed like years, she finished taking the tenth x-ray.

“All done!” she said, withdrawing the pink thing from my mouth, my drool stretching and clinging to it like a child being left at daycare. 

“Where are you from?” she asked casually as she wiped drool off of my face. “You have an accent, are you from Denmark?”

For a moment, I just stared at her. I was stunned to silence. 

“No,” I managed to squeeze out.

She couldn’t possibly be serious. Yet she was.

“Well, what country are you from then?” 

So it had come to this.

“Um . . . America?”

“Oh.”

She then tried to soften her invalid assumption by telling me the way I spoke made me seem exotic and exciting, but all I gathered from the exchange was that I must have some sort of speech impediment. 

Later, the dentist came in and informed me that I had two cavities. He described them to me in unnecessary detail, pointing to various screens displaying the fancy x-rays that had been taken earlier. When he finished, he turned and faced me.

“If you want, we can just get it done and take care of them now?” he said, his bloodshot eyes staring into my soul like I was a specimen he couldn’t wait to dissect.

“O.K.,” I said.

My brain was flabbergasted. “Have you lost your mind?” it screamed.

But it was too late. The first domino of the torture sequence had been tipped.

First, they flashed me a large number representing how much this torture was going to cost me. Then they made me sign a paper saying that yes, I will pay them this exorbitant amount of money, in full, or else. 

After I signed the paper, without warning, they laid me back, strapped a mask to my face, and told me to breath in deeply to allow the laughing gas to rush through my lungs. The gas began to take effect, and, right at the moment when all of my troubles began to slip away, a new woman shoved another clipboard in my face.

“Read it and sign,” she said.

 I read over it quickly, skipping words and phrases here and there. There is a possibility of allergic reaction. There is a possibility of seizure. There is a possibility of permanent facial nerve damage.

And with a joyful flourish, I signed the paper, promising that whatever happened, it wouldn’t be the dentist’s fault. What a joke. What a very hilarious joke.

But despite the fact that I had just surrendered my life into the dentist’s hands, I wasn’t bothered at all. Laughing gas is quite the quality concoction. It put all of my troubles and worries to sleep and I began to feel a sleepy happiness filling up my chest. Uncontrollable laughter started bubbling out of me, but, with the dentist’s hands crammed down my esophagus, it came to an abrupt and painful halt. I stopped laughing and started choking. The dentist noticed this.

“Breathe through your nose,” he said, grabbling another torture mechanism from his table. “Deep breath through your nose.” 

Panicking, I did what he said before I realized this was just part of his evil plan to get me so plastered by laughing gas that I would forget I was even choking in the first place. 

I felt like shouting, “I am a human being!” but I couldn’t. 

The dentist was shoving a grinding machine down my throat and the only sound I could hear was the grind of my precious teeth and the only feeling I felt was ouch.

Forty-three agonizing minutes later, it was finished.

When they finally raised the chair up and took off the laughing gas mask and the bib, I was so happy I didn’t even care when they failed to give me a free toothbrush. 

I got up from the chair, stumbled out to the receptionist’s desk, and paid her a small fortune for the torture I had just experienced. She smiled and pushed a receipt toward me.

“Sign here,” she said.

 I signed and headed down the stairs and out to my car, my mouth crying all the way. 

“Never again,” my brain said, through the fog of the remaining laughing gas and the throbbing complaints of my mouth. “Never again. Next time, you let me make the decisions.”