Friday Quotes

I'm starting my weekend now.


"Does anyone have a soda they're not using?"
-Grant

Me: Don't hit your brother, Eden.
Will: I'm not her brother. I'm a boy.

"I let someone else pack my pedal bag, so it's still sitting at Urban Lounge, probably getting Hep C."
-Randal

Me: You can have one of my fries, Noah.
Noah: I'm going to use this for long term energy.

"He's trust falling all the time these days."
-Garrett, as he looked vacantly out onto the beach at Hayden

"Makensy, we don't trust you. You're unAmerican. You hate cinnamon rolls, and you probably hate freedom too."
-Philip

I wake up with the old songs stuck in my head, and wonder where they came from.

I open my eyes and want to keep them shut the rest of the day. I think of Regina Spektor, try to make my lips move. Try to make my legs move.
"Like a soldier, one foot in front of the other."


I miss my routine, so I make coffee and slap my own face to say, "You can do this, you can pull it together for a few hours to go to work to pay your bills." 
I think that maybe it is the right time for this vacation to be almost over. Or at least, for the inversion to be over. Every time I leave the house, I say to myself that it can only last for so long.

I went back to my house tonight to eat egg rolls with Noah and my dad. Noah and I sat on laptops opposite each other, and made small comments. I listened to him hold his breath while he watched TV online, and let it back out periodically to inhale again. I thought how it was a little bit nice to have someone else in the room. We could talk or not talk for hours, the two of us.

Things will be good. I am so blessed to celebrate the birth of my Lord who saved me. Who picked me to spend eternity with Him. What a wonderful God.

"Good old babies."
-Noah, commenting on Isabel's fake baby that she has to take care of this weekend that was starting to cry

"Thank God for Vegas."
-Martha

I walked into my dark family room after every one had gone to bed and saw light reflecting off of Noah's glasses.
"Oh my gosh you scared me," I said. "What are you doing in here?"
"Well, I am really bored, and I can't find any of my clothes."
"What? What clothes are you looking for?
"Any of them."

This is a typical conversation with Noah.

"What? She only works 20 hours a week?" He said, a half hour earlier.
"That's not bad for a college student," I suggested.
"I work 24 hours a day," he said.
"No you don't," I said. "You play a lot of video games."
"Well I do work til twelve, and then I come home and play video games," he adjusted.
"Enjoy that while it lasts," I said.
"Oh, I plan to do it forever," he said. And for a moment I thought, So do I. Like a teenage boy, I will be living in my parents' basement. I thought, What is so wrong with staying still, with not marrying, with not procreating....when everything will turn to dust and it will be our time to sleep with our fathers in the ground, and after that to face judgment.

I suppose judgment is what is wrong with staying still.

I don't know all the answers, Sharon, but I find myself sleeping through the whole night now.

"Noah, not every disease is an airborne disease."

"If I cough in your mouth, you will get a disease."

-Emma, then Noah

"This might be long and boring. We don't know yet."
-Judy on film Hereafter

You might have heard Celisse and I pretending to be Judy while we watch movies. But I always have to laugh inside when I am actually watching a movie with the real Judy.

She does a thing of explaining to you what we usually already know, and she says this collectively, like we are just finding it out together. It's fun. Try it.

"Oh the girl is just now realizing she's in love with the guy."

Also, she falls asleep during movies a lot, like my dad, but she wakes up and then asks a whole bunch of questions, and then falls back asleep. Kind of like watching a movie with Noah, only he doesn't fall asleep. He just asks a lot of questions.

On a side note, I think Noah is going to turn out, somehow, to be the most wildly successful of all of us Tenenbaums.
He'll be the one ignoring our questions and phonecalls. And rightly so.

I looked down tonight at my hands, washing the coffeepot, and thought about each day that I do this. I like playing house.

And Judy was right. Hereafter was way long and boring. Too many plotlines, but not enough Magnolia-ness.

Well somebody has a hot date
and I think it's Noah. I think he smells like Usher. Whatever cologne he is wearing, there is a lot of it, and it is flavoring my Chinese food in the wrong direction.

To live here is confusing. And you may say, "Rachel, remember that time you said that one has to become a mind-reader to survive?" Well I did say something like that. I think it was pertaining to relationships.
But something you aren't prepared mentally for, is to hit your 23rd birthday, and to still be living with your parents, and jobless, and still going to college.
You aren't prepared to stand next to a skinny 20 year old in front of the library, and hear her talk about graduating next year and moving to Boston, and living a really exciting life.
And maybe you look at this skinny girl, and you think about how she loves Arrested Development and Joe Vs. the Volcano as much as you do. And you sigh, because this other girl, she gets up in the morning and wears a skirt and tights, and lives in the dorms, and takes a shuttle to Spanish. She is living out the Harvard dream instead of you. She is more Betty Draper than you, too.

It might be a heartbreaking moment. But you pull yourself onto the bus, and the guy next to you chats you up, and you still got it, a little bit. Dave is looking at you, wanting to know your phone number because you are a good wholesome girl, born in the Midwest and sensible in all the Prairie Home Companion type ways.

I close my eyes, lean my head against the window. There is a place in my mind, where I don't have to share a car. Where I ride my bike or the bus to Everywhere. Where I talk 12 credit semesters, and have 300 Bible verses memorized. Where I have never let a boy hold my hand. Or I have been married to a handsome black man, and we always iron our clothes, and at the end of the day go to Jazz games and drink Bud Light out of clear plastic cups. Depending on how I'm feeling on this particular bus ride.

But ultimately, I am happy here. I love my family. I enjoy the privilege of driving a car when it is inconvenient to take public transit. I am still going to an amazing university, and the "Harvard" girl sitting next to me heard the same Jorge Luis Borges words that I did today. But maybe it affected her differently. Maybe I am the lucky one.

This is how I know, that the twelve year old boy Noah, who lives in my house, is actually my brother and not a baby my parents found in the mountains being raised by wolves.

He comes home from an orthodontist appointment at 8:45am and says to my sisters, let's make mac 'n cheese. And they are saying, Noah, it is nine o clock in the morning, but I almost say, if you make some mac 'n cheese I will eat it.

That, and the fact that I was around when he was born.

she said the city's not for sleeping

uh. What I am mostly disappointed in is how quickly the fire and burning leaves your mouth after eating things with hazardous amounts of sriracha in them.

Also I am thinking that I like learning new things and meeting new peoples and having experiences and that this is a good time of life.
I hold on to things loosely, especially everything.

"Behind her skin is actually a boy."
-Noah at age 10, commenting on the olympics

A list. In a little while I'm sure that my thoughts will be more collected.
But right now I've just got a lot of fragments that I chew on while I'm staring out the windows of my truck waiting for the light to turn green.

-Noah cooked a bar of soap in the microwave yesterday
-I went to the Asian supermarket today. Whoa.
-short shift at work
-Project Runway Season 1
-drank so much pop and also had an Americano last night, and somehow I fell asleep?
-the sky is the same color as the road right now. Yuck.

Noah is in the room next door making sound effects ON TOP of the sound effects the game is making.

"Look, it's a penguin," he said.
"No, Noah, it's an egg," I answered him.
"No, it's a penguin, and it's French," he said, completely ignoring me as usual.

Its a funny thing that I got to sleep in til 7:47 this morning, and I thought I was going crazy. I figured that for sure, when I looked at my phone, it was going to say 11 o' clock in the afternoon.
I'm a bona fide worker now.
On the next schedule, she has me working full time for a couple weeks of it. That should be a nice cushion, I would imagine.
I signed up for the inVision retreat on Monday, having faith that God would somehow work it out with Debbie that I wouldn't have to work that Saturday. And either, they communicated really well, or she was just going to give it to me anyway. But I get to go! And I'm excited because the last inVision retreat got me really pumped up about what was going on in the church, and made me feel so unified with the other believers. So yeah. Win-win situation, there.

Side note: I'm almost completely sure by now that my parents are moving to Provo. They keep finding houses, and my dad has three job interviews. Something tells me that if none of these jobs work out, he'll just keep applying for more. This is Salt Lake and Fort Collins all over again. Except I'm older now, and them moving means I'll be out on my own.
And I think
I feel like
bring it on.

I felt slightly guilty, upon waking, that it was 11:53 a.m. and I hadn't gotten up with Noah to watch a black and white horror B-movie because he would be scared to watch one alone. I'm pretty sure that kid has seen Lord of the Rings and other graphic, possibly R rated movies, but old black and white Twilight Zone episodes scare him so bad he can't sleep.
I rubbed my eyes and heard the dogs barking really loudly and him yelling at them to be quiet, and I laughed out loud. I pulled the sheets up over my head and realized that I love my life. That life is beautiful even in it's consistent difficulty. Sometimes I think that God likes me just a little more than I deserve, because how else could I get away with so much all the time? Like skipping classes on Thursday for Kelsea's birthday.

Band practice was so much fun today. Learned Kelsea's new song and Steele and Kim came so we could work on our girl band for Women's Conference. Steele sat and ate communion bread and drank coffee while we rocked out with no drums.

Then I went up to Salt Lake to have a fancy dinner made by Chef Ben, and even with no rice wine, it was amazing. :) We watched the end of Mystery Men and all of Bottlerocket with Matt 1 and 2, Niels, Eric, and Phil, then Dan.

It was a good night, even though I had to come to work, and it was an amazing weekend of running around Utah and having a lot of good times with good friends.