Before the trips

I am sitting in the intern office printing off various itineraries because tomorrow, I am leaving Lubbock for three weeks and two days, and I am going to be in four different cities during that time. Friday, I will fly into Salt Lake City and drive immediately to Rexburg, Idaho, for the wedding of one of my best friends, Rachel Dobra on Saturday morning. I will then drive back to Salt Lake that same day. On Monday, I am flying from Salt Lake to San Diego for a conference on substance abuse. I will return back to Salt Lake on Wednesday night, just in time to catch my flight to Tokyo on Thursday morning. Whew!

I plan to blog about every detail of the trip. However, I have learned that when there is actually something worth talking about, I am usually too busy to post it-hence the postings about Knox Overstreet and Mamma Mia. So, hopefully, I really will share my experiences in my blog. Wish me luck!

Austin for the weekend

Here's the background on the Austin trip:

Background fact 1: About a month ago, Stephanie decided it would be fun to get a group of people to go float down some river in New Braunfels, which is between Austin and San Antonio. After sending out a mass e-mail, the only takers were me and Layne.

Background fact 2: Since I moved here, Layne has been touting Austin as the greatest city in the world. He spent two years there while he attended the University of Texas, and he loved it. I believe, at the time, I had just moved to Lubbock and was complaining about Texas in general, and he began his campaign to get me to go to Austin. We actually had an argument a couple of months ago over which was the better city, Austin or Seattle. I think the fact that he has never been to Seattle makes him biased. Having visited Austin before and lived in Seattle for a couple of months, I felt I was the more qualified judge. I said Seattle was better. No heated words were exchanged, but things were awkward and tense between us for the rest of the night.

Background fact 3: We almost went to Austin back in May. Then, we didn't.

So, as you can see, there was a lot riding on this trip. Not only was I trying not to die while tubing a river, I was also-for the sake of my friendship with Layne-trying to like Austin as much as possible.

It turned out neither one of those things was very hard.

We left Friday night and arrived in Austin around 11:00. As soon as we hit the city limits, Layne was like a small child at Christmas. We had dinner at Trudy's, a Tex-Mex restaurant a few blocks from where Layne lived during his college days. Then, we made a pilgrimage to Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium, where the Longhorns play, so he could see what renovations were being done.

The next morning, we drove to the river to go tubing. I have no pictures of this because they were very adamant that you not bring anything with you on the river that you cared very much about. So Stephanie brought a waterproof disposable camera, and these are her pictures.

Me getting into the slow-moving river.

There's a shot of me floating by. I don't know what the guy behind me is doing. I didn't even realize he was there until Stephanie showed me the picture.





After 3 hours of floating lazily down the river-Mom's fears about me drowning turned out to be slightly ridiculous as I was never in water that was too deep for me to touch the bottom, and the current was never very strong-we got cleaned up and hit the Austin nightlife.


We had dinner at Stubb's Barbecue, which is famous for some reason, probably the food, which was excellent. Billy Bob Thornton (the actor/director) was performing there with his band, but we decided that, rather than paying $12 to see them, we were going to see the bats.



Apart from being the Texas state capitol, a great place for live music, and the home of the Longhorns, Austin is also known for being the home of the largest urban bat colony in North America. Here is some information courtesty of http://austin.about.com/cs/bats/p/bats.htm

• Every year, approximately 750,000 female bats fly to Austin from Mexico where they lodge in the Congress Avenue Bridge and give birth to baby bats.
  
• Each female has one bat pup, bringing the total number of bats around this time of year to 1.5 million.
  
• It is estimated that the bats consume between 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects.
  

A video of the Austin bats. Probably less impressive than in person.

For some reason, most of the pictures I took in Austin were while we were waiting for the bats.

Here's a shot of Layne and I before the bats came out:

Here's one of Stephanie and Layne oohing and ahhing over the bats:

After the bats, Layne took us on a tour of downtown Austin, and then to a place which I concluded must have been the University of Texas equivalent of Squaw Peak. Let's just say we saw couples. We finished the night off with ice cream, the traditional Mormon reward when people around you are making out.

This has been a long post. We spent a little more time in Austin the next day before heading back to Lubbock. It's hard to believe we were only gone two days.

Here's a shot of me on our way home. Apparently, Mills County, TX is the meat goat capitol of the world (as opposed to the dairy goat capitol, I guess). Obviously, we hit the UT bookstore while we were there. I think it's a little excessive to own two shirts from a school I will never attend, but it's pretty hard to go into that bookstore and not buy anything. I thought the BYU Bookstore went overboard with apparel and weird items with BYU stamped on them that flauted rules of common sense and taste. I saw University of Texas garden gnomes-male and female. And as for the apparel, Layne scoffed at the pitiful amount of clothing the BYU Bookstore carried while he had a struggle over whether or not to buy UT cowboy boots. Clearly, it's a whole different world here.

Returning from Oz, Dorothy finds herself in Kansas once again.

27?

So, yesterday was my 27th birthday. I have to say that, for the most part, it was like any other day. I ran errands in the morning, saw a client in the afternoon, and ran some more errands at night. The highlight of my day was a voicemail message that went something like this:

Sammie: Happy...Birthday...Megan! (pause for five seconds)

My mother: Okay, Sammie, Megan's not there, hang up the phone.

Sammie: (pause for another 20 seconds).

I think she wandered off with the phone, or my mom got distracted, or something. At any rate, that was all she said, and then there was silence for a long time. I think she was waiting for me to reply, so I called her back to tell her thank you, and she held onto the phone and wouldn't give it to my mom or Melanee. I don't know what she said, but it made me miss her like crazy. Meanwhile, Kevin bonked his head rolling onto the fireplace tile or something like that. He didn't seem too upset.

Anyway, so, other than that, it was a very uneventful day. I got a lot of phone calls, a lot of text messages, and a lot of Facebook postings from people wishing me a happy birthday, which made me feel loved. Tonight, I am driving to Austin with some friends, and tomorrow, we are tubing down some river. "Don't drown," my mom warned me when I told her how I was choosing to celebrate my 27th birthday. As she astutely observed, "If you drown, you can't go to Japan." Plus, I'll be dead. So, if no more posts happen on this blog, you'll know why.

Take a Chance on Me

So, tonight, I saw Mamma Mia!, a musical based on ABBA songs starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth. In our group were five girls and one guy. I wasn't surprised by the gender mismatch, but it got me thinking about things that make a movie a chick flick, and the things that make a movie geared toward men.

Things in a man's movie (here come the bullet points). None of these were present in Mamma Mia:

• Stuff getting blown up.


• Cars driving really fast.


• Jason Bourne. In fact, if you are watching a movie, and the male lead is doing something, and you ask yourself if it is something Jason Bourne would do, and the answer is no, you are probably not watching a film made with men in mind.


• Killer special effects.


• Pierce Brosnan saving the world from the villain of all villains.

Things in a woman's movie that were present in Mamma Mia:

• People dancing about and periodically bursting into songs.


• Costumes replete with feathers, sequins, and jewels.


• Couples on the beach.


• Colin Firth. I think he's great, but let's be honest, I have never watched a movie where Colin Firth has done something that Jason Bourne would do.


• Sentimental moments, like a daughter getting married. I guess that happens in the Godfather, which is mostly a guys' movie, but I'm pretty sure it didn't involve Marlon Brando singing an ABBA song with James Caan singing backup to commemorate the moment.


• Pierce Brosnan attempting to dance about and periodically burst into songs (I'm pretty sure this has only happened in this one movie).
  

Now, I recognize that I am making some sweeping generalizations. I think most women enjoy action films in moderation, particularly if the leading man looks like Jason Bourne. There are men, like the man who watched Mamma Mia with is tonight, who enjoy a Broadway musical/movie, particularly if they are the lone man with five women. But I hope this helps those whose movie tastes follow strict gender lines and somehow manage to miss Hollywood marketing ploys that target specific genders.

Knox Overstreet

So, a friend and I have been having a Facebook conversation about Knox Overstreet. For those unfamiliar with the movie Dead Poets' Society, he's slightly painful to describe. The premise of the movie centers around an all-boys' prep school where Robin Williams is the English literature teacher. His first lesson to the class is about seizing the day, and he brings the boys to pictures of alumni of the school, long-since deceased and whispers "Carpe diem" in their ears. This becomes a mantra for several of the boys, including Knox Overstreet, who falls in love with a girl unbelievably out of his league. Through a series of maneuvers that are truly hard to watch, he professes his love to this girl to the point where you think she just might deck him. And while I find myself getting embarrassed for him every time I watch this movie, I can't help but feel admiration for Knox Overstreet. While I think anyone who has ever stood in front of a person and had the "I-like-you-do-you-like-me?" conversation will agree that it doesn't tend to work out in real life the way it does in the movies, there is something very freeing about saying the thing you mean to a person without regard to the consequences. Thank you, Knox Overstreet, for being a gutsy, hopeless romantic, so that I can live vicariously through you and not have to embarrass myself.

Since I find blogs with pictures more interesting than blogs without pictures, here's a picture of me taken last summer in New York, sitting on Rachel's dad's motorcycle. I never left the place where it was parked, partly because I couldn't see over the handlebars.

I can't believe I have a blog now!

I have been recently disturbed by the number of people I know who have blogs. Most of them either have beautiful children whose faces I love to see, or interesting and funny thoughts I like to read, or both. Some of those people have actually encouraged me to start a blog myself. I have hesitated for many reasons, which I will now list here because that's what you do when you have a blog:

• I have no children with whose pictures I can cuten (cuten?) the space around my narratives. I don't even take pictures of the things that are going on in my life, so this blog is destined to actually be nothing more than my random synaptic firings.
• I don't actually believe I have anything to say that anyone wants to hear. My life consists largely of therapy (as the therapist), research, classes, and a lot of time sitting in my apartment with my thoughts when I should be working on research. That doesn't sound that exciting to me, and it's my life.
• I hate it when blogs turn into a) bitter diatribes about one's dating life or b) a vehicle to rant about the things one hates. And since those are 90% of the things I think about, I am afraid that will happen to me.
• I'm pretty sure it will be one of those things I neglect, much like my Facebook page.

With all of this as a preface, I am now venturing into cyberspace.