Life without Iphone is still actually life, dang it, and other epiphanies as of late.

So here I am mourning the loss of my cell phone. Literally, like, soul dressed in black, angry at the world because I don't have a cell phone right now. How pathetic is that? Of everything that came crashing down around me, I was more worried about this gorgeous piece of Apple technology than really anything else. Clearly, I need to get my life together.

I exhaust myself, too, everybody, not just you. I know that I wear you out, work you sour, talk to loud, talk too often, interrupt you, overwhelm you -- I get it. I'm working on it. I mean, I'm trying to apologize to you, or sort of explain myself, it's just that I'm really, really spilling over with so many words that I don't know what to do with them.

What I'm getting at is that I'm trying. I'm trying to stop mourning my own stupid cell phone and stop interrupting you when you're talking, because I don't mean to. I don't mean to be overwhelming. I'm not ever going to be "the quiet girl in the back of the temple" (get it, Laura?), I realize that, but I'm just going to make this attempt to get my life together for heaven's freaking sake.

Anyway. In this quest to get my life together and whatnot, I've made some interesting discoveries, even in just a week and a halfish, but mostly this: People, just by nature, are better than we give them credit for. They'll come swing by your house in the morning and give you a ride to school in their warm, stick-shift car for no reason other than the fact that you asked if you could please pretty please have a ride because the bus is truly awful and going there in the freezing cold with (no offense) the bus people is just a really painful experience.

And, in my own oh-so-biased opinion, I think my people are the best people (I don't see why I would've picked them as my people in the first place if I didn't think they were le creme de la creme anyway). My people harmonize so lovely, and I like their haircuts, even if everybody else isn't used to it yet, and I guess this is my apology for how long it's taken me to realize this about every last one of you. You're lovely even in the pictures of yourself that you hate. I even like your nose.

In other news, I'm still trying to figure out what the point of this blogging thing is, which is funny because I've been at it for six years now. Is it a place to put pictures of your mission call and then your temple marriage and then your babies that's art-ier than the Facebook? I don't understand it. I never asked for all 147 of you go come over here and read something I had to say. But I guess the point is that I keep blogging here because I can write. I really can. I just came this way.

I'm not trying to brag. We all come seemingly able to do something or other. Like, some of you just get it when we talk about derivatives and linearization and I'm like, "I'm sorry, but can I just write a sonnet about this or something?" Some of you can sing, my gosh you can really sing or really dance or really actually care about people and listen when they talk or maybe you can teach -- no matter, what I'm saying is that we're all just sort of born doing something and you can't quite explain why. At least that's the way I see it.

But I'm having these epiphanies of being and self and relationships, and here I am writing about revolution: Revolution, it seems, finds its way quite literally into the bloodstream of the young. It is in those years between leaving home, developing personal opinions and beliefs, and realizing the fragility of both government and life that revolution plants her most beautiful and fertile seeds, creating revolutionaries with just enough life behind them to understand the importance of sculpting a future worth dying for.

For some reason writing that paragraph and tucking it in between discussions of ideas getting their hands on bayonets and the way Victor Hugo has created Marius as a sort of characterization of himself as a young man makes me feel... better. Because I can do that. I can write that. I can create these things like you can derive and linearize.

The point is, I'm trying to say thank you for being lovely to me and to everybody else. People are usually better than we think they are, and for heaven's sake, it's time you realized that in yourself, because I feel like the day you realize you're good at whatever it is you're good at is going to be the day you can stop mourning your own dang cell phone.

Oh, and look at this. Morgan Jo Nelson made my blog all beautiful, just like she is all beautiful.
All my love,
Addy