I Have a Date!

You know what I love about getting older?

I love watching my siblings growing up. I was on the phone with my stud-muffin little brother yesterday, and we were talking about his birthday (he's 17, can you believe it?) and other, more trivial matters. Mostly about food. Weird, but true.

See, I have this favorite burger place, but it's only in the Austin area in Texas, which means I almost never get to enjoy it, because I'm only home one or two weeks out of the year. BUT! Brian is coming home from his mission in April, and I'll be going home for that, so Mighty Fine and I will be having a delicious, sumptuous reunion.

But then! Ben told me that there was this other burger place that he likes even better. And, of course, the mean little blighter that he is, he started describing the burgers and fries in mouth-watering detail. I had just gotten off work and was waiting for the bus so that I could go home and make dinner. Hello, purest form of torture.

It suddenly occurred to me over the tidal-wave-style rumblings in my tummy that Ben and I should totally go on a sibling date to this superior burger place. And that's when I realized that I love that I'm getting older, because it means that Ben is old enough to drive us to the place and he and I can have a real, honest-to-goodness, one-on-one dinner (or lunch---burgers are acceptable for anytime except breakfast), just the two of us. I don't have to ferry him around anymore.

And I totally love that.

So yeah, I have a date. In two months. With my little brother. It's going to be awesome.

Oh, and I have a date next Saturday, too (not with my little brother). ^_^

Life's pretty great.

New Favorite

On a lighter, more inspirational note from my last post, this is a video from my new favorite YouTuber.



I might have cried. And I might be a little bit in love with him.

I Told You So

Found this quote on Pinterest. It's awesome.

This might be a more open and frank post than I've written in a while, so we'll see how this goes.

You know how you can hear a thing a million times and know what it means, but then suddenly, one day, you wake up and find that you get it? That's what's happened to me this month.

So, we know that one of the most talked-about subjects in the world is love. Everyone has something to say about it. A lot of people have opinions about how to do it right.

Well, one of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard was from my mother (naturally---she's my sage of wisdom, so all my good stuff comes from her). Whenever I got into one of those "I hate being lonely" funks, she liked to remind me that it's vital to be able to find happiness on your own if you want to have a happy marriage. "Marriage isn't about two halves making a whole," she would say, "It's about two whole people working toward the same goals." Basically, if you expected another person to complete you and make you happy, you'd be disappointed. But if you could find ways to be happy on your own, it would be that much easier to find happiness in marriage. In a way, it was a blessing to be single.

Now, she's been telling me this for years. I can remember vividly a conversation on this exact topic about four years ago. We probably talked about it before that, too. And every time we did, I always found myself saying, "Yeah, I know that."And I did. But I didn't really get it.

Some of my friends may know this more than others, but I secretly have hated being single pretty much my whole life (well, since I was old enough to know what it means). Hated. All I ever wanted was to get married. My reasons have shifted and developed over the years, from a selfish desire to have someone who loved me and took care of me to a more mature desire to share a life and learn and grow with someone I can support and cherish. But always, it has been the only thing I really wanted. And I hated anything that kept that from me.

Tying both my desire and my hatred together was fear. I was afraid to let myself enjoy being single because I was afraid that maybe I would actually like it. And if I liked it, maybe I would like it too much. And then maybe I wouldn't want to get married. Or at least, maybe I would become too selfish to be a good wife and mother, because I would have had so much fun being single. It sounds stupid, but I have been subconsciously deathly afraid of that for years.

Over this last month, something just clicked for me, and I got it.

I've been lonely for a long time. Since I've lived in Bountiful, I haven't been able to connect with guys at all, really. My friendships have all been surface-level. I've only had first dates. I watched my friends get into and out of relationships in less time than it took me to get a guy to tell me something more meaningful than his major in school.

It wore me down big time. My friends saw a lot of the emotional turbulence from it, but neither they nor I really understood why I couldn't just snap out of it. I finally threw in the towel. I couldn't flirt, I couldn't catch a guy's interest, I couldn't hold a candle to my friends. So I decided that I was done with it. I was broken, and I wasn't going to get anywhere until I could fix it.

Many of my friends would probably argue and protest the claim that I was broken. Some of them actually did, when I occasionally made mention of it. I appreciate their reassurance. But I really was broken. That fear of allowing myself to be happy as a single woman was crippling me.

Then one day, I had a landmark conversation with one of my coworkers. She was telling me about her sisters. One of them was in a wonderful marriage, the kind we all secretly or openly dream about. The other one was in a so-so marriage. I was nodding in sympathy as my friend described the marriage until she started describing what her sister was like. She was describing me. Right down to the fact that her sister had only ever wanted to be married. Everything else was a distant second place.

Suddenly it clicked. Everything came crashing together at once, and I suddenly recognized that my fear of being single was keeping me from being happy and emotionally independent. I needed to shake that off and be happy.

Well, it was a big moment of self-realization for me. So I did the natural thing. I called my parents. As I rambled my way through my journey of self-discovery, they listened quietly. Then I hit the big, pivotal discovery and stopped, waiting to hear their response.

"That's wonderful, honey."

In that moment, I swear I could hear the smile on my mom's face through the phone. "Mom, you can say you told me so, now," I said.

And, basically, she did. Because she had been telling me exactly that for years. Learning to be happy on your own is the best gift you can give yourself, your spouse, and your children.

You want to know what the best part is?

It works. This has been one of the best months of my life. And I think I'm even more excited about getting married, now.

To You From Me With Love

Happy Valentine's Day.

Indulging the Inner Fangirl

So it's a commonly-known fact that I am a nerd. The biggest collection I have on Pinterest is devoted to geeky stuff. And for those who know me well, it's also common knowledge that Tolkien has held a preeminent place in my nerd-world for over half my life now (in fact, it'll officially reach two-thirds of my life this year (Yes, I calculated that---Editor Lynnae simply had to fact-check herself.))

Well, unbeknownst to me (because I'm inattentive, apparently), part of Tolkien-nerd-Lynnae had been starving because I hadn't read the books since I was about 15. I only discovered this because I was marathoning the movies (my at-least-once-a-year tradition), and my little sister kept asking me "Did that happen like that in the books?" and I suddenly realized to my shame and horror that I honestly couldn't remember.

I honestly hadn't thought about it in years, and had been coasting along on my title of Tolkien Aficionado for years. But how could I claim to be a Tolkien geek if I couldn't remember anything that happened in the books? For shame!

So I've been fixing that. I started rereading the books and I'm glad that I love them as much as I did when I was 8. Honestly, I don't know what my problem was. I stopped trying to reread the books because they felt slow, and my attention span wasn't holding long enough for me to make much progress. Maybe it's because I've been reading reference lists, dictionaries, and indexes for work, but this time around, I'm finding The Lord of the Rings anything but dull.

But watch out! I might be an even bigger nerd now that I'm re-armed with the booklore of Tolkien's world.

Incidentally, I've seen the Hobbit five times already.

Yeah, I loved it that much.