It's been sooooooooo long

Hi there. It's been a while, hasn't it?

Jordan and I moved from Riverton to somewhere else. We moved so we could be closer to Jordan's new(ish) job. He does web stuff for Perfectly Posh, which is awesome because it means I get to try out a lot of fun products for free, awww yeah.

Our new ward is pretty good, but... I'm kinda sorta taking a break from church again. There are just too many things that are bothering me right now. The way I see it is this: I want to stay in the Church, but if that's going to happen, I'm going to need some distance to process some pretty intense stuff for a while. I wish it didn't have to be this way. I actually really miss going to church and feeling spiritually uplifted and feeling generally good about the Church. My heart longs to somehow have a healthy relationship with the Church again, even after becoming aware of some of the negative things they have done in the past and continue to do presently.

Probably the biggest development in my life right now is that I've started therapy. Yup. I finally did it. My therapist seems like a really good match for me and I'm excited to get to work and figure out this depression/anxiety thing, because I'm ready to move on.

On a lighter note, I've been making lots of books lately, and that's been fun. Want to see some of them? Okay!

Basic codex

Coptic binding

Long stitch on a recycled candy box

Spiral bound

Japanese stab binding (the notes are for a Nancy Drew computer game)

What I've been doing or whatever

I keep trying to write a post about what the heck I've actually been up to lately but I can never finish it for some reason. So here's what I've been doing:

Writing

I've been writing a lot over the summer and fall. I co-authored a patent with my dad for a pocket knife he invented, started doing some freelance writing, and started writing for a women's website. My feminist blog is still going as well, although I haven't had as much time for that with all the other writing projects I've had.

Health

The summer was sorta meh but I'm starting to feel better now that I've found a drug combination that actually suits me. Funny how that works. It's like I've been in a dark room and someone suddenly flipped a light switch on.

MoFem stuff

I felt some feminist fatigue over the summer. I was very tired of all the same old arguments against the things I cared about. I was tired of being ambushed in conversations online and in person. Everything Church-related felt very triggering to me. My Church attendance hit an all-time low. I had to pull back a little from the Church and from some feminist activities, but it was a good thing for me at the time. It saved my sanity.

Now that I'm feeling better, I think I'm in a better position to deal with stuff. Church, rather than torture, seems pretty okay to me. That's good news. I know that I will be criticized for my opinions and beliefs in the future; they're unorthodox ideas. But I know that I'll find appropriate ways to respond to people, and that there's always something I can learn from them.

Projects

I got back into driving over the summer. I haven't done anything hardcore. It's a process. But knowing that I can do it, and that I'm on that path, is really exciting.

I'm crocheting a lot. I'm a lot better than I was a year ago. Lately I've made a headband/earwarmers, an infinity scarf, a crochet hook case, driving gloves, and legwarmers. I'm hoping to make a sweater this winter, because I've never done anything that challenging before.

Future?

I dunno. Jordan's graduating in a few months, and then everything will change again, probably. I don't want to be a freelancer forever. I daydream about having a normal job outside of my house, one that I drive my car to. No, neither I nor Jordan knows what he wants to do after graduation. Sorry about that. We'll probably keep living in Utah, at least for a while, but we hoooooope that we can leave this state at some point.

I'm bad at books?

I keep trying to read books that have high ratings on Goodreads, but I keep finding myself disappointed and sometimes bored like crazy.

Last week, for example: I tried reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Water for Elephants. And I hated both of them. Why is that? People love both of these books, right? Am I just super bad at liking good books? Well, here's my defense [*spoilers, maybe*]:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was... original... but it was just about the most obnoxious book I've ever read. The story takes place in 2003 (I think) and mostly revolves around a weird, depressed kid trying to recover from the death of his father, who was at the World Trade Center during the attacks on 9/11. I'm not really a fan of books that use the deaths of parents as backstory. It just seems... lazy. Like the writer needed a "real reason" for their protagonist to be depressed or something. I dunno.

The author used a lot of gimmicks to move the story along and Give It Character, including using tabs instead of spaces to show a character was using a typewriter to narrate; putting in pictures from the kid's Things That Happened To Me scrapbook; jumbling up all of one narrator's words as he runs out of space in his notebook, forcing him to write over his previous words and turning the pages black; putting blank pages in the middle of the book; ergghhnnnngggggg. There were three things that bothered me about this: 1) It happened so often that I lost track of what was going on; 2) It felt like the author relied on the weird gimmicks to tell the story, instead of, I dunno, his writing; and 3) This is a novel for adults. If I want pictures with my story, I will get a comic book, a graphic novel, or an old-fashioned picture book. More prose, please.

Water for Elephants was so boring I only got through a few chapters. Here's what I didn't like: It was tedious, there was parental death as a plot device, the main character had little to no personality, it felt like the author was trying to "shock" the readers with circus life/a peek into the mind of men/etc. and it seemed sort of over the top.

Did any of you guys like these books? Am I just cray-cray?

Our missionary, Trevor

Well, this lil' fella is coming home from his mission tomorrow:

It makes him happy to be taller than at least one dude in the world

It still feels almost too weird to be true.