Best friends. They just get it, you know?

Feeling very blessed today!

I want to live the kind of life that scares me breathless now and again.

A life that keeps me on my toes and sneaks up on me and knocks me off balance. One that surprises me and unnerves me and unsettles me in all the best and worst ways. I don't want to live my life in safe corners, with a wall always at my back to steady me and a glass of icy lemon water in my left hand. Because powers above, I truly detest lemon water.

I want my knees to shake a little. I want my feet to hesitate sometimes about the steadiness of the ground ahead, and then to keep walking anyway. I want my hips to lean toward adventure and my tummy to grow accustomed to knots and butterflies. I want my chest to swell with joy and ache with loneliness and collapse and expand and love and long. I want my fingers to fiddle nervously in my pockets while my elbows stick out awkwardly and sharply. I want my shoulders to learn to broaden by default, when the load gets bigger and things look a little heavy. I want to peel my eyelids open and look doubt straight in the face while my lips make promises about being bigger and braver and not backing down. I want to hear the word no and still be able to tell myself yes, a thousand times, yes.

I want to stumble over myself a little in the process. I want to break into a run, and I want it to feel graceless and divine and angry and holy all at once.

The Delicate Art of a Doorstep Scene

I once went on a first date with a guy who hugged me from behind and laid his head on the back of my shoulder while I was putting my key in my door handle.

So, doorstep scenes aren't really my thing. This could be because I'm not really into hugging people I don't know very well, and it suddenly is highly expected of me after a first date. Dear culture, please make it stop. Also, there's the underlying fear that everyone is going around interpreting what a hug means. To that I say:

via

I recently dug up a newspaper column I wrote about doorstep scenes during my undergrad in Cedar City, Utah. It kind of makes me laugh and takes me back several years all at once. I mean, I dislike doorstep scenes now but I can handle them better than the 20-year-old version of myself.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from that gem:

Awkward Doorstep Scenes Present Present Courtship Difficulty

By: Katie Hawkes

Picture this: It's a frosty Cedar evening, the moon is full, and you find yourself on a doorstep at the end of a successful night of courtship. Up to this point, you've managed to quell the awkward monster inside of you and avoided any situations to go down in the archives of bad date stories.

But this is where things get tricky. The porch. The doorstep scene. The little siblings or roommates peeking through the blinds and flashing the porch light. The movie Hitch, in which Will Smith's character attempts to teach awkward, lovelorn individuals how to, essentially, "get jiggy wit' it," attempted to analyze this inevitable final scene of a date.

In the movie, Smith's character asserts that a girl will drop certain hints or clues -- namely, key fidgeting -- if she wants her date to smooch her. The movie purports that if a girl fiddles with her keys in her hands before she unlocks her door, then she's asking to be snogged.

We all have our own approaches to dealing with the infamous doorstep scene, and I'm sure I have yet to experience the extent of these tactics, but I am intrigued by the few that I am aware of.

First: the high five. Guys love giving high fives. It's kind of a "you're awesome but I'm too scared to touch any part of your body other than your fingers and palm for a split nanosecond" approach. It's a little juvenile -- but it's simple, it's friendly, no worries.

Second: the handshake. I've discovered this particular method to be typical of polite young men who may or may not have recently returned from a two-year hiatus away from interactions with members of the female species. (See: celibate church mission.) Some even feel the need to not only shake their date's hand, but also the hand of every living organism within the vicinity as well. More power to you, boys.

Third: the hug. This seems to be the preferred way of finalizing an evening together, and hey, who can't use a nice "skwudge" every now and then? However, the hug presents some quandaries of its own. For instance, arm placement. Girl's arms on top? Guy's arms on top? The one-over-one-under cross method?

This is an awfully big decision to make in that split second it takes to close the gap between the two of you. Be careful, if yours and your date's decisions are incongruent, you might accidentally cause a fumbling mess of tangled arms and the avoid-at-all-costs-too-close-for-comfort face collision.

The fourth approach is, of course, the kiss. Let's be honest, I'm not even gonna go there. Please refer to preteen chat rooms and magazines for advice on this one.

...end excerpt. Thank you for taking part in this ride down historical-Katie-writing lane.

...any of you single people or formerly single people (hint: this means everyone in the world) have an opinion about the infamous doorstep scene? Best or worst stories? Please do tell. It will be so fun for both of us.

Tattooed Mormon Conversion Story

This video makes my heart warm.
Maybe it'll do something for your ticker, too. It's definitely worth watching all the way through the end. Thanks, Al Fox.

"Hard times will consistently be there, but so will Christ."

"Don't quit after one prayer."

on eating humble pie

When I graduated from college a few years ago, I had no idea where I was going, who I was or what I was doing with my life.

Just days before I pulled on my androgynous polyester robe and sat through a well-meaning commencement speech about the-economy-is-terrible-right-now and good-luck-out-there-new-graduates, I still didn't know if I was going to stay where I was (Utah) or head back to my roots (Arizona). But since I had no local job prospects when my apartment lease ended along with the semester, I put my entire life in my CR-V and drove south.

And then I spent two months eating cereal on my parents' couch.

I launched a daily routine: hunt for any-and-all jobs on my laptop, eat free food, attempt to make friends in a social hometown I barely recognized anymore, and watch four seasons of Lost on DVD. My job hunt was widespread and without focus -- I still had no idea where I belonged or who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. But eventually a job came, and then another, and a couple more after that.

We'll skip all the in-between details, but my life has slowly but surely sorted itself out in some particularly beautiful ways.

I figured out many of the details about where I belonged and what I was doing with my life and who I wanted to be, and I moved a couple cities over and started doing those things and being that person. And life has been good. Stickier at some points than others, but good. Some significant growing pains for sure, but always ultimately panning out to goodness.

Recently, my little life kind of got turned on its head.

But not all at once. It was more like a cartwheel that started out with a little leaning and then a little more leaning and suddenly the trees were upside-down, my feet were in the sky, and my fingers were buried in the grass trying to grip some semblance of stability. (The worst part is, I'm wicked allergic to grass.) (That part's not a metaphor. It makes me itch something fierce.)

Long stories short: my previously stable employment is on its last legs, I'm not exactly sure where I belong anymore, and my condo lease is ending in 13 days with no option to renew.

So in two weeks, I'm moving back in with my parents.

I truly don't mind the idea of living with my parents. Momsie and Papanwa are the good kind of people. But I can't help feeling a little bit like it's a step back that I'm going to be sitting on their couch in a couple weeks, eating cereal and watching who-knows-what on DVD or Netflix. (Any suggestions?)

Last year I dated a guy who lived with his parents and younger siblings. And it bothered me. I tried to pretend I was able to look past it at the time, but I think it always festered. Part of it was the lack of privacy when I went over to his place, part of it was my uppity thinking that you-should-have-life-more-figured-out-by-the-time-you're-25, part of it was...well, we broke up eventually. I sat on my bed the other night pondering my current state of affairs, and somewhere between the rambling journal entry in my lap and the angry little hot tears leaking out of my eyes, I became fully aware of the thick slice of compelled humility lodged uncomfortably in that awkward place between my throat and my esophagus. I'm moving in with my parents, and my position is being eliminated at work. And try as I might, I still can't figure out how all my best intentions and hard work and plans and proactivity managed to land me in this place. And I thought back to that relationship from last year and some particular attitudes and beliefs I held at the time, my chin dropped a bit lower and I felt like a royal idiot. The irony was almost laughable. Here I am, and humble pie, indeed.

But here's what I know: it all works out.

I think I vaguely knew this truth when I went through the "what am I doing with my life" phase right after college, but now I know it in a tried-and-tested-been-to-the-cliff's-edge-and-found-a-saftey-net-at-the-last-possible-moment-as-my-toes-touched-thin-air kind of way. I also know myself about 110% better than I did during my last cereal-and-DVDs phase. Truth be told, I am not worried. Sometimes I feel stressed and/or emotional, depending on the day, but I do have an abiding core of faith that reassures me that the right things are going to pan out at exactly the right time. And it's comforting to confront the truth that, even as so many things I build my daily identity around -- my home, my work, my beloved Scottsdale that will always-and-always own a very large piece of my heart -- are slipping out of my hands, that I am not losing my identity at all. I am more than where I live or where I work. And that means that, regardless of external circumstances, I really am going to always be OK. More than OK.

And maybe some understanding and humble pie is exactly the taste I needed in my mouth right now. Just to keep my feet (or my wobbly cartwheel hands) on the ground.

ever make mistakes?

This communicates just about everything I want to say today, and then some.

via

Happy Friday.

p.s. Congrats to Antonette S. for winning the Conscious Box giveaway! An especially happy friday to her.

A&A: fanny packs & devil toast

I've gone radio silent the last few days, because....well, because. I think my post on Monday kind of took something out of me (in a good way) and I just needed to let it sit for awhile. Plus I had a raging fever on Monday followed by two days of headaches and wooziness (heffalumps and woozles?) so that didn't help my desire to look at a computer screen any more than I had to.

I owe you all some marvelous pictures of my weekend in California. And some ramblings about the general craziness of my life lately. But since I already had the following post in the queue, I'm going to let it run and say, "Happy awkward and awesome Thursday!" We'll chat more soon, I pinky swears it.

Awkward...
▲ I discovered that Walmart sells fanny packs but calls them "freedom hip packs." I don't know if I'm inspired or troubled by this bold break from tradition. Either way, I wore one to Disneyland (plus space pants and R2D2 ears) and I definitely felt free.
▲ I went grocery shopping on Monday afternoon with a 101 degree fever. There was a lot of shuffling around and messy hair and mismatched pajamas. I'm still not entirely sure what's in my cupboard, but I'll check on that soon.
▲ This happened Tuesday morning:

Awesome...
▲ These cat exercise gifs were almost awkward but then I loved them so now they are awesome.
▲ This devil toast video probably made my entire month.
▲ That one time I went to Disneyland and a wheelchair was involved (legitimately needed, no deception with our gang) so we got to basically cut all the lines. I don't recommend doing Disneyland any other way.
▲ I found this blogger and she apparently designs clothes and then sews them and models them and I just think that's super cool and you can see the series of her creations here. Also, she likes Harry Potter.
▲ I had this amazing experience yesterday where I discovered that one of the best mexican joints in Arizona (the burger house in Globe, AZ) (yes, the burger house) has had sister restaurants all over the place for some time now. Don't worry, I've already been to the nearest casa reynoso and it didn't disappoint. There were even barefoot children wandering around like they owned the place.
▲ You. You are awesome.