Stacey's Mom...or Just Stacey will suffice

Sometimes I don’t believe my ears! Or my hands! I can’t believe the gall some people have. Often I find myself in awe of the antics people pull. “What the fudge?” comes to mind, or “How are they getting away with this crap?” Dating provides a great stage for opportunities to ask yourself, “Oh my crap, did she really just say that?”

Take Stacey, for instance. Stacey was a great girl that came into my life unexpectedly through a friend. I noticed right away that she was friendly, cute, funny, giving and interested in others. I saw her at a few functions and made friends with her to a small degree. In the traditional boy meets girls fashion, I was on the brink of asking her on a date. Only, she beat me to the punch…

On my way home from work one night, I received a call from my little brother and I naturally answered. It was David on the other line asking me when I would be home…because I had a visitor. Huh? He told me Stacey was in the kitchen doing the dishes. What the, what? That was weird, right? Especially considering I didn’t even have the girl’s number yet. How did she know where I lived?

When I arrived at home, Stacey was definitely there, in the kitchen. “Holy Cow that is so nice of you. You didn’t have to do that,” I made my entry to the kitchen. She said she wanted to drop by and say hello. Since I wasn’t here and she noticed the kitchen needed some cleaning, she thought she might clean the dishes while she waited. On the one hand, it’s extremely nice to be the recipient of something like that. On the other hand, was this weird, since I had briefly spoken to this girl twice? It was strange how during the course of about 30 minutes, I went from planning on asking this girl out, to being convinced that she was a maid-service stalker-girl jonesin’ for a dating seminar. Shiz!

After a bit of conversation, the awkwardness took over so I made an excuse to have to go do some errands. I remembered an undeveloped roll of film in my closet that would serve nicely as my excuse. She promptly volunteered to go with me, and drive me. How could I deny that? It was like I was paintballing but instead of avoiding getting splattered, I was trying to dodge charitable acts of kindness. She was totally winning.

On the way to the photo store, it became apparent this girl had built up a huge fluffy fantasy with me as the co-star. My favorite song (to make fun of) came on the radio. Yeah, you guessed it, “Hanging By a Moment” by Life House. Crossing the Riverdale Road viaduct, I kept catching Stacey looking over at me with starry eyes.

My Mind: This is weird! I know she has totally planned out the next 40 years of our lives together. I wonder when I can get back home and play my guitar. I hope she doesn’t jump on me like Marty McFly’s mom, Lorraine, did in Steven Speilberg’s 1985 classic film, “Back to the Future”.

Her mind: I’m falling even more in love with this guy. I can’t wait until I get to hold his hand. I wonder how many other times he’s held a girl’s hand. Oh my gosh, I have a boy in my car!!! Oh my gosh!! I can’t decide if we’ll name the first Hyrum or Lehi.

After getting out of the car, I skirted her playful, flirty junior high shoulder hits as best I could. It became glaringly apparent that she didn’t care and wouldn’t take “No” for an answer when she grabbed my hand on the way in Fred Meyer. “Holy fetch, I have a girlfriend,” I screamed…inside. I immediately switched up my hands and got the film out of my pocket to have an excuse to let go of her hand. Then I promptly put my hand in my pocket. She didn’t care, though; she might have been a lot of things, but she was not shy! What happened next should not have surprised me, but it did. Right as we were walking in to the store, I felt her reach in my pocket, grab my hand, and pull it out with her increasingly unattractive mitt. Once again, against my will, we were holding hands walking into the neighborhood friendly grocer on the way to the photo counter.

What a great experience. Next time, remind me to check a girl’s dating history to weed out any clueless desperada’s that might otherwise get pulled in by my increasingly skeptical selective dating rod and reel.

China is soooo frippin big, hory fetch. Shanghai has 25 million people, Beijing has 22 million and there is another city here, whose name I can’t ever remember, that has 30 million!! It’s retarded. The sheer amount of people here really has shaped their behavior in different ways. In my opinion, the fact that they don’t have good peripheral vision has driven some of their cultural mores, i.e. not paying attention lining up for tickets or at buffets, and driving super slow and retarded. Chinese people drive like how they get in (or fail to get in) line – totally chaotically. If someone on the street wants to drive fast (which is rare, but I’ve seen it), they just drive on the other side of the road. Yesterday, I saw a U-turn from the right lane of a six lane road. There are three intersections near the company I’m working at that have no traffic signals (no lights or stop signs)!!! And these are huge mother-packin 6-lane intersections like 7th east and 45th south in the Salt Lake Valley.

I never thought I had a bubble until I came to the mother land. They don’t have a lot of personal space here. My boss and I were walking in Tiananmen Square and two visiting Chinese university girls started walking-talking to us because we were foreigners and they wanted to speak English. They were such close talkers! What the Sirius Fudge? We were just minding our own business trying to walk from one side to the other (in the traditional straight-line fashion), but they were talking so close that we found ourselves slowly inching some personal space, making a large arc-pattern through one of the largest city squares on earth. Hilarious.

Hungry Chinese people chew with their mouths open, wide fetchin’ open. It’s normal here. I think it is so they can taste their food better. For me, you ask?, the more time I spend in China, the fewer ‘chews’ I take and the more closed my mouth stays so I CAN'T taste the flippin’ food. It’s almost as if food loses its taste unless you are the loudest one at the table. What the crumb, Nee-HOW!? So far, the new foods I have muscled down since my first Chinese voyage are duck head, ox intestine, and sautéed tofu: terrible on all three counts. And, of course I’ve been graced by the old favorites, including pig ears, chicken feet and the ever-so-pleasantly textured sea cucumber: still tasty; taste-a-rika-poopoo, that is.

I was amazed at all the fetchers that tried to sell me worthless stuff, and worthless services. I saw a cab driver that, when I said I was going to walk back to my hotel and didn’t need a ride, claimed it would be cheaper for me to take his cab than walk. What the crap, haha!!? Who could argue with that? I went on a bus tour of the Great Wall of China with 10 other foreign tourists. On the way there, they funneled us through a jade factory and a Chinese herbal medicine clinic. I gotta admit I bought a little bit of jade and stared in amazement at the huge jade statues that this place housed. When we got in the herbal medicine factory (which, by the way, had the sickest bathroom in Asia – crazy considering this was an establishment with doctors, medical advice, and modern medicine speeches), a girl in a lab coat spent 7 or 8 minutes totally babbling about how hella-sweet herbal medicating is: something about too much heat in your body, the Chinese doctor, and a totally-tubular ability to read your pulse. Through her thick accent and even thicker eye-glasses, this girl stood in front of our group in this grossly unsanitary ‘clinic’ and rambled on and on. Definitely TMI; no, actually it was more like NEMI. All she really needed say was, “Chinese doctors are way more awesome than Western doctors. They take your pulse, tell you there is too much heat in your body, and then force-sell you ‘prescriptions’ of ginseng and gingko biloa to cure the magically diagnosed liver and kidney problems you are unnecessarily suffering from.”

Seriously though, China has so much history and mystique, it is a wonderful country. For millennia, the people of china have been forced to bow down to cruel and lavish emperors, build awe inspiring temples, harvest rice and fish from the land and rivers and seas and sacrifice their lives in constructing one of the great marvels on earth: the Great Wall. This history has made Chinese people what they are today: very polite, as is evidenced by the constant bowing they do (which has been reinforced by centuries of worshipping their government leaders, IMHO). If any demographic in America thinks its is oppressed, a visit to china to witness the 80 year old women packing bundles of sticks on the back of a bike going 2 maybe 3 mph tops returning home from a 6 mile round trip to their miniscule plot of land.

If I was up against such cultural and historical difficulties, I’d be pretty ticked off, too. I wouldn’t wait in lines, stay in my lane, chew with my mouth closed, or wait for someone else to finish their sentence before I starting talking either. Screw ‘em, right? I don’t know what rates in China are for crime, car accidents, public fighting, or tongue-biting, but they couldn’t be worse than the rates in the US. I applaud all Chinese people for maintaining such self-control, given the crap they’ve spent centuries wading through. We should all be a little bit more like the Chinese and laugh out loud with mouths full of fish and noodles. Why not?...we’d definitely riv ronger.

For real though, what a great experience it is to come to the Orient. The people are friendly and gracious, although eccentric in certain ways. They really do appreciate us and are very good hosts. I am lucky to have these opportunities.

How to lose Tyler in 10 days

Being single for 10 years after your mission is one of the best ways to leave a big wake of babes through the waters of dating...the kind of wake that is big enough to do all kinds of tricks (like a wake boarder). But most of the fun I've had riding in these waters has involved wiping out! When I say I've thrown out a big wake of babes over the years, it's not something I'm proud of; it's more something that I try to laugh about and share with others so I don't repeat my same mistakes.

One girl back in my Weber State days had definitely not seen the movie, "How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days". After one date, I decided I wasn't really interested, despite her extreme good looks. She decided the opposite. She did everything possible to spend time with me from that time forward. Because my house was conveniently located closer to campus than most Weber State parking lots, she conveniently stopped by with her lunch that she needed to put in my fridge, came over between classes, and surprisingly fell asleep on my couch in hopes that I would come home from work to find her asleep. After telling her it would never work out between the two of us, she persisted. Upon arriving home from work one day, I found her doing the dishes in my kitchen (in a very leave-it-beaver 1950's manner) where she nurturingly asked me how my day was. Yikes! Was this girl my live-in wife without benefits? After cleaning out my fridge, making me brownies, chancing in upon my guitar lessons, and scrubbing my kitchen floor didn't work in 'wooing' me, she tried more extreme measures. Because I had long-since stopped answering her phone calls, she called me from my home phone (yeah, this dates back to the last time I had a land line). Thinking it was my brother calling from my own house, of course I answered. This was the last straw. I had to tell this girl to, please, quell her false hopes!

Once we were on the same page, the phone calls stopped, but her efforts were still strong. At the end of the semester, she decided that she would come on an open-invite group ski trip that I was in charge of. On the first run of the trip, my would-not-be girlfriend severely broke her collar bone. AHH! Being the only person she really knew on the trip, I was left in the position to baby-sit her, administer her pain meds, and to cater to her nausea. At the end of the trip, I over heard this girl mention to another that her and I had not yet kissed only because we had the temple in out sites!!

Well, that is a great way to lose Tyler in 10 days. All these tricks are good in the following situations: never or if I'm a 21-year-old dilly bar in Liberty Square in Provo.

Upcoming: Tales of Alice, Stacey, and Holly