Monday night Bear and I were sitting around watching TV with our bellies still full from the crazy big dinner I made for Conference Sunday, the dishes still sitting in dirty sinkwater, when the phone rings and Bear got some terrible news.

Katie, his best friend from high school, was killed in a car crash. She wasn’t even 30 years old.

Bear took it very hard, obviously, but I was immediately filled with a sense of peace. In our beliefs, the afterlife is a wonderful place. We don’t believe in a typical version of hell, just a number of heavenly “neighborhoods.” So Mormons don’t usually grieve in the traditional sense. We miss our loved ones, but we are also confident that this life is not the end and that we’ll see them again. So our funerals are rarely sob-fests where everyone dresses in black. We tend to dress nicely and cry daintily into our hankies as we remember the great life our loved one lived.

Of course that all changes when the person didn’t even make it to thirty. I don’t think I’d like to meet the person who isn’t shocked and hurt by that.

Although, I’m pretty close. I felt bad for Bear that he had to deal with me when he got the news. He was so grief-stricken and all I could say was I’m sorry. I tend to not be very sympathetic when it comes to death. I’ve lost so many people in my life that my usual reaction is to just shrug my shoulders, recognize I have no control over the matter, and move on. This probably makes me sound extremely callous, and maybe that’s true, but you lose your entire family and nearly every friend you’ve ever had in your life and then see if that doesn’t change you.

I was lucky enough to meet Katie on several occasions and she was a wonderful friend to Bear. Like every woman in Bear’s life, they dated once, but they’d been friends for years and years despite that. We got married so young, and in an environment where marriage was very nearly the sole goal, that most of our friends were not only unsupportive, but downright mean out of jealousy and bitterness. She was the lone voice cheering us on and saying we were perfect for each other.

She was so wild, and Bear is pretty sure that contributed to her death. That’s also what contributed to the end of their dating life. She respected the fact that Bear wanted to save sex for marriage and Boy, did she ever not, so she broke up with him so she wouldn’t corrupt him. But she never stopped taking care of him with thoughtful gestures and loving words.

My favorite Katie story is one year for Bear’s birthday, for whatever reason he didn’t want people to know about it. So she shows up to school with a card and balloons, but the card read “Congratulations on Your Retirement” and the balloons said “It’s A Boy,” “Get Well Soon,” and “Happy Anniversary.”

That pretty much sums Katie up in a nutshell. Always thoughtful, always taking care of those she loved. She will be missed. Even by my cold dead heart.

I was minding my own business, chilling on the computer, when the phone rings. It’s Tami, who works with me at church and is the President of the Young Women’s program while I am the secretary. She’s great. So since I am the secretary and therefore the record keeper, she called to get a phone number, and in my quest to retrieve it, I kick the dang chair I’d left sitting in the middle of the room.

4 hours later it still hurts, I can’t walk on it and I had to cancel the activity tonight.

When Bear and I were first married I ended up breaking the very same toe in a similar way. I kicked a door in a mad rush to the bedroom. But the circumstances were a little different.

When we were very newly newlywed, we still lived in Provo, UT while I finished up school. In Provo nearly everyone is Mormon and nearly everyone attends or works at BYU and therefore nearly everyone is exceedingly pure and sheltered and uncomfortable with the idea of married people doing what married people do.

So one day we’re sitting around our house in our underwear (funny, kind of like I’m doing now. I guess some things never change.) When there is a knock at the door. Bear hollers, “Just a second!” as we run to the bedroom to throw on our clothes. Bear’s cousin, thinking that some garbled phrase bellowed out could only possibly be “Come in!” opens the door right up (it being Provo nobody does anything inconvenient like lock the doors!) and comes on in trailing a whole troop of buddies behind him while I’m half naked streaking to the bedroom so I won’t be seen in my scantily clads.

And in my haste to protect my modesty I kick the doorframe and snap my baby toe like a little flesh-covered twig.

So then I not only had to rush to find something to throw on my body, but I had to deal with the incredible pain, and then deal with my own mortification and that of my guests.

Not my best night.

So at least this time around nobody saw my butt, and as an added bonus, I’m already drugged up!

When I was in middle school my teachers swore I was going to grow up to be a lawyer. Not because I love to argue or hear myself talk, but because if I see a wrong committed I cannot let it go until it’s fixed.

Growing up in my family makes this difficult. For so many reasons I can’t begin to relate them all, I do not fit in to my family in any way. Not one. I suppose I look like them, but that’s about it. Because of this, my siblings were all horribly mean to me. And my parents are awful people, but since my goals for my own personal satisfaction happened to make them look good, I was the favorite child and they rubbed that in the noses of the other kids. When I had a gang of disgruntled kids against me, how was I supposed to skate away unharmed?

I just talked to my youngest sister the other day for the first time in over a year. Until extremely recently she’d been living with my mom who I don’t talk to, so that unfortunately meant I couldn’t talk to her either. During the course of our conversation she told me that I was the favorite and that made it suck for everyone else, and I didn’t deny it. But I hoped that she would agree I didn’t do anything to encourage it. That their choosing me to fawn over in their demented way brought it’s own curses and that I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone seeing how it’s destroyed my relationships with all my siblings. She didn’t. She called me a tattletale.

I left home when I was 16, which meant that D. was 6. 6 years old. I’m sure she has some memories from 6 years old, but when I was 16 I was the oldest at home. The next oldest sister hadn’t lived at home since I was 13, which meant D was 3. How would a three year old look at her older sister, go “Dang, that girl is a tattletale!” and then remember it 13 years later? She wouldn’t.

This is a pattern with D. Over the years she’s called me up and read me letters written to me, but never sent, by my mom. She’s accused me of things she wasn’t even alive for, distorted facts she was too young to know about. Part of it she seeks out because she’s 8 years younger than the next youngest kid and feels left out of everything, and part of it is because my family members are vicious gossips with no desire for accuracy, just sensationalism.

The fact that I’m so frequently and blatantly misrepresented by my family drives me bonkers. That they can’t see how they’re causing their own problems and “enabling” (to use a hoary word) my mom while they preach self-righteously about how it would be good for my soul to talk to mom again…well, it makes me lose my mind.

My “twin” sister Reagan visited me a few weeks ago and I’m still recovering. After literally begging her for years, she finally visits me and left her mind behind. She told me that I’m not honest and that I can’t be trusted with her version of events. And then when I expressed shock and hurt at that she yelled at me that I backed her into a corner and I wasn’t looking at my fault in the argument. Oh there was so much more that by now is so tiresome to relate, but the point is: my family doesn’t know me at all.

And the truth of me that I try to show them doesn’t fit with the devil they want me to be, so they ignore it completely.

When I worked in a soul destroying cubicle for a big fat corporate Mergers & Acquisitions company, the Internet saved my life and my sanity. Without it I would’ve stabbed myself with a paperclip. And every day I read every single recap on TWoP I would think to myself, “What did people do before the internet? How did they function sitting at a desk all day with nothing to do?”

Now I work for myself, at home, and thanks to the years I spent at that office job, I have a list of favorites three miles wide. I probably waste like 5 hours every day on the internet reading blogs and message boards and compulsively refreshing to see if somebody commented on my oh so witty remark.

I’m seriously contemplating setting up a workstation in the dining room with the laptop that isn’t connected to the Internet, just so I can get something productive done every once in awhile. How am I supposed to write my great American novel if every freaking time I sit down to write I spend a hour reading to see if anything changed while I was actually out living my life.

I knew people got addicted to internet porn, but never internet content!

Bear and I are strapped. Totally strapped. Since we moved to Modesto I haven’t been able to find work, when I have gotten up the health and motivation to try, because I’m either overqualified for the Barnes & Nobles of the world, or I’m underqualified when competing against all the Bay Area commuters who don’t want to commute anymore.

We were doing fine until Bear got his pay cut. He’s supposed to get a promotion in the fall and then we’ll be doing great, but right now? It’s rough.

In the meantime we moved three times in three months, have car payments, flight loan payments, law school payments, my school payments all because of this freaking economy and the fact that trying to find a job out of college that actually pays you enough to live is impossible. For the first time in my life I have creditors calling me.

We’re doing everything we can to cut back. We don’t go out anymore, we don’t spend ANY money we can get away without spending, even if that means Bear’s brother doesn’t get a wedding gift. We don’t rent movies or even buy ice cream.

We also can’t afford health insurance, or car insurance. In NH, where our car is registered,it’s legal to not have car insurance, and even though we now live in CA where you’re supposed to have it, it just wasn’t as pressing as the student loan guy threatening to destroy my credit with the touch of a button.

Until today.

We got home from church and holed up in the house, and at 12:30 am I got a phone call from the police department saying that they had recovered our car. It had been stolen, in BROAD daylight, from our parking spot RIGHT BELOW OUR APARTMENT.

Good News: It’s been recovered.

Bad News: It was recovered after it crashed into somebody’s house. We don’t know the extent of the damage yet, the Police Officer I talked to said it wasn’t driveable but she also said the only damage was the front end. So who knows.

We have no idea what we’re going to do. We just finished making payments on it and we were really looking forward to putting that money into some of our school debts, but it looks like we’re going to have to buy a new car, and find a way to pay for insurance as well.

I’m sick to death of this.