On Telling Pop Rocks from Peanut Butter Cups

This is a story that I've thought about blogging several times since I started my blog, but I could never find a way to tell it that didn't sound self-defeating. Over Christmas break I dug it up and tried again, and I thought I found my angle. But I spent too much time revising, and it got too long, and I became too self-conscious about the college crush part of the story, and it's been languishing in my drafts for weeks. I haven't written anything here for a little while though, and while it might not be perfect, I already have it sitting here and I've been resting on this story for years - I might as well just get it out there. So in the spirit of Valentine's Day and BYU group dates and chocolate, here goes...

[Oh, and also I have a couple new books up on my book blog: Moneyball by Michael Lewis and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.]

 When I was a BYU student my roommates and I would plan periodic group dates. We called them “friendship activities,” partly as a way to laugh at ourselves for falling into a BYU stereotype, and partly because we wanted to lower the pressure. Because in spite of ourselves, we felt a lot of pressure on these group dates. 
 

Many members of the church think of Provo (for better or for worse) as a mecca of Mormon dating. For a lot of students it is. Even having attended BYU myself, I’m still sometimes amazed at just how many married students I have in the classes I teach, and how young they are. But I didn’t really date much at BYU myself, and my roommates didn’t either. In fact, many of my friends didn’t. In retrospect I know that there was nothing wrong with us, but it didn’t do much for our self-esteem to never be asked out in a place where the stereotype is that everyone is married by 20. For a lot of us, it took leaving Provo to discover that we were indeed attractive and datable. 

I say this not to harp on my college-era dating woes, but to explain why these friendship activities were so laden with expectations. They were often the only dates some of us could expect to go on in the course of a semester, or even a year, and our only chance to try to convince the guys we saw at church or in class or at work that they might want to consider looking at us as more than just casual friends. It felt like our dating lives rested entirely on our own efforts, and that a group date was the only effort that really counted.

That said, I only rarely went on a group date with a guy I was really, truly, undeniably interested in dating, and the group date that kicks of this particular story was not one of those times, exactly. It was one of my last group dates before I graduated, and this particular time I’d been at a loss about who to invite. One of my roommates suggested someone from our family home evening group. Let’s call him Roger. I didn't dislike the idea of inviting Roger. He was smart and funny and cute-but-not-out-of-my-league attractive, and at the previous FHE activity he’d been sincerely and overwhelmingly complimentary about the blueberry cookie bars I’d made for dessert. Sincerely complimenting my baking is a big turn-on for me. I mustered my nerve. I asked Roger. He agreed. 

And unfortunately, the date went really well. 

Roger was friendly and seemed to enjoy being there. We had good group conversation, but he was appropriately attentive to me and I discovered that we had more in common than I’d guessed. We came from similar family backgrounds. We both loved Reese’s peanut butter cups. We were both avid readers and had read many of the same books as children and as adults. By the end of the evening, I was a little twitterpated and that surprised me. I went to bed trying not to feel excited, because excitement had always ended in disappointment for me. I didn’t want to build up my hopes only to have them dashed. But at the same time I kind of felt like maybe he had noticed me, too.

The next day was Saturday and when I went on my weekly trip to Smith’s for groceries I found that bags of miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups were on sale. Roger had spoken passionately about his love of Reese’s peanut butter cups on our date, but I was trying not to think about Roger and I walked purposefully on past the peanut butter cups. 

And then I had a Moment of Clarity. Right there in the candy aisle I realized that I had a self-defeating attitude. The date had gone well! And yet here I was already assuming that Roger would never so much as glance my way again. With that attitude I was bound to act accordingly: I’d be shy and standoffish. At FHE I would make a point of avoiding conversation and eye contact and any sign that I might actually like him, because I was pretty sure he’d think I was a crazy stalker girl if I did. And that would be the end of it, but not because of him. Because of me. 
 

Standing there in the middle of Smith’s, I needed to not let this be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was going to have confidence for once. The night before, I’d had every reason to believe that Roger and I could be friends at the very least, and quite possibly more than friends, and I needed to not assume it was all over before anything had started. I needed to believe in the possibility, something I was not accustomed to doing. And in that moment, believing in the possibility amounted to buying those Reese’s peanut butter cups. If I had the confidence to buy the peanut butter cups, I reasoned, then the universe would conspire to give me a reason and an opportunity to give him the peanut butter cups. It all felt like some great, wonderful experiment that could solve all my dating woes.

I bought the Reese’s peanut butter cups, and Roger started avoiding me. Sometimes I imagine slights that aren’t there, but I was 99.9% positive at the time and am 98.2% positive in retrospect that avoiding me is exactly what he was doing. I was determined not to play my shy, hard-to-get hand, but I am also not naturally overbearing. In church on Sunday I smiled at him and tried to strike up casual conversation, and he slipped away with an awkward excuse. He stopped coming to FHE. He stopped coming to institute. He certainly never called me. My roommates and I invited Roger and his roommates over to our apartment for games and his roommate came, but Roger did not. His roommate said he was studying. At church, Roger avoided eye contact.

Those peanut butter cups sat in my dresser drawer for a long time. I should have eaten them myself, but the thought depressed me. A couple months later I poured them into a candy dish and let my roommates dispose of them for me. 

I have actually seen Roger a couple times since then, in unexpected places. Both times I felt nothing of that brief crush, but since he was a familiar face I wanted to say hi and see what he’d been up to in the years since. Maybe I also wanted him to see that I didn’t really care about what had happened and that I wasn’t madly in love with him. The second part, at least, was true. 

The first time I saw him was at a BYU dance I didn’t want to be at two years later when I'd returned to Provo for a masters degree. I pointed him out to my friend Tana and told her the story, and she encouraged me to catch his attention. But when Roger saw me he seemed to weave away. He made an exit for the bathroom, and Tana and I positioned ourselves casually near the hall but he didn’t come back that direction; he took the long way around. I felt certain he did this to avoid me, and Tana assured me it was just my perception, but she admitted that it kind of looked that way.

The second time was, strangely, in the Hill Street Ward. I spent an entire Sunday school hour staring at the back of Roger's head (not continuously) and wondering if it was him. After Sunday School he stood up and looked at me long enough that I could confirm that it was him. He made a quick exit again. He didn’t come back to the ward. But I think he was only visiting, maybe from Ohio or Bloomfield Hills.

Those peanut butter cups continue to loom symbolically in my memory. To this day I will occasionally do something in the spirit of optimism, sometimes dating-related and often not. I will buy tickets to a show months in advance before I know who I’ll invite to come with me. I’ll purchase a small gift because it reminds me of a particular person and I imagine that buying the gift will create the opportunity to give it to him or to her in the future. I will take a step out into the dark with the expectation that the universe will reward my optimism with not letting me fall off a cliff. But often my first reaction to my burst of optimism is to think, “This is just another Peanut Butter Cup Moment.” And I remember the original peanut butter cup moment when trying to push aside thoughts of what I feared ended up leading to exactly what I had feared.

Once I found a Pop Rocks chocolate bar in a bin at the grocery store. A friend was celebrating his birthday that night and so, on a whim, I bought the chocolate bar to give him as a birthday gift. I didn’t know him all that well and I had no ulterior motives. Something just made me think that he would get a kick out of a Pop Rocks chocolate bar. Before the birthday celebration, I picked up the bar and wondered if I should tie a ribbon around it or make a little card, but I felt kind of embarrassed so I just stuck it in my coat pocket. When I got to the party I fingered the chocolate bar in my coat pocket and wondered how to give it to him without awkwardness, without him reading it as anything other than the token of casual friendship that it was. And suddenly I thought, “On no! This is another Peanut Butter Cup Moment!” and I never took the chocolate out of my pocket. I set it on a shelf in my closet when I went home that night. Later I tried it myself. It was as strange as you’d expect, and I didn’t finish the whole thing.

Much, much later I told this friend about the Pop Rocks candy bar (but not about the peanut butter cups). “I would have loved that!” he told me, and since I knew him much better by that point I knew he would have; at the time of his birthday I had just been guessing. As we had that conversation I regretted that I’d kept the candy bar in my pocket. The truth was, it had not been a Peanut Butter Cup Moment. I’d had nothing to prove to myself or to him with that Pop Rocks chocolate bar. Instead I’d had an instinct and was a good instinct and I hadn’t listened to it. 

Because I have a tendency to imbue objects and events with great symbolism, which they may or may not actually merit, the Pop Rocks chocolate bar has also become significant to me. But the significance of the Pop Rocks is something entirely different from the significance of the peanut butter cups. The problem with the Peanut Butter Cups (as a symbol) is that they represent my attempt to force the universe, or God, or another person to conform to my idea of what I thought should happen. I wasn’t buying them for Roger, I was buying them for me. There was nothing inherently wrong with my intentions; what was wrong was the significance I read into the fact that everything worked out exactly the way I did not want it to.

But the Pop Rocks chocolate bar was never for me. The Pop Rocks chocolate bar was, from the very beginning, for another person. It’s only when it became about me that everything fell through. I doubt anything earth-shattering would have happened if I had gotten up the nerve to take that candy bar out of my coat pocket. Probably I would have given my friend the candy bar, and he would have loved it, and later we would have become friends just as we did and I would have looked back at the Pop Rocks candy bar and thought, “Huh. Maybe I knew him better than I thought I did.” Which is exactly what happened anyway, except that he didn’t get to enjoy the candy bar.

Something I have learned and am still learning is that sometimes instincts are just instincts (like the Pop Rocks), but sometimes they’re promptings. Regardless, instincts to do good for someone else are the kind that should pretty much always be acted upon. But it’s never about me. It’s got to be about the other person. Sometimes I may reap the benefit of doing good for another person either because it strengthens my relationship with that person or simply because I get a good feeling from doing it. But sometimes I might not get either of those, and honestly, that's okay.

Marathon Fail

Before I ran a marathon, I failed to run a marathon.

I've written about my marathon, and it remains one of my favorite blog entries. But I had only just started blogging at the time and I don't think I've ever written about my failed marathon. It was kind of heartbreaking for me. I thought I had done everything right. I had read books and Runner's World articles and online marathon training guides. I'd chosen a local marathon that was timed so that my peak training could happen in the spring. I mapped out four months worth of daily runs, with increasing long runs on Saturdays, and I transcribed my training plan onto a color-coordinated chart that I taped to the side of my bookshelf. I followed my plan religiously.

Every other Saturday I would wake up knowing that I was scheduled to run farther that day than I had ever run in my life. I opted out of Friday night social activities on those weekends so that I could go to bed early and get plenty of sleep, then wake up and be out the door at the crack of daylight (but I usually got very little sleep). I would carefully map out running routes that would loop just a couple miles farther than the last long run - out along Canyon Road, down to Will's Pit Stop and the Provo River Trail, up into Orem, back via University Parkway. After each long run I would spend the rest of the day exhausted and aching, barely able to walk. That was also when I first started having a really hard time fasting on fast Sundays. It hadn't occurred to me when I mapped out my runs that my body might rebel against running 15 miles and then going without food the very next day.

But I stuck with it. I may have spent my weekends tired and aching and hungry, but there was something really exciting about being able to say I had just run farther than I had ever run in my entire life, and to be able to say it every two weeks. That's not something I've been able to say even once in the nearly seven years since my successful marathon. I have no ambitions to run farther than 26.2 miles, so I may never be able to say it again.

The other time I didn't run a marathon.

But this was not my successful marathon. Six weeks or so before the marathon date, I set off on my third to last long run. I planned to run 19 miles, and I felt confident because I'd run 18 two weeks before that. But a couple miles from home my knee started hurting so much that I couldn't run another step. I hobbled down the hill to Shop-Ko and called my roommate for a ride home. I was disappointed, but not worried. I'd had knee pain before and I knew how to manage it. I ran with a knee brace that week, and a week later I set out for another Saturday run and my ankle started hurting. By Monday I couldn't put weight on my ankle without pain. I wrapped it in an Ace bandage, cross-trained for a week, and then set out for a run the following Saturday, but this time I finished the run with a shooting pain in my hip. It was the hip pain that finally did me in. By the end of the weekend I could barely walk or sit or stand, let alone run. I went to the BYU Health Center, where my doctor referred me to the physical therapist, who assured me that I'd be back up to my full running strength by the marathon date.

I wasn't. A week before the marathon I could run barely two miles before my sciatic nerve* forced me to stop. I had already broken the news of my injury to my parents, who had arranged to come to Utah to watch me cross the finish line. The night before I was supposed to run my marathon, I cried, because I had done everything right as best I knew how and I had failed and there was nothing I could do about it.

This is one of my favorite life stories. Of course you already know that it has a happy ending, because the following May I crossed the finish line at the Ogden marathon. But I attribute that success partly (maybe largely) to my initial failure. I don't think I trained better the second time around, but I definitely trained differently. I listened to my body. I mapped out a rough timeline, but not a schedule, and I didn't worry about sticking to it. I ran long runs when I felt like running long runs, and didn't when I didn't. I never once went to bed knowing that I would get up the next morning and run for 15, or 17, or 19 miles, because I never felt like I had to. I didn't miss out on social activities, I got more sleep, and sometimes I did run 15, or 17, or 19 miles.

I certainly carried some baggage from my failure with me. A week before my marathon I panicked because I thought my hip was going to fail on me again, or that I just simply wouldn't be able to finish, and I felt certain that I would let down my family and friends and (worse) myself once again. But other than that week of panic, the effect of my failure was mostly positive. I was better prepared for success, both physically and psychologically. And while I wasn't getting the same I've-never-run-this-far-in-my-life! high every other week, I was enjoying the process a lot more. I was absolutely not doing everything by the book. Instead I was doing what I had learned from experience worked best for me at that time in my life.

I like finding grand narratives in my life. Life can be chaotic and sometimes the grand narrative is just not there (or maybe just not visible in this life). But when I do find them, I try to use them to understand things in my life that don't seem to have that grand narrative yet. This is one I've pondered many time since. I'd like to say that I've been pondering it lately because it reflects other aspects of my life, and maybe I could find some analogy if I thought about it, but it's nothing so grand. It's just that a few weeks ago I decided that this is the year to finally run my second marathon. I'm only now feeling comfortable enough with the decision to let other people in on it, but I've already picked a marathon and begun running long runs and pumping myself up. And it means I've been thinking a lot about what went wrong the first time, and what went right the second time, and what might go better the third time.

That leaves me without a really good ending to the story. Instead I'll just end by directing you (if you're interested) to the new additions to my book blog: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie.




* This was not my physical therapist's diagnosis. He never was able to figure out what was wrong. I diagnosed myself several years later when my sister and I visited the Our Body: The Universe Within exhibit at the Detroit Science Center. The sciatic nerve on one of the bodies was labeled, and when I saw it I got excited and said to my sister, "That's it! That's where I was hurting!" I had long suspected the sciatic nerve, but none of the descriptions on running injury websites quite fit my symptoms. I may still have been wrong, but I felt validated.

Anopsology

A couple weeks ago I went out to eat with a friend at a Japanese hot post restaurant in Orem. I wasn't quite sure what I was getting myself into, and the lunch menu wasn't very descriptive. Whatever we were ordering was called shabu-shabu, and it came in Vegetarian, Pork, Chicken, Octopus, or Fish Ball, with no additional description. So I ordered pork.

A few minutes later the server placed a dish with noodles, vegetables, and several thin slabs of raw pork in front of me, and I had a moment of carefully concealed panic. My personal vocabulary for raw meat dishes extends only as far as sushi, sashimi, and ceviche, but my personal vocabulary for raw meat dishes is decidedly limited. A Japanese restaurant specializing in a dish called shabu-shabu with no menu description seemed was not an unlikely place to augment that vocabulary. In retrospect, on the other hand, a strip mall in central Orem was not. And to my relief, shabu-shabu didn't actually mean "meat that you eat raw," but "meat that you dump into a pot of boiling water to make soup." I still don't quite get the conceit of having the restaurant patrons do it themselves, but the soup was good, and the meat was cooked.

Apparently there are entire food movements centered around eating raw meat. And thanks to Google I learned that my raw meat vocabulary also includes carpaccio and steak tartare. (Before my research I didn't know they were raw. I just knew I'd heard the names of the dishes on Top Chef.) There's also muktuk (cubed raw whale meat with blubber), bplaa raa (a condiment made from decayed raw fish), kibbeh nayyeh (minced raw lamb mixed with bulger and spices), and quite a list of other dishes. Also, steak tartare is sometimes made from ground horse meat and usually topped with a raw egg. Yum.

I feel like I should apologize for this blog post. It's just that I had a bit of a raw meat scare right before the new year when I accidentally ate some raw chicken, and so I've got raw meat on the mind. And when I say I ate raw chicken, I don't mean cooked-on-the-outside-but-pink-on-the-inside raw chicken. The chicken had never been cooked. It was chicken cordon bleu from the BYU Creamery, which I bought because it brought back fond memories of freshman year Sunday dinners when my friends and I would make a weekly trek from Helaman Halls to Deseret Towers, because they had better Sunday dinners and better desserts. Chicken cordon bleu was on the menu once every three weeks like clockwork, and I haven't had BYU chicken cordon bleu since.

I wasn't quite sure how to prepare the chicken myself, though. There were no instructions on the package, just a price, an ingredient list, and a warning about making sure you don't undercook raw meat. Which I suppose makes it sound strange that I wasn't sure if the chicken cordon bleu was raw or cooked, but I feel like I had good reason for wondering. The chicken is breaded. The label is the same label used on all meat products, and it may make sense to create separate labels for raw and cooked meats. Also, I used to buy these spinach stuffed chicken breasts from BJ's in Virginia that were frozen, but fully cooked, and so my concept image of prepackaged stuffed chicken breasts tells me that they all come fully cooked. Also, the dorm cafeterias never served raw chicken cordon bleu. I kind of didn't think they could be uncooked.

And yes, I get the faulty logic here, but to be fair, I didn't rely my logic alone. I cut open one of the two pieces of chicken, and then decided it was fully cooked. And once I'd convinced myself, I popped the other piece of chicken into the microwave, and I popped the piece I'd cut off into my mouth. I was hungry.

All the ham and cream sauce and bread crumbs (and, upon reflection, the raw eggs that the chicken was probably drenched in to make the bread crumbs stick) meant that I didn't immediately realize my mistake. But the texture felt funny, and I suddenly had the horrifying thought that I'd been wrong to think the chicken was fully cooked, and I gagged and spit the chicken out in the sink and re-checked the piece it had come from and it was raw and I felt sick.

If you ever accidentally eat raw chicken, my advice to you is to not Google the phrase: "help i accidentally ate raw chicken." All it will do is lead you to a bunch of unofficial and untrustworthy message boards where people say unhelpful things like, "how in the world did you eat raw chicken???" and well-meaning advice like "90% of commercial chicken has salmonella in it, so pretty much all you can do now is sit back and brace yourself for a pretty awful case of food poisoning in a couple days."

Do you remember the last time I wrote about salmonella? I've had experience dealing with psychosomatic symptoms, and so fortunately for my health and sanity I put less focus on bracing myself for an awful case of food poisoning and more on convincing myself that even if there was salmonella, I had barely swallowed any, and I was probably safe, and if I wasn't there was nothing I could do about it until the symptoms appeared. Except I also drank a 32-ounce cup of water and a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper in the firm and probably misguided belief that it would flush the bacteria out of my system as quickly as possible.

And if you know better, please don't tell me why it won't work because I didn't get salmonella poisoning and I'd like to have an instant remedy on hand, just in case something like this ever happens again.

Theme

For the past several years I have, completely unintentionally (it's only now, looking back, that I'm seeing this), developed a yearly focus. Nothing so grand as Spirituality or Health or Kindness, which are all more like constants that I focus on more at some times than at others. I mean things like Cooking. Last year was a Cooking year. I had a recipe-a-week goal, which I followed pretty successfully until about September when I began teaching four classes a semester, and the success was mostly because I did the thing you're supposed to do when setting goals and recruited a friend to participate with me. But even after my cooking became more sporadic, I still found myself being more adventurous in my choice of ingredients and recipes and cooking techniques. I gained confidence in improvising, discovered with some surprise that I really love making vegetarian dishes, and used ingredients that I have never used before in my life: prunes, tofu, chicken thighs, grapeseed oil, parsnips. This year was a Cooking year.

Past themes-of-the-year have included Movies, Books, Dating, Running, and Travel. None of those were intentional yearly themes. But each one of them involved some sort of big goal that just sort of ended up stretching out over the course of, and in a sense defining, the entire year. This year I'm going to go out on a limb and be fully intentional, and I declare 2012 to be the Year of Writing. For the first time in eight years, the thing I am doing with my life does not require me to do any academic writing, and so it seems like the perfect time to finally focus on what I want to write. The writing doesn't necessarily need to go anywhere. I just want to do more of it.

And I want to share more of it, which is a really scary thing for me. So to kick start the new year I'm going to share something I wrote for an independent study Creative Nonfiction writing course I signed up for recently. The assignment was to create a series of very short, self-contained pieces based on personal memories or memories of other people, and this is just one of the ten or so that I submitted. Short is hard for me (already this introduction is longer than the piece I'm going to share), but that means it was probably good for me, too. I'm not sure if it resonates the way I want it to without the context of the other pieces around it, but one of my other goals is to stop qualifying myself too much, and so I am. Stopping.

Hitchhiker 

          The fly must have entered the car at the rest stop while the kids ducked out to use the restrooms and mom pulled the toddler from her car seat and dad retrieved sandwiches from the cooler in the back. No one noticed the fly; they were too busy stretching and swapping seats and passing around peanut butter and bologna and apples and crackers. 

          It wasn’t until the car was back on the freeway and they had driven through five or six empty miles of Joshua trees and desert shrubs that one of the children announced the presence of the unwelcome passenger. Mom rolled down a window, and the boys waved their hands to swat the fly toward it. The older sister yelled to roll the window back up because the 70 mile per hour wind was blowing her hair in her face. Dad yelled to stop making such a fuss about the fly or they’d all get in an accident. And then the fly found the window and flew outside, and peace was restored. 

          Dad turned on some music and mom pulled out a book and the brothers crouched over a coloring book and the toddler talked to herself quietly. But the sister stared out the window and thought how small the fly was and how big the desert. Five miles to a car of people must be five hundred miles to a fly, at least. They had freed him, but he would never again see his home, his friends, his family. 

          She pushed her windswept hair back behind her ears and for a moment felt very sad.

Diversification

On our last day in St. George over Thanksgiving we stopped at Jimmy John's for lunch before hitting the road. We parked next door in a strip mall, and I spotted this store:

I pointed it out to my parents. They thought it was awesome as I did.