A Great Life Thus Far

I'm turning 30 in a few weeks and it's got me doing a lot of contemplating.  There are a lot of lists out on the interwebs about things to do before you turn 30, and as much as I love lists, I hate the before 30 to-do lists.  While I've been contemplating just how great the last 30 years have been, I've been struck in particular by how great the last 5 have been, and I think it has lead me to some understanding about why I don't like life lists: 1) they are someone else's wishes and make me feel like I haven't done as much as I should have; and 2) they're not adaptable.  #2 really got to me because my real life as a 30-year old is so different than I imagined it could be when I was making lifetime goals at 12, 16, 18... (once I left the Young Women's organization no one made me make goals about my life, which is for the best).  I didn't know that I could have a job that primarily involved reading and looking at plants, that I could have a boyfriend who encouraged me to get better at things like mountain biking and rock climbing, or that cultivating relationships would be such an important part of life.  I don't think I had much imagination as a teenager, so I definitely couldn't see myself still being in school, but I did think I would be married and probably have kids... I didn't have many well-formed ideas, but I thought I would be like my mom (which would have been rad too). 

All of this contemplating would be for nothing if I didn't celebrate all the great things I've accomplished in life and the lessons to be learned from them.  Keep in mind, I'm using the term "accomplished" quite loosely, these are often other's accomplishments that have had a positive impact on me; however, I like the idea of using a proactive verb to describe the events in my life.  While I did mention just a paragraph ago that I feel like following other people's lists is un-fun, I highly recommend doing many of the things below. 

Year 0 - Learned to breathe, eat, and move outside the womb.  I give my mom some grief about introducing me to cows milk so early in life, but the focus on new foods throughout my life has made for a delicious life.  

Year 1 - Gained the first of five siblings, each of which has brought extreme joy and adventure to my life. I don't remember any parts of my life when I didn't have siblings, and that's pretty great.  Other siblings joined the mix at age 5, 7, 11 and 14.  

All of my siblings with me

The first

Year 2 - Learned about the importance of hygiene from Grandma Fisher.  Which is really a way to say that my grandparents (Downard and Fisher) had a strong influence on my life when I was young and we spent a lot of time either living in Provo or visiting Idaho Falls.  The time I spent with all of them listening to stories and playing made for a pretty great childhood.

Obviously I've loved being clean from an early age.  

Year 3 - Learned that I am the boss because I am the big sister...  I've since learned that birth order does seem to confer some advantages, but Liz is the boss.  Through the ages I've come to see even more advantages in my life to having so many siblings because they are so different from me and offer perspectives on life I wouldn't see if I didn't love them so much.

View the last time I was the boss of Liz.  

Year 4 - Attained the Dinosaur book.  My grandparents gave me a book about all the dinosaurs discovered up until that point (1988(?)) that was one of my first prized possessions.  It was the first thing I took to show and tell and one of the first books I tried to read once I could tackle chapter books.  And it planted the seed of my lifelong love of dinosaurs and natural history.

Doing something nature-y

Year 5 - Learned to read and love it.  Maybe it was good teachers, or perhaps my mom's love of reading, but I've enjoyed it a lot since I learned how to do it.  Among my first tasks was finishing the dinosaur book.  My favorite thing to do on the weekends is sit down to read a book and do nothing else.  

Obviously, learning to read led to big things for me, like graduating kindergarten.  

Year 6 - Moved to Clinton and learned to ride a bike.  Clinton was full of wide open spaces: undeveloped lots, fallow agricultural fields, unpaved roads... lots of biking space.  Once we figured out the importance of solid inner tubes in puncture vine territory and how to avoid hitting things, the world of Clinton was ours to roam.  To this day when I have idyllic riding experiences it reminds me of being 6 years old with my pink Huffy, feeling like I owned the world.  

Note the pink Huffies, wide open spaces, and puncture vine habitat.    

Year 7 - Attained first perm and learned about regret.  Remember "Ramona the Pest"?  One of the characters in that series had curls you could "boing".  I thought my long hair would have boingy curls, but it's thick and unmanageable and when permed it takes up 3 times as much space with 3 times the unmanageability.  And my curls never boinged, it's just hair pulling in real life.  

I didn't brush my hair for 2 years after this.  

Year 8 - Learned to play the piano.  Little did I know when I went to my first lessons that I would enjoy playing the piano the rest of my life and eventually teach my own piano students.  Playing the piano is a great calming activity and teaching was one of the most worthwhile jobs I've ever had.  Plus those students have gone on to be great people who also know how to play the piano, and I take some pride in that.

Somehow I persisted through early morning cow-pajama practice and...

Eventually I began teaching my own students, a good experience all around.  

Year 9 - Learned to operate a cd player.  The most important part of this was discovering "The Hippie Hippie Shake" by the Georgia Satellites.  It's a loud, fast, 1:30 minute long song, perfect for getting together with the cousins and listening on repeat.  Other important musical developments include attaining the tape soundtrack to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

Party animals right here.  

Year 10 - Began playing team sports, learned about the difficulties of teamwork and the importance of post-game snacks.  I played city league softball and basketball for years, and I rarely had a good team (in part because I was not good at softball).  However, it wasn't a negative experience for me because I met some good people, learned that teamwork is hard but worthwhile (a lesson I keep learning in graduate school), and found that popsicles after a long, hot, losing game make everything better (in this life, it's a post field work Slurpee).

A lot of great people, at least one ended up being a great softball player.  The rest of us had other skills that are not softball related.  

Year 11 - Wore the worst dance costumes ever, learned humility.  Yes, the costume below was inflicted on 8 people.  8 people with very different shapes at an impressionable part of their lives.  Perhaps the worst part of the whole thing: it wasn't a photo shoot, we had to get on stage in front of a full auditorium and dance in those costumes, twice.  The lesson: let your dancing shine past the costumes.  Your moves are are awesome.

Guess what song we danced to in those costumes?  "Kokomo."   

Year 12 - Made friends with these girls.  I met my greatest friends my first year of junior high and we're still friends.  They were fun, troublesome, and a little dramatic, and my teenage years would have sucked without them.

Year 13 - Started forming my own opinions about my favorite music.  Up until junior high my musical tastes were shaped largely by the tapes my parents listened to while we were on vacation (and truth be told, I still love Chicago and Elton John).  My first foray into setting my own tastes was stealing the No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom CD my mom bought.  I think I gathered a pretty sweet CD collection in the next 10 years, but then CDs went out of favor and I could get all the pop music I wanted on the cheap, so my music collection is far more whimsical now.

Of note here are the Hanson posters in the background.  This is where my new found music freedom took me.  

Year 14 - Played on sports teams that sometimes won games and learned that winning is fun.  Yes, it took four years to find a team that won with any frequency, and it was great.  I learned that my competitive nature could be channeled into positive arenas, that if I tried hard I could see some real results on the scoreboard.  Sportsmanship eventually came of this, as I realized games could be fun winning or losing, so long as the players didn't behave like jags.

One of my favorite basketball teams.  This year had the best colored Junior Jazz jerseys ever.  

Year 15 - Donated my hair to Locks for Love, learned that hair grows back.  I have periodically had very long hair in my life.  Very long hair gets lots of compliments, but it takes a lot of time to brush and often gets caught in things like closing windows.  At 15 I decided I would do something dramatic and cut all my hair off.  I remember over hearing people afterwards say things like "Oh my gosh, she actually did it."  and feeling like "Oh, you cut your hair" isn't actually a compliment so much as an observation.  But really, the important lesson was that hair grows back, so any good/bad hair decisions won't last long.

Another lesson -  styling that Meg Ryan look is difficult.  

Year 16 - Earn driver's license and high insurance rates (sorry Auntie Boo).  I was psyched to get my drivers license when I turned 16 and wanted to drive everywhere.  So I took my parent's Astro Van, Herbert, at every opportunity.  Within 3 weeks I got in my first car accident when I backed into my Auntie Boo's car while it was parked in the drive way.  I can't remember all the other things I hit, but it happened in quick succession and I ended up with pretty high insurance rates, which spurred my need to get a job.  So I suppose the lesson is that there are consequences to paying poor attention to your surroundings.

The striking power of the Chevy Astro Van: Herbert only sustained a broken tail light.  

Year 17 - Attain a Gus, discover what love is.  Gus was the first car I ever bought, a 1994 Toyota Pickup.  There were many lessons that came along with car ownership that I didn't really want to learn, like the importance of maintenance, the need to account for costs like gas, or the striking power of older, metal vehicles.  But the lesson that I will remember the longest is the joy that came with getting something that I had wanted to 10 years: my very own truck.  Setting and attaining money saving goals is very fulfilling.

Year 18 - Left high school and entered college.  Such an exciting time in life, one more of those opportunities to realize that attaining goals is satisfying.  I honestly felt like I was bound for college from a very young age (right around the time I attained the dinosaur book), and it was a pretty great place to be.  I got to choose my own classes in areas that I was really interested in, there were other people in my classes that were just as interested in learning as me, and there were couches everywhere that were perfectly acceptable to nap on.

Year 19 - Realize that 19 is not that old.  I mentioned earlier that my mom is one of the most important influences in my life, someone who I would like to be more like.  And she got married when she was 19.  Further, my friends all got engaged when we were 19.  Up until I turned 19 I thought I would be following this same path, which lead to a little bit of angst at 19, not because I really wanted to be married, but because I didn't really feel like an adult who could get married and have kids.  I think the lesson to be learned from all of that angst is that people mature at different rates, and I've never been on the fast track.

Working at the theatre, definitely not ready to burst out into the real world.  

Year 20 - Attained my own apartment, learned about rent and utilities and the importance of a good neighborhood.  The outgrowth of my angst at not feeling like an adult was to move out of my parents house into my own apartment.  The easiest place for someone like me, who spent most of my money going to college, was a nearby complex that rented on a month-to-month basis.  They conducted background checks but didn't have any financial requirements that would prevent someone as poor as me from getting an apartment.  Within a month my ceiling fell out, my doorknob broke, and I heard "Oh, you live there?  I used to buy my drugs there" at least 10 times.  The last straw was when someone vandalized a car with poop (literally).  I moved to an apartment up the hill that required a co-signer and a lease agreement 3-times as long as the previous place, but I slept much better there.

Year 21 - Learn the link between looking and feeling good.  At this point in my life I started purchasing quality underwear (no rayon here!) and high-heeled shoes.  I also started to understand flat-irons and their ability to control my hair.  I rarely wear the high-heeled shoes and I only use my blow drier to weather proof my house, but making some effort to look like I feel (or want to feel) is always worthwhile.  I think it works both ways, feeling good makes you look good, and looking good can make you feel better.  Most often this involves smiling and trying to keep my hair away from my face, but occasionally high heels are necessary because they make me feel confident.

Obviously, I started being fashionable early

Year 22 - Graduated college and moved to Logan.  Here the I'm-not-a-grown-up angst begins to fade a little.  Receiving my college diploma was a pretty big deal because it was the result of a lot of work, but I think moving away was an even bigger deal.  For the first time I wasn't sure what I would be doing for a few weeks in the future, I lived with my first roommate and had to make brand new friends.  Lots of things were new and unknown, but it all turned out fine.  Leaving the safety of my undergraduate institution and Davis County was scary, but it's important to do scary things.

I graduated college, it was a pretty big deal.  

Year 23 - I held four different jobs in one year and learned the link between satisfying employment and a good life.  During this transitional period between my undergraduate and graduate work I drifted a bit.  I worked in the mall (thoroughly dispiriting), went back to the movie theater (not terrible), started working at a zoo (awesome! finally using the Zoology degree), and began a graduate assistantship with TA work (I never want to teach a whole class of student, they suck).  I also went for 3 weeks without a job at all.  Before this series of jobs, I had worked at a movie theater and taught piano lessons, and I did each of them for 6 years.  I hadn't learned how to quit anything or take advantage of opportunities that were coming my way.  Transitory employment was scary, but again, it's good to do scary things.

This guy gored me a year after this picture was taken.  If I'd never worked at the zoo I'd be missing a lot of great stories. 

Year 24 - I went on my first solo adventure.  In the spirit of doing scary things and taking advantage of opportunities that come by, at 24 I went on my first Spring Break vacation all by myself to southern Utah.  I hiked to some pretty great places in Zion, learned how to break into my truck, forgot the paddles for my kayak, and got stranded on a remote beach for an entire day.  But I also learned that being by myself for days on end isn't bad (but shouldn't exceed a week), and ultimately that people are great.  Solo vacationing brings out the best in others, somehow.  I've met the most interesting people hiking by myself, and when I've run into trouble, there is always someone that can help, so long as I ask.

Yep, wind stranded me on a beach, where I was forced to call 911 for help.  

Year 25 - Learned how to climb rocks and enjoy it.  While bogged down in the graduate school process, one of my friends asked if I wanted to come along with her to the rock climbing gym, and it totally saved my graduate experience.  Rock climbing made me feel like I was good at something, a feeling that was missing while slogging through the writing experience.

Who knows why it took until 25 to learn how to climb when I started this early.  

Year 26 - Attained Master's Degree and stayed put.  It took me an extra year to finish writing my thesis (which I blame on Facebook), and it took 3 more years to publish my research in peer reviewed literature.  None of that would have been possible if I hadn't had the opportunity to stay put in Logan because I was offered a position as as a research technician (originally so I could publish...).  This gave me many opportunities I might not have had otherwise, like trying road biking my climbing friend.  This weird mishmash of a year ultimately lead to the connections that kept me in graduate school, so I think the lesson is that trying new things (like field work, road biking, and cooking) can lay the ground work for new directions in life (like a PhD in ecology) and staying put is sometimes the right thing to do.  Also of note, I met Brent this year, which was pretty great.  

Year 27 - Field work in different locations leads to understanding of what really makes me scared and what makes me happy.  While working as a field tech I got to do field work in various, really remote places across our great state, including the forests in the central Utah and the West Desert.  Through this I learned that soil pits, plants, and hiking make me very happy.  I also learned that I am still seriously scared of lightning and have a great degree of trepidation about committing to long term things like a PhD.  But pressing forward is always worthwhile.

Thunderstorms coming in over the Fishlake Forest

Year 28 - I bonked and learned about the importance of vacations and keeping your blood sugar levels high.  The first year of my PhD was probably the most tear jerking time of my entire life, and it was that way from the very beginning.  During a January trip to Red Rocks the week after my brother's wedding and week before I started school again, I had an epic meltdown about salad.  In short, I was tired, feeling overworked, and I hadn't eaten much during the day, so I over-reacted to a minor set back (wanting something more substantial than salad after a day of climbing) with fierce tears.  This is a bonk.  Without regular vacations and enough food I spent a year having weekly meltdowns about the work I was doing.  By October I finally figured out that vacations are important to feeling energetic and that actively maintaining good blood sugar levels is critical in being able to react to situations appropriately.

Would you believe a complete meltdown about salad was just an hour away from this picture?

Year 29 - Mountain biking and the importance of pace.  I've tried mountain biking before, but this year it started to be really fun for me.  This new found fun-ness came from being able to set a sustainable pace when peddling uphill.  Without a good pace, it's impossible to get to the top of the mountain without taking a ton of breaks, and that's less fun than making one sustained push.  This lesson, of course, is easily applicable to life outside the bike, so I'll just leave it at that.

Year 30 - ...

Good things have happened in my life so far and I think the future will be even better. 

On Learning the Wrong Lesson

I occasionally find myself purposely learning the wrong lesson from things.  This desire to learn the wrong lesson has hit me a few times this week as I've reminisced about my life thus far and the lessons I could learn 29.90 years of living.  But even more pertinent is my experience today - I had a rage aneurysm.  You know, when something is so suddenly upsetting that the combination of jaw clenching, eye strain from not crying, and rage-induced high blood pressure causes your blood vessels to expand and then burst (figuratively)?   With a single email, I went through an intense series of emotions that ultimately lead me to decide that I had wasted all of last week, and I was angry about this.  I'm uncomfortable with anger, but I proceeded to stifled rage.  I was in my office, you see, so tears and yelling "Are you freaking kidding ME?!?!?" were not appropriate, thus the rage aneurysm.  Once home, I let the tears loose and thought about how I could prevent such an outburst in the future (after all, the next aneurysm might be real).  My first reaction was "Don't work so much, you can't regret work you didn't do."  But that didn't seem right, I take pride in my work and the reputation I hope that builds.  The next reaction was to consider emailing the antagonist to let them know my rage, but I had already sent an email that said "Right on," so it was a little late for an about-face.  I'm not sure what the right lesson to learn from this is.  I suspect it is something nuanced, like to be more of a participant in work place activities and say "no" to requests that might waste my time.  But I think I might just become jaded, because that's easy; plus my mom used to call me jaded and she loves me.

Earlier in the week, while I was thinking about life experiences and the lessons they have taught me, I remembered the time my parents got me to admit to something my sister did.  This happened more than 20 years ago, but I think I finally figured out the lesson to learn from it, which means I've been learning the wrong lesson for decades now.

Flashback to 1990.  The Downard's had just moved to Clinton, to the first home my parent's were owners of, not renters.  Can you feel the freedom?  It was palpable to me (and I imagine to everyone who recalled our recent apartment complex years).  Also relevant to this experience, my mom was buying nice makeup, I can't remember if she was into Avon products at the time or purchasing things from her department store job, but she definitely wasn't using the grocery store stuff that I buy.

At the time, our yard looked like this -

 - and Liz and I were just learning how to ride our bikes (a great story for another day), so there was often free time to make trouble.  Of course I used this as an opportunity to study the new suite of plants around town, help my dad dig trenches for the irrigation system, and read the dinosaur book (as I remember it).

But do you know what Liz did? She drew X's on the house with my mom's waterproof mascara!  As I mentioned I earlier, it was quality mascara, so the X's are still there and I'll be taking a picture next time I'm in C-town.

This was pretty upsetting to Mom and Dad.  Big black X's on their brand new house.  So they sat Liz and I down and asked us who had desecrated their house.  Here my memory gets fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure they went into the interrogation knowing that Liz did it, and that said interrogation lasted for 3 hours.  [Keep in mind, it was 1990, we were 5 and 6.]

After 2 hours (or maybe less) I cracked.  I said it was me.  I remember weeping profusely and thinking that the whole experience would be over if I just admitted to it because Liz definitely wasn't going to.  But then IT DIDN'T END.  They called my bluff and kept asking who did it, they kept giving Liz the opportunity to admit what she had done.  I don't even know how long it took for the interrogation to end, but I'm 90% confident it ended when my parents told Liz that they knew she had drawn the X's.

So what are the lessons to be learned from this?  The lesson I carried with me for most of my life was that Liz is more devious than me, so I shouldn't challenge her and definitely should not tattle (we had an excellent list of "I'll tell mom's" to hold against each other).  This whole experience might actually be the root of "Mean Lizzie" (the siblings sometimes call her that, because clearly she used to be mean).  But since we've graduated high school and become quite good friends, Liz has convinced me she's actually very sweet and can't lie, even if she wanted to.  The other, longer lasting lesson I learned from this is that confessions induced by interrogations can't be trusted.  Thus, I've got more faith in judicial proceedings that aren't based on coerced confessions and I don't think "enhanced interrogations" are a good means of combating terrorism.  Come to think of it, perhaps I did learn at least one good lesson from the whole experience.

However, 23 years later, I think I've finally learned the "Right" lesson from the Mascara X's Interrogation Experience:

Parenting is hard, especially when your kids are smart.  

I've only learned this as I've watched Mom and Dad raise my younger siblings (some of which are young enough they're still being raised) and Liz raise her kids.  Kids are trouble and often much smarter than we give them credit for.  And sometimes they use those smarts for evil.  That's all.

Of course, this has been strictly from my perspective.  If Liz wants to chime in with an explanation of why she drew the X's (I'd love a story about buried treasure), or if Mom and Dad want to let me know if they really knew it was Liz, you're welcome to do it.