Juice Please?

I can't believe the last post was in August! In all fairness, I am now a graduate student and everything I write is critically judged -- a practice that tends to stifle creativity.

To catch you up, we left Memphis and a home we still owned and moved back to Utah. After a few weeks we found a spacious apartment at homely Wymount. It is great because the apartment does not echo like our house did because there is no wall far enough away for sound waves ... to ... do whatever they do to echo. Our house in Memphis miraculously sold the day before we had to make a rent payment for Wymount. The church is true!

Anyway. It is almost Thanksgiving and I thought I would treat you with some creativity so that tomorrow at the dinner table you have something to be thankful for. I wrote this a while back, but it is 100% true and accurate, as far as I can remember.

When I was a senior at Davis High School I took an elective class titled "Adult Roles and Responsibilities." The topics of this class revolved around parenting, marriage, cooking and adult responsibilities – all subjects that are constantly on the mind of a 17-year-old boy/man. Among these topics was that of childbirth. I'm not sure if this was really intended to teach teenage boys about childbirth, or indirectly to prevent teenage boys from engaging in practices that resulted in childbirth. Either way, I suppose the process works.

The capstone of this wonderful lecture series on childbirth was a trip to (then) Humana Hospital to watch a fun little video tape of nameless random woman's exciting child birthing experience.

It would not have been so bad if I were not the only teenage boy there. As it turns out, the rest of the boys in the class decided to skip class that day, and I didn't get the memo – one of many memos I missed in high school.

What an experience! This educational trip did not just stop with a birthing video. After the video, a fresh placenta was rolled in.

I am not sure if it was the video or the placenta or some permutation of both, but it was apparently a shock to my system. As the class walked down the hall, my head felt lighter and lighter, and I had a hard time avoiding the walls. Before I knew it, I was awoken by the sharp fall to the ground.

Don’t worry. Fortunately I was at a hospital. Almost immediately there was a nurse at my side. Before I could say “no” I was lying on a hospital bed contemplating how I would face my friends at school. The nurse made me drink some juice. After taking a moment to fix my hair, which was a little out of place from the fall, the nurse led me back to my waiting classmates. I remember looking up to see them looking back at me. There I was, being escorted down the hall with a cup of juice in my hand and a red bump on my head.

All I could think to mutter was:

"What does someone have to do to get some juice around here?"