Hi, my name is Emily, and I'm a creepy stalker. Please hide your children from me.
So, tonight I spent a good amount of time looking at the facebook profiles of people that I haven’t spoken to since high school. Is this considered stalking? They did technically “friend” me at one point. And isn’t the internet pretty much public domain? Well, I wasn’t particularly “popular” or “cool” back then (what, like I am now?), so needless to say, I’m not in any hurry to reconnect with most of them. But I am, however, in a hurry to study their lives via their blogs and websites for hours on end! Woo-hoo!
My high school was in an affluent suburb outside of Seattle, Washington. And do you know what you find out in the middle of nowhere when there’s this strange white-on-white gentrification of rich Microsoft yuppies moving into an area once largely populated by hicks? Well, you find a lot of things. Meth labs, llama farms, Ford Excursions…But do you know what else you find a lot of? Mormons.
So, I went to high school with a bunch of Mormon kids. One of my high school classmates even converted to Mormonism! I think she was probably the only 16-year-old in the history of the United States to say, “You know what would be cool? No, not a VW Cabriolet. I’d like to be Mormon.”
So now that I’m a young, spry, single twentysomething who’s desperately trying to figure out whether I want to stay working at my non-profit job for a wage that even we consider low-income or run away to a developing nation for a while and live out of a bindle on a stick, I realize that all the Mormons I knew in high school are MARRIED. Every fucking one of them. (As a side note, I think it’s really interesting to see what happens when a generation of kids who follow each other’s lives largely through Facebook start getting married and making babies and suddenly start finding out that someone had a baby because the creepy stalker feed on your homepage tells you that they changed their profile pic to one of them nuzzling their newborn. It’s like a whole new form of gossip. You don’t have to hear it from her mom’s neighbor’s hairdresser anymore. Which is helpful since I’ve lived out of state for the past six years since high school ended.)
As I’m voyeuristically (so proud of myself I spelled that right on the first try!) looking through the Facebook photos of my high school classmates, the nosiest part of me that yearns for more starts to get antsy. That’s when I see it.
http://_________and___________.blogspot.com.
Oh my god, they have a coupley blog.
I click the link and I am immediately hooked. I spent the next hour reading the blog of a high school acquaintance and her family and newborn baby. Then, I link to another. And another. What is this? Is this, like, a Mormon thing? All the Mormons I know from high school have blogs chronicling every detail of everything from putting down an offer on their tract-style home in the burbs (I swear it’s the exact same floor plan of the one my parents bought when we first moved to the Northwest) to their ritual Friday-night dates to Outback Steakhouse (where she worked as a hostess before she got preggo) to the growth of a baby bump on an ultra-hot, petite frame which eventually became an adorable-as-fuck trendily-named baby. Here are some of my favorite highlights from an unabashed night of blog perusal.
On one blog the wifey decides to dedicate a Valentine’s Blog entry to her hubby. Sweet, huh? She writes,
He is so amazing. Everything he does is so cool to me, and all of the knowledge that he has is so humbling. He is not only book smart, but he knows so much about the gospel and about the little things in life, that I cant help but learn something new from him everyday.
Wait a minute. What’s the difference between being book smart and gospel smart? Isn’t the gospel a book? Well, if you thought that she’s just looking for a pious man who can recite passages from the gospel on command, think again. Oh no. Other things are important. Like hottie factor and style:
He is so attractive! Not only does he dress nice, but he is always clean shaven and he always smells so good. He has a good fashion sense, and puts me to shame in the shoe department. He is always in the best of moods. First thing in the morning he is sweet and happy and all through the day he is positive and laid back. There is never a time where he is hard to be around.
Okay, I’m going to feel really bad about saying this, but I think your husband might be a gay.
I’m just saying.
Then, there’s my favorite post of all! The one where thet go over to some relative’s house (he’s a real estate agent and is going to help them with their. house-buying! Sweet!) and oh yeah, the newlyweds get to kick it with their pet Niko. A Serval. A wild cat. A freaking wild cat in their home. A freaking straight-off-the-Savannah wild animal.
”
Oh yeah, you know. Just come over and kick it with me and my fucking exotic cat! How crazy is this? So then deviate a little bit from my busy Blogstalking schedule to look up Servals, and I find out that it’s actually legal to own them, you just need an exotic animals permit. Anyway, it seems weird as hell to me. But I couldn’t get hung up on this issue for too long; I had more ultra-cheezy blog entries to read.
Basically the main themes of the blogs were love, family, quality time, love, babies, religion, and pets. Oh yes, pets. Pets are huge. If you don’t have three pets (extra points for exotic ones) you can just kiss your blog readership goodbye.
And so I was giggling to myself and thinking about how scary it would be right now to be all wifed up and babied out….and then I read this, which basically solidified my desires to live up my twenties and take as much time as I need to see this world before I settle down.
On a list of “six random facts about myself,” hidden way at the bottom is this secret little desire that desperately wants to be realized…
6. i really wanted to live in new york. when craig was applying to a bunch of different dental schools, I was rooting for Columbia. and then, when he got accepted there (and we hadn’t heard from UW yet) i was living on cloud nine. picturing myself taking the subway everywhere, shopping everyday, and becoming a true new yorker. then, craig got accepted to UW, and there was no question that we would go there instead. i love seattle, being next to family, and saving tons of money…… but i still dream about living the “real life” in manhattan. someday, i will get over it. someday.
Pretty much heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time.
