irielife.net

I decided a while before moving out here that I didn’t want living in Provo to be about dating. I renewed this resolve a month or so ago when I enrolled in summer session at BYU. However, just minutes after walking into my soccer class, my dreams of living in studious solitude flew right back out the practice facility door, as I had a date with my instructor. Yep, I think it’s official that I have the strangest life ever.
That was about a month ago. Three nights later, disaster struck my social life.

Just know that I have survived with most of my integrity intact. Jeff was here in town visiting and of course, then, had to meet the boys I’ve been dating – among them Matt, whom I met at the Glenwood hot tub. Well, one night we all played Cranium with some friends from the ward, and then walked out to the parking lot to say our goodbyes. Just as we walked out – Matt, Jeff, and I – one of the other boys I’d just started dating showed up with a surprise for me. Let me just tell you what an awkward situation you have when the two boys you’re dating are meeting each other – one (matt) with full knowledge that I date other people and therefore smugly and confidently going out of his way to make friends with the intruder; and the other living under the mistaken and uncorrected assumption that I have few other interests in my life than him and am completely unattached. This second boy was so crestfallen – and I’m sure didn’t know what to make of not only the boy trying to hug and hold me, but also my male best friend of 9 years who has spent time desiring to be mixed among these would-be suitors and for some strange reason loves me even after experiencing years in this mess of men!
Jeff and I were laughing yesterday about it and how I’ve somehow managed to maintain amiable dating circumstances with both, when Jeff just looked at me and said: “Oh, what a tangled web you weave…”

That’s the good and the bad.
There is one other phenomenon that I’ve come across in Provo that disturbs me. It is the assumptions made after having acquired the most important information about a person whom you’ve just met. This vital information is, of course, where a person is from, what they do (ie work, play, etc), and what color that person’s hair happens to be. Apparently I have socially lethal answers to these: the combination of California, lifeguard (work is play), and blonde has provoked such descriptive assumptions about me as:
high maintenance
superficial
materialistic
and my personal favorite, which caused me to have nightmares of my acquiring a freakishly large chest that I might have to support on an ever-shrinking waist: BARBIE.
This also caused me to confess to mom a couple of weeks ago that I wish for my acne back again. When I had bad skin, people only ever seemed to assume that I must have had inner beauty and strength of character…