Are you familiar with this Satanic and glorious game? A game so savory, so haunting, that the five minutes you vow to play expands into an unthinkable four hours where the only thing that matters are lining up the multipliers and lining up rows of five. A game so enchanting that it matters not what social interaction you aren’t having, but only the points quickly racking up on the top left side of the screen. I feel my life getting sucked into the world wind of gemstones, and as long as it stays on my I-Pod, there is no foreseeable end in sight.

I explain the true menace of the game to make this lapse of childcare forgivable in the eyes of my readers. It wouldn’t have happened had it not been for all the Blitzing going on. Bethany and I were at the computer—eyes watering, hearts thundering beyond our ribcage and to our entire body for what seemed like mere moments. Surely it couldn’t have been longer than one round. Fixated we sat. Transfixed, Mesmerized, Bedazzled… Bejeweled. And finally when consciousness seemed nigh, we realized that a strange calm had come over the house. We rose from the computer room only to find the product of our neglect!

Have you ever seen something that just… makes you better? Because it takes everything you know and everything you feel and just flips it upside down, and hands your knowings and feelings back to you with a big sign stamped across them that says “You are wrong” and you can’t help but realize that they are right.

I saw something that made me better. BYU’s latest theatrical project, which can’t be named for copyright’s sake just… made me better. Because now I know that I am wrong about my feeling that things couldn’t be worse than they already are.

For those of you who did not see BYU’s unnamed production, let me explain to you why you should have. First of all, the actors not just crept, and not just danced, but positively burrowed into your heart and twisted their ways into all the crevices until it bled. This doesn’t sound pleasant, and truth be told, it wasn’t really, but it reminded me how to feel again. To feel so hard you bleed. And something about that was comforting.

Secondly, the tiny black box of the theater mutated before your very eyes into a drab dance hall without the use of any props or set. For two meaningful hours the world transformed and absorbed into a disgusting world of entertainment, manipulated by masks and drama. For two short but oh-so-long hours everything was horrible and beautiful, black and bare yet elaborate and decadent considering you were all the way back in the 1930’s.

And third of all, the balmy realization that things can always be worse. They can always be worse to the point where “living ain’t the prize anymore.” Things can be so bad that you have to beg someone else to kill you because you just don’t have the courage. Things can always be worse.

It’s pieces like that that make you realize that you have it good and you were wrong to think otherwise.

I’ve been a kid, I think maybe my whole life, until this year when I grew up so much that I think I became addicted to it. Size-wise, I grew down a little, but I think mentally I have finally hit five foot seven. And I think age 21 brought me a new wrinkle, maybe in my forehead, or my cheeks, or my brain, but quite possibly—and most of all—I have a new wrinkle in my soul.

Soul wrinkles are different than forehead and cheek wrinkles, which usually indicate the aging process, and maybe dry skin. Brain wrinkles indicate increased knowledge and since I am college student, I suppose it makes sense that I’ve acquired a few more of these. But soul wrinkles are a different breed of wrinkle. A soul wrinkle isn’t visible. It isn’t surface level. A soul wrinkle takes its shoes off and wades barefoot through your bloodstream. It builds a little nest in your heart and settles for the season. A soul wrinkle isn’t visible, yet it registers an identifiable shift in your outward demeanor, and therefore people can tell you have one.

So what is the origin of this unexplored wrinkle? I can pinpoint two things this year that brought it about: My travels to Europe and my relationship with Shaun Michael Johnson.

Chronologically, it makes sense to first discuss my travels. “My travels” include the month spent agonizing over whether or not they were actually going to happen. For those of you who don’t know, I started my year with every intention of going to Metz, France to be an au pair (which is a glorified nanny) for eight months. I sold my purple Provo apartment, deferred my enrollment for a semester, broke things off with my nameless casual male attachment du jour, and quit my job, thus putting all my eggs in the European basket, which was decorated like the inside of Versailles and plastered with paintings by Leonardo DaVinci. I wasted January waiting for my work visa to arrive, and as soon as it did, I got “the fated email” from the family that I was supposed to nanny for. Would you like to see it? Here it is, verbatim:

“Bonjour Sierra,

I am deeply sorry not to write you back but something happens last week and we had a serious conversation with Pierre this weekend. Actually, I didn’t have the courage to call you because I am really upset, but Pierre lost his job and financially with the crisis in Europe, we are not able to welcome you for the year…. I AM SORRY SORRY because you are so great and it was a hard decision to take…”

While I am sure that her decision was actually hard to make, for me, it was difficult to take. With this startling introduction to 2009, I was almost certain that the year was going to be a complete wash. I spent two full days on my mother’s leather sectional watching “The OC,” (which, let’s face it, only made things worse,) and bemoaning the loss of my adventure. Yet, in retrospect, I embrace this experience as part of “the wrinkle.” Because out of the dust, I came back stronger– a life motif I’ve discovered this year. Finding another route to Europe required me to be resourceful, to not allow my metaphorical kick in the crotch to physically debilitate me. I still had my European adventure, and in retrospect, fighting for it made the journey even sweeter.

In Ireland I stuck my face out over a 300-foot drop into the ocean. I sat where William Wordsworth composed his poetry. In Wales I visited the country of my ancestors and felt them rooting me on with resolute fists punching the air. I read Peter Pan under a tree in France, and could feel myself growing up as I encountered the boy who never could. I came to find that there was something much deeper to me than just my little American body. There, in Europe, were the roots of my existence. I dug up my roots and wiggled my toes around in the dirt surrounding them. I planted a new part of myself, writing along the way about the changes that were taking place inside me, about the wrinkle that was forming. I romped around the country that gave me life. It was no accident that I got that fated email from my French family that day. Because going on the British Literature Study Abroad was so much better for me. It changed me. It made me wiser. It gave me a new purpose and a new understanding of self. I’m better because of it.

And so it’s only fair to explain the other half of the year, maybe (dare I say it?) the better part of the year. I am nervous to write it down for fear that he is reading it, but ultimately I think it’s just all too fair that I pay tribute to the boy that made 2009 the best year of all 21 of my years. If it hadn’t been for the fated email, I would have been in France when I was supposed to be meeting Shaun Johnson. Thank goodness for disappointment.

Shaun Johnson made me smart. He gave me confidence when I had none. He taught me about how I deserved to be treated, and how much better it was to have one person truly care about you rather than several other people who are mildly interested in the way your butt looks in jeans. He taught me how to settle down. He taught me that I was pretty without the makeup of the day, or the disguise of the century. And even if things didn’t “work” between us, I’m thrilled that he happened to me, because otherwise I would just have 21-year-old forehead wrinkles, and those are absolutely no fun. Without Shaun Johnson, there would be no wrinkles in the surface of my soul. Shaun Johnson inspired words to write. Journal entries, and stories, and letters all happened because of him. 2009 would have been a sour peach with a worm embedded within. Instead, 2009 was a succulent watermelon that leaves sweet juices trailing from the corners of your grin—even if you had to spit out a couple of seeds.

2009 has been described by someone other than me like this: “2009 was like a really great book that had a disappointing ending, but I still really enjoyed reading it.” Can I echo this? But can I make an amendment? “2009 was like a really great book that had a disappointing ending, but I still really enjoyed writing it.” I authored my own version of 2009, and despite the extreme ups of the last 365 days, bumps and bruises definitely elbowed their way into my story. I do not shun them. I embrace them. They mingled with the good of 2009 and made it the best year I’ve ever written. The bumps and bruises are part of “the wrinkle”, because let’s face it, a wrinkle is not an entirely good thing.

2009 brought 21. It brought a 3.8 GPA, and acceptance into my major, and it brought Xan home from a mission. But most of all it brought me a soul wrinkle that forces me to grow up just a little bit. It forces me to say goodbye to kid Sierra, and embrace the burgeoning adult that I’ve been threatening to become my entire youth. So I’m a little bit wiser after this year. Maybe a little bit sadder, but a little bit happier too.

It felt so strangely like a movie, wandering through the spices aisle amidst obnoxious “Oh the weather outside is frightful-ing” going on over the Smith’s stereo system. I swear as I dropped my third lean cuisine into my basket—just enough food to just subsist throughout the next solitary week– I heard my feelings plink into to interwoven black plastic. As I turned the key into my apartment later, which is now completely devoid of roommates, I realized that if I had a cat, I would be pulling a Sandra Bullock and dipping my oreo into its milk bowl. Truly, this feeling can only be described as cinematic. That special sort of holiday loneliness that only has an end in sight when the radio will stop playing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

How do I combat this? Any tips?

The silence sat under my toe the same way a crunched leaf wiggles after the savor of its crunch has been extinguished. It tiptoed across my shoulders and put its weight around me like a blanket. It muted the passing cars in their tracks by creating the tracks that muted them. And it pushed the forming tear back into my tear duct as I began to feel like a martyr.

You know those impossibly bad days? Those days where you swear that the cosmos crooked their pinky finger in your direction, which pulled the bench out from under you right when you sat down to eat your lunch? And then, oh Academiaus, who had a hoot watching you wipe the macaroni off your forty dollar blouse and climb back onto the bench, decides that messing with you is fun, so he will watch you squeam and squirm as you get your grade back on an essay that you thought you nailed. And then, of course, Cupidus Maximus Meanus comes along and shoots you with an “embarrass yourself arrow,” which takes over your vocal cords and forces you to say something that makes you beat your head against the nearest lunch tray and/or wall repeatedly until you think you can show your face in public again (even though it’s red and bruised from the lunch tray beating). You know those days?

Those “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad” Days where you look into your wallet and realize that you don’t even have enough money to move to Australia?

That has been my today, today.

And then there was silence. A blissful, glorious silence of snow blankets that wrapped around my shoulders and hugged until the tear in my duct slipped quietly back inside my eye and decided not to freeze down my cheeks.

Snow, my friends. It makes the world so quiet that even the air ventilation in a building seems loud. For whatever reason, the snow has enveloped me today in a little air pocket of solitude that makes my bad day melt away in the ice, as oxy-moronical as that seems.

The snow saved me today, in all of its silent goodness.

When I was a little girl, and required any special attention from the school nurse (which usually meant she would give you a swig of children’s Tylenol and allow you to call your mom to inform her that you were sick before escorting you back to class), the afore-mentioned school nurse would greet me like this for a good solid six years:

“Why! I know you! You’re the girl that got a rock stuck in her ear!” And it was true, that was who I was. I remember the day of infamy. I’d spent a delightful recess outside being rough and tumble, but when I came inside to Mrs. Mallaber’s first grade classroom, I noticed the jiggling–Like a little tickly bug skittering across my eardrum any time I made a move. This was a curious thing, and until it started messing with my balancing ability (for I am told the inner ear is where balance is regulated) that I started to consider the new addition to my ear cavity as a detriment rather than a cool new feature in life. My teacher only believed me when I shook my head back on forth, and the mysterious object rattled back and forth like a maraca in my head. And then she sent me to the clinic where I got to spend the next three hours ear down on the sterilized paper atop the uncomfortable bench while I waited for the unsuspecting piece of gravel to dislodge.

I was pleased to hear that I belonged to a heritage of people who got objects (inanimate, or perhaps animate in the case of my sister) stuck in their bodily orifices. The reference I draw here is of my father who had to control his gag reflex as he tweezed Rolly Pollies from my sister’s nostrils.

So it only seems fair that, considering our genetic make-up, that my nephew Doug should surface from the basement, clutching his ear and complaining that it felt weird in his ears. Upon closer examination, it became clear that the yellow air soft pellets that Doug had been hoarding all week, now had a new stashing place—his ears.

All the way to urgent care, my sister asked him “Douglas, do we stick things in our ears?” It was only until several hours and one doctor later that Douglas was able to answer “No,” with supreme confidence.

Way to follow those genetic inclinations, buddy boy.

I felt small today, remarkably small. noticeably small. I noticed this as I was walking across the grass in front of the JSB and I noticed how extremely close my head was to the ground in comparison to other bodies. I noticed it when I realized that my shadow, cast by a premature descent of the sun, was a foot shorter than everyone else’s six foot shadows. And while my smallness is something that everyone in the entire world seems to notice, today I noticed how very small the world sees me as. I am small.

I felt small when I got a French paper returned to me positively barfed on with red ink of corrections to make. I felt small when I got an English paper back and I got only 7’s as a score and not 8’s. I want eights. I felt small only making 75 dollars on a Friday night of work. But it’s nothing compared to the feeling of absolute smallness of huddling over a toilet dry-heaving all the smallness out of you because it hurts so much to be this metaphorically little. For the first time ever, I felt like the person inside my small little frame might actually be a small little person.

It kind of hurts my feelings to be this small.

I’d like to echo my friend, Lanee, when I say “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

My apartment smells like pooh, and I’m not talking about A.A. Milne’s cuddly bear. As a whole our apartment has had to cope with an over-abundance of unpleasant odor, which I will now chronicle for you now.

The Rotten Milk incident- I have since wrote about this on previous blogs so I won’t go into large detail except to say that it was enough to trigger my gag reflexes in an impressive way.

And then there was the mold ordeal. Please don’t think we as an apartment have terrible hygiene. I think we have about the same amount of cleanliness as most college co-eds, which is to say, we shower daily, wash our hair every other day, and fuss with our hair far too much and usually we do our dishes within an hour of having eaten them. It was an apartment malfunction that led to mold, where our air conditioner leaked coolant into our carpet steadily for about a year while maintenance men were continually stymied by the repair, and thus mold began to grow. Now I know how to diagnose a mold problem: The carpet smells like BO.

But today, today, might be the worst of all smell problems that we’ve had, and I feel like I’ve encountered more than my share of nasty smells in my life. But last night when I returned to my apartment after some late night homeworking, the overwhelming unpleasantness of methane gas hit my nose, and knocked me to the floor. My apartment smells like pooh, like now we also have a plumbing problem to contend with. I say this not to be crass but to be blatant and truthful. It smells so bad. Don’t be surprised if you see the residents of #9 running around with gas masks for the next week until the problem is fixed.

In Summation: It is time to move. It is time to move. It’s time to move.