~*just some cool pix while I play Russian Roulette with my bladder*~

Yo, was that title TMI? Good. If you're too weak to handle the word "bladder," this blog isn't for you.

I haven't really talked about school/Logan/myself in awhile. hAHA. Is this even a real blog still? Idk.

So here's a picture dump with story-like captions to CAPTIVATE you. Get it? Captions to captivate. I should sell knives door to door or something like that. What else do people sell these days?

When the sun sets in our house, it always lands on my mom's face in just the right way. I have like fifty variations of this picture in my phone. I guess she just attracts light or something. I call it "Dude From X-Men Reincarnated As My Mom."

OK BUT LISTEN. MY WALK HOME FROM SCHOOL IS BETTER THAN ALL OF YOURS.

*drops mic onto your face*

a few weeks ago we went to Park City. I got stuck on the Alpine Slide. It was embarrassing. An attractive guy had to come rescue me (probably a skater, no doubt no doubt no doubt *BONUS IF YOU KNOW WHAT THAT'S FROM*).

me imagining eating 50 of these once I get inside.

me wondering how my wedding pics are gonna go if I can't even keep a straight face with this pan of cookies.

me accepting the fact that I don't care right now.

just look at that ho(l)e

Errbody talks about Logan Canyon like it's the beezy so I went to find out for myself. They were right, dangit. I'm never gonna see another human bean again.

This is my neighbor's cat. His name is Freddie Prinze Jr (according to moi). He follows me around until I let him use my leg as a nuzzling post. If I try to pick him up he's mean. He gets overly excited around grass. He lounges on the sidewalk across the street and meows whines at me until I tell him he can come over. 

SO WHAT I'M SAYING IS HE'S MY SPIRIT ANIMAL.

That's it, I guess. School isn't kicking my trash as much, but like, it's only week four. I'm barely even a professional expert person yet. 

something about empathy

I've been thinking about pain. Pain, my old friend, you are so familiar to me now. I know every crook and crevice in your face. Come sit for awhile.

I'm learning how to be happy even if, and especially when, I do not have everything I want. Because guess what? I probably will never have everything I want, not in this life. That's not how it was meant to be.

And now, my sons [and daughters], remember, remember, that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you, to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall." 

Today in class I taught my students about the "so what?" question. That is to say, "what's the point of this? Why am I still reading this essay? How does it apply to me?" And don't the prophets ask us all the time to ask that very question of ourselves--so what?

Trials are going to come. The devil "shall send forth his mighty winds." That much is inevitable. But something else is inevitable--the devil shall not win. In fact, he already lost. He lost a long time ago when Christ overcame for everyone, individually. And it is upon His shoulders that we can cry if we need to. We can run to him for relief. We don't have to do it alone. We don't have to do it alone. That's the answer to today's "so what?" question.

This matters because you matter.

I'm learning that pain doesn't have to be our own for us to feel it. That sometimes humans just need to sit and like, cry. Just cry or close our eyes against the pain pushing down on us. That there is such a thing as "raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness." You know it when you see it. You can feel its cosmic pull. It's like...well, it's like charity. And it's what makes us weep when we see those we love in pain. 

I need the Atonement for those times, too. When I want to carry someone's burden but simply cannot.  He makes up for my shortcomings in succoring. 

So I'll be grateful for that today.

"No love is ever wasted. Its worth does not lie in reciprocity." Neal A. Maxwell

a call to (p)arms

PARMESAN CHEESE, THAT IS!

Did I fool you?

...yeah, ok. Maybe it's Monday night and yeah you guessed it, I've been awake since my alarm beckoned me from slumber one Sunday morning. If you're doing math in your head right now, that means I have been awake for approximately 36 hours.

I'm being seriously serious when I say I NEED HELP SLEEPING. Sleeping pills do not touch me. Neither does doTERRA (sorry all ye blogger moms reading this). So all of you that have witch doctor remedies or other things you do to help you sleep, hit me up.  Hit me up with a nice soft pillow...and some Melatonin...ohh great I really need to go to bed right now. But first, words. That's what I came here for, dangit! And so did you! ...I'm guessing...um what else do you guys come here for? It would be cool if blogs had concession stands.

Let's talk about cold showers for a minute. Not metaphorically. NO METAPHORS. I mean actual cold showers.

The other day I was taking a shower. The spigot only emits pressure from one little spout, and it's a lot of pressure for one little spout, and in conclusion this shower feels more like one jet in a jacuzzi is dousing you in the back. It's pretty nice if you move around a little. Like a Poor Person's Masseuse.

So I was showering and suddenly the water turned cold...right in the middle of a rinse-off! Where is the justice? But then I thought "Ok, I've done this before. In Mexico." In Mexico, we had to light the gas which heated the water for the shower, and it took about 25 minutes to heat up. And we didn't always have gas (haha. HAHAHAHAH I'm immature), so we had to take cold showers.

That previous experience from the McKenzie Vault helped me get through this brief three minutes of a cold shower, and honestly it was not even a big deal. It wasn't a thing. I wouldn't have even brought it up if not for this blog. Whoa did I just analyze the existence of blogs just then...? LATER, MCKENZIE. LATER.

I just want to say this: I am not having an easy time right now. Grad school is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I've done hard things. Grad school has turned out to be the culmination of every hard thing I've ever done, but maybe that's just it, you see. I was being prepared for this. Those three years of awful in-between-ness and then the four years of school before that, that was a preparation time, a probation (I borrowed that fancy word from the scriptures). And this is preparing me for more sacrifice, more tears, more exhaustion, more crazy awesome learning experiences (it sounds like I'm describing parenthood, what) in the probably-near future. Can I just say "the future?" The future is always near. Like literally the future is 5 seconds from now. IT'S CLOSE. AH THERE IT IS! AAAND IT'S OVER. See what I mean? I think it was Einstein who said "I never worry about the future--it comes soon enough."

I'm ready now...to just let the "cold shower" of life wash over me and for me to not just endure it but be like "Hey this isn't so bad. I can do this. I like cold showers!" Mmmm yeah maybe I won't say the last part.

EXCEPT HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN A COLD SHOWER AFTER BEING OUTSIDE ON A HOT DAY IT'S THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO SWEATBACK.

Leave it to me to end a serious post with "sweatback."

And this.

WAIT DO YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THIS.

HERE.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

OK BYE FOR REAL.

BYE. GET OFF MY BLOG.

"I fell in love with you the way ketchup falls from a bottle...slowly, then all at once." -not john green

HI GUYS I'VE BEEN AWAKE FOR 15 HOURS NOW HAHAHAHA

Things I've done in the last few hours that I now regret:

1. Ate macaroni and cheese for dinner. Tried to spell "macaroni" like "macaronio." Had Triscuits+peanut butter+chocolate chips for dessert. It's hard to ration my chocolate chips. Hard=impossible. 
2. Said this sentence: "HOW MUCH FOOD WOULD A FOOD TRUCK TRUCK IF A FOOD TRUCK COULD TRUCK FOOD!!??" I said it out loud to myself, in the "locker room" (basement) where I live. Just let it come out of me like some kind of war cry, floating into the darkness.
3. ^^what am I smoking?
4. Oh yeah and then I started quoting lines from Adventuretime to keep myself awake. Yeah. I said "Nobody flicks me in the butt without my consent!" in public. Kind of half-muttering, like people do when they're sleep-talking. I'm a mess.

Okay so maybe this grad school thing wasn't such a good idea. Have you met sleep-deprived Kenzie? HAVE YOU? Those of you who have hiked Timp with me before have only gotten a mere taste. Maybe you hung out around me when I was jet-lagged? Yeah, that's more like it. Throw in a dash of too many breaks without food+nonsensical emails from my students+homework (lol what)=NO TIME FOR SLEEPING EVER. And then I go crazy. And when I'm crazy, I'm also crazy+ every other bad superlative. Like crazy lonely. I ALMOST posted an Instagram and captioned it with "I NEED HUGS SO BAD RIGHT NOW" in all caps. But I refrained. And now I'm posting it here but 

the POINT is

I need to go to bed.

p.s. if you wanted to hug me that would be a-okay too 

manswers: just chill. it's NOT a metaphor, ok?

Maybe everything isn't as deep as you think it is.

Maybe you're overanalyzing something that you really just shouldn't. Just cut that out, ok?

Maybe Augustus Waters wasn't exactly right (he was also fictional). The cigarette isn't a metaphor. It's just a cigarette. You know?

Look, sometimes we gotta take a step back from scrutinizing every little detail of our lives. I'm the first person that will tell you to try and find the meaning of things. It's my thing. I'm "English-y." Is there a better way to describe that? Anyway.

Overanalyzing things gets me into trouble sometimes. It's okay to say to ourselves, "You know what, maybe I just had a bad day because my life needs some balance. Not because I did something wrong and I'm being punished." Or "So-and-so didn't text me back because they didn't want to. They didn't have time. They forgot." Not "They hate me and they never wanna speak to me again." Like, sometimes, yes, stuff means something, but sometimes it doesn't!

Can I use this as my master's thesis? I think it's pretty bangin' so far. Such wise. Very coherence.

~*bye~*

this post was sponsored by Trent, who doesn't like when I say "it's a metaphor" after I spill food on myself/get lost on the way to my own house/drop my phone on my face/do basically anything. You're right, you left-brained weirdo. YOU'RE RIGHT! EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE LEFT-BRAINED. GET IT?! IT'S A METAPHOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

who the heck in London is reading my blog? are you a man? do you have facial hair? are you between the ages of 25-30? ARE YOU SINGLE?!

^The problem with having a stat counter on your blog.

*this was a nice moment*

*asterisks are cool*

*supposedly*

*shoot*

*um*

*i*

I MADE A TRIANGLE ON ACCIDENT! ^^^

Anyway.

Been sitting here (here=in bed, and other flat places) for awhile, doing homework. I had forgotten what it was like to spend an entire Saturday writing papers and reading. I had sweetly slipped into an ignorant reverie where homework and the weekend did not exist in the same sentence. But alas.

I'm a grad student now. It took all of my restraint not to type "meow" instead of "now," but I realized it would've nullified the whole "grad student" thing. AND NOW I'VE GONE AND NULLIFIED IT BY OVER-EXPLAINING.

I nullify lots of things by over-explaining. I'm done saying nullify now, you can quit yawning!

But me, I'm not going to stop yawning. Not for 2 years. Because I'm also not going to sleep for 2 years. And it's okay. I knew I was going to sacrifice something when I signed up for this. The past week has been SO FRAPPING HARD. Like, so hard. Like I kinda wish I could go back in time and visit the McKenzie of 3 months ago who was so blissfully ignorant of what was about to occur, and tell her to "Man up. Get ready. Take 5 naps. Buy lots of Kleenex. You're gonna need it." That kind of thing.

I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss the drive from Orem to Provo and Provo to Orem. YEAH I MISS UNIVERSITY AVENUE WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC IRONIC GARBAGE?! I could go on and on making lists of people and places that I love and wish I could've taken with me to Logan.

But then I remember how it felt when I moved to Provo--about the same. I hated it. Wished I wasn't there. Wondered why I had been led there at all and spent many nights crying, alone, and hurting, and thinking "This was a bad idea. Why did I do this?" And if you could go back even further in the McKenzie Timeline, you would see the same pattern over and over. When we moved here from Oregon, I knew 100% it was right, but I didn't like it. I felt extremely uncomfortable. And alone. When I moved to Rexburg, I felt funky and too young and out of place and cold. The feeling of being cold never went away. But the other stuff did.

So now, here I am, in a similar position, once again being pushed way outside of my comfort zone and, in classic human style, not liking it one bit. We all like the idea of change and adventure and growth, but the actual doing of the thing gets a little bit tangled. So what are we supposed to do?

Well, I learned this trick in institute last week. This trick that involves asking. When we pray, a lot of the time, we offer up a prayer that goes something like "Please bless that a will happen because you're God and I can't do it myself." Example: "Please bless that whoever didn't come to church today will come next week. Amen."

But those kinds of prayers...they don't work. It says right in the scriptures that a prayer without the intent to act behind it is void. It doesn't count. Maybe we don't pray the right kinds of prayers because we're scared of the answer. Because we kNOW that it's going to get answered. If instead we prayed "Help me to know who is missing at church today so that I can help them come back next week," that prayer would get answered pretty quickly.

In summary: faith is hard. It's supposed to be. Without it, we can't get nooooo miracles. And trust me, when you've been awake all night because you're nervous about teaching in the morning/surrounded by spiders/worried about never having a social life ever again/lonely/too hot/too cold/too hot again...you NEED miracles. As many as you can get your hands on.

So let's try it out, friends. Let's just try out this whole faith thing and see where it takes us. I'm game.

being an adult is being able to fall asleep in a room with a spider trap full of 50 dead spiders in the next room (also eating lots of Cheddar Bunnies)

s/o to Provo, kinda miss you a little

I think my body is probably 80% Cheddar Bunnies at this point. When I graduate, they will hand me a diploma and be like "Congrats on your thesis and matriculating through this program and uhhh also you have orange crumbs on your robe...??????"

The house I live in is very old. By "old" I mean it has a line out back (for those of you born after 1975, a "line" is something people hang their clothes to dry on). There are secret compartments all over the house, including a smallish door in the basement that is actually nAILED SHUT. That's straight from an M. Night Shyamalan movie! AND IT'S NEXT TO MY BEDROOM. Today I was sitting in our dining room and the mailman dropped off our mail, but it sounded like he was hammering on the side of the house. I realized then that we have a fancy mail chute, so it starts at the front door and ends in the dining room.

The dining room + front room resemble the house from Jumanji, which isn't necessarily good because in case you didn't see that movie BAD THINGS HAPPENED IN THAT HOUSE. And then there's the spider issue, which I don't really want to write about because the only way I'm successfully coping with it right now is to pretend it doesn't exist. So if you're prone to extreme fears about spiders maybe skip this next part (no pictures because I'm not a masochist).

On Saturday eve I walked into my room and saw the biggest spider ever known to my eyeballs, and he was crawling on the wall next to my bed. I screamed a little, cried some fire tears (sort of) and tried to figure out how to kill him without him jumping on me because in my mind all spiders' legs are spring-loaded. I found the spider spray which is conveniently located on the wall outside my room (it's like they knew...wait) and gave the spider its last rites (which was just me doing some rendition of a warrior cry, probably sounded more like a pterodactyl getting hit by a bus though). Then I killed it. Then I walked into the hallway and found its brother coming towards me. THEN I turned to my left and saw a spider trap fULL OF PROBABLY 50 MORE OF HIS DEAD BROTHERS AND THEN I SET THE HOUSE ON FIRE.

Not really. But I didn't sleep for 2 days.

As I arrived at class on Monday morning with zombie eyes and sweatback like nobody's bidez (Old Main Hill=the ultimate thighmaster/and all the other body parts-master), my overeager student who had arrived thirty minutes early saw me walk up to the front and he was like "Ummmmmmm hi hello you're like way too young." *P.S. I'm totally hyperbolizing what he said because I'm not allowed to quote students verbatim on the internetz* So I just kept messing with the projector and he, very concerned about his teacher's age and wanting to press her further because if he didn't find out her age GOSHDANGIT he was gonna probably do nothing about it but ANYWAY--he said, "You look....young." He said the word "young" like it didn't taste very good to him. Like he was being forced to eat some canned green beans.

And I just looked at him with steel eyes*

*zombie eyes

And I whipped my hair authoritatively*

*tried to give my neck some air because of the aforementioned sweat

And I said,

"Thank you."

School is going gr8 so far. I haven't told my students about this blog yet and I don't think I will until they graduate. Gotta keep an air of mystery, right?