Underground.

If you haven't ever ordered an Animal Style burger at In-N-Out, I won't just assume you live at the bottom of the Marianas trench. You could also be Amish or Martian, or maybe you're a caterpillar so you don't eat meat. These are all valid excuses. Maybe you suffer from a life-threatening allergy to grilled onions. Who am I to judge?

My point is this: underground menus are often not quite as subterranean as they sound. You expect an underground menu, with such exciting and mouthwatering items as the Animal Style burger, from the kind of companies that keep up a folksy mom-and-pop image like In-N-Out. Especially when you start hearing about them on NPR. But you don't expect an underground menu at huge, boring, faceless national chains like Taco Bell.

I'm here to tell you that what you expect is, as usual, totally wrong.

Latitutde +40° 14' 55.55", Longitude -111° 38' 49.73": birthplace of arguably the best thing ever to be born in a Taco Bell, including Lindsay Lohan. Near the beginning of 2009, an employee at the Cougareat decided she wanted to improve on an existing underground menu item called the Man Burrito. She added a few touches of her own, suggested it to a few indecisive customers, and soon realized she had created an underground phenomenon. Without the help of national marketing campaigns (or any kind of marketing campaigns besides word-of-very-pleased-mouths), her creation began flying off the big industrial griddles at at rate of more than 15 per week.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the Super Man Burrito. You, reader, go over to BYU's Taco Bell and order one. All the employees know how to make it by now. The receipt will tell you that you have ordered a cheesy double beef burrito with guacamole, sour cream, red chip strips, and potatoes. But by the first bite you'll know that you got so much more. (Especially if you tell them to grill it. Don't forget.) By the last bite you'll FEEL that you got so much more. By dinner time you will still feel like you got so much more. And the best part? It's also on the receipt: three little numbers called $2.62.

This could replace the memory of talking to Javier the midget every day at lunch during high school as your favorite all-time Taco Bell memory. I know it has for me. But you don't have to take my word for it . . .

You never know.

I came home one night and walked across my moonlit backyard to find a dead chicken with its feathers all over the lawn.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire -gmh.

I went to the dentist-- have I told you this?-- for the first time in almost three years. They scraped on my teeth with these sharp metal things. I mean, yeah, I knew they were going to do that. But I'd forgotten how uncomfortable it is. Don't call me a crybaby-- I recognize it's no root canal-- I'm just saying there is something sinister about the cavalier way they drag those pointy things across the intimate parts of your teeth. The fingernails/chalkboard effect. In the middle of what seemed like an exceptionally thorough scraping I realized that almost every muscle in my body was tensed-- neck, shoulders, legs, toes. Because of one metal point on my teeth. I had to consciously will my fists unclenched.

Later I went to yoga. Yeah, you read that right. For the first time ever. On the wall outside the wood-floored, naturally lit, sanskrit-inscribed yoga studio-- yes, the wall next to the cash register-- there is a poster with little photos of a dude doing, I don't know if all, but a heck of a lot of the yoga poses. Let me just tell you there's one where he's upside down, completely vertical, balancing on his head. Crazy. In my class of course we're nowhere near that, it's definitely toward the beginner side of intermediate, and still, I'm sweating, my muscles are shaking, and I'm thinking, This is supposed to be relaxing? And yet by the time I got to the end, lying on my back, I was so calm I actually dozed off for a few seconds.

I was thinking about this while I was home, trying to balance the contentedness of rest and the restlessness of sloth. Hope and worry dominating each other alternatingly, like a rhythm, like a heartbeat. The ebb and flow of the tides at Point Lobos. Like my vacation was a study in tension and release.

Then on the day I got home I remembered, with a wallop, that's just what regular life is anyway. And it's all right. In fact it's beautiful.

Summer Reading.

I recognize I haven't written here for a while-- but I've been busy doing more interesting things.

For example: reading children's literature. It's especially beautiful when you know people who write kids' books because sometimes they give you an advance copy and sometimes it totally melts you.

I heard this on Garrison Keillor.

Listen. You will like it.

http://www.imeem.com/birchwood/music/0uMMWKSF/kristin_andreassen_crayola/

Strange and Beautiful.

It's always kind of vivifying to start a new anything, and I'm starting a new semester, 2 new jobs, and a new apartment-- I've been feeling top-notch. But folks, here's the dark lining to my silver cloud: both my new jobs are at school, and my apartment is right across the street from school, which is all awfully convenient and all, and I'm not complaining, but: it means that more than ever The Campus Is My World. I tread the same paths again and again, in varying degrees of snow. I don't even feel like driving my 1984 two-wheel-drive Nissan pickup anywhere because no matter where I park it I get stuck in the ice and I have to ask someone for help. Not that I'm all averse to asking for help. People are always very willing. It's just . . . I'd prefer not to. I guess the Winter kind of forces us to confront our group-forming human instinct. Huh.

Anyway. A break in the monotony came a couple days ago. I had an evening class in a building I don't go in very often because it feels like a dungeon. When the class ended it was after dark, and as I walked out the doors it was snowing, everything was all obscured, and for a second, I didn't recognize where I was. I didn't look around carefully enough to orient myself, I just started walking and taking pleasure in this sense of being in a new and unfamiliar place. When you're in a different place, it feels good to have snow falling quietly. The snow serves to further surrealify things. Then I saw that crazy stained glass rocketship statue or whatever it is, realized I where I was, reoriented myself, and returned to my humdrum life. But it left me thinking how cool it might be to crash land in a new place where you don't know where anything is. Things just acquire a totally different feel when you recognize them. Know what I mean? It's not even the same town anymore.

If there's any place on campus that still holds for me a smidgeon of that undiscovered, virginal quality, it is (ironically?) Rape Hill. Those stands of trees, intersected only by meandering footpaths, strike me as the Provo equivalent to Hogwarts's Forbidden Forest. It's an oasis in the stark Purpose imposed by the rest of the campus's design. It maintains a certain enigma; it invites mystery and subterfuge. Let's go hide in the woods dressed like Mowgli for all of spring term. We shall feast every night on roast duck.

Math Brains.

I just took my first final exam. I chose not to worry about any other ones until after this one was behind me, because it was the one I was most worried about: Economics. Sometimes people who know me ask me, puzzled, why I'm studying economics. Sometimes I ask myself that. Probably about every day. Especially on days like that day a few weeks ago when I got a 77% on my Econ midterm and a glistening 100% on my English midterm. Frustrating. But I just know that buried down beneath all the qualitative, relative, complex, inconclusive, human, intellectual flotsam strewn all over my mind, are my Math Brain Muscles, atrophied and anemic from so many years without seeing the sunlight. And I refuse to let them wither and die. Why? Because of the singular satisfaction, like that I had this morning, of figuring out how to solve problems and knowing you nailed The Right Answers.

Hold on, Math Brains -- I'm coming.