If We Were a Movie...

If my life were a movie, it would UNDOUBTEDLY be a comedy. There is just simply no way around it. So I decided to make a list of some of the funnier moments in my life that would make awesome movie scenes. And yes, the title comes from a Hannah Montana song. Don't judge.

Family Life
My family is hilarious. Basically every family gathering of any kind could/should end up in a movie someday. Some standouts:
--My mother and her four sisters exclaiming, in very VERY high pitched voices, over dill-pickle dip, smiley face tupperware, and 4th of July baskets.
--My two older brothers having a fist fight over crayons in the aisle in the middle of sacrament meeting (Sadly, we were never allowed to bring crayons, colored pencils, or markers to church after that.)
--Me dressing my little brother in "preppy" clothes, spiking his hair, and coaching him on the path to being a male model named, very cleverly, Spikey Mikey.
--When the movie "Shrek" came to theaters, Jared saw it with the Kearsleys first, and then saw it with our family. On his second viewing, he stood up in his seat and screamed, for the whole theater to hear, "THE PRINCESS IS AN OGRE!"
--Our recent camping trip to Wallowa Lake, where we (my parents, Cherisse, Jared, and I) started setting up the tent and found out, much to our dismay, that none of us were tall enough to set it up without standing on the ice chest.
--On more than one occasion, I have walked up the stairs and passed various pieces of Alyssa's clothing, only to find her completely naked on the couch. I once asked, "Alyssa! Where are your clothes?!" and she looked at me and nonchalantly replied, "I don't know."

School
--Kindergarten. P.E. I'm wearing a pair of home-made pants and what happens? They split down the seam. And I didn't tell anyone. Not really sure how I kept THAT a secret until I got home.
--I rode the bus in high school until senior year. Need I say more? Insert lots of teenage long-suffering sighs here.
--In second grade I sat next to Nathan Hillborn (he got really weird in high school, but I think we were buds back in the day) and he said "dude" just about every other word. Conveniently, I had just watched an episode of "Step By Step" where they cured the cousin--his name escapes me, but it'll come to me in the middle of the night tonight, I promise--of this very same predicament by using shock therapy. Apparently telling Nathan I was going to do that to him was a threat and I got in trouble for violence. (Bit of foreshadowing, turns out.)
--My senior year of high school, I took statistics. The class as a whole was a joke--the teacher taught all remedial classes and then somehow was teaching AP Stats. Okay. We did a lot of group projects and made a lot of bar graphs. We got our papers taken away when we tried to work ahead. Boys were jumping over tables and the teacher didn't even notice. Melissa Fults came up with a simplified equation that gave the right answer to every problem in about half the steps and the teacher forbade us from using it. Tyler VanderZanden and I spent most class periods trying to best each other in Block Dude, a game on our calculators. But one of the most memorable events was when our teacher taught the same lecture two days in a row. Exactly the same. Word for word. Every example had all the same numbers. EVERYTHING was the same. And nobody seemed to notice except Katie Powell and I. We kept looking around, searching for SOMEONE who noticed, and no one did! (To be fair, most people didn't notice because no one paid attention to that teacher anyway. She wasn't exactly the brightest bulb, and it was an AP class. We pretty much taught ourselves.) So we did what we always did in a situation we had no control over and couldn't believe...we pretended to stab each other repeatedly to end each other's misery.
--There is a very wonderful phenomenon in Rexburg, ID called "ice." One lovely day, my Eastern European Culture class got out early and this made me so happy I may or may not have been skipping on my way back to my apartment. Well. Skipping + Marlaina + ice =/= safe. (Okay, to be honest, the problem part of that equation is really just the skipping + Marlaina part. The ice is just an added annoyance.) Yes, I slipped, but I caught myself. I happened to end up almost completely in the splits. But I was alone, so it was okay...until I heard a boy behind me say, "Nice save."

High Adventure/EFY/Basically Every Time I Hang Out With Judy
Seriously, people. Kenzie and I deserve our own reality show. We have discussed this MULTIPLE times.
--On our very first HA, we went white water rafting. But the most injury came to me not while braving the treacherous Deschutes River...nope, I tripped over a rock in the campsite while we were just standing there. Still not quite sure how that happened.
--One night, we pitched our tent on an ant hill. The next night, we were less than ten feet from the HORRIFICALLY smelly outhouse. And the next year, we pitched our tent literally ON the roots of at least three trees.
--We got back from our first day of white water rafting and pitched our tent. It was so ridiculously hot that we sat in our tent, staring into space, not speaking, not moving, for at least an hour. It was probably ten degrees cooler outside our tent, and yet we sat in our tent in a heat-induced stupor.
--I had to stand on a chair to see myself in the mirror in our room our first year at EFY.
--We instantly fell in love with two boys in our group, whom we dubbed "The Wannes" because we would cry, "Oh, I wanne!" We may have stalked them. And I think you know that "we may" means "all our pictures of them are from behind or are super blurry because they're zoomed in so far due to the fact that we were hiding in the bushes when we took them." No big.
--I got clotheslined by a tree while inflatable kayaking and did quite a graceful back tuck off the back of the kayak.
--I very nearly drowned Kenzie while we body-surfed a rapid together. Turns out I'm completely terrified of water. I was kinda sorta maybe pushing Kenzie under the water to push myself above the waves so I could breathe.

The Bank
You probably wouldn't think that very many amusing things happen while tellering at a bank. Oh how wrong you are.
--My very first day of working, I spilled a $50 bag of pennies all over the counter and the floor and then had to crawl around everyone's feet and pick them all up. While rolling those same pennies into rolls, I also encountered a human fingernail.
--The first day I worked as a teller, the girl training me stepped away from the teller window for a minute. A drunk guy came up and advised me to "never be a monkey's uncle." Good advice.
--A very creepy 50-year-old man complimented me on my "beautiful eyelashes" while we were the only two people in the lobby.
--Customers always think it's hilarious to comment on how short I am, because, admittedly, I am barely visible over the teller windows. I also had my own stool to stand on while I worked the drive-up window last summer. (That stool has, sadly, vanished since we remodeled the bank. I could really use it, too.)
--While I was home for a break between semesters, a woman came in with 15 minutes to close with $60 in pennies. Our coin machine is a bit...well, crappy, and pennies have a tendency to jam. While I was clearing one such jam, the bag that the pennies flow into after being counted fell off, and the pennies were being counted right onto the floor. My supervisor and I were helpless with laughter at that point, and the woman who had brought the pennies in assumed we were laughing at HER and got offended.

Boys
My awkward boy experiences could be a movie all their own, trust me. It's not pretty. Read on if you dare.
--Once, at an EFY dance, the boy I was dancing with conversationally asked, between "Where are you from?" and "How many siblings do you have?": "So...were you born in the covenant?"
--My very first kiss was so short and so quick I wasn't entirely sure our lips actually touched. I raced in the house and called Kenzie and she said, "Did he kiss you?!" I replied, "Um...I think so?"
--One of the aforementioned Wannes, Cameron Mackay, happened to wind up at BYU-I. I happened to wind up at one of his flag football games one time. After the game, my roommates and I were sitting on the grass talking, and he walked by and nudged me in the back in what has now been infamously dubbed the Kidney Kick. I turned around and gave him an ecstatic/creepy grin, and...didn't say a word. My roommates laughed forEVER.
--My date with Dallin my second semester at BYU-I was just awkward all around. My roommate Heidi's boyfriend (husband, now!) cornered him in the library and asked him out...and then picked him up AND dropped him off afterward. While getting out of the car on the actual date, I slipped on some more dang ice and almost ate it. Throw in a roommate who kept trying to flirt with him, an F-bomb or two in the movie we saw, a SPECTACULARLY awkward hug at the end of the date, and the fact that I was texting his roommate mere seconds after he left, and you just about get the nature of our relationship those two semesters.
--I really desperately wanted to make Matt a cake for his birthday. I had all these spectacular plans to break into his apartment and leave it there with candles lit and everything as a surprise. Well, obviously that didn't work. But I did bake him cookies...sort of. I'm basically baking-retarded. Somehow or another, the cookies went wrong. Horribly. In fact, Lauren was over and saw them before Matt got there and asked, in true Lauren fashion, "Are you really giving those to him?" They were horribly flat and I didn't bake them long enough, so they were goopy and kind of runny and just...not good. [Sidenote: He still ate them. :)]
--I was kneeling on a stool and boasting to Matt that I was taller than he was. Well, he came over to prove me wrong, and we stood/kneeled there, literally nose-to-nose, for like a full ten seconds, staring at each other. Awkward moment.
--My cousin was going on a date with a boy from her ward and she really didn't want to go. But this boy had a really good-looking little brother Cherisse's age, so they arranged a double date. Well, there was a middle brother, so I got dragged along, too--VERY much against my wishes. No one was talking, and it took a ridiculous amount of time for our food to get there. There was a lot of awkward eye-contact dodging and a LOT of awkward/nervous laughing. And then I got a speeding ticket on the way home. I was not a happy camper.
--A boy I liked was over at our apartment and I got on the topic--NO ONE KNOWS WHY--of pads. Seriously. Something is psychologically wrong with me.
--At work one day, I was giving a reading comprehension test to a very cute boy. We came to a certain section of the test that all tutors loath, because it takes forever and is beyond boring for the test-giver, as well as super frustrating for the test-taker. So I warned him of this fact by saying something like unto, "Oh, this section really sucks. It takes SO LONG!" And he said, with a smile and a wink--a WINK, I tell you!--"But I've been enjoying our time together." So how do you think I replied? I flipped the page and said, "Okay, go ahead and start." Ten minutes later, I realized he'd been trying to flirt with me. Oops.