Some People wear glasses, Beth looks like a dude.

I had an awesome awesome fireside, and i need to write about it before i forget.

So the speaker was Shuan Perry, who is this broadway actor, dancer, singer extrordinaire, who, if you didn't know, you'd swear he was gay, he has that whole gay actor vibe, but he's mormon, so yeah. I didn't really know what to expect when i went there, because sometimes firesides are really kinda lame (like that sorority one a while back, although at the tabernacle), but this one was not. I'm not going to summarize all of it, because i don't remember it all. His main theme was how we need to put our trust in God, and let him lead our lives, and amazing things will happen. He was originally set on being a Doctor, but then in school he started taking some acting classes, and then he just ended up really feeling strongly that he should go into acting and all.

He referenced a fireside he had gone to when he was young, where the person said if there was one thing you needed to take home, was that you should always make your bed, and it will change your life, and he tried it and said that he did, so i think i'll try it. It is oh so easy to make my bed anyway.

He talked for a while on 9/11, and how he spent that time, which was really very beautiful. He was living in New York and so he spent the week doing everything he could to help, which ended up with him digging around in tunnels trying to rescue people, and he came very close, he heard noise, but all he could find at first was a Twin Towers Teddie Bear from the gift shop, but he had to evacuate because another building was falling in, and when he went back in the noise was gone.

All in all, it was just a great experience, i'm always disappointed with the inadequates of words to convey the emotions and feelings i feel.

That said, reflections, and thoughts i had during the thing:
The 9/11 story immediately reminded me of The Things They Carried. It all seemed so implausible, but i realized that whether or not it actually happened (i would be shocked if it didn't) it was very much a true story. Because the events are as true as anything, and the feelings felt were real as well. The fact that after all that he did, he didn't find anyone, is just too awful, and beautiful, to not be true.

He talked for a made a bit of an extended metaphor between ballroom dancing and God, which was cool, about being taken by the hand and all that.

I feel like there were other things i remember, but alas, the infrequences of memory strike again. Speaking of that my institute teacher spoke today on the importance of keeping a log of experiences, so that you can go back later and remember them. He said you should just keep a notepad, and whenever you're reminded of something that happened to you write it down, just a sentence or two, so that you'll remember. I think that'd be a cool thing to do.

Lets see, other news: This weekend was crazy, as the last two posts suggest. On sunday i went up to Hyde Park to eat dinner, spend some time with the grandparents, and get some of my stuff. That was nice, so now i have a piano again. Today i had calculus and physics, which is starting to level out a bit between unreasonably hard and easy, and then i went to the fireside, so yeah. All around a good day.
So now i need study for my cal test tomorrow, so i don't fail, lose my scholarship, and end up owning lots and lots of money i wouldn't otherwise.

~Au Revoir

So fill your lungs and sing it out and shout it to the sky

Wooo!

We just beat UCLA. Not only did we beat them, we demolished them. 44-6. This weekend is shaping up to be pretty amazing.

a Utah man am I.

Ki-yi!

Catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world

So, what can i say about to day. I went to a concert and heard the format (cool) and Jack's Mannequin (also very cool). I crowd surfed, which was awesome. And then i hung out and then got free ice cream and then watched anchorman, all or mostly with (in order of appearence) Cathy, James, Kelsey, Flora, and Vanessa.

I also have now met every single one of my hometeaching people, and my companion, so i'm pretty well set up. So yeah.

Good Day.

Buy Sneakers: A Note to Myself

It's 12:30 and i'm not really up to thinking of a clever title, and there's a sticky note on my compy reminding me what i need to do. Somehow the title comes off sounding deep.

Life of late has been tolerable. Monday night, and therefore tuesday, was completely crazy. I stayed up till 3am doing homework and not accomplishing anything, which was sad, because i managed to finish the whole thing in about 45 minutes on tuesday afternoon (although i'm concerned that i did everything wrong) Then i didn't have time to finish all my reading, so i missed a couple things on my odyssey reading quiz. I would have missed more, but memories ms. Mahan's 7th grade english class and wishbone came to my rescue. After that i pretty much hung out for a while, but probably due to lack of sleep, my roomate was really getting on my nerves, he really wasn't doing anything, and, true to form, just last sunday someone said something about how when someone annoys us we need to look at ourselves and think about what we are doing to be a good companion (on a mission) or roommate in my situation. That notwithstanding (a silly word), i needed to get out. So i sent James an SOS, and we played ping pong for a while, and then we met up with Cathy and Kelsey and hung out for the night, leaving my physics homework oddly neglected. At around 10am we finished our game (which consisted of a nerf football and a nerf basketball goal, and various variations on throwing technique) and so i went and did most of my homework, until i got frustrated at the world and quit, instead replying to an email and venting angsty angst while talking about how stuff was going.

Let me pause for just a moment here to point out the fact that i actually hung out with some people, a great step up from sitting in my room, or even hanging out with cami, which, while super fun, makes me feel like just a bit of a loser for not having any friends. So yeah, good stuff. moving on.

Oh, also on tuesday i tried to play intermural ultimate. I'm a 'free agent', a sort of ronin if you will, so i was looking for a team to join. What happened is a brilliant internal conflict. I got there at around 4:30 and it was the honors floor team vs. some other team. Now the honors floor team contains a bunch of members of the church, and through that i've ended up playing ultimate with them on thursdays, and i'm getting to know them and all kinda of good stuff like that. However, the honors floor team were getting their honors butts royally owned by the other team. So that was a little sad. But i asked them (the honors floor guys) if i could join their team and they said of course, and so that was all groovey. On the way back up to my dorm, i crossed paths with some people from the other team, and it turns out that they're my building's team, and they invited me to join it, since they only have around 9 players.

So, herein lies the conflict. Should i join the good team, under the justification that they are my building and they have fewer people and all, but in truth mostly because i want to be on the winning team (if the honors floor team had one i wouldn't even consider this) or should i stay with the honors guys, people i'm getting to know and be friends with. It's quite a predicament.

So, wednesday continued the stressyness of tuesday, but i felt a bit better. I didn't have any homework due, and i ran into cathy and kelsey at dinner so i talked to them for a bit, also adding to the not feeling like a loser bin. After that i went to volleyball though. now, for some more prologue.

A while back i went to plaza fest, which is basically a large convention type thing of all the different student organizations trying to get you to join them, there's tons of swag (or shwag, as it is more fun to say), music, free food, and other stuff like that. I gave a few people my email address, the ultimate frisbee and volley ball teams, Relay for Life, and something else that i don't remember at the moment. Anyway, i got an email from the volleyball team telling me that there'd be some friendly scrimages/practices throughout september. So i went, expecting your basic pick up volleyball game fun. As it turns out, these guys are playing volleyball at a level i've never even seen. There's all kinds of crazy jargon, strategy, spiking, all in all i was very much overwhelmed. The captain was really cool about it, didn't seem to blame me at all even though i probably made our team lose. It was at a point where i was probably doing more harm than good. But yeah, he told me i should come back next week, we'll see, if i'm going to be practicing with a team i have no intention of joining, i'll do ultimate, because in that i can at least hold my own.

This also made me re-realize that i really really hate to feel useless, or just generally fail at things. I've always known i didn't like failing, but somehow it's different and a lot worse in both active things (as opposed to, say, the last term of calculus), and especially in team games. It reminded me of ninth grade, and how i felt on the soccer team, where i definitely wasn't the best player (although i wasn't the worst, and that was nice) and snowboarding, where i fell over and over and over again. The best i ever felt that year may have been when i won the 200m butterfly and we won the swim meet, and the worst i felt all year was when i broke my arm and couldn't swim anymore. So from this, lets draw some conclusions:

I really hate letting people down. I don't mind failing individually, but when i fail others it makes me feel awful. Although i was getting a bit tired of falling when snowboarding, it wasn't until i snowboarded with a bunch of people and fell a bunch that i felt just stupid (and then breaking my arm didn't make me feel to awful. Man. that was a really bad night. i forgot how awful that night was. I had to walk home in the really very freezing night, and i had to use the bathroom really badly the whole way there.) Finally, i've concluded that i'm nowhere near as good at volleyball as the guys on my college team are.

This post is getting really quite long, and i'm geting really quite tired, so i'll wrap it up. Today was great. I'm a big fan of thursdays. I slept in until 10am, which i think has pretty much fixed my stressed outyness, and my eye twitch (my right eye's been twitching for the past few days. probably the most annoying thing possible). In physics discussion i learned almost nothing, but did manage to copy down an equation that made my homework tonight possible, even if i don't understand why (which i can't stand). I finished my reading before my class, and then on the way there discovered a 3 dollar pizza slice (wow. what a rip off. i was starving at the time so i didn't think about it, but that pizza was no where near worth 3 dollars) and a free doughnut (which was worth every cent). I played CIV III for a while, and i'm starting to get better, to teh point where i can compete with the computers, although i'm thinking that they cheat, both because they somehow go super fast, and because the computer keeps placing me in crappy spots without iron or gold, so i'm dirt poor and can't create a good army.

After that i played ultimate frisbee, and our team one, most definitely due to my impressive one man defense (there were about 4 people in the endzone, and i was pretty much the only one there still guarding them, and i stopped about 3 points). So that was fun. I have a gnarly battle wound, although nothing compared to my suitemate sam's gruesome mountain bike induced gashes. So yeah. I just finished my physics homework completely, so that was nice, and now i have to go to sleep, and dread the onslought of calculus, which is actually better now, both because we're doing new stuff, which i can learn as fast as everyone else, and because i've remembered most of what i've forgotten about calculus, which was really slowing me down in the slightly reviewish sections about sequences and such. So yeah, that is quite a post for only covering four days, but failure can cause me to wax poetic. 1am on the other hand, causes me to wane conscious, so i'm going to go to sleep now.

"We could close the curtains; pretend like there's no world outside. We could pretend it all the time"

~Hala ka ukelele

Family News Letter - September

This is my little update i'm going to send to my mom for our family newsletter. I guess i should keep it kinda short.

Greetings from Salt Lake

I feel fairly weird writing a newsletter since it's always been one of those things that older people did, like college and home teaching, but I'm doing that too now, which is odd. So far I'm enjoying the Utah life quite a bit. It's gorgeous outside right now, cool and dry, two things that are almost always missing in Mississippi. It's been great to be able to spend time with Cami, especially since I'm only just getting to know people on a 'hang out on the weekend' basis, and i think I'm saving around $100 by borrowing her washing machine. It's great to know I'm only a short drive away from extended family, and I'm looking forward to visiting Grandma and Grandpa, which looks like it will be next week.

I've gotten all set up in my ward, I even received a calling last week. I'm the Elder's Quorum Pianist, which surprised me a little bit, only because I didn't realize they knew I played the piano. The most difficult part of this is making it to church on time, since somehow waking up at 8am is difficult for me now, but I'm slowly getting better at it (today i overslept and missed Priesthood. I felt awful, but the first day I found myself utterly lost in the Labyrinth that is the Institute building, and didn't find my ward until Sacrament meeting, so I'm making progress) I was divvied up into a Family for Family Home Evening, and it seems like there are some pretty cool people in there, so I'm looking forward to that.

Otherwise I've mostly been enjoying college and Salt Lake. I was able to go to a fireside in the Tabernacle; and although the fireside turned out to be a drive to get me to join a fraternity, it was amazing to be in the Tabernacle. It's much smaller than it looked on TV, or maybe i'm bigger. That's about all that's going on here. I'll keep all of you updated as things unfold.

The Newest Utah Perkes (i think)
Ammon

~~~~

So yeah, that also, incidentally, is the gist of what's been going on the past few weeks.

Also today i had a fireside and met some people and that was fun, today was one of the first day i didn't feel like i was socially deprived, which is a nice change that i plan on keeping up. Otherwise, it's all quiet on the Western Front, hold tight my eastern bound readers (and cami, who i suppose is a south west of me)

~Jupiter
(from The Planets)

I've made an important discovery

I've discovered that there's really no way to mess up an Ice Cream Sandwich. There's never been an ice cream sandwich i didn't enjoy.

Also, i've discovered that waking up at 9:20 is no way to make it to church by 9.

1 Is the Loneliest Number That You'll Ever Know

Incidentally, i'm not actually that emo, or that lonely, but there is definitely a slight dearth of friendship at the U. I've met a bunch of people, it's not like i've been holed up in my room all day, i just haven't really met anyone i want to spend lots of time with. So yeah. It's also possible i just haven't really gotten to know anyone well enough to have a good time spending a lot of time with people, but i dunno.

In happier news, i've decided i'm not as behind in calculus as i feel, considering i did all of the homework last night without help, and when i got to class today a bunch of people were frantically swapping answers. So that made me fee a little bit more comfortable. Otherwise class is pretty groovy, i finished my reading for The Odyssey earlier today, that was good.

Church is fun, i'm glad i have it to get me out of my dorm and do fun things. I had my first Family Home Evening last night, we played tag and ate cookies, and brainstormed about what we can do. I need to pay my tuition today, because MTA is holding out on me, i also need to drop them a line and tell them to send me my $750 or i'll get out of this chair and drop them like 3rd period french.

Anyway, i think i'd better head to class, and then i hope to swim and register for intermural sports. I can't think of a witty ending, and i'm about to be late for class, so so long.

“‘Sort of’ is such a harmless thing to say. Sort of. It’s just a filler. Sort of - it doesn’t really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like after ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re going to live’ or ‘It’s a boy.’” ~Demetri Martin