My Name is Jonas

That's not entirely true, but Guitar Hero III is entirely awesome, and My Name is Jonas happens to be a really fun song to play. Rock climbing is also entirely awesome, today i was bested by the rock wall, but it was still fun.

Guitar Hero and rock climbing, all my life is missing is a physics midterm...
Oh happy day! I have one tomorrow at 2, and as such, i think i should be hitting the proverbial sack.

Also, Happy Birthday to Amy, who is probably the nicest person in the world, maybe tied with my mom.

No joke people, i wish i were as nice as Amy, but as it turns out i am a bit sarcastic and critical. I need to get that in check before i do the whole mission thing, i don't think that'll fly so much out there.

So yeah, that's all. I hear there's supposed to be some mad snow storm coming in in the next couple days, i dunno if that'll actually happen, i've become a bit suspicious of the weather peopel of late because they're bad at telling me when to hope for snow. I'm going to sleep now.

~Iron Man

weak, BYU won by 7.

that game should have been ours, when we had them 4th down and 18 deep on their side with one minute left that should have been the end. Oh well, i'll survive.

Happy Birthday Katie!

It is now officially Katie's birthday, even on her side of the country. Generally Katie does awesome little exposés on people's birthday (maybe exposés isn't the right word, but i just spent a solid couple minutes trying to figure out how to make an é, so it stays) but since it won't be the same with her doing it for herself and with me still a ways from feeling tired, i thing i might as well.

Katie for me has always been extremely thoughtful about how i turn out, which is always pretty awesome. She's bought me presents solely for the purpose of making me cooler (boxers, weights, a secret passageway, which i still think is awesome, even if it was a little thrown together), and i must admit that a good percentage of my wardrobe has been purchased only after receiving her ok. I remember Katie doing my artsy projects for me when i was in the earlier years, and for some reason, random bits of advice she's given me have stuck; my chucks are completely writing free, and i still remember that now that i'm in college i'm suppose to buy a bunch of dress shirts, especially pink ones, which i wasn't supposed to buy pre-college because it'd be weird, i only wear that brown tie with Khakis, which sadly meant that i couldn't wear it for about three years on account of not owning a pair of khakis, and the blue striped tie with dark pants. Actually come to think of it about half my ties came directly from katie. I think i terribly underrated Katie when we were still living together, which is probably true of most siblings. I think Katie might know me better than anyone else in my family, from treasure troves of blow pops to rearranging our rooms to make libraries to playing spies and making bombs, to hiking down to the local grocery store to load up on gum because we were going on a road trip and that was the only time we were allowed to chew gum. About 2/3's of my music comes directly from Katie; all things considered, Katie's had a pretty profound influence on my life, which i think has probably made me a much better person generally, or at least a much less socially awkward one.

It's been great to see Katie go from a somewhat struggling, shy to the point of sickness, skinny college student to a really very successful, healthy woman, wife, and soon to be mother, especially because it gives me a bit of hope for my life (minus the woman, wife and mother part o' course).

So Happy Birthday Katie. I have no doubt you'll be an amazing mother, and have by far most trendy kid(s) on the block.

What's this? Ammon on vacation but not bored?

Today was surprisingly eventful. Perhaps not exceptionally productive, but at least full of accomplishments. I woke up at 1pm, ate some breakfast and watched the second two discs of scrubs season 6, having watched the first last night. Then Tim im'd me and we went down to Dick's and took another crack at the rock wall, which this time around i totally beat. My forearms aren't nearly as sore this time either, which seems to be indicative of a certain bit of progress. After i climbed my forearms didn't look skinny, which is something that hasn't really happened in the past decade, so that was kinda cool. I must admit that despite being confident and suave in all other respects, i am a little overly conscious of having such tiny wrists. It's not something i lose sleep over or anything, but yeah.

I've realized that generally my Blog and my Journal are in direct competition, and generally the one i write in second gets a lower quality account of my thoughts and musings, and my increased consistency of writing in my journal may be contributing to a lack of quality and quantity in my blog, but i figure my journal will be more likely read by descendents and such, although i imagine my blog will still be around, barring some collapse in the internet and/or google infrastructure. Anyhow:

After climbing i came back and finished reading Freakonomics, having read the first chapter last night. That pretty much was my day, but i'd say it was a good day.

Freakonomics had a section on baby names and their social implications, and as it turns out, Amy and Katie are among the top 20 whitest girls names. As it happens, all my sisters respective significant others have names on the whitest boys names list (Dylan, Colin, and Logan)

reading through i spotted a few other names that are native to my family, so i concluded that my family is very very white. Go figure.

It's interesting how a single moment can have such a profound influence on the rest of your life. None of those moments happened to me today, but i did remember a few of them.

Herein lies the problem with this blog. It, unlike my journal, is written not for an audience per se, but certainly in front of one. I mean it's listed right over there >
not to mention the variety (vicissitude is a fun word, btw) of random people who might happen to come across it, and future people i'll meet who will probably see it. I read my Latin Teacher, the venerable Davy Jones', blog, which had months of really fascinating stuff that i'm sure he never planned on any of his students reading, especially since in the hands of certain students it could have led to some very serious problems between him and the murrah administration...hm, there was a point to this tangent...
right: People read my blog, and so i don't say quite as much. It's not that i'm hiding things from people really, just some things aren't polite conversation, which is why i have yet to post about the rather surreal experience that i was privy to in the midnight hours of tuesday night, or why i'm not mentioning some of the random instances that have forever changed my habits in some way or another. And then of course there are somethings that i probably am hiding from people, at least things that i wouldn't bring up without a bit of prodding, and of course, the things that would logically follow that thought to support that statement are the very things that i'm not really wanting to say.

Freakonomics was an interesting book for me to read, or rather, it's an interesting time for me to read freakonomics, since for the past few weeks i've been thinking about a few interesting questions, and i'm not quite sure how to vocalize them, which is a bit of a problem because they inevitably get worked into papers i write, where they aren't very well illustrated. I just used two verbs in describing writing that really have nothing to do with writing, interesting. Anyway, for one, stemming a bit from the discussions we had with The Things We Carried and Beloved, on the difference between truth and fact, and the readings i've done of plato and aristotle, i want to say that feelings are the truest form of thought we have, but then that poses some problems, because i don't really want to say emotions are more relevant than rational thinking, but there's definitely a difference in my mind between feelings and emotions, in that emotions are much more temporary, but feelings are much more consistent...or something.

Also, why is it in church when people are asked to volunteer to say the prayer there's almost always this long awkward silence. I doubt most of the people in there are in a position where they don't like praying, or don't feel comfortable praying. I guess it might be a symptom of a general fear of speaking in front of other people, but i don't think that's really what it is...i dunno.

There was something else i was going to poorly elaborate upon, but now i don't remember so much...i should write outlines for these things, seeing as they're longer and more eloquent than a lot of essays i write, though definitely less correct as far as spelling and grammar go.

Well that's all for me tonight, i've been writing this for a rather long while, and i need to go to sleep. 10 Hours from now i expect the Utes to be mopping the floor with BYU, and i'll need to be awake to watch that.

fin

Happy Thanksmas!

thankoween doesn't roll of the tongue in nearly the same way. Tongue is an oddly spelled word.

Thanksgiving was a pretty decent day for me, i slept in until 10ish, which isn't that much later than usual, but it felt nice. I went up to grandma's with cami and colin and hung out with the extended fam. I like my extended family a lot, but it's really not the same. I definitely miss having thanksgiving with my family. The food was good, but i'd say my parents are better. Also there were no oyster crackers...sad.

Anyway, after thanksgiving we hung around for a while and talked, then we drove back to salt lake and i hung out with cami for a while and played games. I won jambo and we tied trivial pursuit, then she went out to park city and i hung out in my dorm and watched the first disc of scrubs. I was tempted to watch the rest of it, but i have a long weekend, and i'm not sure if there's anyone around to hang out with.

Vacations are always a little questionable here, it's great to have time off from school and all this free time, but so many people here live so close that it's pretty easy to feel like the only person on campus around breaks, and that tends to lead to boredom. I can't imagine staying here over christmas break, i'd die. I'm looking forward to christmas a lot, it'll be nice to spend time with my family and friends.

In the spirit of thanksgiving, i'm going to sketch out my christmas list. What better way to give thanks than compiling all the things i want:

A nice suit (including shoes, mine are dead)
A Camera
Keychain oil container thing
Winter clothes
Guitar Hero III

hm, that's all that i want that i can think of. Clothes and music are usually a safe bet too. I felt like i had a lot more to say when i started this blog, but apparently not, that seems to happen a lot as of late.

~No Superman

i think i've ended with that before...

Oh, P.S.-It mortifies me that at this very moment, a mere two timezones away, people are going shopping for christmas deals. How did we come to this?

I sort of lost my focus halfway through this post...

This past week was fairly uneventful, in all the wrong ways. I get bored far too easily sometimes, but what can you do? Yesterday we had our last home game, and it was pretty crazy go nuts. We won 28-10, so that was cool, next week we play BYU, that's going to be intense. After the game i went over to cami's and got a BLT, did some laundry and played games with cami and some of her friends, so that was a pretty decent night.

I have a killer headache, and it's really not a lot of fun, i had one friday night too, but that was on the right side, whereas this is on the left. good stuff either way though.

Thursday i played a little 3 v 3 ultimate frisbee, which never works very well, but this was pretty decent. We won over all but lost the pivotal ending game point, but that was ok, it was way too cold for ultimate with no gloves. We also almost went to see a free movie, but it was sold out, so instead we wandered around Gateway, hit up an arcade, and found a glorious rock wall at Dick's, so that's kinda going to be my new random obsession for the next while i think. The rock wall won round one, my grip gave out before i was even halfway up (to be fair, the bottem half has the two hardest spots, and after you can't hold on it's hard to make much progress). But i may have found a solid workout buddy in Tim, so we'll see how that turns out.

Wednesday was a temple trip and i got to go to the Salt Lake Temple for the first time, so that was pretty cool.

Pretty unexciting week all in all, i'm going to read some Aeneid and try to get rid of this headache, and then i guess i should do my math homework.

It looks like i'm going to have an A in all my classes. Hooray for at least 1 more semester of scholarship.

~No Moss
This blog post is really unexciting, that's unfortunate.

oh yeah, thanksgiving is in a few days. I don't quite know what happened to this semester.

Loads off my back:

So far the past 24 hours has just been full of happy discoveries. First, talking to my mom, i found out that the house is sold and we're completely out of debt. Woo!

Then i found out that, contrary to what i had discovered earlier that day, the wisdom tooth study that pays hundreds of dollars is not a myth, it just isn't going through the university. It's actually an anesthesia test where they're using something other than codeine to see how it works, in search of a pain killer that doesn't run the risk of doubling as a patient killer. I'm a little wary of drug tests, but i think i'm going to call and see what the deal is, because it seems legit; it's a real oral surgeon and getting paid to have my wisdom teeth removed would be pretty stellar.

This morning, after rolling out of bed into calculus, i found out that i got a 100 on my midterm, which made me tres happy. Ever since the beginning of the year i've been worried about failing that class, not cutting it as a math major, and losing my scholarship, especially since technically i wasn't supposed to take that class, having only a 3 on the BC Calc test. I do need to really learn Maclauren series, which i've always struggled with, it being the last thing we learned, during a time when i was quickly losing my motivation in school. So yeah, that made me pretty happy.

Then, i came back and showered (i really don't know how i'd live without showers, i think without them, hygiene problems aside, i'd quickly devolve into a stressed out mess), ate, and decided to tackle the financial issues between me and the university. Basically over the past couple months i've been baffled by how much money i'm owing the university, and it just hasn't been adding up. Before college i had figured that i'd make it through the entire first semester with a few hundred to spare, not accounting for book costs and random spending, but book costs and random spending aside, i found myself owing the university 1600 dollars. This wasn't helped by the fact that MTA has yet to give me the 750 dollars they owe me, but even without that, it shouldn't have been that much.

Well, today i discovered that instead of giving the money to me to give to housing like i had been expecting, they credited the extra money back to my mom's credit card, in the amount of 1500 or so dollars. So now everything makes sense, my housing bill is paid for, and i just have to wait for the card to be processed before i can register for classes.

Huge sigh o' relief.

In other news, life has been pretty average. We drove down to provo on a whim on friday night and hung out with some people that my friends knew. At one point we ended hanging out in the apartment complex that amy had lived in once upon a time, which was thoroughly surreal. I thought about calling jessie or buckley, but i don't know how i would feel about my cousin calling me at 11 o'clock on a friday night to see if i wanted to hang out, so yeah. Also, BYU honor code is surprisingly constraining when you're not expecting to get kicked out of the dorms at midnight, and then the apartments at 1:30. So we went to denny's and got some food and then drove home.

Saturday was way fun, we had the funnest football game ever involving a really very clever fake punt that we ran about 40 yards for a touchdown (although the refs didn't give us the touchdown and we had to run it for half a yard) we beat wyoming 50-0 in what the opposing coach had called a guaranteed win for wyoming. It's really a shame Utah had such a rough early season, or else we would be in 2nd with BYU in first, our last game deciding the winner, but alas.
So that's been my last few days, i'm pretty happy right now, it's a shame i have physics in an hour. Oh, and i bought more contacts over the weekend, it's great to have them again, although my eyes had gotten mostly used to glasses, and it's weird, but my glasses aren't quite the right prescription, and they're crooked, so it's nice to be able to see better again. So yeah, good stuff all in all.

~An Unladen Swallow

Concussive Ramblings

It's official: sometimes i do some pretty stupid things. More on that later.

This week turned out pretty good all things considered. I'm somewhat surprised it's already thursday, and more surprised that thanksgiving is only two weeks away, madness. Also there are only five weeks left in fall semester, it's gone way too fast.

Tuesday we went to another basketball game. As it turns out, i don't like basketball games nearly as much as football games, i dunno, they're just not as much fun, maybe there's too much scoring for me, as a soccer player, to feel comfortable. Either way, we almost got a free pizza but Nick dropped it, and i decided that diving headfirst into the ground just for a personal pizza was not worth it.

Ironically, last night i decided diving headfirst into the ground would be an awesome thing to do. On our way back from smiths and squirrel brothers (strawberry cheesecake icecream is as good as ever) i noticed a massive pile of leaves, by far the biggest i've seen in my life. So me, Madeline, and Molly, being far more awesome than James and Vanessa, jumped in. (i guess it makes no sense to facetiously insult people when they don't even read this to appreciate it). At some point i thought it would be cool to dive headfirst into the pile o' leaves, not reasoning that leaves don't have anywhere near that much cushion, and that diving into a 4 foot high pile of leaves can't be that much different from diving into 4 feet of water. It ended up being rather painful, and is definitely not something i would recommend.

The moral of this story, however, is in no way "look before you leap". I've discovered that, barring some very serious consequences, i generally don't regret the things like this i do, because they really were pretty fun. I sometimes regret the consequences, but usually only when they involve other people. I've said many a time i'd break my arm if that's what it took to go snowboarding again, and that's somewhat true. I never regretted having gone snowboarding, except for how it affected the swim team and how much it cost. I didn't mind much falling out of the treehouse other than, again, the financial cost. A lot of times i don't mind dealing with a little bit of pain, because that goes away pretty quickly, but then you have these great stories to tell, and fun memories, and all that jazz.

So that's my philosophy on leaping. Probably not the wisest of philosophies, but i find it makes for a much better life than 'don't leap'. Incidentally, in relation to all things dealing with people and such, i use the opposite philosophy, something of a 'look and then over analyze for ever before you leap, and then afterwards when the opportunity is gone regret not leaping." but whatever, at least i am, as aristotle would say, 'consistently inconsistent'. I'm also waxing verbose, so i'd better stop before i make any more concussive ramblings.

I'm going to take some aspirin.

By the by, is there any way to dive other than head first? It seems to me that a dive generally implies diving headfirst, and diving headfirst is a little redundant, and if we're going to be more technical, your head isn't usually first, your hands are first. Had i actually dived headfirst into the ground i probably wouldn't be writing about, but luckily i'm not that stupid.

You are my everything

My alarm clock is iTunes, this morning Ben Folds - Losing Lisa came on while i was half asleep, and i didn't realize until later today when i was listening to iTunes some more why it was stuck in my head and why i wanted to make a joke about somebody being my everything, so don't read too much into the title.

Anyway, i'm better, i had a pretty all around crappy weekend, but it's over, i'll live. Hm, i set out to make a blog post, but i realized that i don't really have anything else to talk about...yup i got nothing. oh well. How did college life end become so dramatic, i thought that was supposed to end when i switched my little tassel to the other side. Oh well, i deal.

~Exquisite Dead Guy

Here's a truckstop, instead of St. Peter's

Today could have probably gone better, but i have clean laundry again, which is a nice change over last week.

I don't think i've ever liked what's followed after, "i really need to talk to you."

this has been a very emo weekend for me, and Coldplay and R.E.M. definitely aren't hindering that, but they are providing an appropriate soundtrack.

~The Sidewinder

times like these

So i'm in somewhat of a melancholy mood at the moment, and i decided that listening to Coldplay wasn't helping, so now we're seeing what Jack Johnson can do. Jack Johnson is generally a good way to feel happy.

So yeah, life these days is fairly decent, i have friends, so that's cool. I took care of all things unsaid in my real journal earlier tonight while i was emo, so i'll just chronalog the past week, which was pretty good.

On friday i went to Calculus which was about the same as always, then i worked very hard to not go to sleep and motivate myself to go to Colorado. For a few days there i was feeling craptacular, pretty much exhausted always, which i think was partially mental, probably stemming from the fact that i'm partially mental, but i got over it because Colorado is way too cool a state to skip out on.

The drive down was pretty uneventful, I half slept through most of james driving, and then enjoyed Wyoming in all it's beauty for Madeline's shift. We got to Molly's at around 9, it would have been sooner but we got caught in some very slow traffic for the last 2 miles. We ate dinner, courtesy of the molly parents, and then played password, which me and james beat molly and blaire in, although just barely. hm, that should be "in which" but sometimes i like to not be so pedantic a.k.a. grammatically correct. Anyway, at some point we slept, with the unrealistic idea of going hiking at 9am the next morning.

Madeline got there around 11 or 12, and suprisingly we ended up hiking. James, Madeline, and I left Molly (since molly had to go watch the Rockies lose up close and personal), and met up with Madeline's friend...jake...i think. Anyway, he seemed like a cool guy, reminded me a little bit of Kimball, but of course no one reading this knows who he is, so that doesn't do much good. Anyway, we went on a nice hike in Estes Park, which took us up to the Meadow (prompting various bambi references). Me and jake were feeling somewhat adventurous, or rather i was and jake was cool enough to follow, so we hiked up to the top of the little mountain we were on, which was pretty amazing. The hike back down was fun, and involved a bit of bouldering and trying not to die. The hike back went pretty fast, since it was all down hill, so that was cool.

We went from there to Porter's (another friend of madeline) house to watch that game and/or The Invisible. Porter's lady friend...ellie?...ella?...i'll go with ellie, said that we were jinxing the game by watching it, so we didn't really see them lose at the end. After the game me, porter, and james took on madeline and ellie in an intense game of Disney Scene-It. It was way intense, we lost because we said flubber instead of the Absent Minded Professor, but it was fun. That was saturday.

Sunday i went to church in some random ward, which made me appreciate the lack of babies in my ward, but Church is Church no matter where you go, which is always nice. Sunday was pretty chill, i took a nap, and then packed when molly and james got back (they'd gone up to Fort Morgan, where Molly used to live). We left at 2ish, and i drove the first stretch, which was fun. James and Molly were mostly asleep so Madeline drove the final leg. We started getting pretty tired with an hour or two still to go, so we played freeze-out (roll down all the windows when it's cold and go for as long as you can). That turned out to be way too intense for Molly and not nearly intense enough for me and madeline, and it looked like the windows would just be open for the rest of the drive, so we invented Freeze-out Extreme, which requires you to hold your hand out the window (holding onto the top of the car). We lasted about 12 miles and i decided i cared less about winning then i did about the inevitable nerve damage i was doing to my hand, so madeline took the prize for most hardcore/stubborn person.

We got back into Salt Lake at 9ish, and i think we did something, although i don't quite remember what. This is getting long, but the next few days weren't nearly as intense.

Monday was mondayish, and that night we watched heroes and met James new roomate Nick who seems like a nice addition to the group. Then we hung out and me and Madeline played with James awesome laptop (complete with tablet screen thing) and drew a picture of what molly and james would look like, were they unhappy pilgrims. Molly and James didn't seem to appreciate it nearly as much as we did, but it was fun either way. Oh, all day monday i was weirdly energetic, i'm not quite sure what happened there, since i definitely didn't get enough sleep.

To contrast, tuesday i was weirdly unenergetic, but i found out i made a 99 on my IT midterm (which was dippin awesome). That night we went and saw the Simpsons Movie, which is funnier than i remembered it, and then watched zoolander, which was exactly as funny as i remembered it.

Wednesday was halloween, and another dissapointing year. I came pretty close to having a costume, but as it turned out nothing happened, so it never happened. Me and Madeline and then Kelsey and Cathy and Vanessa and Flora and James and Molly (in order of arrival) watched Spiderman 3, which is funny and awesome and tacky. I'd forgotten the ending, and remembered it all of a sudden a few minutes before the end. After that we went looking for something to do, the creepy Chapel of Chapel Glenn seemed like a good choice, but it was locked, so we wandered around and me and Nick climbed on things than i climbed the hardest tree i've ever climbed (the first thing to hang on was about 15 feet up, so it involved some hardcore climbing.) And then i sat there for a while because i was having flashbacks of Arm-break 2006: The tree house of horror. I think after that we went to some mexican restaurant and then hung out in james room until i was too tired.

Thursday james got a couch, that was pretty awesome. Me James and Nick got front row seats to the Utah - Montana basketball game, which was lots and lots of fun, on our way out we saw a dippin dots, and that's when i realized that dippin is a good word to say in place of frickin, so i'm going to try to work that into my vernacular. We also watched The Emperor's New Groove with some girls, since 3 guys alone watching disney movies is somewhat suspect.

Today, friday, i lost my soccer game. It sucked a lot, we should have won, and i played like crap, so it's pretty hard not to blame myself, but happily no one else did verbally. We lost in a shoot-out, so i'm sure the shooters that missed and the goalie feel at least as bad as i do, but still, it sucked, i hate losing, but i really hate losing when i know i should have done better.

So yeah, that's my week. I did do some college work too, read some plato and aristotle, re-wrote an essay on oedipus rex, took a midterm and other collegiate things. Tomorrow i'm going to finally do laundry, since i'm down to dress shirts and soccer socks. This entry got way long, and took up nearly an hour of my time, which is good, my time right now is going way too slow.

~More than humid

Random Note 5/17/08: James' roommate's name was Tim, not Nick. I dunno where Nick came from.