Things I Don't Get, Part 2

Or, in other words, Criticizing Everything

So, i hadn't planned on making this a multi-volume thing, but I was thinking about hurricanes today, and i just don't get the appeal of the Coast. I really don't know why anyone would choose to live here who could live somewhere else. I get that my Dad works here and gets a lot of fulfillment from that, but for people working at Walmart, or really any occupation that doesn't require the presence of a hurricane swept landscape, why would you stay?

First of all, there's the hurricanes. Having to board up your windows and leave your house with all your most valuable possessions is ridiculous. And there's always the chance that everything you own will be destroyed. Katrina was a bit of a fluke, but there are the average, run of the mill hurricanes that tear up the coast without generating quite as much media. So from a catastrophic point of view, the coast is one of the worst places to live, along there with at the base of a volcano or beneath a large and precariously placed boulder.

Now, i would understand living here in spite of the hurricane if this was a spectacular paradise. But this isn't the bahamas, it isn't even florida. The beaches crappy and fake. The water is brown and stinky. The waves are non-existent. At this very moment there's a cockroach roughly the size of a walnut climbing up my wall. There are these sand gnats everywhere that are even worse than mosquitoes (though on the plus side, there aren't so many mosquitoes as there are in jackson). The summers are hot, humid, and unpleasant, the winters are cold, rainy, and grey. Spring and Fall are ok, but they come and go without any of the spectacular colors of New England and other places. As far as the natural beauty goes, the trees are quite lovely, but there's aren't many things that can really impress upon you the magnificence and the magnitude of Earth. You can't even see the stars.

Then there's life itself. There's no great urban scene, or music scene, or college scene, or many things that are entertaining at all. I've realized, in making friends and hanging out, that there's just not that much to do here. And everything to do is so corporate. Sure, out in the boonies and around some places, you can a few quirky local restaurants or shops, but in biloxi proper, it's all chains, casinos, and shopping centers.

So, redeeming qualities: Sunsets are beautiful and there are lots of thunderstorms. Those were two things i missed in Utah. Utah just doesn't know how to do sunsets, and your average Utahn doesn't even know what real rain looks like. (the drops are really big). For those with a ruddier complexion of the nape, there's lots of good fishing and hunting, and you're never more than 5 minutes from a walmart. You can wade through the dingy water with lights spearing flounder and night, that's a manly thing to do, yeah? It's never gets too cold, so you need not fear the winter just because you don't want to invest in a decent coat. Life is quiet, so if you're the kind of person that just wants to sit on your porch and sweat all day, it's easy to do that here without interruption. If you've got lots of family here, which it seems most people do, you're always close to a bunch of people you love but don't especially want to see every day. There are lots and lots of churches and the people are nice. It's a great place to write a stirring coming of age novella, or make a quaint postcard, or get good barbecue, i just have never felt those were good parameters for a place to live.

Now, i'm certainly jaded by my family's preference to live in an Urban place. I cannot grasp what possesses people to live in a place that's truly in the middle of nowhere, so it shouldn't be a surprise that i don't want to live somewhere that's sort of backwater. Obviously not everybody wants to live in the city and that's fine and good (although i do think suburbs are contributing to the decline of our civilization), but there are thousands of small cities and towns around the country so much nicer than here. I think people wind up here by mistake, either their born here, move here for a job or get stuck here by the military, and they forget what it's like anywhere else. They make friends and form connections and seep so far into life here that they can't imagine moving somewhere else.

I guess what i'm trying to say is i'm not going to miss biloxi much. Which is good. In 3 short weeks i'll be in provo, and in 3 short months i'll be in Portugal. Maybe i'll write a letter about all the crappy things about Portugal. I think it will be rather short.

So, in less critical news, i read Ender's Game and Speaker of the Dead over the past couple days. They were both good, Ender's Game was lots of fun to read, but Speaker of the Dead left me with a sort of empty feeling. It was filled with portuguese, which was unexpected and interesting. It's weird that in around 6 months i'll be quasi-proficient in another language. I also read the whole Artemis Fowl series. Those were all good, although the 2nd and 3rd were a bit dull. I think after i read some more of the Orson Card books, i'll try to find some more mature lit to read between now and my mission. Something i can't read in a day. I ought to read crime and punishment for reals. So we'll see if that happens. Infinity is getting awfully close.

28 Days

It's a sad state of affairs when my greatest accomplishment recently has been not throwing up.

other than that, i've been watching a lot of Veronica Mars lately. That is a good show. I never got into it when it was on, i think it was on at the same time as Smallville, but it's just so well done.

Except duncan, i can't stand Duncan.

That is all.

Things Fall Apart

Time passes in the worst way down here. Day's trod on with no real distinction, but already it's been 4 weeks since i said goodbye to everything i had found over the past year. I am such a bum.

I wrote in my real journal last night (always a good decision) and realized i haven't really accomplished anything while here. I mean i've gotten some interviews that have moved me forward on the path to exciting adventures in mission life, i've become immune to hepatitis (originally i was going to try to do that through sheer force of will, but it turned out the vaccines are cheap), and today i discovered that i can make uncrustables. Is it sad that the highlight of my day is making little pb&j crepes? perhaps. For a second there i was worried my spacebar had stopped working. That would have been disastrous.

Lets see, i may have given up reading The End of Nature. It's a sad book about how climate change has fundamentally altered nature, not just the climate, but the innate independence and immutability of earth's environment has been lost. Probably the scariest part is it's nearly 30 years old and the climate change discussion hasn't really changed: the majority of scientists are calling for change while the majority of status quo is hoping some deus ex machina will come alone to make in a non-issue. Maybe it will, with any (i.e. absurd amounts of) luck the next president will be able to fundamentally alter the nature of American politics, since anything short of that isn't going to change much.

I started to read this book that my mom said was really good. The book itself said that it could change my life by discovering my true attributes. I just couldn't take it seriously though. It started by comparing humans to flowers and how we need to bloom and transcend our trepidatious ways and discover blissful...so that's about that point i stopped reading. Any book that could change my life would read better than a self help book for little girls. And, as a rule, i try to avoid Oprah's book club.

So with one book depressing and one extremely dull, i've opted for reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy again. While it does, admittedly, leave you with a certain emptiness, it is a happy emptiness, akin to video games, or general anesthesia. I figure between intensive temple and mission preperations, i'll be able to find enough meaning in my life even without motivational oprah books.

My Jackson trip has been pushed back and shortened due to the dual requirements of a Stake President interview next thursday and family coming a week after that. It'll be cool to have family around, even if 14 people, two of whom are still card carrying babies, will make this house feel a bit Oliver Twist. I don't even know where we're all going to sit, but i'm sure we'll manage.

That's about the extent of what's going on down here. Yesterday we saw the new indiana jones. My main complaint is an overabundance of silliness. Swinging through trees with monkeys is ok if you're Tarzan, but not if you're Shia Labeouf. CGI is spectacular and all, but it really takes away from that grittiness that the old indiana jones movies had. One shock is how spry Harrison Ford still is. Apparently he worked out 3 hours a day and did a lot of his own stunts. That is one hardcore old man. Other than the over all silliness, the plot was weak, and a lot of things weren't explained properly. A good movie, but not a great one. Lucas should be limited to no more than three movies of the same title. Or maybe he just shouldn't be allowed to make movies after the 1980's. Either way, there's a threshold he's crossed into the place where great movies lose their magic.

Digital TV is good stuff, the picture is as promised, and our current technical difficulties stem from an antenna that long ago became trash. The bigger issue is the total lack of good tv on network. I never realized what i was missing, but USA, BBC America, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, and others are all pretty good stuff. and, lest we forget, FX has the movies. All in all, it's difficult to enjoy idleness (idle-atry). Naps remain highly enjoyable however.

Today i played ball in the house. I'm a rebel.

these pretzels are making me thirsty

The neighbors down here have a weird affinity for crappy music with crappy baselines. Usually i don't care about the musical tastes of people i don't know, but when i have to listen to the same baseline for 20 minutes, it gets a little old (f#bf#bebeb, etc). Oh wait, it modulated down a half step. Those are the neighbors to the right, on the left they like to sit on the porch and be loud when i'm trying to sleep at 10am. I really don't like this house. There are just so many things about it that don't work the way they're supposed to, and for some reason flies like to hang out in here. It just gets to be a little much.

In other news, i'm having a hard time staying productive. I've started going to the gym, and that's a plus, and i'm making dinner and doing dishes from time to time, but i'm spending half my day sleeping and half the time i'm awake i'm watching tv online. I'm sure this is about to change since i may have caught up with all the tv shows i watch. Scrubs, Chuck, and Smallville are all done for the season. I've run out of Psych dvd's (which is probably my favorite show on the air, by the way). Monday Bones and House will be done, i've watched all the firefly episodes (the best show of all time and one more reason to hate fox) so yeah.

We went to see Prince Caspian last night. I've never seen a movie less faithful to the book, but that's ok. Had they stuck to the book, it would have been a pretty boring movie. They added a whole new battle sequence and found ways to stretch conflicts that were resolved in about a page into long-term story arcs. They also added random unnecessary romance for some reason. Anyway, it was a good movie with pretty decent battle scenes and good acting, although Prince Caspian's acting left something to be desired, such as a good actor to play prince caspian. He had a really weird accent that i couldn't quite pin down. It was vaguely spanish. It was like someone with an already heavy accent trying to put on a spanish accent and not doing it very well. I also find it odd that battles in this movie only took like fifteen minutes. That just seems weird. And the giant water Jesus at the end was sort of odd, i dunno where that came from. It was a silly movie, but definitely worth seeing.

We (me johnny and caitlin) Kayaked the okatoma on monday, and that was fun. They stuck us on the crappy part of the okatoma, something i realize was happening at the time. So i'm thinking i need to go back and do it again, this time on the fun part. After that we got some food, and hung out outside a movie theater since there wasn't anything we wanted to see. Driving hope at 1am in mississippi is really creapy. It feels sort of claustrophobic, with the trees and the lack of people. Also because there are deer all over the place, it's not so safe to zone out and just drive, which is what i usually like to do. I also saw a bunch of cops, and so i couldn't really speed. One of them pulled out after i passed him, but i didn't after i crossed the next hill i didn't see him, so that was sort of scary. I was only going about 10 over (in a 75), and it would have taken him around 10 minutes of serious speeding to catch up to me. Ultimately i got home without losing any kayaks so all went well.

If i ever find myself in some ethnic minority somewhere, i have decided i will not eat only ethnic food and listen to ethnic music at 100 decibels. This isn't really a problem for me since as Americans we have very few things that are uniquely american. Most things that we call american are just cheap knock-offs of other people's culture. I guess i could crank up the Mo-Tab and break out the jell-o casserole, but i don't think people would quite get it.

So that's what's going on right now. I'm getting a bit concerned that i'm going to have to wait longer for my mission than i want to, both because my papers still haven't gone in (i need to call the bishop about that today) and i'm going to have to get a hepatitis A booster in november, and i don't quite know how that works. Oh well, with no scholarship being put on hold, it doesn't matter much, i really just don't want to stay here until novermber. I think i'd be really very bored. Anyway, that's all for now. Probably one of my less interesting posts to read, and i apologize, i'll try to make my life more exciting from here on out.

And so, Ammon waits, Ammon waits, Ammon waits for a call from a friend.

Biloxi is a boring place. This is what i have decided after spending about a week here without doing anything. Biloxi probably would be a more exciting place if i had friends or even family that wasn't busy all day. But yeah, there's just not much to do and nobody to do it with. On top of that, the sick that i got a week or so ago seems to have passed on to Isaac (i carried it all the way from utah, like a modern day plague-rat) so he's stuck home all day meaning i'm stuck home all day watching him. Hopefully that'll be done tomorrow so that i can go kayak the okatoma with some jackson friends. We shall see. i wonder if releasing isaac back into the wild is a good idea, given the apparent contagiousness of it...oh well.

So yeah, not a whole lot going on on this end. I've been watching a lot of tv online, since there are only like 3 channels in biloxi, and one of them is PBS. I need to start exercising, since i need my knee to be in working order, and not doing anything all day seems to make it worse. I don't think it'll be a problem for the next two years, what with the bike riding and such, but it'd be nice to be able to walk into the MTC.

Otherwise i've been pretty bored, waiting to hear from Katie when little Soren joins the mix, since he's due any second now, and playing ben folds songs on the piano and playing a bit of guitar to see if i can't remember how that works. My problem with guitar is that i lack guitar music to learn songs to make it fun. I have figured out "We're going to be friends", and that makes me happy, but i want some new songs. I can't find my teach me to play guitar book, but that was a pretty crappy book anyway, it didn't include fun songs, just boring chord progressions. If i expect to woo some future wife with mad guitar playing skills I'm going to have to have those guitar skills within a couple years, otherwise i'll already have woo'd the wife and lost my motivation for guitar. Then i'll have to pick up my other goal, mad harmonica skills, in order to convey my loneliness when my wife leaves me because of lack of mad guitar skills, so obviously it's pretty critical that i be able to play the guitar. My whole future depends on it, just like Michael J. Fox, or i suppose Joaquin Phoenix, although he never travelled to the future to realize how important it was and avoid a potentially crippling injury.

So yeah, that's life of late. Hopefully it'll pick up soon.

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.

This is my friday night...

why is it that words with ea are less friendly than words with ee?

Meat, Beat, Steal, Weak, Bear, Dead...

Random observations while watching baseball.

Also, it's interesting that college football is way more exciting than pro, but college soccer is much less so.

If i go crazy then will you still call me superman?

I've almost made it through this week, only one more day and then everybody will be back and life will continue. Good times.

I've had a pretty unproductive week, although i've gotten a few things that i needed to get done out of the way. Otherwise this week has been very thoughtful, and i find myself missing mississippi. Today i was hiking about through the mountains, and it reminded me of being a little kid and wandering around the woods near my house. I wish i'd had utah then, there's so much more to explore, i could go for miles just behind my dorm.

Today i've been missing murrah soccer. We really had some good times. I don't think i'll ever have as much fun as i did at some of those games. Even though i have intermural here, it's not the same, we're not a team, and winning and losing barely matters. Most of all i miss a way to constantly play soccer. I really like soccer, like a lot. I think if i were good enough i would have no trouble playing pro-soccer. It'd be so much fun. Since it's too late now, i'd settle for a large group of soccer playing friends.

I miss Sal and Mookie's too. That was a really fun job, i think if pro soccer doesn't pan out, i would enjoy working at a restaurant. I know it won't happen, because i don't want that as my career, unless i became a chef or something, cus those guys are awesome.

Lets see, what else. I just generally miss having a lot of friends. When you only have a few friends it's pretty easy to find yourself with nothing to do.

I'm pretty much out of things to say, i wrote extensively in my real journal today, that was good. Other than that my life is pretty calm, tepid even. Maybe i'll have exciting dreams...

gosh, these are so emo sometimes.

fall broken.

it's been a long while since i did a blog, so i guess i will. A lot has happened, but it seems like not a lot worth talking about has happened. Right now it's fall break, which i'm really not enjoying much because all my friends went home for the week, leaving me bored and lonely trying to figure out what to do with my time.

I watched the prestige for the third time, but this time i actually watched it, and it's crazy how much more i noticed. i guess i won't talk about it much, so as not to ruin it for anybody, but yeah, it's a good movie to watch again.

General conference is this weekend, which is always a good weekend. It sleeted yesterday, which is about the worst possible precipitation (except maybe freezing rain), but the snow in the mountains looks cool.

Friday was lots of fun, i had a physics test, which i think i did well on, and then we hung out, played games, watched Batman Begins (also an awesome movie), went to denny's, and finding it rediculously full of people for 2am, went to IHOP. By about 5 am we were all pretty tired, so we just ended up watching boomerang until i decided to go to bed.

Thursday was pretty fun too, the office always makes for good times.

Wednesday was crazy busy during the day, as wednesday always is, but i went and saw Dan in Real Life with Cathy, which was fun. Dan in Real Life is a Steve Carrel/Dane Cook movie coming out in a couple weeks. You'd think a Steve Carrel/Dane Cook movie would be really funny, but it really wasn't. It was a nice movie, but it was closer to a chick flick than anything.

That's about as far back as i can remember interesting things happening. I got my bed lofted on monday, which was definitely a good decision. My room is about 100x as cool now. I decided i'm going to buy a hammock, which will make my room even cooler, if i can make it work, which i think i will.

I have a new roomate now, again, he's pretty cool, and he has a piranha, which eats little fish and is awesome. This week i'm on fish duty for Cathy and Madeline, i'm really worried i'm their fish are going to die this week, because while fish are relatively hard to kill, they're even harder to keep from dieing if that's the way they're going. Madeline said she's never forgive me if i kill her fish, and i think she's fairly serious, so there are some pretty high stakes.

Anyway, i'm going to watch the rest of conference and then wonder what to do on sunday night.

I'm no Superman

hm, i was thinking about making a post about the glories of the interweb, but it just wasn't working right. Instead i'll just talk about what's been going on.

Not much. I'm getting into a bit of a routine with this whole college thing. I bought some oatmeal and water and cheeze-its which do a good job of keeping me going in between dreams. My meal plan is all worked out, so now i'm less hungry all the time, which is good. I know where all my classes are (although i forgot where physics was yesterday for a little while). I finally (for the first time in something like 6 months) have a working cell phone, courtesy of Katie and Logan enterprsies, and the glories of the internet, which gave me the code for unlocking it for freezies.

Otherwise, i've been watching a lot of scrubs. I finished off the 5th season, so now i'm ready to watch new ones (unless there's a sixth season, and then i'll have to quickly rent and watch it along with the office) So that's my life in brief. I'll update some more when more is happening. I'm hungry and my hands are cold, so i'm going to go back to my dorm and find something to do until 2, when i have my last class of my first week of classes.

Let the hours roll by doing nothing for the fun

So, i'm back to living by myself, and now, without decent computer or video games, i'm finding it hard to fill the time. This has some benefits in that i end up being more productive, but mostly i just spend a bit of time bored, contemplating things.

I have a really cool dream last night. It was a harry Potter dream, which, in a world with no harry potter book coming, is about the best i'm going to get. I think i was harry potter, or else i was me and i was in Harry Potter's position. We were running from a basilisk that had materialized out of the grass. It's kinda hard to explain, but i'm sure i've seen it before, i think it must have been a different dream. Anyway, we ran from that, and found the sword of gryffindor, and for some reason at that moment (when the snake was either within sight or i could perceive it getting closer) it seemed very important to sop up the remnents of basilisk venom into a rag. I'm just going to tell you right now that that never came up in the dream, although to be fair i woke up before the end. After that we (who included me, Ron, perhaps dumbledore, or lupin) started running up the corridors of Hogwarts, which were somewhat reminiscent of parts of carslbad cavers. Anyway, eventually we got to this big room where a bunch of hogwarts students were hanging out. The run to this room was actually very long and very scary, but i don't remember it as much. Oh, but on the way we got to this room that had a bunch of doors, and i know one said "Geography Bee". A couple of them were too small (made for house elves) and so we chose a big one with blue lettering. This took us to the hogwarts student room. In this room we were kinda trapped, and i remember that i needed to somehow get to someplace. I climbed up on these rafters and then made my way over to some ropes that were hanging down. :I swung over to this little secret door that i knew was there, and would take me to where i need to be. It took me a while to get the door open, all the while mrs. van uden was below saying she'd catch me if i fell (which i hardly saw possible). Eventually i opened it up to the passage way, but found that it was far too small (which is a part of a dream that i've had many times since i was 9, there's this passageway in the jackson street house that's about as wide as an air vent, and i somehow have to get into it). Some goblins come in (not harry potter goblins, Lord of the Rings goblins) itching for a fight, and i'm having trouble remembering spell names, so i get someone to give me my sword, and petrify the goblins and then stab them, which kinda makes them fall apart. I go over to corned to stay for a while, and this little kid next to me is really thirsty, so i go to find some cups, and use aquamenti to fill them with water. Shortly afterwards Snape came in, and i remember thinking that he was good, and that he was just pretending to be evil, but then he came over and started acting very evil, he poked me with his wand and i remember this searing pain in my side (which i now realize is where i bruised my ribs on a volleyball pole yesterday) And i couldn't remember the spell for shielding, and i couldn't really see straight, and the more i tried the harder it was, it was like i couldn't open my eyes, and then my mom called and i woke up to answer the phone.

Yesterday i played volleyball with some people from work, which was fun. I've realized how extremely competitive i am, or rather, that not everyone is extremely competitive. Some people are perfectly ok playing games to have fun, and i don't quite understand that. I mean i would rather have fun than win, but winning is usually fun, and so i don't often have to make the choice. Anyway, i think i proved myself alright at volleyball, which made me happy. It's not easy to gain respect working in the ice cream shop, i dunno, it just seems juvenile compared to the other side of the restaurant, which i think is part of the reason i want to do expo again. Also that you're part of something bigger there, as opposed to the scoop shop, which is pretty enclosed.

So now i'm trying to decide what to do until i have to work, which is complicated by the fact that i'm not sure when i have to work. I think i'll probably swing by work and then go to the gym. So until i succumb to boredom and write again, farewell.