Stay cool soda pop

I should really be sleeping, and therefore i think i'll update my blog. I don't know what it is about 2 in the morning that makes me feel like not going to sleep. Maybe it's the recurring, guy smiley nightmares.

So, the last couple of days have been fairly eventful. I went swimming tuedsday, and played soccer with the spanish speaking members and missionaries. That was way fun, it's been too long since i've played legitimate soccer, and it was nice to see that i can still hold my own. I scored two goals, blocked a bunch, and even managed not to injure myself. So that was an accomplishment and a half. I still can't dribble worth anything, but dribbling is for babies and international soccer phenom. Real men pass the ball.

Today i helped some ward members move several hundred pounds of food storage across biloxi, lifting mostly with my back. My philosophy is that if i lift enough with my back, it'll be so strong that it won't get injured. Most people just don't lift enough with their back. There's their problem.

So apparently hurricane Gustav might come our way, brining with it impending, katrina-esc DOOM. Incidentally, Katrina hit almost exactly 3 years ago. We should have had a party. Anyway, so there's talk of evacuation, all our stuff getting destroyed, scary things like that. On the plus side, i might end up going to jackson again. Starkville looks more likely, but we'll see. If i'm going to be spending 2 weeks someplace while waters recede, i'd like to be somewhere i've been in the last 10 years. Either way, this is probably one of the more threatening things anything named Gustav has done. I really hope it won't be on the scale of katrina, it'll ruin the funniness of Gustav forever.

Tomorrow i'm getting my eyes checked and backing up the hard drives (maybe) and going on exchanges with the elders, and going to institute, and then probably doing fun stuff afterwards. It's just a packed day. So i'm going to go to sleep, and hopefully the next time i update this thing, i will have shifted my sleep 5 hours back, or at least a few, so that waking up at 6:30 doesn't kill me.

Until then, i'll be defeating evil, one idiot bike thief at a time
(oh yeah, my little brother's bike got stolen. That's messed up. What's even more messed up is that it'll cost around 3x the price of the bike to fix the car window. Who breaks into a car to steal a 8 year olds bike and then leaves everything else in the car of value? Maybe some guy really needed to teach his son to ride a bike.)

You know, i've noticed something. In the midst of tv's witty repartee (ala psych, veronica mars, firefly, all the other shows i watch, etc) nobody ever laughs at their really quite clever jokes. I mean, not laughing at your own jokes is pretty key, but it seems like people around would catch the cleverness and laugh. But then i guess it wouldn't be witty repartee. It just seems weird. I still prefer it to laugh-tracks. I'm glad no one really uses those anymore.

~So 90's

Already i'm so lonesome i can die...

Well, school is almost done. Tomorrow i have to do a project, and then i'm more or less done. Typical of my life, the days before i leave are the best of my stay here. Everything i have wanted this year has come about very recently. I have great friends, i have enough money, i can walk again, it's warm and happy, i even have a relationship of sorts (btw, i'm not sure whether or not it's worth dating in the weeks before you leave somewhere for 2 years. It does make that last little bit a lot of fun, but it makes leaving so very hard.) But i guess that's why it's called a sacrifice, and i'm sure when i come back, everything will still be here, though perhaps not through the same people. My friend offered to chip for a bus ticket, and it was really very tempting. But tuesday remains my departure. That john denver song is great, but it takes on so much more meaning when you're leaving someplace. Actually lots of songs do. We sang Improve Each Shining Moment and God Be With You Till We Meet Again in church today, which was nice, since this is the last sunday for a large portion of the ward.

I actually have lost my voice almost entirely over the past couple of days and have a pretty gnarly cough, but other than that, this last weekend has been awesome. Friday i had a linear algebra and a physics final, with a physical in between. The physics final didn't go great but it's awesome to be done. And in talking to other people i get the feeling that it didn't go great for too many people, so hooray for curves. Other than that friday was pretty chill, i watched doctor who, did something productive i think, and went to sleep.

Saturday was amazing. I don't think a day could be very much better than saturday was, except if you threw in like a temple trip in the morning, but otherwise it was a very complete day. We went to play baseball at the place where the sandlot was filmed, and also saw vincent's drug store (which looks exactly the same) and tore the skin off a baseball, and i bought glass bottles of pop and rootbeer, so all in all it was a very sandlotish day. After that i went to a modern dance performance, which was cool, if a little abstract. Then we hung out for a while, got hot chocolate, and watched august rush, which is a really sweet movie, and has a very cool soundtrack. That little kid is such a great actor. Also saturday night i submitted my misson papers, so that's almost done with

Today was nice too, i got to church on time so i got to play piano one last time. Sunday school was good, we did Q&A with return missionaries on stuff. And then the bishopric spoke and said farewell and that sort of thing. After church i got an interview with the bishop so now all that stands between me and my call is setting up an interview with the stake president. This actually may turn out to be difficult, but i'm sure everything will work out. After church i ate and took a nap and then went to dinner, ward prayer, and then we watched a couple movies to round the night up very late. Now i'm tired, and i have to get up tomorrow to do that project and hopefully have a bit of time for fun, so it's time for bed. The next one of these will most likely be from mississippi, so, until then, fare well.

~Roger the Shrubber

Oh, by the way, we can now rest easy knowing that i don't have Tuburculosis, or as some have loved to call it, "The Consumption!!" So yeah, physicals, while always extremely awkward, and great when they basically tell you that you are entirely healthy. Fun times.

Matrices and Magnets

I have never in my life been so happy to know how matrices work as i was about 5 minutes ago when it cut literally hours of time off my physics homework that would have been spent mucking about in algebraic mess.

Math teachers should tell their students, in response to why you should learn matrices, that they will allow you to get a decent night sleep someday in college. I lucked out by pairing my math perfectly with my physics classes, calculus with kinematics, and linear algebra with electricity and magnetism. If it weren't 2am i'd make a more legitimate update, but life is pretty good right now. I don't think i'm going to get that job, but that's ok, donating plasma and other things should get me through this semester with a good bit of spending money while allowing me to retain a reasonable social life.

anyway, peace out my sleeping peeps.

Leaving on a jet plane

Real quick because i need sleep. I'm supposed to wake up to fly back to utah in 2 hours, i hardly see the point in that little sleep, but at least it'll differentiate today from tomorrow, which looks to be a wicked hectic day. I fly out at 6, and classes start at 10:45.

Now that i'm actually leaving i'm kinda sad to go, more than i was the first time. But then last summer was weird, i barely saw any of my family and i was off to new and exciting things. This time i saw almost nothing but my family and i'm off to old but still relatively exciting things. Either way, saying goodbye to isaac was sad, he's by far my favorite little brother.

Today was a nice last day, i had church and then had my dad make some really good asian noodley stuff, and then we played some games and i got packed and so forth. I finished Katie's gift, and it's awesome. There are pictures, but i'm not going to upload them for a few days, thereby maintaining the surprise. Hopefully katie will post some pictures when she gets it. Now all my presents lie in the more than adequate postal abilities of my mom.

So that's all for now, i suppose i'm going to meet my new roommate today, that'll be exciting. I was pretty amped about having my own room, so i've been thinking of ways to get him to leave. He's asian, and i wonder how he would respond to me playing the typical asian music on my keyboard everytime he walks in...or just use the gong sound. I think that would actually be pretty hilarious, and if he thought it was funny, i'd know he was a keeper, and if not, then i'd have 200ish glorious square feet of room to myself...anyway, i guess i'll take what little sleep i'm offered. I've never been one to sleep on airplanes or in cars, so i'll probably take a nice nap in the afternoon tomorrow. So that's it, signing off from Mississippi.

~Sister Susie Sittin' On a Thistle
(for some reason this song is stuck in my head, which makes no sense, other than that it sort of reminds me of the Oscar Mayer Weiner song, which was stuck in my head moments ago.)

In case of emergency, spend all day in bed.

I just realized it was saturday, that was kinda disappointing. I've discovered that my pain medicine makes me sleepy. This isn't all that suprising, since it says right on the botle that it may cause drowsiness, but this is the first medicine that's made me drowsy. Niquil and Benadryl, while difficult to spell, don't really do anything for me, so this feeling of just wanting to lounge around all day and read lemony snickett is novel.

I have been occasionally productive though. I made another camera case, since my first one was lost and then slept on, and then i improved it to make a pocket for my little felt screen cleaner. I've taken copious amounts of photos, and made a time lapse of a settlers of catan game, and realized that a time lapse of risk would be rad, and decided to do that some day. Yesterday i spent a few hours working on my made gift, which required bamboo, a guitar, and a power saw, so now that's almost done.

Other than that days have been pretty slow filled with games and planet earth. I guess i'm going back up to jackson in a couple days for new years, so that'll be a party. Hopefully the package of stuff for friends will have come in by then, or else i'm going to have to mail it or something, and that'd be weak.

salut

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

"It's my blog...it's kinda a big deal"

I've been bad about updating consistantly, but, in my defense, a lot has been going on lately. I graduated. That's pretty monumental i guess. It doesn't really feel monumental, i hope other big milestones in my life are less anticlimactic. Despite what people say, i haven't been building up to graduation for 4 years of my life, i've been building up to college, and being out of high school. Being out of high school is not at all dissapointing, and is every bit as independent and enjoyable as i had hoped. Thus far, it's been significantly less productive, and i still haven't gotten in the habit of working out. My New Month's resolution is to start monday working out consistantly and keep going through the entire month of june. I'm going to swim too, so that i'll be in shape for backpacking.

I went shopping today, completely on my own. It sounds kinda stupid, but it's the first time i've gone shopping completely independently for a long time, probably since the cambridge years. Usually i'll at least have to ask to borrow the car, and or clear some spending with the parentals, but today i just up and went after cashing my check, and then went to work.

I bought some sandals, some shorts, and some khakis from target, and i'm pretty happy with them. The sandals are, in truth, more of water shoes, but i like the way they look and this can be fodder for some new nick name. I also need to buy some new running/hiking shoes, but those are expensive, so i'm going to shop around some.

I got another Wii remote on wednesday night for a graduation present, which is pretty awesome. Now we can play 2 player boxing and tennis and baseball on the wii. And i downloaded Starfox 64 and Mariokart 64 for the Wii. I think i wasn't supposed to let logan know, but whatever.

Lets see...in other news i'm working a lot. That's taking away all my hang out time, so i'm having to be creative with my fun times, like in the mornings, or the middle of the night. Yesterday michael and spencer hung out at my house and we played video games and watched a movie until around 5am. That was a bad plan, i was sleepy this morning, and though it was mostly okay, spencer missed his grandparents leaving, i feel bad about that, I really failed at being woken up by my alarm. I don't even remember it at all, at some point i managed to turn it off without waking up. So that's something.

I think that's all that's been going on right now. I got payed today, so i have almost enough money to completely pay off the parents. That's pretty fun. Oh, we now have a house rented down in biloxi. I say we, i really mean they. I'm never really going to live in it, which is weird. But because of that i have to pack up all my stuff and be pretty much packed for college sometime in the middle of june, apparently i'm living pretty much on my own for the second half of june, which is going to be a little weird, probably some fun, hopefully i'll stay productive. We'll see. I think that's all the news from the Ammon front. Stay tunes for the next exciting installment of Ammons blog.

"Come, let's get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more"

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflection, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—"

I just love that quote, the way it rises into an inspirational call to arms and then crashes back into the actionless stupor is great. I really like Waiting for Godot.

So anyway it's 5am and i haven't really slept all that much. I got a nice 2-3 hour nap, which has held me over quite well. Aim mysteriously died, so i can't ask spencer about the merits of my bibliographic entry. I'm pondering whether to just go to sleep, and work on a poetry response after Seminary. I think i'll do that, i'll clear up any bibliographical format errors with mrs. Williams before school.

Camping is going to be rockin, i need a job.