Where have you been, where are you going?

(Please note: I've been have trouble formatting the last few blog posts--all my paragraphs just mesh into one. I'll try to avoid that, but I really don't think there's anything I can do) Last night, as a break from horror stories and paper writing, I went tunnel singing with Debbie, Julie and their respective men. Tunnel singing is a unique BYU phenomenon where we all huddle together in the chilly weather in the tunnel outside the Marriot Center and sign hymns for an hour on Sunday nights. During my freshman year, I was a tunnel singing pro. I went almost every week by the end the semester and I pretty much thought I was the cat's pajamas. Going back as a second semester junior gives your a different perspective on things. I watched circles of freshman students interact. I watched girls chatter and text and share things on their cell phones with each other. I watched boys insert loud cheers ("Let's baptize!") into church hymns. I watched the ebb and flow that is freshman interaction at the end of the year. And I realized something about myself: Two years ago, I was an idiot. For some of you, this probably isn't a surprised. I mean, most eighteen year olds are going to be idiots. I think I was a particular breed of idiot, though. I used tunnel singing as a means of posturing and looking good. I went and I memorized hymns so my friends (particulalry the attractive male ones) would think I was extra spiritual. I got caught up in my petty and shallow need for attention and would stand off to the side of the circle, a pious tear in my eye, waiting for on my friends (hopefully one of the attractive male friends) to usher me back into the fold. I jostled for position at the end of tunnel singing so I'd be next to who I wanted when you all join arms and sing "I Need Thee Every Hour." I didn't want to be practically hugging those two people, so I'd shift around (leave to take a phone call or say hello to someone else I spotted or move across the circle because I "couldn't see" in the dim light where I was) until I was wedged in between two people who (I desperately hope) were completely oblivious of my shamelessness. Two years later, I realize how stupid and shallow and petty I was. Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of really great things going for me then too, but hopefully now I'm just a bit better. I've stopped trying to appear pious and righteous like I used to. Perhaps it's a result of having gone through some trials and learning to bear burdens. Perhaps it's a result of seeing the Atonement work in my life and the lives of those I care about, but I look back on that "look at me, I'm so holy" attitude with something akin to mortification. I've grown in these last two years. I've learned how to stand on my own, to not change who I am to vie for attention. I've learned that it's more important to love myself for who I am and who I have the potential to be rather than wait for some boy to come along and sweep me off my feet. I'm still a romantic at heart. I do daydream about wild fantasies (wild in the sense of unlikely, not in the sense of untamed or unbridled), but I know it's far more important for me to be who I am and work on improving myself. Everything else will fall into place. So, to my younger self, I shake my head. Perhaps we can blame it all on the fact that I know I wasn't getting much more than five hours of sleep on the average night. That's bound to make you a little crazy. To my present self, kudos. At the very least I can recognize that I've learned something. To my future self, please forgive me if you look back at this in a few years and feel the need to smack your hand to your forehead. I'm trying, okay?

Growing Up in the Digital Age

I'm currently working on three seperate papers for three classes of mine. One on linguistic choices in general conference talks as a reflection of the times, another on the cowboy code-ism of Daisy Miller, and the third is a comparison of Stephen King's "Man in a Black Suit" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." Because I've grown up with the internet, most of my research has been conducted online and I'm reasonably proficient at looking stuff up on the internet. However for my Stephen King/Nathaniel Hawthorne paper, I've found that I needed to use a couple of books. I was just flipping through two of said books, scannning pages and chapter notes for any reference on King or Hawthorne. It was painful and tedious. I thought to myself: Why can't their be a "search" function on books? Why can't I tell the book "Show me every thing you have on Stephen King" and then it would tell me where to look? Five minutes later, I remembered that each book has an index, in which they tell me every page whereon they mention Stephen King or Nathaniel Hawthorne (and in some cases both of them together). It really would have been nice to remember that right at first.

Irony is...

Irony is writing a report on a book about punctuation and the song "Oxford Comma" by Vampire Weekends plays on your iTunes.

NaShoStoMo

For the past couple of days, I've been itching for something to blog about but nothing has particularly come to mind. Nothing interesting, at least, which was why my last post was about the weather. Last night I was debating whining about the papers I have to write for classes, or the fact that I feel like my writing ability is getting worse (rather than better), or the new library employee policy which says that I'm not allowed to read books on the clock. Or write them, for that matter. But then I struck blogging gold. (Editorial Note: The fact that I'm listening to "Jerk it Out" by The Ceasars seems to make this blogging gold better. Its something about the beat of the song in conjunction with the sun outside which makes me really excited) I was stalking some professional writer's blogs and found Dan Wells (author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You) and discovered that while he's on book tour this month, he is venturing his own NaNoWriMo knock off. Since it's hard for him to novel-write on book tours and because he's terrible at writing short stories, he has decided to do a short story a day for the month of April. And because I'm a writing junkie and like competing in off-the-wall writing challenges, I think this is a marvelous idea. Here's the short list of goals (established by Dan): each story has to be AT LEAST 200 words; each story must have a beginning, middle, and end; by the end of the month, you should have 30 short stories, so it's not necessary to do one short story a day--just have thirty by the end. So my dear blog followers (of whom there are few), I extend the challenge to you. Thirty days, thirty short stories. For all of you who thought a novel was too much to handle, this is much more feasible (and if each story is only 200 words long, you're writing about 44,000 words less than you would during NaNoWriMo). As for me, I'm totally jazzed to find a productive way to continue procrastinating my research papers, school projects, and finals studying. Rock on, writers, rock on.

This is just ridiculous

I know its conference weekend this weekend, which means that the weather is obligated to uncooperative, but dropping more than twenty degrees between Saturday and Sunday is just plain ridiculous.

Saturday Night Work Shifts

I'm at the circ desk with Tawny on a Saturday night and there's nothing to do. I mainly attribute this to the following facts:
(One) It's a Saturday night. Most people like to go on dates on Saturday nights.
(Two) There was a basketball game and we totally trashed whatever school we were playing (by 22 points)
(Three) Because we trashed them, we are now in the Sweet Sixteen and people like to celebrate things.
(Four)Who on earth goes to the library on a Saturday night? Finals are still three weeks away.

So I just have to suffer here, not being witty or entertaining, just relatively bored.

Life is Good

My feet were cold, so I grabbed a pair of fluffy socks that had been sitting underneath my netbook. My netbook was on and the socks were being heated by it.

Now it feels like I've stuck my feet inside a toasty oven.

Life is grand.