Eva

via

I never made promises lightly
and there have been some that I've broken,
but I swear in the days still left
we'll walk in fields of gold.

Homework Dreams

So I'm sitting here at my desk "writing my paper" that's due tomorrow in my Rhetoric and the Poetics class. Moments ago, as per usual, my eyes started to droop and my head began to bob and before long I was slumped over asleep in my chair with my chin resting uncomfortably on my chest. As I dozed I dreamed that Kristine Hansen, one of my professors from last semester, walked up to me, shook me by the shoulder, and in her very caring, motherly way told me to go off to bed.

Grateful for her understanding I looked up at her and nodded sleepily. Kristine then took off the small hat she was wearing (about the size and shape of a tuna fish can) and set it on my head. Once her hat was on my head, she reached into her pocket and asked if I'd like for her to play me a tune on her magic harmonica. Delighted at her offer, I agreed to her playing me a song before I went off to bed.

Tragically before the harmonica had even reached her lips, I slipped in my chair and awoke with a start. I don't think I've been so disappointed to wake up in years. Heartbroken that I didn't actually get to hear Kristine play her magic harmonica, I've decided that at some point before I graduate from BYU I want to reenact this dream with a stranger. I want to find someone sleeping in a public place, shake him/her awake, and while they're struggling to come to grips with what's going on, place my tuna can-sized hat on top of his/her head and offer to play my magic harmonica. Without waiting for a response I will play a lively little ditty and be on my way.

I feel like that kind of service is best proffered to someone only half-aware of what's going on around them.

Now I just need a harmonica.

A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success

Today in the carrels I sat down with Paige and Aimee and I asked them if they wanted to hear a secret. Naturally they did. Now usually when I tell people that I'm going to tell them a secret, the secret is that I'm wearing gray socks with brown pants and shoes, or that I haven't showered today, or that I just realized that my zipper was down and that it had probably been down since I left the house. Not real secrets, but interesting tidbits about my life all the same. The secret that I wanted to share with Paige and Aimee was not this kind of secret.

The secret that I shared with Paige and Aimee was one that I've been thinking a lot about the past couple of days. I've decided that I'm now going to share that secret with any and all who stumble upon my blog. So here it is: I feel like a phony. (As I play the word "phony" over and over again in my head I keep thinking of the word "phoneme" and how glad I am that I don't study linguistics.) But really, sometimes I just feel like a phony - like I don't belong here. Here being in graduate school and in front of a classroom. I sit in my classes and listen to my peers make brilliant comments and engage in intelligent conversation and I feel like I'm way out of my depth. I hear other teachers talking about their classes and what they're doing and how they feel like failures when they don't get their students' papers back to them within a week and I'm self-conscious of how long I've had my students papers. (Two weeks tomorrow) I occasionally hear older, wiser students talking about all the conferences they've been to and how they don't understand why some students don't go to conferences, and as I think about how I've never been to a conference I sink lower in my seat hoping they won't look over at me and ask me how many conferences I've been to. These seem to be the road markers of success, and if they are I seem to be on the highway of mediocrity.

Last night this feeling was really harshing my mellow so I went to Smiths with Jordan and bought grapefruit juice and ginger ale. When we got home I mixed them up and drank myself to sleep. This morning I felt much better until I went to class and heard my peers talk about the papers they're planning to write. Again I felt the wind go out of my sails.

Right after class I went to devotional thinking it would cheer me up. And I'm sure it would have done just that if I hadn't fallen asleep during the opening musical number and stayed that way until everyone around me said "amen" at the end of the closing prayer. That was when I went back to the carrels and shared my "secret" with Paige and Aimee.

Naturally, being good friends, they told me that everyone felt that way and that I shouldn't worry about it too much. I believed them of course and we went on to watch Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" music video, but there lingered a dissatisfaction with where I was and what was going on. This has continued to cast a cloud over an otherwise lovely day. Round about 10:30 as I was sitting at my desk preparing my lesson for tomorrow morning I decided that I needed to go drive down to the basketball court by the tracks and shoot around until I felt better. I was there shooting, running around chasing my misses and generally wearing myself out for a solid 45 minutes when I sat down and leaned my sweaty back against the cool cinder block wall of the building next to the court.

As I sat there I continued to muse on my faults and failings and the myriad ways I should be trying to improve my life and I came to several conclusions. 1) It's true, there are a lot of things I need to work on improving. 2) I need to stop comparing myself to other people and basing what for me is success off of what they do and who they are. 3) I need to do more to put myself into situations I'm not entirely comfortable with, and I need to do so with greater frequency. This one applies to several aspects of my life both in school and outside of it. I'm very uncomfortable with vulnerability, and that fact leads me to be much more tentative, introverted, and apprehensive than is altogether requisite or healthy. 4) I really need to practice free throws more often because while I can hit a turn around jump shot from 10-15 feet with moderate regularity, I'm worse than Shaq when it comes to free throws. But mostly 1, 2 and 3. (that's right, no oxford comma. bam.)

Coming to these conclusions, and feeling a chill start to settle in my bones, I got up and went home. When I got back to my room and before I got back to planning my lesson I decided to watch a TED talk to pump myself up. I just so happened to watch this one by Alain de Botton that was just exactly what I wanted and needed to hear. So here 'tis. Even though it's 17 min long, I recommend you watch it in its entirety. It's phenomenal.



Through the basketball, the reflection and the TED talk I feel marginally better but not entirely so. I think I like it that way. Dissatisfaction can be a powerful motivator for change. Here's hoping that's the direction I'ma headed.

I Have a Family Here on Earth

Tonight after dinner as we were sitting around chatting and generally celebrating Heather's and David's birthdays, Mom started telling us about the four levels of conversation that she had recently learned about and suggested we use that as a pattern for our conversation. As she guided us from chit-chat to gossip to the exchange of ideas and finally to level four, feelings, I realized that I'm really not that great at verbally telling people, especially my family, how I feel about them. Frankly, I'm not great at verbal communication in general and tend to function much better via the written word; I guess that's why I study rhetoric and composition and love to teach writing so much. Anyway, I realized that I should probably tell my family more that I  love them. My family is pretty much the best, and yes I am willing to fight you on that one. I've written before about how awesome my parents are, and I am definitely still firmly in the camp that they are the best a boy could ask for. Tonight  I got to thinking about how great my family really is.  Having previously written a post centered on my parents (follow the link above to arrive at said post), I decided I'd focus this one more on my siblings.

My siblings are great. They are absolutely my best friends. And when I say siblings I use the term to include their spouses as well, as they have all, without fail, chosen fantastic spouses. I really look up to and am appreciative of the wonderful examples that my siblings are to me. We've had some good times together, from playing "nobody can get up the stairs" while the parents weren't home to the recent vacation we all took together this last summer to New York to times spent just sitting around chatting. I don't seem to feel super comfortable about a lot of people, but I'm always completely at ease with my siblings, and I love that. I can allow some of my more strange thoughts and ways of being to slip out and they don't think any less of me for it.

As these kinds of thoughts were generally swimming about my mind, I happened to glance up at the wall and saw the painting of my sister Emily that passed away several years before I was born. Despite never having known her personally here upon the Earth, from a young age it was instilled in me that she is still very much a part of our family and that I have another sister that I just don't know yet. In thinking about Emily in conjunction with my other thoughts about how good of friends all of my siblings and I are, I couldn't help but get really excited at the prospect of having yet another best friend that I haven't met yet.

I sat there imagining the larks we'll all have when we're all together yet again, and in doing so was overcome with an overwhelming gratitude for a knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Plan of Salvation that makes possible hope for family relationships to be perpetuated beyond the grave. Knowing that the friendship and camaraderie that exists between me and my siblings will continue on after death with the added benefit of Emily's company almost allows for more joy than I can contain.

God be thanked for my wonderful siblings and God be thanked for good and faithful parents that live their religion and provide us with a concrete path to follow via the sterling examples of their lives. And, perhaps most of all, God be thanked for Jesus Christ who makes it all possible.

(p.s. I realize this photo is kinda blurry. If you click on it, it gets bigger and clearer.)

Progress Report and Real Brain Food

Last night I was up rather late working on a progress report that I had to present to my "Rhetoric and the Poetics" class. As the clock hit 12 I decided I was hungry for cold cereal. Realizing that I had neither milk nor Honey Nut Cheerios, I decided to make a Smiths run.

My mind was obviously still preoccupied with the paper I was writing as opposed to the task of obtaining sustenance, because as I walked out of the store this is what I had in my hands:

1 gallon of milk
1/2 gallon of orange juice
4 avocados
2 sticks of deodorant
1 giant tube of pixi stix

That's right, no Honey Nut Cheerios. I don't know how or why I decided against my original intentions, but for some reason the cosmos had directed me otherwise.

I got home with my purchases, and before I had even made it back down to my room from the kitchen, I had swallowed 3 large mouthfuls of pixi stix, taken several swigs of orange juice and was working on an avocado. I got to my room, finished off my avocado, took another couple swigs of oj and got back to work on my paper. And that's the last I remember of last night.

This morning at around 8:30 I jerked awake as "Take Five" played loudly from my phone which doubles as my alarm clock. In jerking awake, pixi stix was strewn across my bedroom as I instinctively waved the tube clutched in my right hand like a magic wand. Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes to try and make sense of my surroundings, I found myself on the floor. In my immediate vicinity I saw my laptop, four empty avocado peel halves, a half-empty carton of orange juice and my space heater casting an eerie orange glow about the room. As I sleepily pieced together what I was doing there, I realized that I must have fallen asleep while writing my progress report. And I was immediately filled with panic.

I tapped the keyboard of my laptop impatiently waiting for it too to wake up. As the screen lit up I looked at my progress report and found that while I'd gotten quite a bit of it done, I'd fallen asleep before finishing it off. I didn't have much time to before class started, so I grabbed the oj, took several long draws and got back to work. I wrapped it up and made it to class nearly on time.

As class went on around me I read over my progress report to see if I was going to embarrass myself when I presented it to the class. In reading it I thought I had done a fairly good job, but the added pressure of having to present/read it to the class made me self-conscious that I'd totally misread the text I was responding to. After all, this paper was fueled on orange juice, avocados and flavored sugar. That sounded more like a recipe for a stomachache rather than sound scholarship.

Eventually the class turned to look at me as I handed out copies of my progress report and proceeded to read it aloud. It actually didn't sound too bad out loud, and the conversation that ensued after I had read it didn't seem to contradict anything I'd said. So far so good, but I still wasn't quite sure it was good enough. I still had to email it to Greg, my professor, and have him look over it.

Now Greg is notoriously thorough when he reviews our work. He's the thesis chair for one of my friends and she is currently very stressed about her thesis because the revisions that he is suggesting she do are going to require a lot more work than she had anticipated. She's easily one of the brighter students in the program, and working with Greg has caused her to say such things as "sometimes I wonder how I ever even got into graduate school...what the heck am I doing here?" and "I fear I am an idiot and everyone's been hiding it from me." Thankfully Greg allows and encourages (read that "requires") revisions of all work that isn't up to snuff, even short progress report essays. This is the second class I've taken from Greg while in graduate school, and this is the fifth progress report I've written for him. Never have I done a good enough job on the first try and have always had to revise. I say these things not to complain, revision always helps me learn more and sharpen the knowledge that I'm gaining, but rather to illustrate the fact that Greg is a very rigorous grader and that no matter how good my class presentation went, that was no indication of what Greg's personal response to my paper would be.

This afternoon as I woke up from my nap on the 4th floor of the JFSB (incidentally, I had been sleeping in the very same chair I was in when the incidents surrounding the famous "onyx eyes" poem occurred), I opened my laptop and saw in my inbox that Greg had returned my progress report. Assuming that such swift response meant revision, I opened the document and found after a few minor grammar and usage corrections the following words:

"Nicely done, Sam. A"

A. No revision necessary. I attribute it to the pixi stix, avocados and oj.

On Last Night's Game

Last week when BYU lost to Loyola Marymount I drafted but didn't publish a blog post talking about my love of BYU sports and how I try to not get so wound up in the flow of athletic competition that my emotional well-being is determined by the outcome of the game I'm watching. It's something that I've been trying to get under control for a couple years now, and while I'm not perfectly capable of always keeping things in perspective and I do get frustrated occasionally, I'm doing a lot better. The Loyola Marymount game caused one of those thankfully rare occasions of frustration. For whatever reason I didn't post that little bit of writing. But last night as I watched St. Mary's dismantle my beloved Cougars I found myself frustrated anew, but for a very different reason.

I've been to a lot of BYU games in the now going on 6 years that I've been here. I've been there for some great triumphs and some heart-wrenching defeats. I've seen some bad officiating and bad sportsmanship on the part of the fans on several occasions (Wake Forest '09 comes immediately to mind), but I've never been quite so disgusted with fan behavior as I was last night.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about a good boo every now and then, and I'm not above a little taunting of both opposing teams and referees. I booed last night at the first few perceived bad calls from the refs and found the chants of "U.S.A., U.S.A." every time St. Marys' Australian point guard came to the line rather funny. But as the game progressed the fans just got worse and worse. With every little thing the refs did everyone was booing and yelling fit to wake the dead. It wasn't so much the booing and yelling that bothered me, but rather the malice and hatred for the refs that did it. It seemed like people were more intent on vilifying the refs than they were on watching and enjoying the game. By focusing so single-mindedly on the officiating, the game was made much more difficult to enjoy for all involved I'm sure. Granted I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it much anyway considering the fact that BYU couldn't hit a 3 if their lives depended on it, but as the game came to a close with a rousing chant of "Worst Refs Ever," I felt sick and admittedly somewhat ashamed to be associated with the BYU student body. I wasn't ashamed to be BYU fan, just ashamed to be a part of the disgusting display that was our student section last night.

Now I realize that I'm painting with overly broad strokes here and that not everyone was so riled up and angry, but fan bases are often referred to, in basketball, as the 6th man. Five men on the floor, the sixth a collective body in the stands. By that logic I'm really not being too dramatic or unfair to lump us all together in this way, myself included.

After a technical foul was called on the crowd and the end result was 5 points for the Gaels, I took a step back and consciously decided that the outcome of the game wasn't going to determine my outlook on life. By making that decision to try and emotionally detach myself from the game I was able to watch the game a little bit differently, and what I saw rather surprised me.

Yes, the refs were bad. Really bad. I'm not sure I'd call them the worst ever, but they were bad. That said, they were equally bad going both ways. They were equally inconsistent on what they did and didn't consider a foul, blind to traveling violations on both ends of the floor, and seemingly unable (or incapable) of figuring out who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds. But like I said, the refs made as many bad calls that went against St. Mary's as they did those aimed at BYU. So if the refs were equally bad at officiating on both ends of the court, why was everyone so angry?

I'll tell you why. Because BYU wasn't playing well. They looked hurried and out of sync the whole game. They couldn't hit a shot from outside if their eternal salvation was hanging in the balance, and all the while St. Mary's went about the business of winning the game. That aspect of the game was, admittedly, very frustrating. But rather than being frustrated with our team and coping as best we could, as a body of fans we took out our ire on the refs. The whole atmosphere in the Marriott Center was sickeningly negative. Even as the boys in blue made a push to make the game competitive the air of negativity wouldn't go away.

I've always loved college basketball, especially BYU basketball, for the emotional ride it puts you through. But usually, at least in Provo, it's clean, good-spirited fun that rides the wave of competition. Last night it was as if everyone's collective mothers, girl/boyfriends and dogs were being insulted with every tweet of the ref's whistle. I shudder to think what might have happened if BYU weren't a stone-cold sober university.

Frankly, I don't care how bad the officiating was. From where I'm standing, there's no call for that kind of behavior ever at a sporting contest. Ever.

All in all, it was a disillusioning night for Cougar basketball, and I hope it's never repeated.

Paddington

This is Paddington. He's my teddy bear. Yes, he is named after the beloved children's books. If he looks a little bit ratty that's because he's 25 years old.

Whenever I go home to Bluffdale I sleep with Paddington. I got Paddington the Christmas after I was born and have slept with him ever since, with the obvious exception of being on a mission in Ecuador and living in Provo while going to school.

Over the past two weeks I've realized anew how wonderful it is to sleep with Paddington, and I'm a little bit worried that I'll have a hard time adjusting to sleeping without him when I go back to Provo. Kind of like how it took some adjusting when I went into the MTC. But there are greater tragedies and I'm sure I'll get on with life.

Some people might be ashamed to admit such things, but I'm not one of them. I'm proud of the fact that I sleep with my teddy bear. Maybe my doing so illustrates immaturity and juvenile behavior unfitting someone my age and station in life, but I disagree. I think that being able to accept one's true identity for what it is shows remarkable maturity, even if said identity includes sleeping with a teddy bear that you've had your whole life.

And if you disagree with me on that point, well then my dad can beat up your dad, so there.