I dreamed that I had to hold 6 white mice in one hand. They squirmed and stratched and 2 quickly fell out. It felt horrible. Like seething little furry snakes.

Maybe I'm trying to hold on to too many things at the same time? 

My class went to the cafeteria this morning to observe the eating folk.
Here is the result:

Your brown sack lunch
folded over with such perfectly straight lines
and your huge gut
folded over your belt with heaving curves
funny that the same food
in just one instant
can leave it's bag of order
and enter an inflatable jump-castle

BYU Honor Code Exposed

At last! Public proof that the BYU honor code is ridiculously out of touch with students. I love BYU, don't get me wrong, but I like free agency better.

Heard of the Facebook page "BYU-I Secrets"? The idea is that students can send secret thoughts and actions anonymously, to be posted to the now over 3,000 people who have liked the page.

It's an honest and sometimes painful glimpse of the sexual frustration, social repression, and sometimes depressing state of BYU Idaho's students. People criticize or comfort each other, act self-righteous or rebellious, and all around expose the disfunctional and Orwellian idea that a University, even if it's the Lord's, can control the thoughts and actions of it's thousands of very different students.  Take a look if you dare.

https://www.facebook.com/ByuISecrets?fref=ts

BYU Provo has one as well, though it is less popular.

https://www.facebook.com/ByuSecrets?fref=ts

Recife #2 - Traffic

I miss the buses constantly passing and making me feel like there was something enormous going on. Streets in the US aren't the same. They are sterile, planned. Obnoxiously accurate turns and angles make the thrill of driving feel like math. 

In Recife they are veins. Full of humans, horses, taxis, buses, pedestrians, and life, twisting their way through buildings, across bridges, past beaches, over and near the ocean. Buses give window to an array of human life, standing. It’s so different to stand as the world flies by. I don’t think any Americans really know what it’s like to look around as they travel, with no control, no hand on the steering wheel and no reclined seat.

That said, at least I don't have to wait 2 hours in traffic anymore :)

Recife post #1

I've decided to make a series of posts about my mission, specifically, about Recife. I think I do some about my gym too, but here's the intro for now!

Brigham Young once said that if a young man served a mission to see the world that he would come back sorely disappointed. He also once said that there were people living on the moon and sun. Bah! I refused to serve a mission with my eyes closed. I saw the world. Brigham Young only saw Great Britain and Canada, if he had served in my Recife he would have known better.

Experiencing another culture shoves your own up your nostrils. I learned what being an American meant, the good and bad. I questioned why I was a certain way, why I did certain things. I adopted Brazilian good and threw out American bad. I treasured American good and sorrowed at Brazillian bad. No leader of a country, no religious leader, no one, should be allowed to have influence in this world without having tried it. Without having another world purge themselves of their bad and fill them with it’s good. I believe God is God because he is of every culture. All that is good in Brazilians, Americans, and everyone was given to them by God. In some of the potions he made were added a lock of his hair, another, his toenail clippings, another, a tear. Here you go, take this talent, and share it with your neighbors. Learn from them in return. No one is given the whole ten talents.

Observations in the Library

Apples taste better unwashed.

College is the only place you can sleep in public without being a hobo.

Every time I see a woman with facial hair, I question the existence of God.

My mom freezes water bottles before going to soccer games, even in the winter, and we come back and they are still frozen.

People (especially women) hould high five more. High fives are perfect for people you don't know well enough to hug, but know too well to shake hands with.

Why I write

I grew up in an Accountant’s home. From a young age my brothers and I were trained to make budgets, my father made spreadsheets for us to keep track of our incomes and expenditures. Or only income was a small allowance for doing chores around the house. I got a gig filing my mom’s feet. In true accounting form, our allowance was frugal to say the least and our goals and dreams were long-term at best. 6 months of saving and extra chores and we could buy a lego set, a year and we could get a bigger one.

This style of detailed and frugal management didn’t contain itself to our financial lives; it became our outlook on life. I saw the world in numbers, figures, and deadlines. I planned what I would do during the day while I dressed myself, and stuck to my schedule. I always knew what time it was. I always left time for homework. I made for an efficient student.

When I started high school I started to notice that world wasn’t as organized as I thought it should be. The realization that there were more career paths for me than the financial one I had seen in my home was eye-opening, and arrived at an identity forming time. All of us try to figure out who we are and who we want to be in our teenage years, and I was no different. However, my identity crisis didn’t just involve a career choice between accounting and another career; it involved my outlook on life.

I decided to shed my logical outlook and embrace the humanities.

I developed artist-envy. Musicians, painters, filmmakers, and photographers became my idols. Whether they were the celebrities I saw on the internet or the artsy kids at my high school, I tried to be just like them. I started doodling, took a photography class, taught myself guitar, did anything that couldn’t be created on a spreadsheet. It was a way for me to pretend that I wasn’t becoming my father.

I was not good at any of these things. I can’t draw, sing, or paint. I only play guitar well to people who don’t know anything about guitars. To realize that I would never become an artist was to accept a boring fate in a math-bound career. I couldn’t accept a life completely devoid of creativity and art, but at the same time couldn’t seem to make my life full of it either.

My logical tendencies are a part of me, it’s in my wiring, and I was foolish to try and deny that. My crisis then, became between who I was and who I wanted to be. I decided to take 2 years off as a mormon missionary. My mission became a way of reconciling the two sides of me that weren’t connecting.

In my free time I vented to my notebook. Everything I couldn’t tell my mission leaders, my Brazilian roommates, or my family back home, I wrote in G-2 pilot ink into a simple spiral notebook. My simple angst-ridden complaints and thoughts were therapeutic and let me escape from the pressures of mission life. I would hate to say that I love writing just because of this. It was a phase I went through in my writing that I consider important, mostly because it’s over.  Some of what I wrote is embarrassing to read. I improved and learned from my mistakes, and learned to change my venting into actual creativity. I planned my Sunday discourses, I studied the use of language in the scriptures, and learned more about English from studying Portuguese than I would have any other way. I learned to appreciate the relative ease with which I could express myself in English; it didn’t seem so hard after trying it another language. My confidence grew as the space in my notebooks disappeared.

It wasn’t all song lyrics and poems. I found a balance between unabashed sincerity and structure. I wrote essays without Wikipedia our other sources. I learned to apply logic creatively.

Writing to me is more than a subject in school, or a part of my career. It represents the balance I’ve found between my nature and my desires. I learned that there is room in writing for all personality types and all styles as long as you are willing to embrace your own.

I always wondered what will be left of my father’s career when he dies. A lot of spreadsheets. Money made for his bosses. I no longer see anything dishonorable with his life; he does what is necessary to provide for his family. I hope to do the same, but to have a legacy more human, one that takes all that I am to create. All of my strengths and weaknesses are evident in my writing, and that is why I love it.