To Be Frank, part 2

Wednesday I had plans to visit friends in Murray, but first I decided to kill some time by riding the new University/Mid-Jordan TRAX line. I read my book until the train left Fashion Place, after which we entered new territory and I looked around curiously. Around that same time, a teenager boarded the train, sat across from me, and opened his Monster energy drink, which made a loud popping noise that caused a couple of people to glance over. The kid made some comment about bomb scares in post-9/11 America and I gave him a courtesy chuckle. Had I gone back to my book, that probably would have been the end of that interaction, but the kid (who was roughly 18) jumped on my inactivity to start justifying his caffeine addiction by comparing it to amphetamines. I took the bait and reminded him that excess caffeine consumption is difficult on the heart. My response somehow gave the kid an opening to start talking to me about his decision to never have kids because he didn't want to bring any children into a world like this one but he also didn't want to do anything to benefit society. He seemed quite convinced that not having kids was the best thing for him to do.

I wasn't in the mood to listen to the philosophical rantings of a teenager, so I got off at the stop just before the end of the line. I knew that the kid was just exploring the new TRAX line as I was, but I also knew that UTA schedules its TRAX trains so that one departs from the end of a line just as another arrives. I figured by getting off a stop early I could catch the train that would soon arrive from the opposite direction, while the kid would be stuck at the end of the line for 15 minutes or so.

PROBLEM #1: My train was 5 minutes late. In other words, the train I'd hoped to catch left the station I hoped to catch it at just as I got there.

No matter, I thought, and I worked out a plan for getting back to Murray without awkwardly running into the kid again. We'd been sitting at the front of the train, so I could expect he'd be at the front of the train as it returned. I could hide behind the shelter wall at the rear end of the station platform as the train returned, then climb on the back of the train without the kid ever seeing me.

PROBLEM #2: TRAX trains reverse instead of turning around, and the kid didn't move to the front of the train while he waited.

I could see as soon as the train stopped that the kid was in exactly the same seat as before, and worse, he was looking right at me. I climbed on the train and awkwardly answered his question "What were you doing there?" with something about exploring the new unfamiliar TRAX line. He seemed to accept this answer and soon thereafter was telling me of his plans to meditate himself to death. Yes, that is "meditate" and not "medicate." And he plans to do it the very day he turns 50.

That is, unless he has children.

"Why I Ruled Out IU" or "I mean, sure, you liked the program at U Arizona, but c'mon, you know this helped"

Friday night I stayed up all night for some cancer fundraiser walk-a-thon (`Cancer doesn't sleep so neither will we'). Each team was only required to have one member walking at a time but by 3am the only way to stay awake and warm was to keep walking so that's what most of us did. Talking helped to pass the time, and somehow during the night's conversation I was reminded of this little gem of a story from last spring's grad school recruitment visit to Indiana University.

I wasn't even sure in the first place whether to bother visiting IU; I knew I was probably going to rule it out anyway. But they were going to reimburse travel costs up to some amount, so I thought `Heck, why not?' Of course, by the time I made this decision, the departure date was sufficiently close and airfare sufficiently high that, if I was to remain under the reimbursement limit,* I'd have to sleep in the Indianapolis airport and take a 6am shuttle to Bloomington the morning of the visit. No matter, I thought. I can easily sleep in the shuttle (I did), and there's a website devoted to sleeping in airports, sleepinginairports.net, which gives Indianapolis pretty good reviews.

My plane arrived at around 10:30pm local time, and by then the airport was mostly empty. I found a nice little patch of floor in the international terminal, set my alarm and left a post-it note for passerby in case my alarm failed, and laid down for sleep . . . only to be chased out of the terminal by a fat man on a segway. I think that was for the better, because it turns out the lobby had nice padded couches instead of thin carpet, but I still got less than enough sleep since the high-ceilinged, polished-floored lobby caused a great deal of echoing.**

Up to this point, everything I've said has served no purpose other than to establish that I was tired. And spending the day touring physics labs, meeting professors, and hoping some of their information barrage would stick just made me even more tired. I was in no mood to try dinner and bar-hopping with the grad students, so I asked the hotel clerk for directions to a grocery store. I needed food for dinner that night, plus breakfast and lunch the next day, and it seemed like a good way to explore Bloomington on my own terms.

The directions given me by the hotel clerk were useless. They led to a back-alley where some hipsters watched over a room full of exotic fruits and vegetables. I continued to walk the streets of Bloomington (where snow briefly started flurrying) until I found a gas station clerk who gave me directions to a real grocery store.

I eventually found the filthiest Kroger I've ever seen: produce was poorly-stocked and decaying, floor tiles were missing, shelves were empty. Still, I was able to find the things I needed. I remembered a microwave in my hotel room, plus some cups and my titanium spork, so I bought some precut frozen vegetables (a mixture of corn, carrots, beans, and okra, the latter of which I'd never before eaten), microwave oatmeal, and a box of crackers.

Back at the hotel, it turns out I was wrong about the microwave. All I had was a coffee pot. Luckily hot water is all you need for oatmeal packets, and I was even able to heat my vegetables by pouring cups of hot water into the bag and letting it drain through holes in the bottom. But as I did so I noticed something: my vegetables were getting warmer, sure, but they were also getting slimier. It seemed that every cup of water left some kind of residue with the consistency of thick, mucous saliva. I tried draining the slime into the sink and ate anyway.

As I ate, I wondered about the source of the slime. It wasn't the coffee machine, because the oatmeal was fine. It was either tampering at the nasty grocery store or okra is just naturally slimy. Once home in Salt Lake I Googled okra and learned that it is indeed naturally slimy, but of course that wasn't soon enough to stop me from throwing away the last couple spoonfuls anyway. I feel bad about throwing food away, but mostly I feel bad because the slime accidentally clogged up the sink. Whoops.

* In fact, I should more accurately say `To not terribly exceed the reimbursement limit.'

** I felt somewhat vindicated with my decision to sleep in the airport when I noticed a number of other people attempting the same thing.

Help Help!

So you want to help people. Great. How? Why? 'How' is the more relevant question, but to address it you need the 'why'. For example, it might be helping to take your coworker's phone calls while he runs to the restroom, but it's not really helping to set up his drug deals while he is already incapacitated from drugs. Of course, if this life is all there is, it won't matter whether you try to help people or not, so you might as well.*

Before continuing, you should stop and try to answer these questions. I'm curious to hear your responses, hopefully untainted by what I have to say.

Thanks in large part to my LDS background, I claim the 'why' is progression, both for individuals and as a society. That's still very open-ended, however: to what end should we progress and help others to progress? Of course we should look to achieve something better but what exactly do we mean by 'better?' Maybe it's like WoW and the goal is to gain more tools and experience. There's something attractive about being equipped to solve any problem we encounter. But then again, many of life's great satisfactions come from overcoming challenges. Ask any researcher why they like their job and they will tell you they enjoy solving problems no one else has solved before. Athletes similarly thrive on overcoming obstacles. Is it really better to share your tools and experiences with others, rather than let them discover for themselves?

Upon reflection, a further consideration comes to mind: I've never been a parent, but I've observed that many parents seem to take their greatest pleasure from their children's successes. As a tutor I've felt gratified when my students did well on exams. So perhaps the best way to help someone is to make them a parent. Or if not that, then a teacher or some other mentor will do. There could be a cascading effect of satisfaction as each mentor sees the success of his or her student, who in turn sees the success of their student, and so on.

Circling back to my LDS background and following a tangent: Suppose benevolent father God exists. One might ask what's so great about being God, for if God is perfect then there is no room to progress.** One idea is that perhaps God isn't actually 'perfect.' That's a can of worms I won't open here. But in relation to the topic at hand, perhaps the thing that makes being God worthwhile (progression or no progression) is observing the successes of humankind, which would probably be measured by the ways people help each other.

* So I practically almost just whipped out Pascal's Wager. Sue me. Actually, let's make it "Sue me, Nazi." Figure as long as I'm throwing around logical fallacies, I might as well pull out a Reductio ad Hitlerum.

** The word "perfect" denotes completeness; it could connote any number of things. Sometimes I like to play around with the idea of an imperfect God just to see where it leads. I think it's not such a dismal proposition as people suggest.

Here We Go for the Hundredth Time

In a church meeting a couple weeks ago our lesson was on sacrifice. One person made a distinction I found compelling between 'donating' and 'sacrificing.' As he described it, donations are things you can easily give up; sacrifices take real effort. Choice of definitions aside, I began to think of the importance of sacrifice and what, if anything, I might sacrifice, and why.

In the meantime, I'd been thinking about how much of a role media plays in influencing my mental well-being. Mormons love to insist that rock music and rated-R movies are bad and MoTab and Disney are good, and I love to insist that that's a load of crap. There is good to be found everywhere; why should I let some arbitrarily-defined social conventions limit where I look? To use words that came to mind in a satisfying flash of inspiration: "An active immune system keeps you healthy. An overactive immune system gives you allergies."

My suspicion is that in the end it doesn't even matter, but I allowed the idea to cultivate in my mind and the following questions came up:
Is my media pushing me away from something more? Is it going to break me down? Is my mind like a little piece of paper with a picture drawn, floating on down the street 'til the wind is gone, where once the paper's crumpled up it can't be perfect again. Could it be the case that I've become so numb to reality through my media?

Surely my music and movies can't be all bad. I can always appreciate a beautiful day when I see one, for example. They happen all the time. I cherish the days when I see life in technicolor, and I love every friend that's ever been mine. Life is truly magnificent, and several times my movies and music have helped me to appreciate something completely new.

But maybe I'm deceiving myself. Maybe by forsaking angsty rock music I'll remember all the sadness and frustration and let it go. Maybe I've been living a lie. Maybe the weight of the world is clouding my vision. After all, when all we have left is deceptive, so disconnected, what is the truth now? I find the answer's not so clear.

Ultimately I remembered one of my favorite personal mottos: Try it and see what happens. Thus after this epic mental battle, I knew what my sweet sacrifice would be. If I am a slave to my media intake, then it is up to me to release myself. Hence, I have given up the following things:

• No movies or TV unless it's Clone Wars or I'm watching it with friends. Even then no R-rated movies, or even PG-13 unless there's a good reason for watching it (like Britney and my other roommates have to see Batman and Robin). In particular:

1. No Batman
2. No Star Wars (except, as I said, the Clone Wars; timeliness matters)
3. No Jason Bourne
4. No Star Trek

• No music, except for classical, jazz, the soundtracks to Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and The Incredibles, and Audio by Blue Man Group
• No Digg, CollegeHumor, etc.

So I'm breaking the habit tonight. Well, no; this happened a month or two ago. Regardless, it will take some getting used to for me to accept this new divide between the media I'll ingest and the stuff I am forsaking. In choosing what I would take in, I've decided to lean 'overly-cautious' in hopes that whatever contrast I experience is more dramatic and easier to notice. The net result is that I have a system which is even more arbitrary than the one I was complaining about earlier.

Some early observations: As I'm waiting for the end to come to this self-imposed media diet, it's hard to let it go. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a single day when some song from "A Thousand Suns" hasn't gotten stuck in my head. Holding on to what I haven't got, amirite?

Over the next few months, I will look back at what I've done since the change, and see how it compares to the past. I've made notes in my journal and the early results are promising, albeit far from conclusive.

P.S. I didn't have to look at my iTunes library once when writing this. Maybe a break from my music was overdue.

P.P.S. The title references the fact that I've been working on this blog post off-and-on for a month-and-a-half. It also references this song.

Lazy

I started writing a different blog post but it just wasn't coming together the way I'd hoped. I might salvage it someday, but for now I'll just recycle content from Facebook last month.

Some background: At the beginning of the month, one of my aunts updated her status to something about finding something different to be grateful for every day during December. I did that and by the end had decided it was an interesting enough challenge that I'd continue to find something to be grateful for every day until I forgot. Here's my list:

December

1. I'm grateful for my sisters.
2. I'm grateful that Qiushi hid his textbooks in the barbecue.
3. I'm grateful that Smith's puts cat food and scented candles in the same aisle
4. I'm grateful to be essentially done with grad school applications. I'm grateful to have attended my siblings' piano recital. I'm grateful for my friends; to name only the ones I encountered today, this includes Hailee, Jamie, Tiffany, Drew, Laurel, Sabah, Lisa, Lindsay, Rhiannon, and Steven.
5. I'm grateful for my college ward. Today was the one of a very small number of testimony meetings I actually enjoyed.
6. I'm grateful for a healthy body. I'm also grateful for mountains.
7. I'm grateful for Linkin Park. Today it's the song 'Iridescent,' and no, I don't care how un-Linkin Park-y it sounds.
8. I'm grateful for John Peterson.
9. I'm grateful for bananas and the internet.
10. I'm grateful I have the weekend to study, because I'm not going to feel like doing much next week.
11. Spending the day with modern algebra has reminded me how funny it is to impose the group axioms onto groups of people . . . I'm grateful for algebra.
12. I'm grateful for downtown Ogden.
13. I'm grateful for the opportunity to do research as an undergrad, and interesting research at that. That said, I'm also grateful to be done putting together today's presentation.
14. We caught a few cheaters during a final I proctored today. I'm grateful for a mind which does not require that I cheat to succeed.
15. I'm grateful for things that make me laugh. This includes: RedLetterMedia's Star Wars reviews; the weekly 'Parents Just Don't Understand' column at CollegeHumor; and Britney, who this morning said "I hope my soul-mate isn't at the HC, because this is what 'I don't feel like getting ready but I still want breakfast'-Britney looks like."
16. I'm grateful for my dad, Eric. I'm also grateful for bicycles. I'd feel even more grateful for bicycles if it wasn't stupid finals week. Then my dad and I could go for a bike ride and he could remind me how his now-52-year-old body used to be fast like my 21-year-old body. Happy Birthday, Dad.
17. I'm grateful for all of my cousins. If you are one of my cousins, pat yourself on the back for being awesome.
18. I got home today and found cheese-flavored popcorn on the table. I needed to get the orange powder off my fingers but didn't want to wipe my hands on my black shirt or my white shorts. I'm grateful for the orange tablecloth.
19. I don't want to think of something to be grateful for today. Right now I'm just grateful that things are the way they are.
20. I'm grateful for public transportation.
21. Yesterday my parents noticed some of the outside Christmas lights glowing even though they weren't turned on, so today my dad and I wandered around the front yard with a metal pipe and a digitial multimeter trying to figure out why. We think radio waves are inducing a current in the rain gutter spouts, which in turn is inducing a current in the light strings . . . I'm grateful for physics.
22. I'm grateful for physical therapy, for making my sister less broken. And I'm grateful for this Christmas tree ornament The Bald One made a year or two ago.
23. Dec 23 - I'm grateful for the folks in the ward I grew up in. Special shout-out to Kylee, Mandy, and Scott.
24. I'm grateful for all the wonderful teachers I've had (and not just the ones at school). I thought about listing them all by name but that would take too long. I guess I'll mention Mrs. Taylor because she'll get a kick out of it.
25. I'm grateful for Simon and his 3 keys to happiness: good food; good friends; good family.
26. I'm grateful for the people who have seen me at (or near) my worst and don't completely hate me for it. Obviously this includes my parents, along with Kjersti, Bonnie, and Laurel.
27. I'm grateful for my family's safe passage to Arizona today, as well as yesterday's opportunity to indulge in unbridled hedonism in Las Vegas.
28. Oops, looks like I missed yesterday. If I had posted, I would've been grateful for good books.
29. I'm grateful for pillows.
30. I'm grateful for the conversations which take place at the times they are needed most. I'm also grateful for my Grandpa Mac for showing how true love endures all.
31. I'm grateful that even though I'm spending New Year's in a hotel in Page, Arizona, at least it follows a safe day of travel and we brought "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" along.

January

1. I'm grateful for family traditions.
2. I'm grateful for Nerf guns.
3. I'm grateful for the days where it feels like you got something done, even if it's just a couple gallons of citrus juice and a 1.5-hour Nerf gun fight.
4. I'm grateful for old friends who you can talk to without remembering how long it's been. Today that applies to Kylan and especially Bonnie.
5. I'm grateful for Star Trek. I'm grateful for Sarah and her amazing blog.