This is how we do it

Well I feel like its been a while since I wrote something here and my competitors have raised there production levels and have jumped ahead of me in the number of blog posts. So I will try to combine two things that I'm sure have not been combined ever in the history of the...well world probably. Blogging and Mountain biking. I want to talk about mountain biking because on the ride up to sundance yesterday I noticed that the snow line has receded far enough up the mountain to uncover one of the few and favorite trails I know about here. Called affectionately Bridalveil falls, its near the waterfall called Bridalveil falls. I think they named the waterfall after the mountain biking trail because in the grand scheme of things, what do you think is more important? Sure people go see the waterfall and ooh and ahh and whatever. Which I've done by the way, after I did the Bridal veil falls trail, and I testify that biking the trail was much more rewarding than looking at the stream fall off a cliff. Mountain biking. Probably the greatest sport since...ummm probably just the greatest sport I think. Make no mistake, I am not talking about down hill mountain biking, where you take a lift up and go down the mountain without raising your heartbeat. Im talkin true blue you get the gravity you pay for mountain biking, where you actually have to sacrifice to the gravity gods before you can reap the reward. Its like some kid inheriting a million dollars and never realizing what it is he has, you never appreciate something until its gone or until youve paid the price for it.

One of my favorite trails in Arizona, we called it Hawes trail, cuz it was near Hawes pass I think. Clever name dont you think? We dont mess around much. It was a pretty excruciating ride up the mountain Then you took a break, peed on a cactus, flipped your bike around and laid your life on the line on the way down. One time I remember we took a different way down called the Secret Trail. But it turned out it was pretty dang secret because when it intersected a dry riverbed we lost the trail and went down the dry riverbed. Which turned into a very sandy trail, prolly about a foot or so of loose dry sand, the riverbed was relatively flat but ran at a good slope down hill. So naturally you loose the dragons and just fly like heck down the river. But whats strange is when your killin it that fast you kind of just ride on top of the sand. As long as your just going straight that is, for when you turn to the left your front tire starts to sink into the sand and push like a mother. The tire just wants to turn perpendicular to the trail instead of parallel. Of course this happens in like a millisecond so you slight to the left and all of a sudden you have to over correct to the right like lightning. Which creates a massive divet in the sand as when your tire pulls itself out of the sand and starts riding ontop again. Its seriously alot of fun to be that close to pulling a header going that fast, your reaction time is on max and you really know that sooner or later your gonna go south.

Another of my favorite trails of all time, honestly I dont really know about alot of trails but I do know more than the average Joe. So another of my favorite trails is one we call respectively the McDowell trail, its a bit north of fountain hills and is an actual legit mountain bike trail for like races and stuff. It has a few loops in the park, the sport loop, longer sport loop, and the inexplicable loop. The inexplicable loop is around 10 miles long and one of the things I remember most is one feature call the The Step. Basically the trail goes up the mountain but in the way is a large boulder a couple feet high. Your challenge is to bunny hop your bike onto the boulder. You'd have to be pro to do it, I'm tellin you. But especially after a couple miles of hot sweaty glorious riding up and down rocky hills it is especially brutal. And as its already an uphill ride its not like you can get a ton of speed and just go for it. I went for it. I didnt get it. Someday I'll get it. Someday. But, it wasnt that day. I kinda hurt and embarrassed myself when I tried the step the first time. I sheepishly got off my bruised hindquarters and hiked up the hill a little ways past the step.

One of the preemo mountain biking races is called the Leadville 100, the Race across the sky. Its held in leadville colorado and is one of my bucket list items to compete in and finish the race. A one hundred mile mountain biking race. Climbs thousands of feet and descends thousands of feet over some of the most harsh and rugged yet beautiful landscapes in the US. It was won by lance armstrong a year or two ago, who paid a few young riders to help him win the road cycling way. In cycling you stay as a pack and draft off of each other. In mountain biking its a different style. Its all about you and the mountain. You, the lone wolf, a solitary sport. About how much you can endure and how much you can handle. Its supposed to be hard. hard hard hard. Thats where you find the joy. As a solitary warrior facing the vast landscape, is what its all about.

To Us and Our Good Fortune!

this past friday i visited our friendly neighborhood ski resort Sundance. It was splendid. Steven showed me a few new trails I'd never considered before. They were not really trails. We just bumped off the trail randomly and went straight into the forest. It was splendid I tell you. Plowing through the snow where not many others had gone before. Ahead of you your view is obscured by trees. You see board paths veer right and left and straight ahead. Quickly you choose a way. Your goggles fog and your face gets hot. Your breath becomes stressed and ragged. You cant see the path. You are lightning. You are speed and agility combined with a trace of euphoria. A tree looms. It moves into the foggiest spot in your vision. You dodge by throwing your self against your back foot. Your board revolves quickly but continues to translate toward the dense pine trunk. Pushing for resistance you hope and pray. With inches to give you jump and switch to toeside. Quickly reversing to heelside to avoid the next tree. You pass the tree but cannot squeeze past the next one. You bail into the snow. Head down you spin around and plant the board. Snow has creeped into your skivvies and up your jacket. Continuing on with gravity at your side you pass stumps and dead trees at astonishing speed. The real trail is ahead but is blocked by a rope. You cant ski through it. You preserve your speed and head uphill to get around the rope. No good, you bail and it snows again on the inside of your shell. You get up goofy and aim for the rope. Close but no good, half a biff while passing under the trail marker. No one saw except Suzy, Youre good. Another good memory to daydream about while taking notes in american heritage.

Quiet People

I hear alot about "quiet people" and I'm not really feeling the love here. Hey! Everybody! I'm a quite a quiet person! I dont like to yell over people or talk endlessly all the flippin time.

Today in a meeting, we discussed different ways to help the "quiet people" (like they had a disease or some sort of disability) get more of a social experience.

Now I am not saying that us quiet people are super social. We arent. In fact compared to the social crowd were actually pretty unsocial. But thats not to say that we never have any social contact with the world aight? I mean I think that you social people just force your social situations on us because you dont understand why we arent being social in the first place. We maybe happen to like...ya know...we might feel accepted and comfortable with our selves...even if we arent the center of a circle of people. Just listening to others. Feel their ideas and roll them around our minds and look for their merit. We might be just making our own opinions about what we are thinking about. If we think they're are worth sharing with another person or group then if you all social people would shut your yappers a second we'd prolly spout em out. But you guys insist on insisting we have a problem.

I dont think we have a problem. I think we're just fine. I think we are just great! I dont want to say that having a social life is bad, in fact if youre picking that up then youre not getting the point. The point is that their is a gray area between too much talk and too much silence. I personally lean toward the silent side.

Yeah and it IS definitively harder to talk to a quiet person. But HELLO that doesnt mean you cant communicate with them. They just communicate differently! Like I just met this chill guy named Sam in one of my classes a week or two ago. He's pretty quiet! He doesnt have to talk alot to feel like he's communicating. He says what he means and you can figure out the rest. ( prolly the opposite of what im doing) He's nice and helpful but if youre looking for an extensive conversation about something you are in the wrong place. He takes his time with what hes going to say. With him there is no reason to rush the words out of his mouth. He takes time to consider a question and then considers it twice. Alot of people just rush out with a disconcerted "Whaaat?" before their brain even has a chance to process the words. They just say "Whaaat?" to let you know that they realize they are being spoken to.

Another example. I met a girl named Holly, she was pretty awesome. She didnt have to have a tornado of a conversation. She was kind of quiet and cool. It was kind of like she was a little disconnected, but it was very refreshing. To just be able to be yourself and go your own speed. You can relax! Some girls are just in...yo!....face! You get question after question and you feel like its just a speed interview.

In conclusion, their should be more people that think before firing off the "Whaaat?". People should relax and say what they mean. You can use less words, its not a crime. Think. Its good for you, you dont always just need to react.

I hope somebody feels a little less inclined to bash on the quiet people from now on.

Wow, you just read that!,

Taylor

In

Dreams

Its a sunday morning. Also happens to be fast sunday, which means that i am not eating breakfast today and will therefore have time to give birth to a little literature.

My dream last night was pretty intense. Or at least one of them was. There were a couple that were not worth mentioning at all, like the one where i got a new alarm clock that looked exactly like carters (roommate) except i put mine closer to my face. So that when i woke up in the morning i didnt have to peer around the bunk bed and squint to get a good look of what time it was. Pretty exciting eh?

But the dream i had before i woke up was the real slim shady, it was almost a nightmare id say. It wasnt scary in the dream but it got real scary right before i woke up, as the part of my brain that translates whats really going on starts to kick in.

DaLynn and I are both needing to get somewhere. The semester has ended and we both need to go home. But we are not at provo utah anymore. We are somewhere on the east coast of the united states and we need to be on the west side of the US. A car is too expensive and so is a plane or any other mode of travel except basically hiking. So we put our hiking clothes on and start to walk. Only the US is no longer populated with towns and cities along the way, there are no people anywhere, and the entire landscape has turned into a dry arid desert. We have with us 3 water bottles and lunch for the journey. So after walking all day, i ask DaLynn how long it is going to take us to get to where we are going? She says its a 3 day hike across a desert the size of the atlantic ocean. I think that this is where my rational brain starts waking up because i start to realize we are totally screwed. We are now 1 day into a brutal trek across a harsh landscape and have no food to last us all the way there, we dont really even know what trail were supposed to be on, and we're not in the right clothes too. So then i start having hallucinations of DaLynn getting bit by a rattlesnake and me sucking the poison out and putting a turnekit (how the heck to spell turnqkit?) on her leg. We dont have a cell phone, or cell phone service (i dont know how i figured that out) so i have to basically carry her 2 days across the desert.

So while I am freaking out about being totally screwed, i realize i should have just shelled out the dough for a plane ticket. Anyways as i am contemplating my demise i kind of wake up and realize its a dream. The end

Its not the craziest dream ive had, or you have had probably right? But it was one of the freakier ones to wake up to especially when you realize you arent getting breakfast today. I guess i could tell that dream about me and my siblings being the power rangers but then again id rather go peruse facebook than keep writing.

I cant believe you actually read this,

Taylor

Much more to do about nothing much

So as I sit here on the brink of a brilliant blog posting I wonder what this post will be about. Im just waiting for inspiration here. What about a blog about nothing? Sounds boring doesnt it? But yet youre still reading it arent you? Still reading huh? When are you gonna stop? I mean seriously youre having a conversation with a former phantom of myself. I dont even do that.
But now on to the topic of this blog, which mentioned before was going to be nothing. Think about it. Does nothing exist? Or is nothing the only thing which exists? I once heard from a brilliant friend of mine that 90% of all of our reality is actually nothing. He was saying that 90% of everything that we know and feel and touch on a daily basis, including our very bodies, is empty space. I think that he was talking about atoms and how their is a small compact nucleus made up of protons and neutrons with even smaller electrons orbiting the nucleus. So inside the electron shell was only a tiny tiny nucleus. Imagine a pro league football stadium being the entire atom, the nucleus would be the size of a marble at the center of the field. There by most of our world is empty space right? Well i conclude that first I dont know, and second that may be wrong. If an object can be broken down into pieces all the way to the atom and its parts, then why cannot an atom be broken down even further? What if we found out that the proton was actually a sphere with little rabbits floating around inside it. But, the rabbits only took up about 80 percent of the space inside the proton? And what if we divided those rabbits and found that they as well were made up of empty space too? And if we divide up all of these small pieces into smaller and smaller parts then eventually as we take the limit of this function as it approaches infinity then conclusively the answer would be zero. How does that make you feel? Kinda funky i bet. Honestly i cant believe youre still reading this but Hey!, who am I to judge on what kind of literature you read right?
So how is that possible that our entire world is made up of nothing at all. How can that even be possible? Well the electron has mass and acts as a wave and a particle, how is that possible? Now I'm not saying that you should take my word for it because that would be just plain dumb. Im just saying that according to the logic that i just played out in my head for like 15 minutes while I was writing this blog, is what I came up with. Im not saying I believe it or even understand what I'm saying I'm saying I'm not believing I'm just saying, why not? Although it is a little wierd and doesnt make a whole ton of sense when compared to anything else that is not this blog post.
Now I am changing the topic of this blog post. Kind of like a double header for those of you still reading. (I cant believe I said "those", thereby implying more than one person would read all this in one sitting and not click on something else in their web browser infinitely more entertaining, but if you ARE still reading this then Thanks. That makes me feel good I guess.) My new topic for rambling OH! I mean "blogging" is...those wierd people that just make you feel uncomfortable. I came a little late to a lecture class today and picked a seat next to this guy that just made me feel uncomfortable to put it in the least buzz word I can find. He smelled something like rotten cauliflower and grime, and he had large pink and dark red bumps on his face. Now I realize that I am judging this guy unfairly. He was polite and was curteous in his actions to me and the guy on his other side. But MAN he was WIERD! How does he live with himself? NO! that was mean, I feel bad for him. That could just as easily have been me in his shoes. Without access to a shower and having a flesh eating skin disease. I would appreciate people trying to be friendly and act normal around me.
Alright, Ive got to wrap this up real fast. But! same goes for girls! And... that is another blogpost.
Until you read again.