An Uplifting Experience

October 2010.

The sun shone weakly through the gray clouds when I left class, wandering towards the middle of BYU's campus looking for a spot to sit down and eat lunch. "Somewhere that I can be alone but still be around people", I thought to myself, "Close enough to the crowd it looks like I'm not a loner but far enough away that I actually can be." I choose a spot outside the busy library on a granite wall where I can watch people pass by for classes. A few other students share this granite ledge, eating lunch as well or using their laptops. But no one close enough to mumble a "Hello" or "How ya doing?" I sit down and pull off my heavy backpack and start fishing around for my hasty homemade sandwich.

At this point I feel the chilly breeze pass through my hoodie and I can feel the cold gray rock start quickly leeching heat from my legs. People watching is fun when you're with people, but when you're not it only make you feel more alone I realize. The sky is almost as sunless as I feel friendless here. I moved out of state for college and I'm beginning to feel homesick. I miss the warmth of Arizona's hot and bright sun. I miss my family and friends. My daily routine. My first time away from home and these feelings of loneliness and depression are beginning to encircle me. I'm sure everybody else feels this way sometimes? Maybe. I munch on my sandwich and try to focus on my ratio of mustard to mayonnaise and not to let my feelings get the best of me. Just not in public I tell myself. Why do I feel so alone in the middle of so many people? Why don't I have someone to eat lunch with?

Startled from my thoughts there is someone is talking to me! A cute girl with light brown hair walked across the grass and was setting her backpack down next to mine. Uncomfortably close. I try to understand what she could possibly be doing and to pull myself out of my dismal thoughts. "Hi, how ya doing?" I reply, feigning enthusiasm. A fitting response no matter what’s happening I hope. I focus all available brain power now as I realize I have never met this girl before and I don't think she knows me either. "I'm gonna change things up a bit and talk to people", she says, "I'm trying to break up my habit of not talking to people around me." I'm in disbelief. I raise my eyebrow and squint an eye. She seems normal though... Weird. She asks me my name and where I'm from, what classes I'm taking and what my major is. I ask her the usual questions too. But then the chit chat passes out of small talk zone and I find myself in a good, real conversation. And although I'm too embarrassed to express my loneliness clearly in words I feel enough of the same emotions in her attitude to make me feel like I'm not alone. I enjoy the sudden companionship and it buoys me out of my temporary depression. After a while she packs up her stuff and says goodbye. As she walks away I wonder if the pause before she left was an invitation to get her phone number. Stay in contact? Maybe? I thought. She is a few years older than me though... I bury my desire to keep a new friend along with my fear of rejection and take a deep breath and look around. Campus seems a little clearer and happier. Another deep breath and I look back up at the sky. I don't have the courage to follow her or maybe the brains to understand what's going on, but the day seems a lot brighter and not because of the sun. It feels good to be alive, there are challenges to be braved and experiences to savor!

Although I regret not keeping in touch and I always keep my eye out I've never passed by that light brown haired girl again. I am sure she doesn't know how good she made me feel that day to have a friend. Even now, almost 4 years later I remember the kindness of her deed. I don't think she realized I could have been on the verge of tears or needed a friend. I don't think she'll ever know the impact her 20 minutes of conversation had on me. It was because of that 20 minutes I knew I wasn't alone that morning. It was through her that I felt God's love for me. I don't think she knows that she was an angel that morning, sent by her Heavenly Father to buoy me up. But I know that she was. I don't know everything, but I do know that when we live our lives in a way that allows God to comfort others through us then we are doing something that is lasting and worthwhile. It doesn't matter if it's cold and cloudy, or if you're a fallible human being like the rest of us, you could mean the world to somebody else for and never even know it.

Evolution of my Wood Watch Project

     My younger brother came home from a summer job last year with a wood watch. We all thought it was pretty darn cool. When I saw "we all" I mean the boys in the family, although I'm sure the girls thought it was cool too. My Dad is a darn good wood worker and has some pretty cool machines in the garage, so everyone in our family is relatively familiar with what goes into making things out of wood. Whether its carving things from whistles to figurines or just whipping out a few wood picture frames, we're all pretty comfortable with things like that. So someone in the family  making a wood watch shouldn't really come as a surprise to anybody, what did come as a surprise to me was the cost of the professionally made wood watch.

     There are 2 major companies that produce wood watches (in reality there are a lot more) and those 2 are WeWood and Mica. My brother had a WeWood produced watch. Like I said, I thought a wood watch was a pretty cool idea. When I looked them up online however the price for one of those was not so cool. You couldn't get one for under a hundred dollars. 

                                     

     Granted they used some high quality wood, they had a lot of different options, they came with a couple replaceable links and a warranty, but shelling out over a hundred bones for a watch piece attached with 50 odd small pieces of wood and some minuscule metal parts was not my idea of a bargain. I'm sure that WeWood and Mica make some serious bank on their wood watch business. And to prove it I decided I would make my own wood watch. Having never done it before I decided to go with quick prototype to prove the concept.

     The first one I made ,although it may not look it, was a success. It's role was to prove that with the tools I had I could make the wrist band part of the watch, since that seemed like it was going to be the hardest part.   

                                                                       

     I actually cut the pieces by hand, and by hand I mean with a saw. I drilled the holes and put a paper clip in, bent the end and clipped the other side and bent that side down too. It was a little time consuming but definitely not as much as the other ones. This was my attempt at the clasp mechanism. It fits together by threading a paper clip through the watch face and out the other side. It's not easy, by yourself, to put it on but since my main motivation was to make a wood wristband I didn't really care. I would improve upon that in the next model.

     Which lead to Alpha v. 2.0. Basically the same as the first but with some noticeable improvements. I tried to make the band pieces uniform and spent some time sanding them and putting them in an aesthetic order, lining them up by grain direction.

     It didn't turn out perfect though, I spaced the links too far away from each other which gave it a look I didn't like. I improved upon that in the next version. I decided I could live with the paperclips since I couldn't think of any other material we had lying around that would do the job. I improved the clasp, which made it a lot easier to put on. I intended to put a watch face in this version but after seeing the way the band looked I decided it wasn't worth it. Even though it didn't turn out perfect I definitely enjoy putting together an idea you have in your mind and trying to translate that into real life. This version made some serious improvements and brought the concept a lot closer to reality which gave me hope that I could not only make a wooden wristband with a watch implant but that it could even look cool.

     With some new ideas I actually spent money on Alpha v. 2.1. I improved the overall look and spaced the links as close as I could, which I still think looks pretty legit! I intended for this design to be the clincher, the finisher, the final version. But like the last one it ended up having its own set of problems and prompting me to get back to the drawing table to improve it if I wanted to ever wear one of these in public. 

     I had a fun time figuring out the right drill bit and nail size. The trick was to make it a snug fit in the outer edges of the band so that it would not allow the band to fall apart but not tight enough to bust the fragile pieces of Pine wood. The inside middle pieces just have a slightly larger drill bit size to allow rotation. I cut out each piece and then rounded them by sanding so that they would rotate while still being so closely packed. After hammering in the nails I used a grinder to grind off the extra nail sticking out of the band. It looked pretty knarly with the nails ungrinded, looked like a weapon with all the spikes sticking out of the band. I also counter sunk 2 magnets into the middle of the band so that the band automatically claps together and keeps itself on your wrist. The watch is just a watch from Walmart I clipped the band off and countersunk into the face.

     The downfalls to this design; I cracked the glass face while it was still in production. I finished the watch like that anyways but felt like an idiot for being careless. The magnets is a good idea but just 2 wasn't strong enough so I added more in the next version. I also began to see a problem with the band. It rotated perfectly but it is super rigid. In the picture you can see my fears realized. I broke one of the links. It was easy enough to glue back together but the problem is its inability to absorb any sort of impact. The wood is not strong enough in that form especially with a relatively large hole in it. Wood is never a good material if there is any torque or impact involved.

     With some more good ideas I felt like I was getting close to a final design. I followed with another design,  Alpha v 3.0. I felt confident enough to use some quality wood, the brown is Rose wood and the lighter colored is still Pine. I spaced the links a bit farther in an attempt to allow more room for the links to flex and absorb more impact. I added 2 more magnets to strengthen the clasp and I used an old watch I had instead of buying a new one. I also added 2 coats of sealant to make the links more durable.

     What I'm really proud of in this design is that I didn't just counter sink the watch into the wood face. I took apart the watch and put in only the parts I needed. Which it turns out is not very much at all. Its just a little bit of mechanical parts and a battery about the size of a nickel. I used the metal back part of the actual watch and hammered it onto the back of the wood face. There is actually a glass covering I spaced just above the watch hands by bending a paper clip into a circle. The paper clip sits between the glass and the wood that the hands spin around. Making the thin wood circle was a tricky one, it had to been thin enough to allow the hands to still connect to the gears below and be a perfect enough circle to not look ghetto. A couple tries and some raw fingers later I got it.

     The downfalls of this design was that the band was just still to rigid to be viable and I was just not feeling the magnets anymore. The good part was that the magnets could unclasp if it got caught on something instead of breaking the links but that's just embarrassing if your watch falls off when it gets caught. I wanted my watch to be a little more tough than that. I'm still way proud of this design though, this is as close to a wood watch as you can get. One thing I wanted to change in the next design though was the face, this one is kind of plain. I spent more time on the way the band looked that the face was more of an afterthought.

     Last but not least Alpha v. 4.0. This is the last one I have made but not the last I will ever make. It's just the most current version. It's durable with the stretchy string and 4 coats of sealant. (Many thanks to Greg for coming up with the idea for stretching string to weave the links together!) I went a little overboard with the face. The thing is huge. I went from plain looking faces to in your faces watch design. I have to admit I wanted to create a little bit of an eyesore when I made this watch. I wanted you to see it and have to say something about it, or at least think to yourself "Wow! That is a unique watch!" I've only worn it a few times and I have to say it is a great conversation starter. A wood calculator watch is kind of a self conflicting piece of work.

     Since it's an Alpha version that means it's not a finished product. If it was then I have to admit it would be a little bit of a bummer because I enjoy designing and making them so much. Downfalls to this design is that it's a little bit of a hassle to put on. You just slide it over your hand but it takes a few seconds to get it completely on. Plus the watch face is a little over the top. Granted I designed it in my head to be that way but I want to make another one that is more classy than shouting for attention. This one is cool though, it's a legitimate wood watch. It accomplishes what I set out to do. It's durable enough to wear around, it was over 10 times cheaper than a WeWood or Mica watch, and it brings me some satisfaction to accomplish that.

     If I wanted I could make more and try and sell them. I don't have the time to even try right now though, and I wouldn't want selling them to take the fun out of it for me.  Plus you can buy cheaper wood watches from shady online retailers and I don't really want to compete with them. If you read the whole post I'm impressed, and you learned about one of my hobbies. If you have any suggestions for improvements (for a watch, not my blog) let me know. If you want to compliment me then you can do that too, I love compliments. 

Nelson & I's First Attempt on Mt. Timpanogos

November 2, 2013 my brother Nelson and I attempted to climb the legendary Mt. Timpanogos. The summit of dreams. Specifically, our dream was to get a head start on the snowboarding season. We packed up all of our needed gear; boots, boards, water and food, determination and some extra dry socks. We left Lehi close to 7am that beautiful Saturday morning and arrived at the trail head a little before 8 am. Taking some pictures and video along the way we began our hike. 

Sadly, if you've watched our little slideshow already you noticed we didn't make it to the top. In truth we weren't trying to get to the top, just to Emerald Lake and the historic glacier that feeds it. (Make sure to read 'glacier' in a Bear Gryll's voice, pronounced "glassy-ehr.") We reached the top of the valley at around 2:30 pm. Still a ways off of the glacier where we wanted to begin boarding. For those of you that didn't bother to do the math, that's 6 and a half hours of hiking in snow with 50 pounds of awkward gear on your back. The clincher of why we turned back was a combination of the top of the valley being super steep, and super deep (with loose snow), plus it was getting windier and windier. We were faced with the prospect of continuing our glycogen depleting climb up a veritable snowy waterfall as the wind pushed the loose snow over the edge of the valley and down the mountain on top of us. This, which was altogether very exciting, when added to the fact that we were running out of valuable time and that Nelson's gloves had soaked through we deemed it best to stop there. We determined we had underestimated Timpanogos (not the first time for me) and that it would be best to retreat and attack a different way another day. Nelson and I will probably make our attack without the snowboarding gear next time, which will allow us greater flexibility and speed on the mountain. We will, however, make the attack in the Winter. We may not summit, but we will make either the Saddle or take the trail around the glacier. 

If we had pressed on that day, we would likely have reached the glacier around 5:30 or 6pm at the latest. We would have been exhausted, we would have probably had enough energy for a single run and then turned back for the parking lot. It would have been getting dark at that time. It would be much colder and the steepness wouldn't have been easier on the way down, especially with all of the weight of the packs. We both slipped numerous times anyways. No mistake, Nelson and I are tough guys. I have no doubt we would have made it back to the car and back home but the risk factor was too great. It would have been too easy to slip and break an ankle, fall forwards down the mountain, any number of things. But we're not dumb, so we made the call before we hurt ourselves. So while physically we recovered with some warm food and a days rest, emotionally Timpanogos triumphed again. It hurts to muscle your snowboard gear that far but never use it. Fortunately we can plan smarter next time, Timpanogos you will be beaten soon enough.

A documentary of November 2, 2014. 6 mins 56 sec. Please enjoy.

What is it like being a recently RM?

Oh hey Taylor! Thats a good question, what is it like to be a returned missionary? Well, since I've got a few, why don't I enlighten this subject a bit.
First off, the perception of an recently RM is what? Akward, only talks about the gospel, trying to get adjusted to "normal" life again. From what perspective is this? From people that are not recently returned missionaries. Not that they aren't qualified to make this judgment call though, I mean if you think about it, it really is a different world that the missionary has come to and the people there are allowed to decide what is "wierd" or "akward" according to their worlds standards. But as you see, that there is the point, they are in a different world than the missionary. If a green alien showed up at your door and you were like "Bro, you're weird!", he'd prolly say the same about you. This is not just about physical location. Its about everything but physical location. This RM just spent 2 years re-programming his brain. A complete over-write. Tabula rasa. Everything includes just about everything when you think about it. When you see an RM, you're not seeing the same person there that left. "Oh hey! (insert name here) is back! How's it going?" Thats not really logical, from the frame of the RM anyways. What the RM really is is an alien. An alien that just got adopted into the role of your former friend.
Don't think wierd green alien from another planet though, that wouldn't be correct. Think alien as in foreigner. That's better. Imagine your life right now, all your friends, responsibilities, memories, quirks, and morals. Think about them, and realize how integral they are to you, you. Kind of makes up part of your core, you might say, all those things. Now imagine, for a second, that you are now called to take upon you the role of someone else. All of a sudden, it seems, you now have a responsibility and obligation (which is mandatory by the way, not optional) to change who you are. Wow. That would suck right? You might have cried just a little bit right now. Go take a second to wipe the tear off your face. Change who you are? What? Thats...unbelievable. I don't get it. So the RM is a missionary still, who is being asked to become someone else. A missionary is obedient though, this is what God wants the missionary to do, so he/she is willing to do it. But that, switching roles, is not the clincher, what makes the missionary sad is that it is not just anyone that they are supposed to be becoming. They're not supposed to be becoming another missionary. They are supposed to be becoming something that they don't understand and don't really want to be. Let me explain this, as a missionary you are set apart to a higher plane of thought and activity. Jesus Christ becomes the focus, everything. You are special. You are unique. It's not like you look down on everyone else, members and non-members, but I think that in some way, missionaries actually do. You're not really looking "down" on them, more like to the side, you just have a special role in obtaining divine direction to help them in their lives. Thats a pretty legit responsibility. You see, you are aloft from all of this madness that the world is going through. You have a special role in staying away from all of this worldliness, you help clean other people off. You're the guy cleaning the mud of the world off of people. When you go home it seems God is asking you to go stand in the middle of the mud. You're like "why?" Why can't I keep helping people get clean? I stay cleaner that way too. So when you are home now, you are standing in the middle of this giant mud puddle, waist deep. You stand there motionless, you're keeping your arms and hands up out of the mud because you don't want to get any dirtier than you have too. You sadly despise the mud. It seems like a dream. It's not possible that you could have been cleaning other people off that managed to get out of the giant mud puddle, and somehow now you waded out into it! And you are supposed to stay there! It's hard to distinguish from whats mud and what is not. You get home and you don't know what the right thing to do is. You don't have the same purpose and guidance anymore. When you look at your new life as an RM, in the frame of a missionary, everything looks like mud! Communicating with friends, prohibited as a missionary and therefore looks like mud. Consuming social media, listening to popular songs, watching television and movies, they are not allowed as a missionary, therefore they look like mud. You get home and everything looks like mud. Even though you cognitively recognize that these things are no longer wrong, its been 2 years everyday repeating the opposite to yourself. What you feel like is that somehow by partaking in all of these so called "normal" things you are really dishonoring your former life. You're somehow disparaging what kind of a missionary you were. You were the clean missionary, helping people get out of mud, and now you are dumping mud on yourself! Hypocrite! This is what has to change, beating all of these missionary specific things out of you. Its been two years beating them in and now its time to beat them out. But hey guess what? There's no white handbook for when you get home, theres no list of things to beat into yourself. You are involuntarily having these things beat out of you as a result of day to day life and theres no approved list of things to replace them with. You have to choose for yourself. Thats alot harder. What do I do today? Its not focus on helping other people, its focus on helping yourself. 2 years ago you knew how to focus on yourself but now you forgot. You have to re-learn. Thats why RM's are akward. They're just babies. They're learning. Of course they're akward. They have scriptures pop up in their mind for every sentence you say. If you make a statement about the gospel they instinctively want to teach you,  quoting general authorities and scripture. They have opinions...about the gospel! Not many about anything else. All those other opinions they forgot. So of course they're awkward, they have nothing to say! If you're not talking about the gospel they are learning more about the world. A world that may seem opposed to the world they came from, but is nonetheless required for them to immerse themselves in. So they may be hesitant, they may shrink, they may not be "normal." But hey, thats okay. They're going to adjust no matter what, its as inevitable as rocky road icecream melting in the hot sun. They'll get better, they will improve. TV won't be a sin anymore, facebook won't look like the plague, and soon they'll develop some opinions, regain a personality and be okay. Its a rocky road but its shorter than it seems.

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.

A word of peace

To whome it may concern:
As it has become company policy to maintain the secrecy of who and how these posts affect other people this post will be no different. Although unlike many of these blog posts only one of the recent ones has become compromised. In result of this compromisation of a blog post another one (this one) is required to set the record straight.
None of these blog posts is to be taken seriously at any time unless the situation requires it of course. Except maybe this one is one exception to that rule although it seems i have snapped that absolute already several times (again). So the reason for my authoring this particular piece of literature is because i have offended a great human being. A human being whose gender shall be protected as well as her name. (haha that was a joke, it might be a guy you never know okay?) But this is an apology in the form of a blog post. I cannot say for sure if this particular being ever will choose to follow the link from a certain social networking website that leads to this particular bloggish website but if that scenario ever occurs i would be glad if it ended with that someone reading this post and realizing that i have given the matter much thought, and ended with the conclusion that i was wrong. Wronger than i had thought i would be. Much more wronger than my grammer at present. And I am sorry. How rude of me to put such a thing on a public website. Who am I to harshly misrepresent and judge others? No one. I feel bad about it. My perceptions are my perceptions, how i saw the situation may still be how i see the situation, i may not have changed my mind a ton about how it should have went down you see but thats not what was wrong. Thats how i am raised. I still like how i was raised, i still think it was right. You were raised with different ideas and think that they were right. Ya know does it matter whose is more right? Can one of them be more right? It may be like photons. Both wave and particle characteristics may be needed to better illustrate the situation because the situation may really be beyond any of ours control. So why did i even worry about it? Should have let it go.
My B. Dont let this put another fatal crack in the lamp of this sorry relationship.
This blog post has run its course. If in the scenario prescribed above the human being this is written for scans the changing eyes over the black and white symbols do not fear, this is not a drill. Yeah nevermind, its got to end and its getting a little too abstract to hold onto. Farewell and be well. So let it be written so let it be done.

College Kitchen Blunder

2 weeks after i made a great pizza i went back into my spacious pantry to retrieve my jar of spaghetti sauce to make another pizza. Lo and behold my jar was bloated and the bottom was pushed out due to the inside pressure of the container. Upon further inspection i noticed small white dots on the inside of the the jar. Mold. Fungus. Whatever. So it went bad. My spaghetti sauce went bad. Dang it. I then chucked the jar in the trash can. After inquiring about this matter to several roommates i now know that spaghetti sauce is supposed to be refrigerated after opening. Who knew? I didnt. So i ended up using Carter's very very meaty sauce on our pizza. It was pretty good. Not like freaking amazing but it was aight ya know? So i threw it in the trash on a saturday 2 weeks after it was initially opened and the next day, sunday, we came home from church and what you see in the picture is what we got. Somehow the pressure had increased until it had blown the spaghetti sauce all over our humble apartment. Like a spaghetti powered rocket, the jar knocked over the trashcan and ended up in the adjacent room.

My theory is that now our apartment is covered with small spore like bacteria that infest all of our perishable food. Anything that is opened and left out goes bad in like 3 days its crazy. So most everything goes into the fridge now. Support to my hypothesis is that my grapefruit juice that ive left out is now bloated. I accidentally grabbed it and was thirsty so i just wrenched the lid off, the air hissed out loudly, and i swallowed a gulp. It tasted exactly like the smell of the rotten spaghetti sauce. Wierd. So we've left the grapefruit juice in the corner of the kitchen and are waiting for it also to explode. Alex and I are interested in the potential of this phenomenon as way to prank people and want to bring this down to a science where we can predict the time of ignition for the food. Just good future engineers I think.

Get in the car

life is about doing, experience does come with a price. so what if you fail? now you know where a limit is. You didnt before. How come you can justify not acting when you dont know where it can lead. Potential is there. What happens is up to you. You decide what you do, and how it defines you.

Where is the justice in the world? No action in the face of danger is fine and dandy. Was fine and dandy. That was before you started affecting me! Please. Why is it okay for you to mess up my plans. I'm not talking to all of you that had an excuse. Even if it was a lame excuse. Yours wasnt really an excuse at all more of a different plan you decided to persue in the face of adversity. Not really even persue persay. More like running away. But for you that straight up said you wouldnt go because it might be hard. Okay. Really? In the face of a trial i will sacrifice others to protect my own. Arent i great person? No, that doesnt make you a great person. In fact its a pretty unattractive quality in a person if you ask me. Both boys and girls, although im not talking about any specific guys right now. So at least maybe you had fun at the game though right? Well there you go, tell me about the game in 2 years. Try. Just try. Im listening and not caring. I cared a little when it was happening. Less after it ended. In two years it wont matter to very many people on the planet less alone me. If it matters to you in 2 years then i guess you made the last choice after all. Give me a break. I feel like i could use one. I just wanted to do something i would'nt regret and i didnt get the opportunity.

Your excuses held no purchase in my soul you currently next to abominable human being. Man up next time. Which next time you will plan bc i will not pursue a course which directly leads me back to that same circumstance. You made me feel bad. Without judging you i feel like you have made a poor decision. Right.

Wharehouse Citizens

I work at a warehouse behind my old highschool, yes i know i just spelled it differently than i did in the title but thats just because i dont really know how to spell it, and lots of people work there that i would have never met in this life and prolly never would have imagined existed before but now i know them and all their...umm differences. Richard, i wont use last names just in case it can be traced and somebody finds out what i wrote about them and stuff, but Richard is this really old, well not really old, like early 60's late 50's old ya know? and hes one of the coolest peoople probably ever to be born to this planet. hes a spurs fan and hes also been at the warehouse so long that nobody knows what his job is anymore so he just kind of works in chips or wherever he wants to, like maybe push a cart around for a while and just avoid the supervisors or something but nobody care because everybody loves this guy! although i am kind of worried about him and think hes going a little crazy bc ben heard him asking the chip boxes how they were doing that day and he just seems a little wierd lately. he also runs his own painting gig.
Speaking of crazies, there is crazy bob, hes almost as old as rich and hes short, like 5 foot maybe. very stocky build, balding sandy brown hair, and wears coke bottle glasses some of the time. Case 1- bob looks out the window during one breaktime and we ask him what hes doing? he answers hes just looking at the world and proceeds to stare out the window, hes not just looking out the window hes more like peeking out the window holding the blinds up ya know what i mean? who does that? if you ever meet him ask him about the time he met a bear and tried to get back in the tent and ripped off the zipper! flipping hilarious
Next is Mi-K e, i spelled it like that just in case he searches the internet for his name and i dont want him to find me especially! im pretty sure he is a russian spy and uses the warehouse as his dayjob. hes 6'5" and i really cant tell what ethnicity really, his nose has been broken more times than hes years old from all the barfights and bc his brothers a pro boxer. which im kind of scetchy about. you see i dont really trust what he says... he wears black all the time from his shoes to his hat. funny story- i ripped his hat off once about 2 years ago and he has a bald spot. you wouldnt guess that bc he has long black hair kind of like a mullet or something, but he does have a bald spot. please dont spread this around and now i may make this blog private just so he doesnt find out, but anyways he then lunged for me and his hat, so i hastily stumbled backward trying to avoid the deranged russian assassin and lacerated myself on the conveyor belt and threw the hat at him. he growled at me, yes growled thats how i remember it when replaying it in my head anyways, and walked off obviously pissed off like no other. so now im pretty sure im on his list and i dont know how long i have left but it cant be long, hes prolly jsut waiting till im 18 i bet and then he'll try and make it look like an accident. but hes cool though. very quiet and reserved most of the time but i think hes a pretty decent guy.
I could go on about all the freaks that get stuck in this place like Don, oh don, now theres a story but i am about done writing so maybe some other time.

Physics for simples

So ive had this question for a long time and ive asked it to many and many have failed to grasp the concept of what im trying to say. Does a single point exist? how about a perfect circle? are they not just concepts available only in our minds? are they the same thing anyways? if you magnify a circle then no matter how close you get with our technology you can make out the particles that make up the shape. so the edge of the circle really is just a lumpy line when you get to close, so is there a line at all or just shapes? how about magnifying down to the subatomic level to find the smallest particle that exists and that takes up an infintesimally small volume and then classify that as a point. but even then at the subatomic level we have not scratched the surface of how infintesimally (big word did i spell that right?) more we could go. so the smallest particle known to man is still billions times bigger than the actuall smallest particle which we now know doesnt exist. so if the smallest particle doesnt exist what makes up the bigger particles? how can we classify space if we cant say how big things can get? maybe we'll learn that in the life to come. so here we are in our reality infintessimally small and also infintessimally large trying to find out if a circle can exist that fits our definition... i havent found one yet i think circles are not real except in our mind and i cant measure the circle in my mind so for all i know its so small it could be assumed to be a point but i can imaging the space inside so maybe its really big except its got to fit in my head right? to sum up what we dont know is this: perfect circles dont exist(probably) and mathematical points dont exist(that we know of). according to einstein we cannot know the exact location of an object, so a specific point, we can only know the speed that it has given the time or where it has been and you cant know both... so try not to think about this kind of thing for it only leaves you with answers that are satisfy your curiousity for the moment but lead to more questions and thus you are on the path to knowledge. or something else... let me know when you get there