Oh La La London ... &ct.

In the wake of destruction caused by my approaching field study in the grandmotherland, my poor blog here has been neglected. Blame it on the fact that I'm blogging thrice-plus a week for my field study prep class—I feel like I'm on here all the time, and so it can't possibly have been that long since I last blogged. Anyways, you can check out the fun link over there to see how my project and whatnot is progressing. Right now it's pretty boring because I have to be constantly reflecting on readings and whatnot, but I hope that it'll get more interesting once I actually, you know, leave the country.

Moving right along ... I've nothing really wonderfully interesting to tell anyone about or talk about right now, so I'll give you a couple of blurbs about what's been happening to me since school started:

• Three consecutive class periods delivering 15-20 minute presentations in English 620. That being said, graduate classes are AWESOME, and so much more interesting than regular classes. Also, easier. 
• A Saturday in Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. Awesome to keep the tradition going, but all in all that was probably one of the worst days of the semester. A quick summary of the awfulness: bad weather, frozen feet, a hour long nauseous bus ride, and then a 3-hours-in-horrific-terrifying-dangerous-weather-whilst-being-simultaneously-super-nauseous-and-in-pain-à-la-the-flu-car-ride followed by four hours being miserable alone in bed, and topping the night off with offering up pineapple-and-Canadian-bacon oblations at the altar of the porcelain god. 
• A super rad 3-day weekend in Vegas spent enjoying a time at the Hoover Dam (so many dam jokes...) and on the strip (love me some Bellagio fountains ... seriously though, they're inspiring), and bouldering in Red Rock Canyon with new dinner groupies that I absolutely adore. Also, having a full-on picnic in a Wendy's, defying gravity, being an awesome Kinect volleyball player, calling Colorado home, and it was just awesome, okay? Here's some photos I stole from Caitlin because I accidentally left my camera at home: 

Hoover Dam :)

At the top :)

I'm somewhere in this photo.

Wonderful, wonderful fountains.

But enough about how much my life is such the best all the time. :)

I was lucky enough to stumble upon (and not StumbleUpon) a pretty awesome website this weekend. It's called ThoughtCatalog.com. It's kind of like a group blog/non-fiction-journalism-musing-awesome-ness that I really love. I highly recommend the following post: You Should Date an Illiterate Girl

Didn't tempt you? Here's an excerpt: 

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so expletives difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied.

Seriously. Go read it. It's stupendous. And I'm sorry about the expletives. But it's really so, so, so good.

A Rant: Greeting People

I hate greeting people.

I didn't really realize this until this week because I have had an unusually high number of awkward passings-by since my return to Provo. I offer one quick example:


I was wandering down the sidewalk enjoying the evening air, not looking at any of the people coming towards me, when, as you might expect, an unexpected person saw me and decided to make their presence known. I hear my name said with a really odd interrogative tone—I say odd because the fact that the tone was interrogative suggested an uncertainty about whether or not I was the person he was addressing, and yet his volume was such that there was no way someone could have ignored it if they weren't actually me. Maybe I'm just the weird shy one here, but if I'm not sure that I'm addressing the person I think I'm addressing, I do not use the 300-yard shout within the cloistered 3 feet of usable space on the sidewalk.

So after being clobbered in close-quarters with this unsettling and brash uncertainty, I recognize the perpetrator—someone whom I quickly found to be socially-awkwardly-creepy about seven years ago and subsequently tried to avoid, I dunno, all the time. In resting my eyes upon this individual, I saw that the bizarre interrogative tone was accompanied by a strange interrogative posture. Kind of like this:

Okay, sans crazy eyes. But you get the idea. It was like he was trying to make up for the 300-yard shout with this super interrogative posture. Instead, it just made the run-in creepier because it was like he was shocked by my very presence, despite the fact that we had an awkward run-in during finals week. He knows I live here! Anyways, this is just super detailed background for how the actual conversation went. Which was like this:

Him: Kayla!????!!??!??!?!???!???!!!! (Click to see my post Pet Peeve: Guess What for a little on why I hate "?!" so much)Me: Oh! Hi! [Shocked and dismayed at seeing this person because of aforementioned socially-awkward-creepiness.]
Him: What's up? [Or some similar question posed to indicate interest in the other person's life without really expecting or desiring an answer to the question.]
Me: [So shocked, dismayed, and disoriented by the weirdness of the conversation that can't form words and compute what question was actually asked. Result: turned other way and had verbal vomit in form of mumbling something like...] Good .... ? [Note weird interrogative tone because recognized that "Good" might have been wrong answer to question.]

How embarrassing. Not that I care in the slightest about his opinion of me, but I do so hate to loose my composure like that. Who knew all my coolness could be derailed so easily? (Or maybe I'm not as cool as I think ... [entirely possible and extremely likely].)

This scenario brings up a few problems with the way we greet each other. As I see it, greeting people that you don't spend a lot of time with is a lot like holding the door open for someone, so I'm going to use the following illustration as a jump-off point for this whole greeting-people problem.

Let's say you see someone you know coming towards you. If they're far enough away that they're in the awkward zone, STOP. DO NOT BEGIN CONVERSATION. Why? Because of all the little people you're going to trap awkwardly in the air space between your conversation! It's not a fun place for them to be. (Believe me, I know this from personal experience.) Furthermore, you're going to run into another problem which I like to call "Too Much Space, Too Little Conversation" or, conversely, "Too Little Space, Too Much Conversation." It can really go either way, depending on how bold you are in continuing the conversation after the necessary pleasantries are completed.

If, on the one hand, you are very bold, you end up starting a conversation that you don't have time to finish without stopping. (And we're going to assume that you aren't able to stop, because if we didn't, I'd have too many possible scenarios bouncing around in my head.) On the other hand, if you aren't very bold, but you stop the conversation too early, you've got all this extra time where you both know you've got nothing more to say to each other. Awkie.

Once safely within the courtesy zone, we have to deal with this awful societal beast I call the Necessary Pleasantries. For some reason, we've got this idea that in order to be polite, we need to act interested in the other person's life. The best way to do this, as far as we've figured out, is to ask simple questions. "What's up? How's it going? How are you?"

Unfortunately for us, we picked simple questions that don't have simple answers. And apparently we weren't quick enough on the draw to stop this horrendous misstep in creating social conventions, and so we went with Plan B which was to make up basic, meaningless answers to each of these questions. "Not much. Good. Fine." Congrats, humanity. Now we have the psychological repercussions of feeling like we should feel good about interacting with each other while simultaneously recognizing that our interaction was completely meaningless, and therefore being unable to actually feel good about it. Well done. (snarksnarksnark). The good side of these answers is that a conversation made in passing can happen very quickly and easily. We can happily acknowledge each other, fake a little interest with meaningless prattle, and go on our merry way without disturbing our forward momentum.

This, apparently, was not good enough for us though. Over the course of time, we've tried to make these Necessary Pleasantries a little more interesting by shaking up our answers. "Great. Lovely. Doing wonderfully, thanks."

EEEEEEEEEKKKKKKK. Time to put on the brakes everyone! This is a BAD IDEA. Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

1. The more you shake things up, the more likely you are to overrun your allotted time for passing conversation, which then leads to this whole problem of trying to finish the conversation and having to twist your neck to maintain the eye contact, turn around and start walking backwards (super dangerous), or feel super weird answering the question while you're no longer facing the person. Way too many problems happening here to even be dealt with. 
2. If you start throwing in a bunch of other possible answers to these usual questions, it can get really confusing for people who are trying to answer your question...

... like when you run into them unexpectedly and throw off their groove so that they, in their victimized state of disorientation, find it completely impossible to narrow down the list of possible answers to ones which are question-appropriate, and ultimately pick the wrong one causing loads of undue stress and embarrassment. 

Thanks a lot, society. 

snarksnarksnarksnarksnark.

Hello 2012

I feel like a complete nincompoop for staying up late enough to write this, but I just have a lot of feelings right now and I feel like I should be typing this up and posting it, or I'll never actually say it. And I feel like it maybe has the potential to be something worth saying. We'll just have to wait and see.

2011 was a life-changing year for me. I experienced very real miracles. I learned so much about so many things, including myself. In so many ways, I became a better version of myself. My life truly did change, and it changed for the better. That being said, 2011 was not easy. I struggled with so many frustrations and fears. I was stretched in ways that I had never been stretched before, which was, not surprisingly, uncomfortable. I made so many ridiculous and stupid mistakes; I learned almost as much about how to do things wrong as I did about how to do things right.

If there's anything I've learned from 2011, it's that taking action is the only way to make life worth living. I've found that there's absolutely no pleasure to be found in being stagnant, in meandering across life's plateaus. Sure, sometimes when we climb, we fall. But we have to climb. We learn something every time we fall, if we're paying attention, and there are some things in life that you can't learn by observation—you have to be in there getting your hands and feet and face dirty, getting your knees banged up, scratched and bruised. Standing still isn't an option. It's kind of like my good buddy Garth Brooks says: "Life is not tried, it is merely survived if you're standing outside the fire." (Look it up on YouTube. That song is amazing.)

I'm just sick of letting things happen to me instead of making them happen for me. I don't want to miss anything because I'm too scared or too lazy or too worried about what other people might prefer that I do.

This is part of the reason that (dun-dun-dunDUN!) ...







OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
I'm going to be spending the summer in London. 



Yes, my dear darling friends. If you haven't already heard, I'm going to be living across the pond from May to August. (And yes, that means I will be in London for the Summer Olympics. Bow-chicka-wow-wow.) I will be doing a field study, pursuing a research project of my own creation (currently moving in the direction of Renaissance cosmology and religion, and involving lots of churches, artwork, hymns, libraries, galleries, museums, etc.). Am I excited out of my mind? Yes. Am I slightly terrified that the plane will go down and that my body will lie with all those nasty fish that I don't want to eat in the bitter blackness of the very bottom of the Atlantic? Also yes, but somewhat less than the first yes.

London is only one of the Action Items (there's some MO DSS [Missouri Department of Social Services] jargon sneaking into my vernacular) that I'm including in the upcoming year. In fact, some of them have already been accomplished, and with (pardon the toot-toot of my horn here) rather magnificent success.

And so, with that little announcement out in the open....

Hello 2012! 
I'll be taking charge of my own life from here on out, mmmk?

---

This is just a random side note, but I thought you guys should become acquainted with a small fact about what blogging is like for me. It's a lot like the following picture:

So .... that's why there are about a million parenthetical comments laced through these things. 

And read this Tumblr*. It's a riot, and where the nice photo/diagram came from.

*Please be aware that the website has rather a significant collection of profane words that it likes to share with readers**. 

**So don't look if you're going to be offended by that. Which, of course, you will be, since the nature of profanity is its offensiveness. But blahblahblah we all know this ia a don't-you-ever-say-I-didn't-warn-you blurb. In short: YOU'VE BEEN WARNED, so don't get your panties in a twist after clicking on that link.